Black Sabbath is the debut studio album by the English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, released on 13 February 1970 by Vertigo Records in the United Kingdom and on 1 June 1970 by Warner Bros. Records in the United States. The album is widely regarded as the first true heavy metal album. The opening title track, "Black Sabbath", was named the greatest heavy metal song of all time by Rolling Stone and has been referred to as the first doom metal song.
After recording the single "Evil Woman" and its B-side "Wicked World" on 10 November 1969 at Trident Studios, the remainder of the album was recorded in a single 12-hour session on 17 November at Regent Sounds Studios, using songs from their live set to construct the album. The album's sound was largely informed by Iommi's playing style in the wake of a sheet metal accident that cut off two of his fingertips years prior.
Black Sabbath received generally negative reviews from critics upon its release but was a commercial success, reaching number eight on the UK Albums Charts and number 23 on the US Billboard Top LPs chart. It has retrospectively garnered reappraisal as one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time. Black Sabbath is included in Robert Dimery's 2005 musical reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.
Background Black Sabbath formed from the ashes of Mythology, which featured guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward. The two would recruit bassist Geezer Butler and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne as part of their new band, initially named Earth and later renamed to Black Sabbath, after the 1963 Italian horror film. After their live debut in Workington, England, the band would sign with Philips Records, and would receive distribution from the label's newly formed subsidiary, Vertigo Records.
Recording The band recorded the song "Evil Woman" and its B-side '"Wicked World" on 10 November 1969 at Trident Studios on St. Anne's Court, London, and recorded the remainder of the album at Regent Sounds Studio on Denmark Street, in a 12-hour session on 17 November. Iommi said: "We just went in the studio and did it in a day, we played our live set and that was it. We actually thought a whole day was quite a long time, then off we went the next day to play for £20 in Switzerland." Aside from the bells, thunder and rain sound effects added to the beginning of the opening track and the double-tracked guitar solos on "N.I.B." and "Sleeping Village", there were virtually no overdubs added to the album. Iommi recalls recording live: "We thought, 'We have two days to do it and one of the days is mixing.' So we played live. Ozzy was singing at the same time, we just put him in a separate booth and off we went. We never had a second run of most of the stuff."
The key to the band's new sound on the album was Iommi's distinctive playing style that he developed after an accident at a sheet metal factory where he was working at the age of 17 in which the tips of the middle fingers of his fretting hand were severed. Iommi created a pair of false fingertips using plastic from a dish detergent bottle and changed the string arrangement of the guitar. Iommi replaced the second string with the first, the third with the second, and so on. In place of the first, he added a banjo string, to make it easier for him to bend the strings. Later, Iommi would downtune the guitar on the album Master of Reality, to make its playability even less painful. "I'd play a load of chords and I'd have to play fifths because I couldn't play fourths because of my fingers," Iommi explained to Phil Alexander in Mojo in 2013. "That helped me develop my style of playing, bending the strings and hitting the open string at the same time just to make the sound wilder." In the same article, bassist Geezer Butler added, "Back then the bass player was supposed to do all these melodic runs, but I didn't know how to do that because I'd been a guitarist, so all I did was follow Tony's riff. That made the sound heavier."
Iommi began recording the album with a white Fender Stratocaster, his guitar of choice at the time, until a malfunctioning pickup forced him to finish recording with a Gibson SG, a guitar he had recently purchased as a backup but had "never really played". The SG was a right-handed model, which the left-handed Iommi played upside down. Soon after recording the album, he met a right-handed guitarist who was playing a left-handed SG upside down, and the two agreed to swap guitars; this SG became Iommi's main guitar that he modified and later "put out to pasture" at the Hard Rock Cafe.
Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne has always spoken fondly of the recording of the band's debut album, stating in his autobiography I Am Ozzy, "Once we'd finished, we spent a couple of hours double-tracking some of the guitar and vocals, and that was that. Done. We were in the pub in time for last orders. It can't have taken any longer than 12 hours in total. That's how albums should be made, in my opinion." Drummer Bill Ward agrees, telling Guitar World in 2001, "I think the first album is just absolutely incredible. It's naïve, and there's an absolute sense of unity – it's not contrived in any way, shape or form. We weren't old enough to be clever. I love it all, including the mistakes!" In an interview for the Classic Albums series in 2010, Butler added, "It was literally live in the studio. I mean, (producer) Rodger Bain, I think he's a genius the way he captured the band in such a short time." In his autobiography Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven & Hell with Black Sabbath, Iommi plays down the producer's role, insisting, "We didn't choose to work with Rodger Bain, he was chosen for us... He was good to have around, but we didn't really get a lot of advice from him. He maybe suggested a couple of things, but the songs were already fairly structured and sorted."
