The identity of Black Sabbath went through some growing pains before the group made it big. Initially starting off as a blues-based band called Earth, the Birmingham quartet didn’t have a strong direction until the theatre across from their rehearsal space began showing the 1963 Boris Karloff film Black Sabbath. With an idea to create scary music the same way people made scary movies, Black Sabbath suddenly came to life.
Of course, Black Sabbath never felt shy about getting meta with their work. The band’s first album was named Black Sabbath, and the first song on the album was also named ‘Black Sabbath’. But if there was ever a song that directly translated the mania of Black Sabbath in its purest form, it would be ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’.
“The lyrics to ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ were about the Sabbath experience, the ups and downs, the good times and bad times, the rip-offs, the business side of it all,” Geezer Butler said in the liner notes for the Black Box box set. “’Bog blast all of you’ was directed at the critics, the record business in general, the lawyers, the accountants, management and everyone who was trying to cash in on us. It was a backs-to-the-wall rant at everyone.”
By the time the band reached 1973, the dramatic success and massive workload that had made the band was starting to turn. Drug addictions and creative burnout ran rampant among the band members, but the machine kept turning. In order to spark inspiration, the band rented Clearwell Castle in the Forest of Dean for recording, where Iommi came up with the album’s title track.
“The riff of ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ was the benchmark for that album,” Tony Iommi claimed in his book Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath. “It was a heavy riff, then the song went into a light bit in the middle, and then back to the riff again: the light and shade I’m always looking for. Ozzy sang very well on it, actually on all of the songs on the album. Very high!”
Ultimately, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath would signal the beginning of the end for the original Black Sabbath lineup. With decades of hindsight, Ozzy Osbourne became remarkably candid about himself in the immediate aftermath of the album’s production.”Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was really the album after which I should have said goodbye because after that I really started unravelling,” Osbourne told Mojo Magazine in 2013. “Then we ended up falling out of favour with each other.”
Check out ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ down below.
