In the wrongfooted-in-real-time category, this review for Rolling Stone of the debut Black Sabbath album is lacking clairvoyance. I don't have the whole thing unfortunately:
"Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath, which was hyped as a rockin' ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like England's answer to Coven. Well, they're not that bad, but that's about all the credit you can give them. The whole album is a shuck – despite the murky song titles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés that sound like the musicians learned them out of a book, grinding on and on with dogged persistence. Vocals are sparse, most of the album being filled with plodding bass lines over which the lead guitar dribbles wooden Claptonisms from the master's tiredest Cream days. They even have discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitized speedfreaks all over each other's musical perimeters yet never quite finding synch — just like Cream! But worse."
That's from September 17 1970. He really bangs away at the Cream connection. This might be where I got the Sabbath as "crude putsch" on Cream idea. Then again I don't remember reading this before...
However Bangs changed his tune / wised up / saw the light pretty quickly. Suddenly he's right-footed-in-real-time, especially as most rock critics continue to hate the Sabs.
Here's Bangs review of Master of Reality for Rolling Stone, November 25, 1971:
The second-generation rock audience (that is, those who went steady to "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and got serious with Highway 62 Revisited) suffer mightily wrestling with the phenomenon represented by Grank Funk and Black Sabbath. If nothing else, though, both Funk and Sabbath are for all their monotony at least supremely consistent — as opposed to schtick collectors with no personal vision like Deep Purple. And since when is monotony so taboo in rock & roll, anyway? Rock has been — some of the best of it too in large part monotonous from the beginning, hypnotically so, as rightwingers would say. As far apart as they are, Black Sabbath is only slightly more monotonous than James Taylor or Joni Mitchell, and any Stooges or MC5 fan who disdains Black Sabbath is just bigoted.
The thing is that, like all the best rock & rollers since the Pleistocene era, Black Sabbath (and Grand Funk) have a vision that informs their music with unity and direction and makes their simple structures more than they might seem. Grand Funk's vision is one of universal brotherhood (as when they have spoken of taking their millions to the White House with a list of demands), but Black Sabbath's, until Master of Reality anyway, has concentrated relentlessly on the self-immolating underside of all the beatific Let's Get Together platitudes of the counter culture.
Their first album found them still locked lyrically into the initial Spiritualist-Satanic hype and was filled out mostly with jamming, while Paranoid reflected that theme only, in the great line in "War Pigs": "Generals gathered in their masses Just like witches at black masses." The rest of the album dealt mostly with social anomie in general, from the title track's picture of total disjuncture (rendered with authentic power too) to "Iron Man's" picture of an unloved Golem in a hostile world, the stark picture of ultimate needle-freak breakdown painted in the philippic "Hand of Doom," and finally the unique "Fairies Wear Boots": "I went walkin' late last night Suddenly I got a fright/I looked in the window, was surprised what I saw/Fairies in boots dancin' with the broads!"
Not all of this, incidentally, was rendered in La Brea sinks of lugubrious bass blasts — several of the songs had high wailing solos and interesting changes of tempo, and "Paranoid" really moved. If you took the trouble to listen to the album all the way through.
Master of Reality both extends and modifies the trends on Paranoid. It has fewer songs, if you discount the two short instrumental interludes, but it is not that the songs are longer than the first record — the album is shorter. The sound, with a couple of exceptions, has evolved little if at all. The thick, plodding, almost arrhythmic steel wool curtains of sound the group is celebrated and reviled for only appear in their classical state of excruciating slowness on two tracks, "Sweet Leaf" and "Lord of This World," and both break into driving jams that are well worth the wait. Which itself is no problem once you stop thinking about how bored you are and just let it filter down your innards like a good bottle of Romilar. Rock & roll has always been noise, and Black Sabbath have boiled that noise to its resinous essence. Did you expect bones to be anything else but rigid?
The rest of the songs, while not exactly lilting, have all the drive and frenzy you could wish for in this day and age. Thematically the group has mellowed a bit, and although the morbidity still shines rankly in almost every song, the group seems to have taken its popularity and position seriously enough to begin offering some answers to the dark cul-de-sacs of Paranoid. "Sweet Leaf," for instance, shows that Black Sabbath have the balls to write a song celebrating grass this late date, and the double entendre, if you can even call it that, is much less tortuous than it would have been in 1966, with an added touch of salvation from grosser potions: "My life was empty forever on a down/Until you took me, showed me around ... Straight people don't know what you're about..."
