R.I.P. OZZY

It was a warm June night in Southern California in 1970 and the Santa Ana wind was blowing dryly through the air. I recall it was a Friday and my sister drove us up to Westwood Village to hang out. We went into a Tower Records store and a large display right when you walked in assaulted my eyes. I was transfixed by the album cover, witchy and inviting.

What was this that stood before me? A figure in black called my name! And the title, Black Sabbath, was the only identifying description of what lurked within the record sleeve.

I bought it and carried it around with me the rest of the night until I got back home and dropped it on my record player spindle, put on my headphones (didn’t want to wake Mom and Dad!) and began to listen. Indescribably, a loathsome, deafening sound met my ears. This was not Led Zeppelin! This was not even Iron Butterfly or Steppenwolf. This was music from the Depths of Hell itself. I loved it and have ever since.

The "Prince of Darkness", the "Blizzard of Oz", has passed. Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath died less than three weeks after his farewell concert, Back to the Beginning, a fitting coda to a career with a band that changed the face of rock music. A great singer and showman, his "crazy train" will ride on the rails into legend.

Thanks for rocking my world, Ozzy.

A SIGNATURE OZZIE BURGER?

Never one to rest on his . . . laurels, the inimitable Ozzy Osbourne has (apparently) endorsed his own signature monster burger, made at a SoCal joint by the name of Grill 'Em All (photo below).

From the LOUDER website:

A signature Ozzy Osbourne hamburger cooked up by Grill 'Em All, the rockin' Southern California metal-themed burger joint, is coming soon. It's to commemorate the release of Patient Number 9, Osbourne's latest solo album. The album emerged earlier this month.

To introduce the burger, a 25-foot inflatable Ozzy that's traveled the world to promote Patient Number 9 will be on display at the restaurant on Oct. 1 from 11AM to 4PM PT.

Grill 'Em All, which started out as a food truck, now rules the Alhambra area of Los Angeles with their crazy burger creations. Proudly proclaiming "Death to False Burgers!," Grill 'Em All boasts a whole menu of tasty burgers based on metal bands.

The spot already has burgers based on Behemoth, Dee Snider, Napalm Death, High on Fire and Metallica. More information about the signature Ozzy burger is expected soon.

To celebrate the release of the burger and the rocking new record ‘Where is Patient Number Nine’ the 25-foot inflatable Ozzy will be invading Valhalla from 11am to 4pm! Burger details to come. Stay tuned to our instagram! Disclaimer - real Ozzy wont be there.

What a mess! The black buns are a thematic nice touch, but not so pleasing-looking to the palate. And who knows what lurks between them? Looks like somebody's brain after taking too much LSD. Maybe that's the idea?

OZZIE'S BACK!

Talk about artists suffering for their work -- Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne has been hit with some serious maladies over the years, the latest of which was painful back surgery. But that didn't slow him down enough to show up not long after to close out the annual Commonwealth Games in the UK with his guitarist, Tony Iommi. Their surprise appearance caused a roar from the crowd as Ozzy edged them on to "get crazy". Iommi was also in top form as they performed "Paranoid" and looked to be seriously enjoying himself.

Ozzy as the frontman has always garnered most of the attention and his drug-fueled antics were the stuff of legend. Everything from (accidentally, he says) biting the head off a live bat to giving up acid after having a one-hour conversation with a horse has kept his name at the forefront of rock extremism.

But at 73, Ozzy's slowing down a bit and has even acknowledged his own mortality on more than one occasion. And the Birmingham boy is even moving back to England according to news feeds and this article from THE OBSERVER.

And here's the show from the Commonwealth Games:

GOOD LUCK, OZZY!

Heavy metal legend Ozzy Osbourne is slated to undergo surgery this week in what his wife, Sharon, says will determine how he lives the rest of his life. Since contracting COVID-19 earlier, the 73 year-old Osbourne has been plagued with health problems, especially with his mobility.

I have been a big fan of Ozzy and Black Sabbath since I picked up their first LP in 1970. Let's hope Ozzy comes through well enough to keep making music.

HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM TONY IOMMI

The great heavy metal guitar master is seen here on his YouTube Channel discussing his accomplishments in 2021 and wishing all his fans the best for the new year.

