Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (8 page)

GLENN TIPTON (Judas Priest):
My old band, the Flying Hat Band, was with the same agency in Birmingham as Judas Priest. We were on the verge of breaking up when Priest asked me to join. They’d seen me play and perform. As soon as we got together we realized pretty immediately that there was something special there, especially in terms of writing.

While Judas Priest was still finding its feet, Black Sabbath was finishing its self-titled debut, which was recorded live and mixed over two days. Then the band seized the moment, touring Europe and leaving audiences bewildered by their fiercely loud, improvisational, and dramatic sets.

GEEZER BUTLER:
We went to Switzerland and Germany for six weeks, and we were literally playing for eight hours a day. We were on tour constantly. But it was good because we got really tight musically. We sort of knew what each other was going to play before we even played it. So we became a really good rhythm section. I loved the way Bill [Ward] always got that kind of swing in his playing. It’s great for a bass player to play along with. But since we were playing so much, we only had enough material from the first album, which lasted for about an hour. So we had to make stuff up for the next seven hours. We jammed about onstage and gradually came up with most of the
Paranoid
album. By the time the first album was out, we’d already had 90 percent of the second one written.

TONY IOMMI:
The second album wasn’t even going to be called
Paranoid
. We hadn’t gotten enough songs to fill the album. So we were asked to come up with another song. I sat there during a lunch break and came up with “Paranoid.” When the other guys came back, I played it to them. They thought it was good, so we recorded that as a filler. And the bloody thing became the most popular track. The album was originally going to be called
War Pigs
. But that title was banned because of the word
pigs
. We got all sorts of shit from the record company. So they named the album
Paranoid
, which didn’t go with the cover at all. There’s a guy standing there with a shield and a sword. What’s that have to do with being paranoid?

GEEZER BUTLER:
The cover didn’t have anything to do with “war pigs,” either, really. That’s like the cheapest album cover the record company could come up with, I think. It’s horrible and we hated it, but we didn’t have any say in the matter, so we were stuck with it. Also,
War Pigs
wasn’t originally called “War Pigs.” It was “Walpurgis.” It’s sort of like the Satanic Christmas. I was writing
Generals gathered in the masses
because that’s what Satan is. War was the big Satan, not somebody who lives in the clouds. I was making an analogy, and Warner Bros. didn’t like the title because it was too Satanic, so we turned it into
War Pigs
, which is a better title anyway. In the end, they thought “Paranoid” was the standout track, so that’s what they called the album, and in England it was the number two single.

MARTIN POPOFF:
Paranoid
is so much more of a trouncing heavy metal album than the first Black Sabbath album, but there are certain things that are done really well with
Black Sabbath
, and that’s scary lyrics, a scary album cover, the devil’s tritone, and big, bulldozing riffs, but the actual
Black Sabbath
album doesn’t do that nearly as well as
Paranoid
or
Master of Reality
do.

GEEZER BUTLER:
We didn’t want
Paranoid
to have one sound or one tempo all the way through like a lot of bands did back then. “Hand of Doom” was quite a long song. The lyrics came from when we played a couple of American bases in Germany and England. I got to speak to some of the soldiers there, and they had just come back from Vietnam. They told me about the amount of soldiers there that were addicted to heroin because Vietnam was a horrible experience. They had to do drugs just to get through it. You never saw that side of it on TV.

LESLIE WEST:
Frank Barcelona was our agent at Premiere Talent. It was Black Sabbath’s first tour, and our agent said, “I have a great opening act for you.” I said, “What’s their name?” He said, “Black Sabbath.” I said, “What are they, an R&B group?” I didn’t know anything about them, but we became great friends with Ozzy.

OZZY OSBOURNE:
Mountain was the first band we played with in America. We used to sit on the side and just watch them. They were amazing, absolutely brilliant. People forget that originally Sabbath was based on a blues-jazz band. Mountain reminded me very much of an American Cream.

GEEZER BUTLER:
When we got to America we started seeing some of our success. Once we started getting paid for gigs, it was really rewarding. But you know, you’d end up in hotels with nothing to do after the show except loads of groupies and loads of things to shove up your nose. Then, before you know it, your money’s gone. But it was mainly out of boredom, really. There was no television on. There were, like, three channels back then. It was so different when we went to the States than it was in Europe. You meet the
real
groupies in America. The ones who
know
how to party. These people were made for partying, whereas in Europe everybody was miserable. So we loved it. It was a completely new lifestyle to us.

TONY IOMMI:
We had our day with [groupies] when we first went to the States, and LA in particular. God, we had all sorts of women. One of the guys that worked with us at the time happened to catch bloody syphilis. That sort of dampened the whole thing.

While U.S. audiences were immediately responsive to Sabbath’s foreboding atmospheres, blaring guitars, and trudging rhythms, they were also captivated by the hysteria the musicians engendered, and sometimes took their occult-inspired themes too literally.

MICK WALL:
Black Sabbath understood that people were reacting to them in this bizarre way because their music has clearly conveyed that image and message, but they themselves were utterly freaked out at this suggestion. When [Church of Satan founder] Anton LaVey had the Black Sabbath parade in San Francisco when they first came to America, they were watching it on TV and went, “What the fuck is this?” There’d be gigs where witches would show up in black cloaks and Sabbath would play stupid, thicko boy tricks on them. The occultists were being very serious about it, and Sabbath weren’t.

