Since Ozzy Osbourne’s passing last month, I have been listening to Black Sabbath. A lot of Black Sabbath. So much Black Sabbath that I sometimes find myself speaking with a tritone-style modulation. Okay, maybe not that much Black Sabbath. But my recent spin through their catalog has confirmed a simple truth.
Sabbath rules.
Black Sabbath was about more than just Ozzy. All the band members were essential: Tony Iommi, the dark prince of guitar riffs and a two-fisted ladies man; Geezer Butler, the mild-mannered bassist and master lyricist; and Bill Ward, the easy-going and hard-drinking drummer. (There is also Ronnie James Dio, Ozzy’s temporary replacement and elfin-sized “devil’s horns” gesture originator. More on him later.) But Ozzy was the star of the show. And he was perfectly suited for fronting this band. In any other context, his voice might have registered as unexceptional. In some ways, it was unexceptional — flat, trebly, and with limited range. But in the ways that actually matter, Ozzy was a magnificent frontman. In Sabbath, that singular howl cut through the bottom-heavy murk of the music with conviction, with Ozzy displaying a unique talent for embodying the lyrics he was delivering, like a method actor, no matter how extreme or silly the words got.
Black Sabbath is one of the greatest rock bands of all time, and the finest metal group. It is time to pay them their tribute. Gather the generals in their masses, just like witches at black masses, because it’s time to count down my favorite Black Sabbath songs of all time.
PRE-LIST ENTERTAINMENT: “ARE YOU HIGH? SO AM I!”
It’s early August 1975, and our heroes are in Asbury Park. It’s the Sabotage tour. Born To Run is set to drop later in the month, but for now Ozzy, Tony, Geezer, and Bill are the kings of the Jersey turnpike. “Hole In The Sky” is the opening track from the album they’re hawking, and it’s the second song in the set. The band sounds enormous. And enormously intoxicated. No one more than the singer, who screams at the gathering throngs, “Are you high? So am I!” It’s a rhetorical question. Anyone in the vicinity who is not high is either a cop or dead from an overdose.
The Asbury Park ’75 bootleg captures what I love most about Sabbath at this point in my life — they’re the ultimate party band. You put them on when you want to feel as high as a pioneering English metal musician standing on stage during the heart of the Gerald Ford administration. You put them on when your brain is engulfed with enough endorphins to make all 20 minutes and 23 seconds of the live “Sabbra Cadabra” tolerable, if not downright enjoyable. (An extended Bill Ward drum solo? Sounds awesome, man.) That’s the role Black Sabbath plays in your life if you’re a fan: They make you feel happy. And if you already feel happy, they make you feel stupid-happy.
But that’s not how I came to Black Sabbath. In the beginning, Black Sabbath did not make me feel good. Black Sabbath scared the bejesus out of me. I was 13 when I discovered Paranoid in my older brother’s Case Logic CD carrier. On the cover, there was a man bathed in infrared pink walking through a pitch-black forest holding a sword. It was glowing, like a light saber. The image was so cheesy that it doubled back around to being frightening. (It’s the Child’s Play Chuckie doll of album covers.) Then I read the song titles and things got really sinister: “War Pigs.” “Electric Funeral.” “Hand Of Doom.” “Rat Salad.” “Rat Salad”? My god.
This was 1990, so it was the prime of the “Satanic Panic” era in American suburbs. The devil was still real, and if you were a kid, he was someone you suddenly wanted to chase. Or, rather, be chased by, like the hellhounds that once pursued Robert Johnson. It was also the moment when my tape collection was composed mainly of Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli albums. I desperately needed some Mephistopheles in my life. So, it was an ideal time to discover Sabbath, a band you could believe in as a genuinely malevolent force because you couldn’t Google search your way to a more credible explanation. The teenaged desire to seek out Edgy Entertainment fortified their diabolically romantic appeal. Sabbath were bad-asses, and their bad-assery (theoretically) transferred to the listener.
