Without Black Sabbath, Metallica wouldn’t have had the blueprint to write “Enter Sandman.” Judas Priest might never have broken the law, Iron Maiden wouldn’t have run to the hills, and Slayer would have never reigned in blood. Now, with 50 years’ worth of hindsight, you can hear that the album represented the start of a new epoch. The album sleeve depicted a witchy-looking woman holding a black cat in a supernatural world, and the music inside delivered on the cover’s mysteriousness. record stores in February 1970 - on a Friday the 13th to capitalize on the album’s unsettling look and sound - it showed the world what “heavy” really meant. When their debut album, Black Sabbath, hit U.K. The six-minute horror vignette was spooky yet thrilling, and the song, “Black Sabbath,” would serve as the prototype for a genre poised to captivate the world.Īrtists like Jimi Hendrix, Cream, and Led Zeppelin had spent the late Sixties edging into darker, denser terrain, but it was Black Sabbath who made heavy a way of life. “Is this the end, my friend?” he wonders aloud. The guitar chords lurch seismically, each one like a gut punch before quieting down just enough for Ozzy Osbourne to paint his own vivid portrait of fear - “What is this that stands before me/Figure in black which points at me?” It’s a scene so unnerving that he eventually pleads to the heavens, “Oh, no, NO, please God help me,” before the guitar riff and church bells come around again to strike him down. The song opens with the sound of a powerful thunderstorm and ominous church chimes before crashing into its lumbering, iconic riff. Half a century has passed since Black Sabbath first scared the bejesus out of rock fans with their eponymous anthem.
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