SMELLS LIKE BLACK SABBATH

I've always thought that Tony Iommi is one helluva cool guy, and when I heard he was marketing a new unisex perfume, Scent of Dark, I knew he was a sophisticated gent as well!

Two versions of the product are offered HERE.

Tony Iommi and Sergio Momo.

"It's something I've always been interested in, ever since the early days of products like Brut and Old Spice, which I'd always get given for Christmas," remembers Tony. "Once I started touring the world with SABBATH though, I started discovering different sorts of fragrances from other countries and began collecting them on tour.

"I met Sergio (Sergio Momo of Xerjoff) through another friend of mine Jimmy Crutchley (who plays bass on 'Scent Of Dark') and Sergio kindly sent me a box of his fragrances and asked if I'd be interested in creating my own, which I certainly wasn't expecting," laughs Iommi. "I had no idea how that would work, but Sergio suggested I come up with a list of things I like the smell of, which I did. He developed some different samples made up from my suggestions and I picked the one I liked; the project moved forward from there."

"Sergio is a really creative chap, he plays great guitar on 'Scent Of Dark' and has one of my collectable models, the 64 Gibson with the cartoon monkey image," Tony says. "He said it would be great to incorporate that, and he's even managed to get it onto one of the bottles."

"I wouldn't put my name to something that I haven't been involved in and didn't personally like or use," he explains. "That's been the same with all of the projects I've done from guitars onwards, this is no different."

The Xerjoff Blends Rock Edition sees Black Sabbath’s legendary guitarist, Tony Iommi, unify his monolithic riffs with Xerjoff’s esteemed expertise to create the first multisensorial interaction between music and perfume in an unexpected olfactory venture. “Sound, taste, and image change and contaminate each other. In samsara of creative confusion stimulated by creative minds that turn the senses, from the smell to sight, to hearing, into their exciting playground”. Sergio Momo, CEO and Founder of Xerjoff Tony Iommi Signed Crystal by Xerjoff Blends is available as a 50ml Parfum as a limited edition.

Tony Iommi Signed Crystal by Xerjoff is a fragrance for women and men. This is a new fragrance. Tony Iommi Signed Crystal was launched in 2021. Top notes are Rum, Geranium, Bergamot and Passionfruit; middle notes are Singapore Patchouli, Leather, Cinnamon and Bulgarian Rose; base notes are Caramel, Musk, Sandalwood, Vanilla, Labdanum, Ambergris and Tonka Bean.

Hear the song, "Scent of Dark":

More on Tony and Black Sabbath HERE.

You have been reading . . .

TONY IOMMI: SABBATH'S AXE MAN

I described in a post here last week that I bought the first Black Sabbath LP when it first came out at Tower Records in Westwood Village, CA. When I first put needle to vinyl, I was immediately transfixed by the sound that blew my head apart, uttering "What is this that plays before me?"

Few records did that for me in the classic rock era -- others I remember were the Allman Brothers' "Beginnings", Van Halen's first, Boston's second, and of course, Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon". I wore the grooves down on these, and for good reason: they are classic recordings.

With Sabbath, though, the sheer power of their sound was equal only to Led Zepplin at the time. Bassist "Geezer" Butler (nicknamed because he called everybody that in school) would come up with the dark, foreboding lyrics for the songs. But it was guitarist, Tony Iommi who was responsible for coming up with the monster riffs that are forever indelible in rock music. From the crushing three-note intro to their title song to the two-note bend that portended the smash hit, "Iron Man", Iommi was a constant source of the sound that brought heavy metal into the forefront of the world.

It took a few years, but I finally saw them live at 1974's CAL JAM at the Ontario Speedway soon after the release of SABBATH, BLOODY SABBATH. It was a great set, albeit with Ozzy's ridiculous (maybe not for then) fringy costume and also odd to see Iommi with a clean-shaven face (leading one person on the YouTube site to comment: "I thought Tony was born with his moustache (!)".

Now, fifty years later, the band has fragmented into parts with Iommi the only original member still on the roster. Here, in this interview from the March 2020 issue of GUITARIST, he opens up about his career and his famed "axe", a Gibson SG (used by many other talented guitarists of the day, including Carlos Santana, John Cippolina of Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Robby Krieger of The Doors).

NOTE: I just checked the page views for this post -- as of Monday morning the number stands at 666! Yow!

BLACK SABBATH LP COVER LADY FOUND!