My son just turned 13, and his version of Sabbath is Eminem, who pushed different boundaries of taste and decorum but who nonetheless endures as outlaw music for middle-schoolers. Ozzy sang about being finished with his woman because she couldn’t help him with his mind, and Eminem rapped about murdering his girlfriend. The continuum, for now, goes on. Though I wonder what the current version of Edgy Entertainment is. What 2020s act will teenagers in 2045 seek out to feel a little more dangerous than they really are? Or has that sector of show business, once an essential part of youth culture, been outmoded? Have all outrages already been outraged? Is the devil’s music just party jams now?
I know the big black shape with eyes of fire is still out there. Hopefully, we can find him together over the next several thousand words.
30. “Hole In The Sky” (1975)
Repeating “Hole In The Sky” twice at the top of this column feels like bad list-making. As a list-making professional, I worry that it evinces an embarrassing lack of craft. In any other context, I would have avoided the redundancy. But this is Black Sabbath we’re talking about. At the start of their discography, as we all know, Black Sabbath put “Black Sabbath” on the album Black Sabbath, a triple redundancy. So, if anything, my double redundancy shows “Planet Caravan”-level restraint.
I also put “Hole In The Sky” here because I want to get my most controversial Sabbath opinion out there immediately: I don’t think Sabotage should be included among the Ozzy-era classics. The first five records are so good that a reasonable person can make a case for any one of them being Sabbath’s best. The self-titled debut invented the metal template. Paranoid perfected it. Master Of Reality is their most influential LP, particularly on hard rock, punk, grunge, and metal’s “stoner” wing. Vol. 4 is the most fun (and my personal favorite). And Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is their most artistically ambitious.
Sabotage, meanwhile, is better than the two Ozzy records that come after, but it’s not as good as the five before. (Ozzy agreed with me on this count. As he later told biographer Mick Wall, “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was our final record, as far as I was concerned.”) Sabotage sounds like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath as made by men who have finally been crippled by their prodigious, years-long substance abuse. In Ozzy’s case, this led to a newfound love for wearing kimonos on album covers, a definite red flag signaling his cocaine consumption had gotten out of control. (Tony Iommi shaving his mustache also seems like a decision made under the influence.)
The songs just don’t hit as hard as they should. “Symptoms Of The Universe” is Iommi-by-numbers, “Am I Going Insane (Radio)” isn’t crazy enough, and “Supertzar” spontaneously invented Spinal Tap. But “Hole In The Sky,” obviously, rocks. Especially when you hear it twice.
29. “Who Are You?” (1973)
After Ozzy died, I saw several people on social media make the case that Black Sabbath is more influential than The Beatles. There are two obvious problems with this argument. No. 1: if you have to frame it as “[Band X] is more influential than The Beatles,” you have already conceded that The Beatles are the benchmark for rock bands and automatically disqualified your point. (The same is true when people argue “[Songwriter X] is better than Bob Dylan.”) No. 2: The Beatles are a foundational influence… on Black Sabbath. Ozzy’s fandom of the Fab Four was well-established, given that he spoke openly about it on numerous occasions. (He also gushed like a schoolgirl on The Ed Sullivan Show when he finally met Paul McCartney in the aughts.) Geezer Butler also enthuses about The Beatles throughout his entertaining 2024 memoir Into The Void, pointing to the mellow instrumentals scattered throughout Sabbath records as their attempt to emulate the Beatles’ eclecticism.
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is where Sabbath’s Beatles worship becomes overt, particularly on side two, where a pair of relatively conventional-sounding Sabbath tracks, “Killing Yourself To Live” and “Spiral Architect,” sandwich two batty and shockingly credible psych-pop songs. I’m giving “Who Are You?” a slight edge over the appealingly melodic “Looking For You,” just because those ELO-like synth squiggles make it a true outlier in Sabbath’s catalog.
