The Complete History of Black Sabbath

What Evil Lurks

Joel McIver

• Publisher: Race Point Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781631063688
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Biographies de musique

The definitive history of the band that invented heavy metal—featuring rare photographs, a complete discography and an introduction by Robb Flynn. With its infernal sound and dark lyrics, Black Sabbath has been a force of nature for half a century. Its career spans eleven different line-ups and nineteen studio albums in addition to the twenty-eight solo albums of the original four members. The band began in 1968, playing blues rock on the cover circuit of Birmingham, England. But guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, singer Ozzy Osbourne, and drummer Bill Ward would soon define a new genre of music—and make themselves world famous. Joel McIver explores the complete history of Sabbath, from precursor bands to history-making albums and on to the present. With more than 150 photos, a gatefold family tree tracing the development of the band, a complete discography, and a foreword by Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn, this is the must-have book for any Sabbath fan.

CHAPTER
1

WHAT EVIL LURKS
1948–1969

John Michael Osbourne, born on December 3, 1948, and raised in the home of his parents Jack and Lillian at 14 Lodge Road in Aston, a bombed-out suburb of Birmingham, England, should by rights have spent forty-five years working in a factory before dying in his sixties. That was the career path laid down by tradition for men of his era and demographic. Instead, Ozzy—as we might as well refer to him from now on—became one of the world’s most recognizable rock stars. What were the chances?

“Low” is the answer. His parents both worked in the automobile industry, with his dad on night shifts and his mum working at the Lucas company in its wiring plant. Aston had taken a beating during World War II, only four years before, and the poverty of the area was easily visible. Most of Aston’s working population was confined to living conditions that would seem primitive to most observers in the pampered modern age in which you and I live. Ozzy, his brothers Paul and Tony, his sisters Jean, Iris, and Gillian, and their parents lived in typically cramped style.

Ozzy photographed in August 1969 as a member of the band Earth, at Hamburg’s Star-Club.

Bull Ring Centre, a brutalist redevelopment project in 1960s Birmingham.

Another local family, the Wards, lived on Witton Lodge Road. Their son William was born seven months before Ozzy, on May 5, 1948. Ward once described Aston as a no-frills place where violence was the order of the day; he witnessed stabbings and saw men coming out of pubs only to drop dead before his eyes. Vagrants abounded in the grim years of postwar shock, although he felt that Aston had a sort of beauty at the same time. For him, and for Ozzy, it was home.

As with any depressed urban area—and especially at this point in history—career options were limited, so a common option for young men who couldn’t find work in a factory was to enter the army. The Butler family, whose youngest son Terence Michael Joseph was born on July 17, 1949, sent two other sons to the armed forces; the boys returned home periodically, having struck up friendships with soldiers from London. As a result, they had acquired the word “geezer”—synonymous with “guy” or “dude” in American English—and the term found its way into young Terence’s vocabulary. The effect was that he gained the nickname himself, and thus “Geezer Butler” was born.

Bill Ward photographed in August 1969 as a member of the band Earth, at Hamburg’s Star-Club.

None of these three youths were exactly academic geniuses, although they all had an innate intelligence. Ozzy, who attended the King Edward VI Grammar School on Aston’s Frederick Road, later described his school persona as “the original clown.” Although he acted the buffoon to amuse his classmates, there was a darker side to his personality. At the tender age of fourteen, he attempted to hang himself. Hanging his mother’s washing line over a bar that extended above head height across an alleyway between houses, Ozzy made a noose, placed it over his head, and climbed a chair. Making sure to hold tight to the rope—he wasn’t seriously suicidal, it seemed—he jumped off the chair. His father caught him in the act, released his son from certain death, and then beat him. Presumably that made a kind of sense.

Ozzy’s school education included some pretty eye-opening incidents. On one occasion, he reportedly attacked one of his teachers with an iron bar (the teacher was subsequently fired for picking on him), and he got into occasional scrapes with an impassive but quick-fisted kid eight months his senior.