I need someone to show me
The things in life that I can find
I can’t see the things
that make true happiness
I must be blind.
—Black Sabbath, "Paranoid"
"The world’s comin’ to an end."
—British bobby, interviewed on network
news in the first bloom of Beatlemania
We have met dark days; the catalog of present horrors and
dire morrows is so familiar there’s not even any point in running through it
again. It may be a copout, but people will do almost anything now to escape
from the pall. The (first) Age of Anxiety gave way to the clammy retreat of the
Fifties, when every citizen kept a tight bomb shelter, then to the sense of
massive change in the Sixties, but the passing of that agitated decade has
brought a new Age of Implosion, yesterday’s iconoclastic war babies siphoned
off en masse, stumbling and puking over each other at the festivals which were
celebrations such a short time ago. Tying off their potentials and shooting
them into the void in bleak rooms.
It’s a desperate time, in a "desperate land" as Jim Morrison said just when things seemed brightest. If the terminal dramas of the Doors and the Velvet Underground were prophetic, their "sordid" plots have now become the banal stuff of everyday life, which certainly doesn’t lessen the pervasive dread, but does imply a new music, a music which deals with the breakdowns and psychic smog on another level and, hopefully, points toward some positive resolution.
We have seen the Stooges take on the night ferociously and go tumbling into its maw, and Alice Cooper is currently exploiting it for all it’s worth, turning it into a circus. But there is only one band that has dealt with it honestly on terms meaningful to vast portions of the audience, not only grappling with it in a mythic structure that’s both personal and universal, but actually managing to prosper as well. That band is Black Sabbath.
Naturally, you can’t pull off something as heavy as that without creating a bit of controversy. Most people are familiar by now with the great Sabbath-Grand Funk vs. rock press controversy (although the press has begun a large-scale reroute in the last year). The band’s first album made the top 20 in England, their second went to number one, the single of its title song made number three on the British charts, and by the time they came to America their record company was ready with a hype fronted by "LOUDER THAN LED ZEPPELIN" banners, though, as lead singer Ozzy Osbourne says, "They had to drop that fairly soon because we just told them not to **** around." The company has never really known what it has in the group or how to handle them. But it really didn’t matter at all, because Black Sabbath wasted no time in repeating their English triumph in this country; all three of their albums were on the charts at the same time for months on end.
The audience, searching endlessly both for bone-rattling sound and someone to put the present social and psychic traumas in perspective, found both in Black Sabbath. They were loud, perhaps, with Grand Funk, louder than anything previously heard in human history; they possessed a dark vision of society and the human soul borrowed from black magic and Christian myth; they cut straight to the teen heart of darkness with obsessive, crushing blocks of sound and "words that go right to your sorrow, words that go ‘Ain’t no tomorrow,’ " as Ozzy sang in "Warning" on their first album.
The critics and others who just couldn’t hear it, whether they were so far from it as to find their spokesman in a James Taylor or merely felt that the riff’s essence had already been done much better by the Stooges or MC5, responded almost as one by damning it as "downer music." Since much of it did lack the unquenchable adrenaline imperatives of its precedents and one look around a rock concert hall was enough to tell you where the Psychedelic Revolution had led, the charge seemed worth considering.
Lots of Black Sabbath fans take downs, but there are certainly many that don’t, and just as many barbiturate and heroin casualties that have no truck at all with the group, including many of those devotees of the mellow acoustic sound who are supposedly into healthier lifestyles than the minions of the music of desperation; if the pop audience knew how many of the heroes whose pockets they’ve filled were on smack right now, they... would probably not be the least bit surprised. But somehow it’s easier to picture the kid down the block, as fuckeded-up as we’ve watched him become, slumped in his bedroom gorged on Tuinal, listening to Black Sabbath prate of the devil and nuclear war and what a cruel kitchen the world is, nodding to himself as he nods along anyway and finding justification for his cancerous apathy.
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.