28. “Never Say Die” (1978)
A popular Sabbath talking point is their terrible standing with music critics in the 1970s. Their approval rating in the press was as unanimously negative back then as it is unanimously positive now. Though some critics came around sooner than others: Lester Bangs wrote the pan of the debut for Rolling Stone (which closed with the memorable kicker “just like Cream! But worse!”) but as we all know, he ended up just a few years later assigning a Sabbath concert review to young William Miller in Almost Famous. (As a non-master of reality, I might be confusing fiction with real life here.)
Almost all the once-panned Sabbath records (from the Ozzy era, anyway) have been critically rehabbed. All except Never Say Die!. That’s the one nobody feels bad about slagging. The band hates it, and most fans hate it. But I… kind of like it? Never Say Die! is part of the subgenre of late ’70s albums by aging stadium-rock bands that are reacting to punk in real time. Some Girls by The Rolling Stones is the classic of the form, followed by Animals by Pink Floyd and The Game by Queen. Never Say Die! is way down the list, past In Through The Out Door by Led Zeppelin and whatever Yes was doing around then. But the title track is an undeniable ripper that moves at a Sex Pistols pace.
27. “Neon Knights” (1980)
Never Say Die! was Ozzy’s final Sabbath studio record before reconvening for 2013’s Rick Rubin-produced swan song 13, a record I will not be mentioning again in this column. There’s a famous story about how Ozzy was discovered one day passed out in a recording studio, laying in a pool of his own urine. And that was the final straw that led to his sacking. (If this is untrue, please keep it to yourself.)
I had a brief debate with myself over whether to include any Ronnie James Dio-era songs on this list. I already knew that I wasn’t going to delve past at least 1981, even though I kind of like 1992’s “reunion with Dio” record Dehumanizer. (Apologies to Tony Martin, Ian Gillan, Glenn Hughes, and a battery of other short-term Sabbath vocalists I don’t have time to list here.) But given the proximity to Ozzy’s passing, I wondered whether I should keep this Ozzy-centric. But my affection for Heaven And Hell and 1981’s Mob Rules eventually won out. There’s a (small but significant) segment of Sabbath fans who even prefer those records to the Ozzy ones. When they separated, Sabbath and Ozzy both suddenly became a lot more metal-sounding than they had been together, due to their new collaborators. (Dio has the quintessential “’80s metal-sounding” voice and Randy Rhodes was the quintessential “’80s metal-sounding” guitarist.) So, how you feel about the Dio era is related to whether you view Black Sabbath primarily as a hard rock band or a metal one. (For example: Quintessential “’80s metal-sounding” disc jockey Eddie Trunk, in the 2022 Dio documentary Dreamers Never Die, calls Heaven And Hell his favorite Sabbath album.) For me, I lean on the “hard rock” side of the equation, though I can’t deny the majesty of “Neon Knights.”
26. “Heaven And Hell” (1980)
I didn’t get into Dio-era Sabbath until my 20s, after years of kneejerk dismissals of the band’s post-Ozzy work. And this was due entirely to the evangelism of Jack Black, who featured Dio prominently in the extremely okay 2006 film Tenacious D In The Pick Of Destiny. And then I heard “Heaven And Hell” and realized that it was the song that Black and Kyle Gass were ironically rewriting over and over in their act.
25. “Sign Of The Southern Cross” (1981)
And here is the song where Sabbath themselves unironically (and quite effectively!) rewrite “Heaven And Hell.” A source of tension at this time was Dio’s insistence that he write the lyrics, rather than the band’s usual lyricist, the vegetarian philosopher Geezer Butler. (He’s the Morrissey of the group.) Dio isn’t necessarily a better writer than Butler, whose lyrics are the most underrated aspect of Sabbath’s most iconic work. (Particularly since a lot of people think that Ozzy wrote them.) But Dio is a better writer for Dio, whose operatic pipes were designed to bellow lines like, “Then the beast is meant to wander / But never is seen around!”
