What a way to go

When that giant farewell concert for Black Sabbath was announced and just about anyone that has made their name in Heavy Metal raised their arm to perform, I took another look at my collection. Not because I wondered if I had any Black Sabbath records. Of course I do. I just wasn’t entirely sure which ones. And on which of them Ozzy had supplied the vocals. Three yes, one no. Can’t really say why and where I bought “Seventh Star”, an album that should have been a Tony Iommi solo album but was labeled “Black Sabbath featuring Tony Iommi” because the record company thought it might sell better that way, even though Iommi was the only original band member on board.

27. That’s the number of names listed on Discogs as (former) members of Black Sabbath. 27. Sure, the band has a very long history, but 27 is still a lot. And yet, if you think of Black Sabbath, there is only one formation, with four guys, the same that recorded the first album as the ones that were on stage on that epic last concert, all of them in their mid-seventies. In between: so many singers, so many drummers, so many questionable releases – and “Seventh Star” was by far not the worst. Four guys. Osbourne, Iommi, Butler, Ward. The other 23 – hardly remembered as members of Black Sabbath. Not even Ronnie James Dio or Cozy Powell.

Now Ozzy is gone. Just weeks after that final concert. This is as close to dying on stage as it gets. He’s said farewell and leaves all stages, the biggest one included. I may not be the biggest fan, but I felt obliged to write.

Four albums. One without Ozzy. Leaving three to choose from. Looking at what people say about their albums, I ended up going through a list that ranked all Sabbath albums from worst to best. 19 of them, which really isn’t all of them – “Live At Last” is missing, for one. But still an interesting list. I would have expected “Paranoid” to be up at number one, with their only chart hit, plus the epic “War Pigs” and “Iron Man”.

But no, “Vol. 4” was at number one. I know, most other lists have it on three or four, and there are good reasons to doubt the usefulness of such lists. Sure made it easy to decide which one to write about.

I don’t know how many times this album landed on my turntable. It’s been a while, and that is true for basically all the Heavy Metal albums in my collection. It’s been an even longer while since my lifestyle could have even been vaguely described as Rock’n’Roll. Unlike Ozzy and bis band mates when they recorded “Vol. 4”. Reportedly, the album was originally supposed to be called “Snowblind”, and no, the title is not referring to extreme excursions in the wintertime. Geezer Butler is often quoted as saying that during the time they recorded the album, they spent money on cocaine than what they had to pay for the studio.

“Snowblind” may not eventually have given the album its title – quite understandably, the label didn’t want to release an album as an ode to the powder – but it sure is one of the highlights, musically. To me, it’s mostly the combination of Iommi and Ward that makes this track an outstanding one. Great riff, massive driving drums, epic stuff. The lyrics will primarily serve as a document of the times, and a glimpse into the mind and reality of Ozzy Osbourne. Not that I would think he had consumed all that cocaine by himself, the other three guys will have helped themselves generously as well. But the lyrics are Ozzy’s of course, and it’s a little weird that he sort of defends his love for coke, even saying that those who think it’s a bad thing to do are “really the loser(s)”. We know what eventually led to Ozzy being kicked out of the band a few albums down the road. “Icicles within my brain (cocaine)”, “this is where I feel I belong” – well, in 1972 it might have been a thrill, in 1979 was already too much of a problem.

Still, the topic is the problem here, not Ozzy’s songwriting abilities. “Wheels Of Confusion” is a classic. Life being a fairytale when you’re young, until you realize that it isn’t when you grow up, the ultimate realization being that the world keeps turning when you’re gone. “Try your hardest, you’ll still be a loser” is the quintessential message that probably best describes the Sabbath philosophy about life and music, a theme that would often be picked up by metal bands that followed, all the way to Lemmy who supplied his epic spin on it on “Ace Of Spades”.

What’s really surprising is that even a ballad like “Changes” doesn’t come across as cringe, even though the lyrics are anything but unique. I’ll never be a huge admirer of Ozzy’s skills as a singer, but he gets through this one quite gracefully – to the effect that you start thinking, you know, a polished voice, a refined delivery, it would have made it just another rock ballad, nothing to write home about. Just imagine Ronnie James singing this one. Nooo. But of course the lyrics would have been incomprehensible. I still keep wondering about the holy diver.

“FX” is what it is. Effects on a guitar while stoned out of mind. I read somewhere that Iommi hit his strings with the heavy cross that kept hanging around his neck. Well. Maybe too much cocaine there, thinking this might be innovative when guitarists in neighboring genres were already much deeper into messing with effects. But maybe it is still a good prelude to the driving and relentless heaviness of “Supernaut”. Not a superhero story at all, more like that of an eternal loner that has “seen the future and (…) left it behind”. Total surprise: the somehow Latin sounding drum passage that starts at the middle of the track. Very cool, even if it doesn’t feel like a logical creative choice.

One theme that still rings quite a lot of bells plenty of decades later is the condemnation of normal life in modern society as demonstrated in “Cornucopia”. Oscillating between slow, heavy doom and some kind of heavy Prog, the message is disconcertingly clear: the world is sinking in what we would probably now call consumerism (“Let them have their little toys / Matchbox cars and mortgaged joys”), a world that Ozzy and his friends neither appreciate nor feel a part of (“I don’t know what’s happening / My head’s all torn inside”).

All that doesn’t necessarily mean that beauty is not a part of this world. “Laguna Sunrise” proves that there is plenty of fine musicianship in this band, and that their style is not a result of not being able to create something more sophisticated, but rather a clear choice regarding their form of expression.

The grand finale “Under The Sun” picks up where “Cornucopia” left off, going deeper, talking about the refusal to live by the rules and standards of society. No preachers, no “Jesus freaks”, no black magicians, they’ll have none of it all, the lyrics being as straight and simple as they can be, not really sounding like lyrics if you just read them: “I wanna live my life, I don’t want people telling me what to do”, “I don’t want no one to tell me where I’m gonna go when I die”, statements more than anything. And the last minute sound exactly like probably every other metal band tried to sound for decades to come.

The last two lines of lyrics on this album: “Don’t let those empty people try and interfere with your mind
Just live your life and leave them all behind.” It’s probably fair to say that it’s just what Ozzy did. Only that he has left us all behind now.

Release for review:
BLACK SABBATH – VOL. 4 – VERTIGO – 6360 071

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