For the longest time, the identity of the woman on the cover of the front of Black Sabbath's self-titled debut album — which turns 50 today — had been unknown. Now, the "black figure" has finally been revealed to be Louisa Livingstone, and she makes electronic music.

The iconic album's cover was shot by a young photographer named Keith Macmillan. He's credited as "Keef" in the liner notes. “To be honest, it was the first time I really enjoyed that kind of heavy rock,” he told Rolling Stone. “But that album made me a fan for life.”

Macmillan recruited an 18 or 19 year-old, five-foot model named Louisa Livingstone for the shoot, which took place at Mapledurham Watermill in the English county of Oxfordshire. She wore a black cloak with nothing underneath it, and they experimented with some shots that were "slightly more risqué," according to the photographer.

"We decided none of that worked," he 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."

Louisa Livingstone today [Revolver].

Livingstone commented on the shoot herself, recalling that it had been "freezing cold" when they were taking the photos. "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 explained. "I’m sure he said it was for Black Sabbath, but I don’t know if that meant anything much to me at the time."

The model, who is now estimated to be around 68 or 69-years old, has released electronic music in the last few years under the name Indreba [her songs are on Bandcamp].

[SOURCE: Loudwire.]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BLACK SABBATH!

Today is the 50th birthday of the band that created heavy metal, Black Sabbath. I bought the vinyl record of this album the week that it was released at Tower Records (remember that one?) in Westwood, CA. When I spun it on my player, it was a fucking revelatory experience. In other words, it blew my head off.

Here's a comment about the history of the band:

50 years ago today, Black Sabbath released their debut album and kicked off the entire genre of heavy metal.
Jon Wiederhorn | February 13, 2020 | Loudwire.com

Take an in-depth look at its creation, reception and legacy. 

It was a clarion call that echoed from the void, a raucous cry of unity for rockers that couldn’t relate to the peace and love vibes of the Woodstock era. The sound had less to do with the escapist tone of most popular music and more to do with the desperation and frustration of living in the detritus of post-World War II Europe.

The eponymous album by Black Sabbath, which was released in Europe on February 13, 1970, and in North America on June 1 of the same year, was like nothing hard rock fans had ever heard. There were elements of Led Zeppelin and Cream in there, sure, but the music was grimmer and far less euphoric.

Instead of flaunting exuberant energy, Sabbath focused on the bleak and barren, confronting listeners with buzzing, overdriven guitars, meandering bass, lumbering beats and nasal, almost sepulchral vocals that sliced through the organized cacophony like a scalpel through a corpse. It was loud, it was weird and, for many, it was almost an overwhelming sensory overload.

Black Sabbath started with atmospheric sound effects and then guitarist Tony Iommi launched into one of metal’s most influential licks, the devil’s tritone – a dissonant, unsettling configuration allegedly once banned by the church and shunned by composers. Rarely was the tritone heard in popular music; it was most often heard along with the haunting noises in horror film soundtracks. Yet Black Sabbath relished the uneasy feeling the repeated three-note passage engendered.

Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian first heard it when he was a kid listening to his uncle’s stereo and the experience left an indelible imprint on his brain. “I just sat there scared,” he says. “From the start, I was listening to the rain and the wind and the bell and then that riff started and just blew my mind.”

Disturbed frontman David Draiman had a similar experience years later when, during a game of "Dungeons & Dragons," his friend put Black Sabbath on the turntable. “They just brought a vibe and a feel that no other band on the planet ever tried to do,” he says. “Before them, no one played those notes and no one played these doomy riffs with that sludgy, heavy sound.”

Other heavy artists — including Blue Cheer, The Stooges and Jimi Hendrix — had dipped their toes into the gut-twisting morass of chords and notes that was to become heavy metal, but Black Sabbath were the first to capture the sound, vibe and attitude that defined the genre.

Over the next five years they recorded five of the most influential and essential metal albums ever, but Black Sabbath was truly groundbreaking — a structurally complete blueprint for doom. Even the cover art foreshowed the originality within. The strange, unsettling image of a plain-looking woman (a witch, perhaps?) standing in the woods in front of a farmhouse contained no occult symbols or violent imagery, yet it was as disturbing as the original cover of The Beatles’ Yesterday and Today. The shot was taken at the Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire, England and it remains one of metal’s iconic images.