24. “Lord Of This World” (1971)
A key difference between Dio-era Sabbath and the Ozzy era relates to the blues. Sabbath got their start as a blues band cycling through the usual Black American standards, just like all the other great British rock bands of the time. But unlike their semi-friendly rivals in Led Zeppelin, they didn’t do straight-forward replications of the blues once they started writing originals. Zeppelin would do “You Shook Me” and exaggerate all the usual tropes — the sleazy 12-bar stomp, the vocal wailing, the sexualized guitar riffage — in the most hyperbolic fashion imaginable. Sabbath, meanwhile, internalized the music; They took the dark vibe of the blues without exactly playing the blues. Whereas Jimmy Page extrapolated blues-rock into a quasi-parody of extreme bombast, focusing mainly on the ecstatic highs, Tony Iommi stayed in the muck and wallowed in the bottom end of John Lee Hooker’s voodoo shuffles. On “Lord Of This World,” it sounds like he’s trying to play even slower and lower than the blues greats he grew up covering.
23. “The Wizard” (1970)
The closest Sabbath came to playing actual blues on a studio record, though Ozzy’s supremely sloppy harmonica honking suggests he was ready to move on from Muddy Waters already. That part was later sampled by Cypress Hill for 1993’s “I Ain’t Goin’ Out Like That,” one of several tracks that connected Black Sabbath to rap’s storied stoner lineage.
22. “Supernaut” (1972)
In the continuum of ’70s metal innovators, Zeppelin was the relatively classy band and Sabbath was the one whose tapes you could buy at truck stops. At least that was the case in the ’90s when I started listening to them. I first heard Zeppelin via that lavish (for the time, anyway) box set with the crop circles on the cover. Meanwhile, I still have my cassette copy of the first Black Sabbath record, a bargain-priced, off-brand pressing that looks like it was manufactured illegally and sold from the back of a station wagon. This dichotomy works in the favor of both bands and reflects their respective sensibilities. They’re both people’s bands, but Sabbath will always be populist in the least fashionable ways.
The bands got together once in the mid-’70s, with all band members present save for Jimmy Page. And the song they jammed on was “Supernaut” from Vol. 4, apparently John Bonham’s favorite Sabbath track. Unfortunately, the tapes were chopped up with a credit card and forcibly inhaled by the players.
21. “The Mob Rules” (1981)
The first (accidental) anti-cancel culture thinkpiece. “You’ve nothing to say / They’re breaking away / If you listen to fools / The mob rules.” I think Ronnie James Dio was actually singing about 17th century witch trials, or something. But if Bari Weiss has a favorite Sabbath song, I’m sure it is this one.
20. “After Forever” (1971)
About that big black shape: “After Forever” is one of the witchiest tracks in the Sabbath catalog, given the connection to the “Son Of Sam” killings in the ’70s. David Berkowitz loved the song and recited the lyrics as he murdered eight people in New York City. Which is strange since, on the page, “After Forever” reads like a Christian rock hymn. “Perhaps you’ll think before you say / ‘God is dead and gone’ / Open your eyes, just realize / That He is the one.” If he had paid closer attention, Berkowitz might have taught Sunday School rather than turn to serial killing. (Or maybe he just would have read more rock criticism.) Thankfully, Tony Iommi’s fat guitar riff is way less complicated and easier to understand.
19. “Children Of The Grave” (1971)
In his memoir, Geezer Butler constantly laments Sabbath’s image as blood-drinking Satanist marauders. As the band’s most prolific lyricist, he’s particularly sensitive about constantly being misunderstood. (“After Forever” is actually about the troubles in Northern Ireland, he insists.) The problem is that Sabbath looks and sounds evil, even when they are being earnest or even idealistic. The vast majority of listeners were too blotto to notice the difference. On Master Of Reality, they doubled down on the heaviness of the first two records by down-tuning their guitars, a move that changed marijuana-centric music forever. On “Children Of The Grave,” Iommi and Butler lock into a furious gallop that nods to the past (namely the biblical four horsemen of the apocalypse) and the future (the non-biblical Iron Maiden).
