At a party in 1971, a young woman turned to The New Yorker’s George W. S. Trow and said, “Did you know that everything demonic is commercial?” The party was thrown by Warner Bros. Records, for the British rock quartet Black Sabbath, at the time a “fledgling” band. Four decades later, thanks to Sabbath and Stephen King and Charles Addams and Stephenie Meyer and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Freddy Kreuger and countless other pop-culture manifestations of the demonic, the question, originally asked in earnest, has become rhetorical—not to say redundant. The undead are everywhere. The occult is a cash machine. New Yorker cartoons are not the only place you’ll find the Grim Reaper these days. He’s also the star of a recent animated children’s series, “The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy.”
“Louder than Hell,” the massive (and massively entertaining) new oral history of heavy metal by Jon Wiedenhorn and Katherine Turman, reminds us where the musical portion of this cultural embrace of the demonic began: in the bombed-out ruins of the British Midlands. The founders of Black Sabbath, half of the musicians in Led Zeppelin, and the key members of Judas Priest were all raised in Birmingham and its suburbs, surrounded by the wreckage of Germany’s attacks on Britain’s manufacturing centers. It’s a bleak heritage, but the city should consider building a tourism trade around it, as Liverpool has with the Beatles. “BIRMINGHAM: CRADLE OF HEAVY METAL: COME SLEEP IN THE JAIL WHERE OZZY OSBOURNE DID TIME.” As the Sabbath front man tells Wiedenhorn and Turman, the Summer of Love never reached England’s second city:
When I was a kid, I was hungry. I had my ass hanging out of my pants I hated the fucking world. When I heard the silly fucking words, “If you go to San Francisco, be sure to put a flower in your hair” I wanted to fucking strangle John Phillips [of the Mamas and the Papas]. I was sitting in the industrial town of Birmingham, England. My father was dying of asbestos from industrial pollution and I was an angry young punk.
It wasn’t just a mood. The industrial surroundings directly influenced the development of the heavy metal sound. Sabbath’s lead guitarist, Tony Iommi, who’d gone to school with Osbourne, lost the tips of two of his fingers in a workplace accident in (ironically enough) a metal-fabricating plant. “I had to come up with a different way of playing because I couldn’t play the conventional way anymore,” Iommi says in “Louder than Hell.” He created his own fingertip prostheses from melted liquid-soap bottles, tuned down the strings of his guitar and combined them with banjo strings, which bent more easily. Not long after the accident, Iommi came up with a composition that tapped into a dread that was centuries old. Discussing the opening song on Sabbath’s self-titled début, Wiedenhorn and Turman explain:
The three-chord riff in “Black Sabbath” has been credited as the first use of the tritone, or diabolus in musica, in heavy metal. In the Renaissance era, the tritone was feared by the Church because of its ominous sound. Later on, various classical composers—including Richard Wagner and Gustav Holst—would incorporate the tritone into their compositions.
Iommi recalls, “When I first played that riff, the hairs stood up on my arm and I knew.” The band’s drummer Bill Ward came up with lyrics to match the gloomy music, and soon the quartet abandoned the name Earth, taking instead, “Black Sabbath,” the English title of Mario Bava’s horror film “I Tre Volti della Paura.” Their first album, recorded in three days on an eight-track machine, went to No. 8 in the British charts.
A year after the party that Trow wrote about, Ellen Willis reviewed “Black Sabbath Vol. 4” in The New Yorker. She saw the band for exactly what it was:
Black Sabbath belongs to the transition period of the last couple of years, a time of romantic, self-indulgent pessimism when people were acknowledging that the dream [of the Sixties] was dead but weren’t quite ready to spit on it’s grave….The genius of these songs is that they convert the residue of a decade’s aborted visions into the timeless melancholy of adolescence.
I discovered Sabbath during my own teen-age period of self-indulgent pessimism, which was spent in another bombed-out city, Belfast. My years there coincided with the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal, a second-generation blossoming of loud music that came after Sabbath and Zeppelin and Deep Purple. The noise and spectacle of heavy metal and its close cousin punk rock were well suited to the fractious Northern Irish capital in the early nineteen-eighties. Befitting their image, hard-rock and punk bands also seemed more willing to play gigs in the province than Top Forty acts were. Judas Priest, Def Leppard, The Damned, Thin Lizzy, Motörhead, and Saxon all performed in Belfast during those years. Every show was sold out and every show was an event. The one band that did not come was Black Sabbath. Even without Ozzy, they had stayed in top form, releasing two potent albums, “Heaven and Hell” and “Mob Rules,” featuring Ronnie James Dio on vocals. When I left Belfast, in 1986, I left my passion for metal behind. I still listened to the albums in my collection, but did not keep up with the new developments in the genre: thrash, hardcore, black metal, death metal, and nu metal, all of which are thoroughly chronicled in “Louder than Hell.”
Decades passed. The original Black Sabbath reunited and put out a decent album, “13.” They announced a tour. Given the opportunity to take care of unfinished business, I bought tickets for a show at an outdoor arena not far from my home, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. I went with a high-school friend who still plays in a band. Traffic was bottlenecked on the highway to the venue, so we took the back roads, cutting through the Manassas battlefield, which is rapidly being surrounded by the sprawl of Northern Virginia. That contrast—strip malls and Civil War dead—felt appropriate for the occasion, and Sabbath didn’t disappoint, opening their show, as they often have over the years, with the air-raid siren that leads into “War Pigs.”
Inevitably, it was an uneven performance. Ozzy, who sang like an old man even when he was young, was frequently off-key. His voice is still otherworldly, but it can no longer reach the heights of a song like “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” which was, mercifully, not on the set list. Bill Ward had opted out of the tour over a contract dispute and was replaced by Tommy Clufetos. His drumming was forceful, but I missed the depth of Ward’s jazz-influenced style. The bassist Geezer Butler has now lived long enough to justify his nickname, but there was nothing geezerish about his nimble playing. And Iommi, in a black leather jacket and spectacles, looked like a movie villain and played, prosthetic fingertips and all, like the guitar god he is. There were plenty of songs in which the quartet blasted the audience with the kind of fearsome power that we had paid to hear. “Black Sabbath,” “N.I.B.,” “Snowblind,” “God is Dead?,” and “Dirty Women” all stand out in my memory.
For the most part, the audience was what you might expect: a horde of extras from the “Sons of Anarchy” set with a sprinkling of middle-aged suburbanites still in their collared work shirts. (The timeless melancholy that Willis identified appears to have carried well into middle age.) What was striking however, was the number of people who brought young children—children who were, by my best estimate, under the age of ten. Perhaps they couldn’t find babysitting, or perhaps the kitschification of the occult had become so pervasive that they didn’t think twice about it. As the father of two sons in that age group, I found it mystifying. The sheer volume of the Sabbath sound system would have sent my boys howling into the night crying for their mother. Onstage was a trio of screens where video of the band was intercut with footage from horror movies and other grisly sources. About two-thirds of the way through the show, as “Children of the Grave” was being played, I saw a woman carrying her daughter up the stairs of the amphitheater, shielding the child’s eyes with her hands. They didn’t come back. It was good to see that the demon retained some of its bite.
Top: Black Sabbath at the Gaumont Theatre, in Southampton, on June 25, 1980.
Above: The author in Belfast, in 1983.