For such a seminal album, Black Sabbath was practically an afterthought for Fontana Records, which booked the band a single day in the studio, October 16, 1969, to record with beginner producer Rodger Bain and engineer Tom Allom at Regent Sound Studios in London.

After the album was tracked the label washed their hands of it, shuffling Sabbath’s debut to Vertigo Records. Just being in the studio was an exciting opportunity for Black Sabbath, which started as a 12-bar blues band called Earth before changing their name, and the musicians were eager to prove themselves.

As Earth, they had tested crowds with the songs “Black Sabbath” and “Wicked World” and the reactions were promising. “That was the first time that people started looking up and going, ‘Wow, what’s this?’ says Iommi. “They’d come up afterwards and say, ‘What were those songs? We really liked those.’”

As soon as Earth decided to stray from their blues roots, they expanded upon their new sound with a batch of dense, equally textural tracks, including “N.I.B.” and “Behind the Wall of Sleep” and rehearsed them until they could play them from start to finish, time and again. They were tight, they were heavy and they were ready to transform rock 'n' roll in a day.

“We went in the studio and we were off from the word go,” Iommi recalls. “It’s hard to even remember the session. One second we were playing these songs and then the next thing we knew we were out of there. Some people think the album was recorded in a haze of drugs, but we hadn’t discovered that yet and we didn’t have time to get stoned. We had one day to prove ourselves, and that’s what we did.”

“We literally went in and played as if it was a live gig,” adds Butler. “We didn’t know anything about studios or production or engineering. We just went in, set up and played and they recorded us. It sounds easy, but it’s actually a really hard thing to do – to record a band live in the studio and get the whole feeling across. A lot of producers tried that but dismally failed. But Roger and Tom just had the knack of doing it.”

Aside from the cult Chicago band Coven, which wrote Satanic lyrics and included a recording of a black mass on their 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls, Black Sabbath were the first group to write songs that mentioned Lucifer and Satan and featured occult themes. To a large extent, Sabbath knew they were playing with fire and enjoyed being provocative. And they wrote from a knowledgeable perspective since they had dabbled in occult rituals and readings.

“We were into it,” Iommi says. “Certainly [bassist] Geezer [Butler] and myself were. It was certainly an interest. There was this thing called ‘the occult’ and we wanted to soak in as much as we could about it and find out what it was about. I suppose we got wrapped up a bit too much sometimes.”

Black Sabbath didn’t exclusively write about darkness and evil and they stopped short of endorsing the occult. “Black Sabbath,” which is often referenced for its blatantly Satanic lyrics, was actually written by Ozzy Osbourne and was based on a paranormal experience Butler had one night.

“In the middle of the night I felt this presence,” Butler told Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. “I woke up and there was this black shape looming over the bottom of the bed. It frightened the pissing life out of me. I told Ozzy and that inspired him to write the lyrics to the song as a warning to people that were getting heavily involved in black magic.”

Considering the band’s name, it’s not hard to grasp how Satanists misunderstood the meaning of some of Black Sabbath’s lyrics and assumed the musicians shared their blasphemous views. Despite their interest in black magic, Sabbath were hardly devil worshippers.

In response to vocal and vehement adoration from witches and Satanists, Black Sabbath mocked them in interviews and started wearing large crosses around their necks at the suggestion of the head white witch in England. Sabbath’s response pissed off disciples of Satan. At the same time, the band’ s dark imagery incensed parents and religious figures, neither of whom stopped to consider that Black Sabbath’s lyrics didn’t endorse Satanism.

“There was one incident where we were due to play in a town and we got banned by the church,” Iommi says. “The show was announced in all the papers for two weeks before we got there. The church managed to ban us. And then the bloody church burned down and we got the blame. They were trying to say that we had caused it, which was just weird.”

It’s no surprise that most of the mainstream press didn’t cater to Black Sabbath’s charms, labeling them primitive and untalented. “They thought our music was for yobs and doubters,” Iommi says. “They didn’t see it as music at all.”

That didn’t stop hard rock fans from reacting to the band’s trailblazing music. Not long after its Friday the 13th release, Black Sabbath was No. 8 in the U.K. album charts. And when the record came out in North America three-and-a-half months later, it climbed to No. 23 on Billboard and remained on the chart for a year, chalking up more than a million album sales.