You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
Then you turn and run farther
when the fast bullets fly.
—Bob Dylan, "Masters of War"
Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at Black Masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death’s construction
In the fields the bodies burning
As the war machine keeps turning
Death and hatred to mankind
Poisoning their brainwashed minds.
Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that all to the poor.
Now in darkness world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs of the power
And as God has struck the hour
Day of judgment, God is calling
On their knees the war pigs crawling
Begging mercies for their sins
Satan laughing spreads his wings.
—Black Sabbath, "War Pigs"
Listen to my last words anywhere.
Listen to my last words any world.
Listen all you boards, syndicates and
governments of the earth. And you
powers behind what filth deals con-
summated in what lavatory to take
what is not yours. To sell the ground
from unborn feet forever . . . And
what does my program of total resis-
tance and total austerity offer you? I
offer you nothing. I am not a politician.
These are conditions of total
emergency. And these are my in-
structions for total emergency if
carried out now could avert the total
disaster now on tracks: Peoples of
the earth, you have all been poi-
soned . . . Any minute now fifty
million adolescent gooks will hit the
street with switch blades, bicycle
chains and cobblestones..."
—William S. Burroughs, "Last Words
[of Hassan I Sabbah]" Nova Express
Despite the blitzkrieg nature of their sound, Black Sabbath
are moralists. Like Bob Dylan, like William Burroughs, like most artists trying
to deal with a serious present situation in an honest way. They are not on the
same level of profundity, perhaps; they are certainly much less articulate,
subject to the ephemerality of rock, but they are a band with a conscience who
have looked around them and taken it upon themselves to reflect the chaos in a
way that they see as positive. By now they’ve taken some tentative steps toward
offering alternatives.
and you will not regret
Leaving the life you led
before we met
You are the first
to have this love of mine
Forever with me
until the end of time...
Look into my eyes,
you will see who I am
My name is Lucifer,
please take my hand.
Since the band’s name is what it is and the thematic content
of this album, as well as its packaging, leaned so far towards this sort of
thing, it’s easy to see why people should stereotype the group as either
exploiting for profit or living and promulgating the form of pop Black Magic
which finds high school girls intently reading books on how to become a witch
and trying out spells on prospective boyfriends (and a sharpie like Anton La
Vey cleaning up) even as dead (literally)—serious organizations such as the
Process carry out their grim rites in Los Angeles, Mexico, New York and
elsewhere, promoting total nihilism and the end of the world, engaging in
incredible machinations to, yes, get people in their power (obtaining zombies
fit for any job they don’t want to soil their own hands with) even committing
murder in some instances with the ritualistic precision of absolute
psychopathy. There are scheming salamanders like Manson everywhere, finding
fantastic utility in this phase when it comes to their own less bizarrely
"religious" ends. What Black Magic is about is absolute control;
since rock ’n’ roll is power music with strange effects on people, sometimes,
with undercurrent themes of almost fascist dominance and subjection running
from the earliest blues through the Stones to Alice Cooper, there were bound to
be some psychic and subcultural connections made. No doubt there are Black
Sabbath fans who like the groups because it seems to reflect their own
preoccupation with hocus-pocus and supernatural manipulation, just as people
used the Velvet Underground once as soundtracks for the hard-drug movies
they’re living to the stone hilt.
Evil powers disappear
Demons worry
while the Wizard is near
Everyone’s happy
when the Wizard walks by
The Black Sabbath vision of life on earth and the machinery
of civilization becomes concrete in their second LP, Paranoid, whose very first
song takes the epithet applied so indiscriminately for the past half-decade to
anyone the speaker happens to be in disagreement with, and carries it to its
ultimate gross characterization in a vignette reminiscent in verbal content and
unbridled bitterness both of Dylan’s "Masters of War" and the
firebrand rhetoric of agit-prop pamphlets of the Socialist Workers and other
parties farther left since the time of the First World War. I remember seeing
old books with vitriolic cartoons of Capitalist Pigs (literally) strolling
along in tophats and waistcoats with buttons ready to pop from the accretions
of fat, lighting giant Havana stogies with $100 bills. Possibly the only
difference between that was conscious inflammatory propaganda and this is (you
can accept this to whatever degree you choose – I tend to take it all the way)
true folk culture, where the hatred is more organic and sensate, churning
straight up from the bowels in catharses of rage as apocalyptic as the End they
visualize in this song and "Electric Funeral," probably the two most
vicious statements we’re ever going to hear from this band. Even Dylan, after
finding it in himself to write "I hope that you die," realized that
there was nothing more he could say on the tip of that particular limb.