Genre On release, a writer for The Boston Globe described the music of Black Sabbath as "hard blues-rock". In retrospect, AllMusic's Steve Huey feels that Black Sabbath marks "the birth of heavy metal as we now know it". In his opinion, the album "transcends its clear roots in blues-rock and psychedelia to become something more". He ascribes its "sonic ugliness" as a reflection of "the bleak industrial nightmare" of the group's hometown, Birmingham, England. Huey notes the first side's allusions to themes characteristic of heavy metal, including evil, paganism, and the occult, "as filtered through horror films and the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, and Dennis Wheatley." He characterises side two as "given over to loose blues-rock jamming learned through" the English rock band Cream.
In the opinion of the author and former Metal Maniacs magazine editor Jeff Wagner, Black Sabbath is the "generally accepted starting point" when heavy metal "became distinct from rock and roll". In his opinion, the album represented a transition from blues rock into "something uglier", and that this sound "found deeper gravity via mournful singing and a sinister rhythmic pulse". According to Rolling Stone magazine, "the album that arguably invented heavy metal was built on thunderous blues-rock". Sputnikmusic's Mike Stagno notes that Black Sabbath's combined elements of rock, jazz and blues, with heavy distortion created one of the most influential albums in the history of heavy metal. In retrospect, Black Sabbath has been lauded as perhaps the first true heavy metal album. It has also been credited as the first record in the stoner rock genre. Taking a broader perspective, Pete Prown of Vintage Guitar says, "The debut Black Sabbath album of 1970 was a watershed moment in heavy rock, but it was part of a larger trend of artists, producers, and engineers already moving towards the sound we now call hard rock and heavy metal."
Music and lyrics
Black Sabbath music and lyrics were very dark for the time. The opening track is based almost entirely on a tritone interval played at slow tempo on the electric guitar. In the 2010 Classic Albums documentary on the making of the band's second album Paranoid, bassist Geezer Butler claims the riff was inspired by "Mars, the Bringer of War", a movement in Gustav Holst's The Planets. Iommi reinterpreted the riff slightly and redefined the band's direction. Ward told Classic Albums, "When Oz sang 'What is this that stands before me?' it became completely different...this was a different lyric now, this was a different feel. I was playing drums to the words." The song's lyrics concern a "figure in black" which Geezer Butler claims to have seen after waking up from a nightmare. In the liner notes to the band's 1998 live album Reunion the bassist remembers:
Similarly, the lyrics of the song "N.I.B." are written from the point of view of Lucifer, who falls in love with a human woman and "becomes a better person" according to lyricist Butler. Contrary to popular belief, the name of that song is not an abbreviation for "Nativity in Black;" according to Osbourne's autobiography it is merely a reference to drummer Bill Ward's pointed goatee at the time, which was shaped as a fountain pen-nib. The lyrics of two other songs on the album were written about stories with mythological themes. "Behind the Wall of Sleep" is a reference to the H. P. Lovecraft short story "Beyond the Wall of Sleep," while "The Wizard" was inspired by the character of Gandalf from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The latter includes harmonica playing by Osbourne. The band also recorded a cover of "Evil Woman," a song that had been an American hit for the band Crow. In his autobiography, Iommi admits the band reluctantly agreed to do the song at the behest of their manager Jim Simpson, who insisted they record something commercial.
Artwork
The cover photograph was shot at Mapledurham Watermill, situated on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, England, by photographer Keith McMillan (credited as Keef), who was in charge of the overall design. Standing in front of the watermill is a figure dressed in a black cloak, portrayed by model Louisa Livingstone, whose identity was not widely known until 2020. "I'm sure (McMillan) said it was for Black Sabbath, but I don't know if that meant anything much to me at the time," Livingstone recalled, adding that it had been "freezing cold" during the shoot. "I had to get up at about 4 o'clock in the morning. Keith was rushing around with dry ice, throwing it into the water. It didn't seem to be working very well, so he ended up using a smoke machine," she said.
According to McMillan, Livingstone was wearing nothing underneath the black cloak, and some experimentation was done involving some "slightly more risqué" photographs taken at the session. "We decided none of that worked," McMillan said. "Any kind of sexuality took away from the more foreboding mood. But she was a terrific model. She had amazing courage and understanding of what I was trying to do."
The inner gatefold sleeve of the original release featured an inverted cross containing a poem written by Roger Brown, McMillan's photography assistant. The band were reportedly upset when they discovered this, as it fuelled allegations that they were satanists or occultists; however, in Osbourne's memoirs, he says that to the best of his knowledge nobody was upset with the inclusion. Iommi's recollection is somewhat different: "Suddenly we had all these crazy people turning up at shows," he told Mojo magazine in 2013. "I think Alex Sanders (high priest of the Wiccan religion) turned up at a gig once. It was all quite strange, really." The liner notes to the 1998 Reunion album state "Unbeknownst to the band, Black Sabbath was launched in the U.S. with a party with the head of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, presiding over the proceedings... All of a sudden Sabbath were Satan's Right Hand Men."