Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (7 page)

TONY IOMMI:
I told Ozzy, Bill, and Geez, “Look, I’ve been asked to join Jethro Tull. What do you think?” And they said, “You should go for it.” So I did. And when I went up to rehearse with Jethro Tull I took Geezer with me to London because I felt really weird not being with the other guys. I really missed them. I felt a bit out of place. I didn’t want to join a band that was already doing well and just be the guitar player. I wanted to be a part of a team.

IAN ANDERSON (Jethro Tull):
In his early days, before Black Sabbath was born, we brought Tony into Jethro Tull very briefly because we loved his playing. Tony is what we call the “prototype” of heavy metal. His guitar playing and the monophonic riffs that he came up with were something not entirely unique, but a natural evolution from the more loose, blues-based jamming in bands like Cream just a couple years before.

GEEZER BUTLER:
We saw the way Jethro Tull worked, and we couldn’t believe it. They used to go in at nine o’clock in the morning and work all day until five, like a regular nine-to-five job. And we realized that’s the way you gotta do it. You can’t just go to some pub and rehearse for an hour and then get drunk. You gotta really put your mind to it and take it seriously. That’s what gave us the kick up the ass that we needed.

TONY IOMMI:
That’s when I said to Geezer, “Let’s get the band back together.” We called Ozzy and Bill from London and said, “Look, we’re coming back. If everybody is really serious about this, I’ll leave [Tull] and we’ll get back together again and really work at this.”

OZZY OSBOURNE:
We were four regular guys with a dream, and we worked really hard and it came true, way bigger than what we ever expected.

TONY IOMMI:
I started coming up with riffs and writing songs. I played this really heavy riff one day [that evolved into] “Wicked World.” Then I came up with “Black Sabbath,” which was a really different thing at that time. That paved the way. When I first played that riff, the hairs stood up on my arm and I knew, “This is it!” It was like being told, “This is the way you’re going from now on.” The rest of the album came from there, and everything fell into place.

That three-chord riff in “Black Sabbath” has been credited as the first use of the tritone, or
diabolus in musica
, in heavy metal. In the Renaissance era, the tritone was feared by the Church because of its ominous sound. Later on, various classical composers—including Richard Wagner and Gustav Holst—would incorporate the tritone into their compositions.

CHRIS BRODERICK (Megadeth, ex-Nevermore, ex-Jag Panzer):
“Black Sabbath” is a classic example of the tritone. It starts with a tonic, goes to the octave, then the tritone. [It’s] basically the distance from one pitch to the next; [it’s] also known as the “flat five.” What this basically translates into is a very dissonant-sounding interval. When they hear it, most people want to cringe a little bit. It’s a tonality that invokes a certain mood, a certain attitude. It suits metal.

GEEZER BUTLER:
I was a big fan of Gustav Holst’s
The Planets
at the time. I loved [the] “Mars” [movement], and that [used] a tritone. I used to always play that on the bass when we were rehearsing and I think somehow that got into Tony’s head, and he came up with a different tritone that became “Black Sabbath.”

MICK WALL:
The very first time they played the song “Black Sabbath” was in a pub called the Pokey Hole in Lynchfield in the middle of the Midlands. They were used to people drinking and talking right through the set every time they played. When they played “Black Sabbath,” everybody stopped what they were doing and listened.

TONY IOMMI:
We did six weeks in Switzerland and we had a gig in England on the day we came back. We arrived at this place and there was a guy there at the front door with a bow tie and a suit. We thought, “Bloody hell, this is weird,” because most of the places we played at were certainly not like
that
. The guy said, “Okay, let’s get your gear in and get ready.” And as we’re getting the equipment in he said, “Oh, I really like your new record.” We said, “Oh, thanks,” but we hadn’t done a record at that time. It turned out that this guy had booked the wrong Earth. There was another band called Earth, and they were a pop band. We played the show and people stood there with their mouths open. We died right there onstage. We said, “That’s it. That’s never gonna happen again. We’re gonna find a name that nobody else has.” Hence Black Sabbath. That movie was playing at a theater across the street from where we rehearsed. We thought, “What a great name for the band.” When we went under the name Black Sabbath it opened the doorway to everything for us.