“Tony Iommi used to bully me all the time when I was at school,” Ozzy later complained, as well he might—his adversary was a tough individual with the brawn to back up his temper. “It was always Tony who used to be the badass guy, going round beating everybody up,” Geezer recalled. “He’s totally mellowed out now, though.”

Geezer Butler (above) and Tony Iommi (next image), members of the band Earth, photographed at Hamburg’s Star-Club in August 1969.

Frank Anthony Iommi was born on February 19, 1948, and lived on Park Lane in Aston. “Aston was tough,” he told me, “it really was—but it depends what you compare it to. We had stabbings and gangs, although there weren’t any shootings then. It kept you on your toes, and you couldn’t relax—you had to be careful wherever you went, because if you weren’t a member of a particular gang, you were against them, and it was very awkward…. Ozzy was a year younger than me [at school], and he had a couple of mates who me and my friends didn’t always get on with. Still, it was a long time ago. At our school you had to be like that or you got beaten up.”

JOINING THE ARMY

Despite his dislike of school, Ozzy found some solace as a performer in hokey pseudo-operatic productions of old stage standards such as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado, and The Pirates of Penzance. But this didn’t deter him from leaving school at the first possible opportunity, which in England then was the age of fifteen.

The adult world of work was hardly welcoming. Ozzy’s first job was as a toolmaker’s apprentice, and he cut off the end of his thumb on the very first day. Having had the missing chunk sewed back on, he moved through a succession of desperate jobs, including killing livestock in an abattoir. Another particularly terrible job was assembling car horns in a factory, where he felt his sanity slowly giving way under the noisy conditions.

In 1965, in an attempt to escape the factories, Ozzy tried to join the army. “I was seventeen and pissed off,” he told the writer Sylvie Simmons. “I wanted to see the world and shoot as many people as possible—which is not much different from being in a band these days—the rap world, anyway. How far did I get? About three feet across the fucking front door. They just told me to fuck off. He said, ‘We want subjects, not objects.’ I had long hair, a water tap on a string around my neck for jewelry, I was wearing a pajama shirt for a jacket, my arse was hanging out, and I hadn’t had a bath for months. And my dad would say, ‘You’ve got to learn a trade’—he was a toolmaker. I thought joining the army would please him.”

The tedium was briefly interrupted in 1966 by a stint in prison for breaking and entering, which Ozzy had messed up gloriously. He was an incompetent burglar at best, on one occasion wearing fingerless gloves while attempting to steal goods from a local clothes store called Sarah Clarke. After turning down the offer of paying a £25 fine—a hefty sum in those days, equating to around $70 at the time—he served six weeks of a three-month jail term in Birmingham’s Winson Green Prison, a forbidding Victorian institution built in 1849. A second spell in prison followed when Ozzy chose, in his infinite wisdom, to punch a policeman squarely in the face. While inside, he at least partially alleviated the daily boredom by tattooing “O-Z-Z-Y” across his left knuckles with a sewing needle.

Birmingham’s Winson Green Prison, where Ozzy spent some time in 1966.

Having served these two prison sentences, it seemed fairly obvious to even the most charitable observer that Ozzy’s career was headed in one of two directions: toward either the gutter or the graveyard. The army wouldn’t have him, he couldn’t tolerate factory life, and he was too much of a tearaway to settle down. Music was his only solace, just as it was for Iommi, Butler, and Ward—three boys wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 What Evil Lurks 1948-1969
• 2 Heavy Metal’s Year Zero 1970
• 3 Snowblind 1971-1978
• 4 Hell’s Madmen 1979-1981
• 5 Rebirth and Death 1982-1983
• 6 Seventh Sons 1984-1990
• 7 Calm Before the Storm 1991-1996
• Mad Sabbath
• 8 The Return 1996-2005
• 9 Lucky Numbers 2006-2016
• Black Sabbath Line-ups
• Discography
• Photo Credits
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Copyright