18. “Killing Yourself To Live” (1973)
Another song ripe for misinterpretation. In this case, parents and extremely stoned teenagers might assume it is about suicide, as neither party was capable of focusing on more than two words in any Sabbath track. But “Killing Yourself To Live” is actually about the burnout the band was experiencing at the time — this was the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath era, after all, the so-called “last” definitive album — as well as a more general lament about the toll of constant drinking and drugging. Once again, Sabbath is stealthily pious. It’s like if AC/DC wrote a song about the virtues of sexual abstinence.
17. “Changes” (1972)
Speaking of Eminem: He sampled this song on 2010’s Recovery, for the creatively titled track “Going Through Changes.” Em’s song is about addiction and grief (over his recently murdered friend Proof), whereas “Changes” is a more straightforward break-up song with a wicked Mellotron lick that sounds like pawn-shop Moody Blues. It makes sense that it would be a touchstone track for multiple eras of middle-school outlaw music, as I’ve always heard “Changes” as a lament about the tortures of puberty. Which is why during our next father/son talk, I plan on playing side one of Vol. 4.
16. “Hand Of Doom” (1970)
Paranoid came out the year after “Fortunate Son,” the CCR song that has appeared in approximately 87 Vietnam movies. In 1970, John Fogerty followed up with another Vietnam song, “Run Through The Jungle.” But by then, Sabbath — who I would argue is the British CCR, at least on the first two records — had assumed the mantle of rock’s premier war-time correspondents, with “War Pigs” (which we’ll get to) and this glowering number about veterans dealing with PTSD by shooting heroin. “Hand Of Doom” was way ahead of the curve on that one, in terms of what people were willing to acknowledge about America’s misadventures in Vietnam. Morley Safer had nothing on Geezer Butler on that count.
15. “Wheels Of Confusion/The Straightener” (1972)
Vol. 4 is my favorite Sabbath album — partly for the music, and partly for the lore. It is Sabbath’s Exile On Main St., only instead of staying in the south of France, they were holed up in an LA mansion owned by a soon-to-be convicted murderer who later became the subject of the 2014 film Foxcatcher.
That’s not even in the top 10 of crazy things that happened during the making of Vol. 4. Here’s a story I like: The band had a dealer who would deliver cocaine in washing detergent boxes. There was so much blow that word got out around town to other rock stars like Pete Townshend and the members of Deep Purple, who flocked to the Sabbath house. And when Tony Iommi got super high, he would try to frighten the guests by wearing a sheet over his head.
The thing about Vol. 4 is that it doesn’t really sound like a coked-up record. Even “The Straightener” coda to “Wheels Of Confusion,” which kicks the mid-tempo dinosaur pace up a few notches, still sounds sludgy in supreme Sabbath-like fashion. Though you can also detect some slackness in the rhythm section that enhances the feeling of intoxicating decadence.
14. “Tomorrow’s Dream” (1972)
Here’s another story I love from the Vol. 4 sessions, as related by Ozzy in a 2004 Rolling Stone interview: “One night, me and Bill were fucking drunk and taking a piss together. I see this aerosol can and squirt his dick with it. He starts screaming and falls down. I look at the can and it says, WARNING: DO NOT SPRAY ON SKIN — HIGHLY TOXIC. I poisoned Bill through his dick!”
It’s truly a miracle that “Tomorrow’s Dream” exists at all, much less rocks as hard as it does.
13. “Behind The Wall Of Sleep” (1970)
I have a soft spot for Bill Ward, and not only because Ozzy almost poisoned him through his dick that one time. In his book, Butler describes Ward as Sabbath’s “fall guy,” a laidback chap who became a magnet for abuse in a band loaded with alphas. (It’s doubtful that Ozzy would spray aerosol on any part of Tony Iommi, a notorious tough guy.) In later years, he was kept out of Sabbath reunions, with Ozzy claiming he was “incredibly overweight” and unfit to play with the band. While I’m sure he’s not blameless, Bill Ward strikes me as Sabbath’s Charlie Brown figure, the sad sack born to lose.
Which is crazy to consider when you listen to him play. A fan of jazz cats like Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, Ward is credited with making Sabbath swing like no other metal band, starting with those sweet drum breaks on “Behind The Wall Of Sleep.”
