How Ozzy and Black Sabbath Invented Heavy Metal

If you had seen Black Sabbath's first show, you wouldn't have recognized the band's greatness.

By 1968, they had a decidedly less sinister name, The Polka Tulk Blues Band, and featured a saxophonist and a guitarist who used a bottleneck (a technique in which a cylinder slides over the guitar strings) to play.

A year later, they downsized, found a new name, and invented heavy metal. Few bands are so intrinsically linked to a musical genre, but Sabbath set the template for everyone from Motörhead and AC/DC to Metallica and Guns 'n' Roses.

Along the way, frontman Ozzy Osbourne, who has died aged 76, became one of rock's most influential figures, with an electrifying, unpredictable stage presence and an almost mythological drug habit.

"If anyone lived the debauched rock 'n' roll lifestyle," he once admitted, "I think it was me."

But how did these four working-class musicians from Aston, Birmingham, England, rewrite the rules of rock?

According to Osbourne, it was a visceral reaction to the "hippie" songs like "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair)" that saturated the airwaves after the 1967 Summer of Love.

"Flowers in your hair? Do me a favor," the musician fumed in his 2010 autobiography.

"The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones you threw in the hole after you died at 53 because you'd worked yourself to death."

Teaming up with guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, Osbourne's initial idea was to put a "Brummie" (relating to Birmingham) spin on Fleetwood Mac's blues sound.

The band's first name, Polka Tulk, was inspired by a brand of talcum powder his mother used.

After abandoning the saxophone, they changed their name to Earth, playing as many shows as they could and even picking up some extras.

"Whenever a big band came to town, we'd pack all our stuff in the van and wait outside the venue, hoping they wouldn't show up," Osbourne later recalled.

And it worked... but only once, when the band was asked to replace a Jethro Tull who didn't show up. "After that, every organizer knew our name," Ozzy said.

This opportunistic streak also led them to their signature sound.

The band's rehearsal space was across from a movie theater that showed horror films at night.

Observing the crowd that filled these sessions, the band came up with a plan.

"Tony said, 'Don't you think it's weird how people pay to be scared? Why don't we just start writing horror songs?'" Osbourne told music journalist Pete Paphides in 2005. "And that's what happened."

The musicians metamorphosed into their final form—adopting the name Black Sabbath, after a low-budget Boris Karloff film of the same name, they began writing lyrics that dealt with death, black magic, and mental illness.

To match the content, the music also needed to get heavier. Ward slowed down the tempo. Iommi increased the volume. Osbourne developed an aggressive vocal that seemed constantly on the verge of insanity.

But it was Iommi's guitar playing that truly set Sabbath apart. His riffs leaped from the amplifier and hit the audience squarely in the chest with force.

It was a sound he developed out of necessity.

At age 17, Iommi was working in a sheet metal factory when he lost the tips of both of his middle fingers in a workplace accident.

Although surgeons tried to reattach them, they had turned black by the time he arrived at the hospital. It seemed like the end of his guitar career.

"The doctors said, 'The best thing you can do is quit, really. Get another job, do something else,'" Iommi wrote in his autobiography, Iron Man .

Determined to prove them wrong, he melted down a bottle of detergent to make protective thimbles for his fingers, and loosened the strings so he wouldn't have to apply as much pressure to the guitar neck to create a note.

After months of painful practice, he learned a new style of playing—using his two good fingers to make chords, and adding vibrato to thicken the sound.

This stripped-down, off-key roar became the foundation of heavy metal.

"I'd never heard that style of playing before," said Tom Allan, who engineered Sabbath's 1969 self-titled debut album.

"I really couldn't understand it. I really didn't understand it. You never heard anything like it on the radio."

The album was dark and heavy - in part because the band had recorded it in just two days, with limited resources.

Critics weren't sure what to make of it. Writing in Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs said the album had been "hyped as a ritualistic rock celebration of the Satanic Mass or some such nonsense... They're not that bad, but that's all the credit you can give them."

The supposedly satanic imagery sparked a moral panic in the mainstream press, which intensified when it was discovered that the album's title track contained a chord progression known as the Devil's Interval, which had been banned by the church in the Middle Ages.