TONY IOMMI:
You open a can of worms sometimes that you can’t control. One time, we were playing at the Hollywood Bowl. We arrived at the gig and on the dressing room door was a red cross. We thought, “Oh, that’s odd.” As we’re doing the show, I was in a really bad mood. I was pissed off because my gear was acting up. I kicked my amp over and went to walk off. As I’m walking off this guy comes behind me with a dagger, and he was about to stab me. He got past security and I just heard this big scuffle on the floor. That’s how close I came to being stabbed.

MICK WALL:
In those days, they were doing so much coke it was like, “Oh, someone went to stab me, wow! Give us a line then? Cool! Wow! Shit.” Going to America was such a foreign concept for them. You might as well have been going to the moon. It’s like going from black-and-white TV to color. Anything could happen. “Jesus, of course someone tried to stab me. It’s America. It’s Hollywood!”

TONY IOMMI:
It’s funny, because some people think those first two albums were recorded in a haze of drugs, but we didn’t have time when we did the first two albums. We were in the studio one day, recorded the first album. And then
Paranoid
was only a couple days and then we were out. There wasn’t time to indulge in anything.

GEEZER BUTLER:
We couldn’t afford anything. When we first started we’d have, like, one joint between us all. We couldn’t afford booze either, so none of us drank. The first time I tried acid was unknowingly when somebody spiked me. It was before we went to America. We did this outdoor concert and somebody gave me this pill and said it was speed, and it was actually three doses of acid in one tablet. I got back to where I was living and I used to have all these pictures of Satan and occult pictures on the wall, and all this stuff came to life. There were all these snakes trying to bite me. It was horrendous. I was in my bedroom, but the bedroom turned into the middle of the desert. Then I was a Roman soldier. It was absolutely mental. We had a gig the next day in the middle of this park. And as we were driving through the park, all the flowers were trying to get into the car to strangle me. Later, when we got to America, I tried acid again in California, but that turned bad as well, so I couldn’t do it. You can’t control yourself. It just turned into a nightmare. For some reason with me, it always went bad.

As with the British Invasion in the sixties, England lit the first heavy metal flames with Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. By 1970, a New York band called Wicked Lester—which, three years later, changed its name to KISS—entered the fray. Although the group was never as definitively
metal
as Sabbath or Priest, it nonetheless altered the face of stadium rock and influenced everyone from Mötley Crüe to Pantera (whose guitarist, Dimebag Darrell Abbott, was buried in a KISS Kasket, the branded casket by the band KISS). Wicked Lester was comprised of bassist Gene Klein (born Chaim Witz, later known as Gene Simmons); his childhood friend, guitarist Stephen Coronel; keyboardist Brooke Ostrander; and drummer Tony Zarrella. At the suggestion of Coronel, they hired Stanley Eisen (later known as Paul Stanley) on rhythm guitar.

GENE SIMMONS:
I was going to college and we were practicing at a loft in [New York City’s] Chinatown. It was a dump. The stairs were wood and they were covered with carpet, but they weren’t very sturdy. You could pull out the step of your choice and use it to start a fire. I’d go to work in the afternoon, then come right there and we’d practice. We were really innocent back then. We were just going forward blindly.

PAUL STANLEY (KISS):
It was so hot we left the doors open. One night we were playing and all of a sudden a guy about six feet five was standing there barefoot in a green hospital gown. We said, “Can we help you?” and he said, “I just escaped from the hospital.” We didn’t know what to do, so we continued playing. He’s dancing around and we’re rocking, and finally we were able to coax him out the door. For all we knew, he was an escaped murderer. We’d always lock the door after that. We were naïve, but we weren’t stupid. We had metal paneling over all the windows, but once, someone very determined clipped the lock and took all our things out the fire escape. We showed up for rehearsal, and it was like a cartoon. The drummer said, “Hey, where are my drums?” The guitarist went, “Where’s my amp?” And then we realized we’d been robbed. There was nothing left but a microphone, so clearly we were robbed by an instrumental band.

GENE SIMMONS:
Paul used to come in with green high-heeled boots and tight leather pants, with his balls lifted and separated. He prided himself on how he looked and he tried to carry himself as a star. We both did. The other guys never got it—especially Coronel. He was more of a musician, and he used to dig into Stanley, and say, “Who do you think you are, dressing like that? You think you’re some kind of rock star?” So Paul turned around one day and said, “Yeah. I have an aura shining over me.”

PAUL STANLEY:
I told Gene that when I walk around, people notice me, and he was ready to strangle me. I wasn’t fucking with him or anything, I was serious. I made this happen. I was a tubby young guy that nobody wanted to know. My pants used to rub together when I walked and they used to wear out between the legs. My ass was as big as my stomach. But I made myself into something else, something that I wanted to be and that I was more happy with. I created my dream.

GENE SIMMONS:
We always worked hard, and when we didn’t have any [money] Paul and I would busk, singing Beatles and Byrds songs for spare change. We made $9.75 one night and ate like kings when $1.25 could buy you a full Chinese dinner.

PAUL STANLEY:
After a couple shows, we were able to convince this guy Ron Johnsen who worked at Electric Lady Studios to record our demo. Everyone recorded at Electric Lady: the Rolling Stones, John Lennon, Bob Dylan. It was incredible. Stevie Wonder used to come in there and take a leak with a girl holding his dick.

GENE SIMMONS:
That was where we got our first groupie. We were on the corner just watching people walk by and Paul saw this really tall girl coming down the street in high heels. He dared me to go and pick her up. So as she walked by I said everything I could. I mean, tires and kitchen sinks came out. Before long, she came down with us. She didn’t have a clue who we were. We were nobody. But within an hour she was in the sound booth blowing two guys. Then she was with five guys at the same time and everybody lined up to take a look, including the producer and his wife. It was like, “Wow, we’re musicians now. This is rock and roll!”