12. “N.I.B.” (1970)
On the first Black Sabbath album, “Behind The Wall Of Sleep” is connected to “N.I.B.” with “Bassically,” a brief Geezer Butler instrumental with a Primus-ass title. Because I hear the songs together in my mind, I have to put them next to each other here, with “N.I.B.” getting the slight edge because it’s a love song sung from Lucifer’s perspective. (A formula not replicated until every love song performed by Robin Thicke.)
11. “Electric Funeral” (1970)
More Bill Ward greatness. When he locked in with Butler, he made Sabbath groove in shockingly nimble ways, navigating songs through tricky time signature changes on a dime. On “Electric Funeral,” the rhythm section barrels forward like a nuclear bomb through plywood.
10. “Paranoid” (1970)
The first generation of rock critics hated Sabbath because they rightly recognized that Sabbath was the first post-’60s band and, in a way, the first post-boomer one. They might have been influenced by The Beatles, but they rejected the ideology and iconography associated with that band. They weren’t self-righteous, they didn’t pay lip service to callow hippie slogans, and they weren’t middle-class capitalists. Sabbath actively critiqued those values. And their popularity confirmed that the prevailing generation had suddenly turned old before their time.
But more than that, Black Sabbath was the first rock band that didn’t care whether you thought they were smart. They didn’t promote the ways they were actually smart, and they didn’t downplay the ways that they actually weren’t smart. Case in point: When Geezer Butler wrote the words for “Paranoid” — he did it quickly, just as Iommi swiftly came up with the music, because they needed one more track to round out the record — Ozzy admitted that he didn’t know what “paranoid” meant. But he sang it anyway because he thought the word sounded cool. There was no shame in this ignorance. And it didn’t prevent him from grasping the emotional meaning of the term as he was delivering it.
Therefore: “Paranoid” is smart on a deep level (because it perfectly encapsulates the effects of anxiety on one’s mental state), and it’s smart on a superficial level (because it taught millions of people a new word).
9. “Sabbra Cadabra” (1973)
What’s sad about Sabbath’s early critical drubbing is that it was internalized by the band members. It took them a while to realize how beloved they are. Case in point: It’s 1986 and Ozzy is on tour with Metallica. He walks by their dressing room and notices they’re playing old-school Sabbath. And he gets pissed. He assumes the upstart opening act is making fun of him. The next time he walks by the dressing room he hears Sabbath again. And he gets even more pissed off. Finally, he says something to his assistant. “He said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? They think Sabbath and you are gods!” Ozzy recalled. “It was genuinely one of the very first times I realized that people actually liked Black Sabbath.”
It’s not clear what Sabbath music Metallica was playing at the time. But I assume it was this song, Sabbath’s proggiest track. Metallica later covered it, though they were missing the uber-trippy Minimoog licks from none other than fellow “rock god” Rick Wakeman.
8. “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” (1973)
When Ozzy died, I wrote a short post about how I think Ozzy “set a template for modern rock singers,” especially compared with contemporaries like Robert Plant and Roger Daltrey. “Ozzy’s influence wasn’t musical, it was attitudinal. He was the first rock god who was also just a guy. He once, famously, worked in a slaughterhouse and he made no attempt to disguise that fact. Instead, he leaned into it. He made it part of his onstage persona. When you hear Ozzy sing, what you hear is his toughness, his naturalness, his audio vérité intensity. All the things that grounded even the silliest Black Sabbath songs.”
You can even hear that “audio vérité intensity” on “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” which is Sabbath at their most Zeppelinesque. But the grandness doesn’t get in the way of Ozzy’s “slaughterhouse worker” realness — check out the way he howls, “Fill your head all full of lies, you bastards!”
7. “Jack The Stripper/Fairies Wear Boots” (1970)
The “Jack The Stripper” section sounds like Van Halen eight years before the first Van Halen record, with a few classic Bill Ward drum fills thrown in for good measure. After that, it’s the greatest rock song of all time about beating the shit out of skinheads, a timeless sentiment that’s extra timely now.