What the press didn't realize was that Black Sabbath , the song, had been written as a warning about the dangers of Satanism, after Ward fell asleep reading books on the occult and woke up seeing a ghostly, hooded figure standing at the foot of his bed.

"That scared the hell out of me," he later recalled.

Whatever the truth, the controversy sold records and attracted legions of fans.

One time, the band returned to their hotel to find 20 Satanists dressed in black holding candles and chanting outside their room. To get rid of them, Osbourne blew out the candles and sang Happy Birthday.

Still, Sabbath embraced their reputation, writing dark material and gaining a reputation as "troublemakers" as the 1970s progressed.

But music was never as basic or one-dimensional as its image suggested.

Their second album, Paranoid , marked a seismic leap in songwriting, from the visceral anti-war anthem War Pigs to the progressive intensity of the title track, through to the sci-fi horror of Iron Man and the ghostly balladry of Planet Caravan .

They kept the momentum going on 1971's Master of Reality , with Osbourne describing Children Of The Grave as "the most spectacular song we had ever recorded."

Vol. 4 , released in 1972, is sometimes overlooked for lacking a major radio single, but it also contains some of the band's best and most varied work.

Snowblind documents his descent into drugs with a deep guitar riff; while St. Vitus' Dance is surprisingly tender advice to a heartbroken friend; and Laguna Sunrise is a bucolic instrumental.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, in turn, was written as a furious critique of a music industry that had discarded them.

"The people who have crippled you / You want to see them burn," says an excerpt from the song, which can be translated as:

"The people who broke you down / You want them to burn."

After 55 years, and hundreds of imitators, the initial shock of Sabbath's sound has worn off. How else do you explain Osbourne and Iommi playing Paranoid at Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee in 2002?

But the power of these songs, from Iommi's blistering riffs to Osbourne's insistent vocal wail, is indelible.

When inducting Black Sabbath into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Metallica's Lars Ulrich said, "If there were no Black Sabbath, hard rock and heavy metal would be very different."

"When it comes to defining a genre within the world of heavy music," he said, "Sabbath is unique."

Writing after the band's penultimate farewell show in 2017, Osbourne said he was honored by the recognition.

"I never dreamed we would be here 49 years later," he said.

"But when I think about it all, the best thing about being in Black Sabbath after all these years is that the music has held up."

Five Essential Ozzy Osbourne Songs

1) Paranoid

By writing a last-minute song to fill a gap in their second album, Black Sabbath accidentally created their biggest hit: the story of a man battling his inner voices, set to one of the most powerful riffs in rock.

"Every now and then, a song comes out of nowhere," Osbourne said. "It's a gift."

2) Crazy Train

The song that launched Osbourne's solo career is almost uncharacteristically optimistic, shrugging off Cold War paranoia and declaring, "Maybe it's not too late to learn how to love."

"Maybe it's not too late to learn to love", in free translation.

Only the maniacal laughter in the final bars suggests this perspective is that of a madman.

3) Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Sabbath's dark reputation often led to their melodic prowess being overlooked. But Osbourne was a passionate admirer of the Beatles, and their influence can be heard in this song's pastoral chorus, before Tony Iommi enters with a guttural guitar line.

John Lennon would no doubt have approved of Osbourne's fervent critique of the music industry, summed up in the line: "Bog blast all of you."

"Screw you all", in free translation.

4) Changes

Sabbath revealed their more sensitive side in this 1972 piano ballad, which addresses the breakup drummer Bill Ward was going through.

"I thought the song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it," said Osbourne, who later reworked it as a duet with his daughter, Kelly, and it reached No. 1 in the UK charts the week before Christmas 2003.

5) Mr. Crowley

Inspired by notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, this track from the 1980 album Blizzard of Ozz allowed Osbourne to live up to his satanic image.

But it also helped him escape the shadow of Black Sabbath, with a heavy, psychedelic sound, capped off by an explosive solo from his new partner, guitar master Randy Rhoads.

Also listen : "War Pigs" and "Iron Man" are all-time classics, while "Diary of a Madman" and "Suicide Solution" are crucial chapters in Osbourne's solo repertoire. Also worth checking out is "Patient Number 9 ," the title track from his latest album, which closed his career in style.