There are still those who affirm that Black Sabbath and the heavy metal They are the same thing. The band, you know, comes from Birmingham, the great industrial city of Great Britain, portrayed by Charles Dickens as an urban nightmare. But that happened in the nineteenth century and they formed around 1969, when Birmingham had already started his decline as a manufacturing center, a decline that was topped by Margaret Thatcher.
The productive world of Birmingham has a lot to do with the genesis of Black Sabbath. It is part of his legend that work accident of 1965, when Tommy Iommi lost the tip of two fingers of his right hand in a cast of Birmingham; His teammates took the cut appendices to the hospital but nothing could be done. It was more useful for the factory manager, who gave him a Django Reinhardt LP, another mutilated guitarist. Voluntary, Iommi experienced with homemade prostheses, varieties of cordage and atypical affinations until the brushstroke of Black Sabbath arose.
The name, you know, was pure chiripa. They were still called Earth, also claimed by another band, when they saw that a horror movie was exhibited in a local cinema, Black Sabbath (Actually, an old Italian tape originally entitled The three faces of fear, by Mario Bava, with Boris Karloff). At that time they had a great intuition: if people paid for feeling fear in the cinema, wouldn’t the same happen in pop music? They took advantage of the fact that their parents, several of them Catholics, did not know the connotations of the term.
They may lack education but Ozzy and his colleagues were ready as hunger. They cultivated the gloomy songs, taking ideas from there and here, speaking of drugs and wars, magicians and depressions. IOMMI himself confesses that, when they began to rehearse Paranoidhalf of the band did not know what the word “paranoia” meant. They were fortunate in the fact that they recorded for the progressive seal Vertigo, whose cunning graphic designers made covers between occultism and eroticism.
The reality is that they lacked claims. The first photos show them as a provincial boy, who did not buy their clothes in boutiques or knew what a good hairdresser hip He could do with his lush hair. Now that did heroes of the working class, in the way lennoniano? We may be facing simplification.
I think of the Pasmo of the Sales Department of the Hispavox record label when they found that one of the BCs of AC/DC was the stores of the wealthy Madrid neighborhood of Salamanca. There is a distance between the hard rock of the Australians and the metal of those of Birmingham but it has always intrigued me that our doctoral students ignore these sociological disasters and prefer to punish us with the nth thesis about THE MOVIDE.
For Black Sabbath, success in the United States was intoxicating. At least, that resulted for Ozzy, which was soaked with all available pleasures, such as the proverbial child in the candy store. It is still discussed whether it intimately lost interest or if it was expelled for its cronies. The second is more likely: they demonstrated an acute business sense, replacing them with a contracted chain of vocalists. There were Ronnie Dio, Ian Gillan, Glenn Hughes, Tony Martin and other employees too fleeting. The loyalty of his audience apologized so mercenary plays.
Even more amazing was Ozzy’s commercial resurrection. He was bounding, claiming that his ideal was to follow the aesthetic trajectory of the Beatles, but his wife Sharon took the nonsense. Daughter of one of the most sinister managers in the London business, Don Arden, she knew how to capitalize The Osbournes. And, after the universal messing generated by the film This is Spinal Tapabout the excesses of a metal band, Ozzy’s nonsense were human, too human.