Victims of mad frustration
Burning global box of fire
Like electric funeral pyre...
Supernatural king
Takes earth under his wing
Heaven’s golden chorus sings
Hell’s angels flap their wings
Evil souls fall to hell
Ever trapped in burning cells.
And the vengeance motif ain’t just limited to Biblical
referents, because "Iron Man," one of their greatest songs, is a
piece of almost pure program music utilizing lugubrious drums clomping like the
falls of Golem feet and a guitar riff that swoops recklessly like a Hulk arm
demolishing buildings, to depict a miscreant, much reminiscent of the Karloff
Frankenstein’s monster who really only wanted to play with the other children,
who finds himself ostracized as a total freak because of his size and lumbering
lack of grace (Hmmm, know some people like that myself; maybe Iron Man is
really a symbol and fantasy for every adolescent ever tortured by awkwardness
and "difference") and responds with understandable rage and a
havoc-wreaking rampage:
"Has he thoughts within his head?"
"We’ll just pass him there
Why should we even care?"
Nobody wants him
He just stares at the world
Planning his vengeance
That he will soon unfurl
People are strange, when you’re a stranger. It’s a melodrama
of alienation, just as "Paranoid" is a terse, chillingly accurate
description of the real thing, when you suddenly find that you’ve somehow
skidded just a fraction out of the world as you have and other still do
perceive it. "Paranoid" renders perfectly the clammy feeling of
knowing that at this point there is absolutely no one on the planet to whom you
can make yourself understood or be helped by. All alone, like a real rolling
stone; it’s no wonder in such circumstances that the imagination might get a
little hairy, and turn to dreams of science-fiction revenge. I’ve felt the
arctic wedge of disjuncture myself at one time and another, stuck in the
painful place where you can only send frozen warnings cross the borderline and
those inevitably get distorted. Because they’ve captured it so well Black
Sabbath means a lot to me and a lot of my friends for "Paranoid"
alone. With the experience so common these years is it any wonder that this
group has conquered the world (so to speak)?
your soul—can it be saved?
Or perhaps you think
that when you’re dead
you just stay in your grave.
Is God just a thought in your head
or is he a part of you?
Is Christ just a name
that you read in a book
when you were in school?...
Well I have seen the truth.
Yes I have seen the light
and I’ve changed my ways.
And I’ll be prepared
when you’re lonely and scared
at the end of your days.
The song goes on to assert that "God... is the only one
who can save you now from all this sin and hate" and even includes a line
that goes, "Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope—do you
think he’s a fool?" Well, yes, and yes, as a matter of fact, because the
Pope is a War Pig if ever there was one, or at least an evil angel. Maybe I’m
making a fool of myself but I see this band making an attempt to provide
direction for a generation busy immolating itself as quickly as possible. Since
nobody else around that I can see seems to have any better advice for them than
Black Sabbath, it pains me perhaps unduly to see them suggesting the hoariest
copout conceived in 2,000 years. I mean, what’s the difference between a
vegetable babbling about how much crank he can hold and stay alive, and one
locked into repeating a zealot litany with mindless persistence to every
stranger coming down this side of the street?
Revolution in their minds—
the children start to march
Against the world
they have to live in.
Oh! The hate that’s in their hearts!
They’re tired of being pushed around
and told just what to do.
They’ll fight the world
until they’ve won
and love comes flowing through
I think there might also be some Sabbath Lester-love in this grubby little paperback called Rock Revolution that Creem published in '76, contents all written just on the eve of punk, a fascinating little document. Most of the contents are written by Lester and there's an appreciation of heavy metal by him in there. But it would be almost impossible to scan on account of being one of those cheap mass-market tight-paged glue-bound pocket-size paperbacks with the margins going right to the centrefold, almost to the point of being unreadable without breaking the spine.