BLACK SABBATH: PROLETARIAN METAL TO OZZY AND BEYOND

From the first oafish gothic crash of “Black Sabbath” it was clear this band was dumb. Really intensely dumb. Even in that first hearing there was something in Ozzy’s hammy Jack Bruce-and-beyond larynx, in the stonefaced simplicity of Tony Iommi’s lost chords, in Geezer’s globular lines and Bill Ward’s sub-Bonham stomp. Something that spelled sublime idiocy. This wasn’t the Black Sabbath of Mario Bava and Boris Karloff, it was drive-in Herschell Gordon Lewis.

Black Sabbath were the absolute prototype gothic heavies. Heavy was Black Sabbath. Their playing was so neanderthal there was never an instant where you thought they might be joking. Sabbath oouldn’t even pull off their horror show, far less believe in it. How anyone could seriously have imagined them to be sidekicks of Lucifer after seeing Iommi’s moustache or Geezer’s robes or Ozzy’s flab I’ll never know.