6. “Sweet Leaf” (1971)
Their greatest contribution to hip-hop culture. I refer, of course, to “Rhymin’ And Stealin,” which finally married the opposing poles of metal’s foundational roots, pairing the “Sweet Leaf” riff with John Bonham’s immortal drum break from Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks.” For nü-metal, this is the equivalent of the “monkeys touching the monolith” scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Which means the first Korn record is like that jump cut from the bone to the space ship.)
5. “Snowblind” (1972)
For any other band, “Sweet Leaf” would also qualify as the all-time best contribution to the “drug song” canon. But with Sabbath, it only earns the silver medal. The gold goes to “Snowblind,” which rocks slightly harder while also being even less lyrically subtle. Bold claims, I know, given that crushing “Sweet Leaf” riff and the literal coughing that opens the song. But the “Snowblind” riff is even more enormous, while the euphemistically “powdery” title is underlined several times by someone whispering “cocaine” in the pre-chorus. If you want to make a moral case, “Sweet Leaf” encouraged millions of kids to toke up, while “Snowblind,” ostensibly, is a cautionary tale, with Ozzy going on about “icicles within my brain.” Though Black Sabbath telling kids to not take drugs in 1973 is like… Black Sabbath telling kids to not take drugs in 1973. (There isn’t a metaphor ridiculous enough to make the point.)
4. “Iron Man” (1970)
From here on out, the use of words to explain Sabbath feels inappropriate. I should only be using sounds, like “na” and “da.” Or, in the case of “Iron Man,” na na na-na-na, da da da da da da da da da-da-da-da.”
3. “Into The Void” (1971)
Regardless, I’ll use a few more words: I think this is Tony Iommi’s second-greatest guitar riff. I know he has already been well compensated for his efforts. I imagine him living in some castle on a remote English isle, stirring a mysterious brew inside a fiery cauldron while a winged creature of some sort sits perched on his leather-jacketed shoulder. But he really should have been paid a royalty for every band that built a career on extrapolating the depths of “Into The Void.” There are so many bands that sound like this song! It is the ultimate example of Tony plumbing the blues in order to go beyond it, venturing heavier and deeper and then, finally, more metallic. Listening to “Into The Void,” you can imagine that the devil sold his soul to Tony Iommi.
2. “War Pigs” (1970)
The best anti-war song of the rock era not written by Bob Dylan. Some days, I think it might even be better than “Masters Of War.” (If only Geezer hadn’t rhymed “masses” with “masses.”) Though “War Pigs” sounds to me more like a sequel — the bluntness of the title picks up where the end of “Masters Of War” leaves off. While Bob pledged to stand over the graves of war mongers until he’s sure they’re dead, Black Sabbath dig up the bodies and do unspeakable things to the corpses. Ozzy’s “audio vérité intensity” is on full display, though I must also shout out, once again, the rhythm section, for Geezer’s stinging lyrics and fluid bass and Bill Ward’s pummeling drum rolls, which hit like mortar fire in the jungle.
1. “Black Sabbath” (1970)
There’s no other choice but to respect the almighty tritone. Failure to do so will imperil you to the big black shape.
This was only the second song they ever wrote (after “Wicked World”), and it’s impossible to think of a better example of a band nailing what it is they are destined to do so early and so completely. Tony’s guitar part, we all know, set the sonic blueprint for a whole genre. Geezer doubled the riff and made it heavier, and Bill’s playing marked the first time that a rock drummer could be suitably described as “cinematic.” And then this is our man Ozzy, who not only delivers an incredible, chilling vocal, but he also wrote the lyrics (extemporaneously, apparently). Never have the words “ohhhhhh nooooooo!” carried so much weight. This was where he introduced himself to the world as a method singer, favoring raw emotion and naturalistic phrasing over the theatrical posturing of typical rock frontmen. “Black Sabbath” is Ozzy’s Rebel Without A Cause, with a deranged Last House On The Left twist. He might be gone now, but this song makes him immortal.