OZZY OSBOURNE:
With a name like Black Sabbath, what do you expect? And the album cover wasn’t exactly about a bunch of flowers. In the beginning, we decided to write scary music because we really didn’t think life was all roses. So we decided to write horror music. Then we started to read books about the occult and we realized that it wasn’t just a thing that movies were made from. It was real. There was a
thing
called the occult. We never realized what exactly we were getting involved in until we started getting success and all these nutters started sending us letters. We never dealt with the occult ourselves. Different crazy people asked us to play at their black masses and other ceremonies. I just didn’t take it onboard, so it wasn’t scary. If you let it in, you’re a fucking idiot. If you play with the dark stuff, you’re gonna have some bad shit happen.

GEEZER BUTLER:
The occult was interesting for me and it was very fashionable at the time. Once, somebody sent Ozzy this really old book about witchcraft. It was all in Latin and it had to be three hundred years old. I got this weird vibe off that book. I was living in this one-bedroom apartment at the time with a shared bathroom. I didn’t want this book in the same room as me, so I went out into the hall and shoved it in the bathroom cabinet where the towels were kept, and went to bed. In the middle of the night I felt this presence. I woke up and there was this black shape looming over the bottom of the bed and I couldn’t really make out what it was, but I could just see the outline of it. It frightened the pissing life out of me. When I jumped up to turn the light on there was nothing there. I thought, “It’s that pissing book.” So I went out at four in the morning to get the book to throw it in the bin and it was gone. I told Ozzy about it because it was him that gave me the book, and that incident inspired him to write the lyrics to “Black Sabbath” as a warning to people that were getting heavily involved in black magic. Of course, the lyrics got so completely misinterpreted. If you listen, they’re saying, “If you’re going to get into it, be serious about it. Otherwise, don’t dabble in it.” But everybody thinks it’s about worshipping Satan.

TOM BEAUJOUR (editor,
Guitar Aficionado
):
At that time, messing around with the occult was part of the hipster subculture on some level. But taking that and turning it into a template for a band was such a weird and powerful thing to do.

ROBERT TRUJILLO (Metallica, ex-Ozzy Osbourne, ex-Suicidal Tendencies):
When I was a kid, we’d sit there and listen to my friend’s older brother’s vinyl and play the song “Black Sabbath.” We’d look at the album cover and freak ourselves out, totally. It was like watching a horror movie. I would have to say Black Sabbath is the first heavy metal band to kick me in the ass for real, scare the living shit out of me.

LEMMY KILMISTER:
Sabbath were fucking great. They seemed dangerous, and basically, you want [your rock stars to seem like] dangerous people. If you read history, you don’t read about the fucking medieval agrarian reforms. You read about Attila the bloody Hun and the Norman conquest of Britain—something with swords in it. The subject of evil is obvious for rock and roll. Look at the news every night. That’s evil. We’re all just singing about it. We’re not scared of it.

GEEZER BUTLER:
The critics hated us. They totally wrote us off. We thought everybody hated us. We didn’t really believe anyone liked us until
Black Sabbath
reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart in [February] 1970. We were absolutely shocked. We knew we had a strong local following, but we hadn’t really made it in London. We used to have to play northern England, so we weren’t expecting the album to do anything. And we’d been turned down by three or four managers in London. Nobody wanted us. And then suddenly the album came into the charts and everybody started believing in us, especially the nutters. We were invited to the Witches’ Sabbath, which was at Stonehenge in England. We refused to go. So, apparently, the head warlock put a curse on us. Then the head white witch of England called us up and told us about this curse and that we had to start wearing crosses to keep the curse away, and that’s how we all ended up wearing crosses.