“We built up our reputation through word of mouth,” Iommi says. “Every time we’d play in clubs [in Europe], we’d see more and more people coming to the show. Little pockets would build up and then eventually they became big pockets. Then, when the album got in the charts in the U.S., we could say, ‘Look what we’ve done,’ and more people started to check us out and if they liked it they brought in their friends. It became this ever-evolving thing.”

The U.K. release of Black Sabbath featured two cover tunes, Crow’s “Evil Woman” (which was previously released as a single that also contained “Wicked World”) and Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation’s “Warning.” The U.S. release removed “Evil Woman” and blended “Behind the Wall of Sleep” into a single track that also included “N.I.B.” and the U.S.-only cuts “Wasp” and “Basically.” The original U.S. version also merged “Warning” into a medley that also featured “A Bit of Finger” (U.S.-only) and “Sleeping Village.”

Through the decades, Black Sabbath has been repackaged and re-released numerous times with previously unreleased songs, outtakes and alternate and instrumental versions. Most recently, the album was remastered and issued in 2016 as a two-CD deluxe edition. The recurring reissues are hardly surprising and, maybe, less of a cash grab than an effort to keep the album vital. There wasn’t a band around in 1970 that was as heavy as Black Sabbath and after the influence of their debut is incalculable.

50 years after its release, Black Sabbath remains a must-have for any metal collection.

“They wrote the playbook for heavy metal,” Scott Ian says. “That's where every riff ever written comes from. Tony Iommi is the guy responsible for all of this.”

These days, Butler is far too much of a polite English gentleman to brag about Black Sabbath being the most important metal record of all time, but he concedes that he considers it the band’s greatest achievement.

“The odds were completely against us when we did the album,” he says. “Nobody wanted to give us a chance. Nobody wanted to manage us. Our families didn’t believe in us. But we persisted. And we made this album that we liked and, apparently, loads of other people liked. For us, it was the beginning of an incredible ride.”

GLENN DANZIG TALKS ABOUT MUSIC AND MONSTERS

Horror-themed rock music has been around since it was first birthed by the immortal Black Sabbath on their eponymous-titled LP in 1970. The theme permeated the industry and found a home mainly with punk rock (The Misfits) and heavy metal (Iron Maiden, Blue Oyster Cult).

One of the more popular bands putting horror to good use in their music was Danzig. Propelled by lead man, Glenn Danzig, the group spawned some minor hits and cultivated a loyal following. After the obligatory hiatus and reshuffling of personnel, Danzig just this last May, released his first album in seven years, Black Laden Crown (Nuclear Blast/AFM Records).

Here he is, interviewed by Keith Valcourt in the November, 2010 issue of HUSTLER, after one of his aforementioned hiatuses. Mr. Danzig talks about his music and his comic book company, Verotik.

Also in this issue of HUSTLER appeared a fumetti-style adult comic strip, "Single Dead Female". If you are a mature monster, click HERE to view it.

HEAVY METAL MONSTER DIAGNOSED WITH CANCER

I think I've made mention that, along with being a dyed-in-the-fur Monster Kid, I'm also a bit of a musician. A rock guitarist to be exact, with enough keyboard knowledge to work out a tune on the black keys. Being a Monster Kid you probably also have an idea of what type of music I like, too. Well, you'd be right if you said Classic Rock --although I'm also an avid jazz and classical listener as well.

But Rock is where my heart and soul is. That's why I was saddened to hear that one of my guitar heroes, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath fame, has just recently been diagnosed with early onset lymphoma. Now, no cancer is a cakewalk to shake, and lymphoma can be pretty tough. Nevertheless, Mr. Iommi has been reported as "upbeat".

There is more than a touch of irony here, because he has finally joined his bandmates for the first Black Sabbath studio album featuring the original line-up in 33 years. Ironic as well, that he was featured on the cover of RUE MORGUE #118.

I consider myself fortunate to have purchased the first Black Sabbath album (that's right, vinyl!) from the Tower Records store in Westwood the week it was released, and to have seen the original Black Sabbath tear the lid off the sky at the California Jam held at the Ontario Motor Speedway on April 6, 1974. And, while Ozzy pranced around in his purple fringe -- later shirtless -- my gaze was fixed mainly on Tony Iommi, pounding out the heavy metal madness on his tricked-out Gibson SG.

Get better and rock on, Tony Iommi!