Black Sabbath was the first major metal band to break out of Birmingham, England, and gain worldwide acclaim. However, Judas Priest wasn’t far behind. The band formed in 1969 with singer Al Atkins, the same year Earth changed its name to Black Sabbath.

K.K. DOWNING (ex-Judas Priest):
The Sabs got an album jumpstart on us, but that was great. It was good to see that a band relatively comparable to ourselves had some success. Everyone was playing it, and that was great news for the Priest because it made us think, “Yeah, if we stick with what we’re doing this is really going to happen.”

IAN HILL (Judas Priest):
There was a nucleus of musicians in the West Bromwich area of the Midlands right outside of Birmingham who were all hungry, all proficient. And they’d form three or four bands between them. If they didn’t make it in about six months, they’d all split up. The different combinations of the same musicians would then form another three or four bands. Judas Priest [featuring Al Atkins on vocals] was one of those. They were together for about six months, didn’t get anywhere, and split up. And [guitarist] Ken [K.K. Downing] and myself and the drummer John Ellis were in another band [called Freight], and we didn’t have a singer yet.

K.K. DOWNING:
Alan Atkins was down at our practice room one day with his bass player and he must have been listening outside the door.

IAN HILL:
Al heard us and asked if we needed a vocalist because [his band], the original Priest, had just split. None of us had a very good voice, so we jumped at the chance. We had a couple of very long head-scratching sessions trying to come up with a name for the band, and came up with nothing. Alan said, “Do you fancy calling it Judas Priest? I’ll call the other band members and see if they mind.” Nobody did, so we took over the name.

K.K. DOWNING:
The first show we ever did with Alan as a four-piece was at a workingmen’s club. There were lots of cute girls there in hot pants, and we were doing a selection of our own songs and a couple songs by an obscure band called Crater Mass. People didn’t know what to think.

IAN HILL:
Al’s a good singer, but he left the band in 1973 because he needed money and we weren’t earning anything. We were living off friends and girlfriends and our families. But Al was already married with a child. So he had to leave, and that’s when Rob came along.

ROB HALFORD:
I saw Priest play at a place in Birmingham, and at that time the music was a mixture of psychedelic blues and progressive rock. You could sense it was a new band that was getting its legs, but it was difficult to pinpoint what the band was about.

IAN HILL:
I don’t think either [K.K.] or myself had seen him or heard him, but I was dating Rob’s sister [Sue]. And she said, “Why don’t you try Rob?” He was in a band at the time called Hiroshima. We went to Rob and Sue’s parents’ house and Rob came down the stairs doing harmonies to an Ella Fitzgerald song. I went, “Ooh God, at least the guy can do harmonies.”

ROB HALFORD:
I can’t remember what song it was. It could quite well have been [Ella Fitzgerald]. I don’t know if I would have been thinking, “Oh, Ian’s in the house, I better start wailing.” But what’s interesting about that is it shows that as a singer I love all kinds of singing performances, no matter what genre.

IAN HILL:
Rob brought this drummer John Hinch from Hiroshima. There was some discussion over whether we should use the name Hiroshima or keep the name Judas Priest, seeing as it was a halfway split. Ken and myself voted for Judas Priest and Rob and John wanted Hiroshima. But Priest had been around a year longer than Hiroshima, so we kept the name. I think we made the right choice.

ROB HALFORD:
We used to go to this place called Holy Joe’s right outside of Birmingham, where we lived. It was this little room, 50-by-50 foot, and it was connected to a high school next to a church. The local parish priest, Father Joe, would rent out this room and we’d give him 5 quid [about $8] to rehearse for the day and night. And the venue itself was nicknamed the Holy Joe, which is kind of cool. Holy Joe and Judas Priest! We didn’t have any songs. We were doing a jam with some heavy blues and I would just scat some words together, but it felt so good. It felt like we were all connected, so we decided to keep going forward and write our own material. Then we got to the point where we decided we could do more with the songs if we had two guitarists.