Showing posts with label Bill Ward. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bill Ward. Show all posts

Black Sabbath's 'Sabotage': Anger is an energy

Classic album from metal pioneers hits a milestone
By Peter Lindblad

Black Sabbath's sixth studio
album 'Sabotage'
Nobody's going to lie about Sabotage's age. The sixth studio album by heavy metal godfathers Black Sabbath did, indeed, turn 40 last week in late July, but it's hard to imagine Ozzy Osbourne, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler and Tony Iommi throwing a party in its honor.

Born out of anger and frustration over ongoing litigation with former manager Patrick Meehan, 1975's Sabotage, perhaps the most underrated of Sabbath's acclaimed "first six" albums, was recorded at Morgan Studios in London. The whole soul-sucking process seemed to take an eternity, as Ozzy would lament in his autobiography, saying that "Sabotage took about four thousand years" to make. Ozzy got so fed up by the whole experience that the singer, who rarely wrote lyrics for Sabbath, penned what amounted to a scathing "diss" track with "The Writ," which asked if Meehan was actually Satan or a man and posited the confrontational query: "What kind of people do you think we are? Another joker who's a rock and roll star for you/Just for you." It was a rhetorical question for Ozzy.

Hyperbole aside, the interminable sessions for Sabotage, only made more exhausting by the band's legal entanglements, caused no shortage of headaches. Butler is quoted in the liner notes to Reunion, the band's 1988 live album, as saying that "music became irrelevant to me." And yet, it's clear from listening to Sabotage, even all these years later, that Black Sabbath put a great deal of care into making it. Although intent on continuing down a primrose path that would lead them further into prog-rock temptation – "Supertzar" is practically a choral piece, with grand arrangements and the London Philharmonic Choir wailing and moaning in sinister fashion in chasing a striking Iommi riff like spectral hunting dogs – Sabotage is a record that has a hot temper, the very title suggesting that Sabbath was sick and tired of being screwed over. And raw emotions have often fueled great rock 'n' roll.

Frayed nerves and all, and perhaps on the cusp of a collective nervous breakdown, the original Sabbath lineup muddled through Sabotage's difficult birth and, in the process, broke new ground in terms of songwriting structures and musical innovation. Although not exactly immediately accessible, Sabotage has endured, slowly becoming a fan favorite, even as everyone laughed at its ludicrous album art and Bill Ward in his red tights. An arty concept gone horribly wrong, although, to be fair, this seemed to happen a lot with Sabbath, the cover of Sabotage ranks right up there with those of Paranoid and Never Say Die! for sheer absurdity.

 It's a journey with odd detours, including the completely out-of-character synth-pop flatulence of the universally hated "Am I Going Insane." Thankfully, it's the only real misstep here, although another confounding turn takes place after the opener "Hole In the Sky" essentially draws up the blueprints for stoner metal, with its heavy swing and charged, churning riffage. In a bizarre bit of sequencing, an instrumental titled "Don't Start (Too Late)" follows, allowing Iommi to display his prowess on acoustic guitar, as he pieces together complex little puzzles with an easy, smooth dexterity that proves, once and for all, that he's more than just a master of riffs. Which is great, except that any momentum gained from "Hole In The Sky" is stalled momentarily for an interlude that probably should have arrived in the middle of Sabotage, rather than at the beginning.

Enter "Symptom of the Universe," the proto-thrash beast that seeks and destroys, inspiring Metallica and the rest of its ilk to rise up from the gutter and revolt against everything '80s glam-metal represented. Trace the origins of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal and here is where you end up, and yet, somewhere along the way, Sabbath decides the track needs a jaunty acoustic jam that seems to fly directly in the face of its evil, menacing riff.

All of this kind of works in a weird way, but upon its release, Sabotage must have been somewhat off-putting, although the forceful, straightforward push and solar-powered flashes of "The Thrill Of It All" and "Megalomania" seem to suggest a more grounded Sabbath that has freed itself from the shackles of doom and gloom. And then there's Ozzy's blazing vocals on "The Writ," so powerful and commanding. Of course, Sabotage precipitated a sad decline, their creative powers eroded by drug use that was the stuff of legend. They would recover, but not until Ronnie James Dio arrived. Sabotage was then, in some regard, a link to past glories, a life line for fans who wondered afterward if the old Sabbath was ever coming back. These days, even if it's not on the level of say Masters Of Reality or Vol. 4, it's damn close.
– Peter Lindblad

A Tribute to Ronnie James Dio from Vinny Appice

Famed drummer also unveils new Kill Devil Hill project and reveals what’s in his memorabilia collection


By Peter Lindblad


Tributes for Ronnie James Dio have been pouring in since the iconic heavy metal singer’s death back in May. The sense of loss throughout the metal community is still palpable, and even now, one of his closest friends and musical conspirators can hardly believe he’s gone.

“He was a leader, a father figure, a brother, musician … it was like he was going to live forever,” said Vinny Appice, who served as drummer for Black Sabbath during the Dio years and subsequently followed Dio when the singer left Sabbath in the acrimonious aftermath of Live Evil to form his own project, the hugely successful fantasy-metal outfit Dio.

Sabbath was in a state of flux when Vinny Appice joined the band in 1980. One year earlier, following the unceremonious dismissal of Ozzy Osbourne, Dio was plugged in to replace the legendary wild man as the band’s singer. Beset with personal problems of his own, bassist Geezer Butler exiled himself from Sabbath during the lion’s share of the writing sessions for Heaven and Hell, the band’s first album with Dio, with Geoff Nicholls of Quartz at the ready just in case Butler wasn’t coming back – he would eventually become Sabbath’s keyboardist, however. And then there’s the fuzzy evidence of the involvement of former Elf and Rainbow bassist Craig Gruber in Sabbath during the whole Heaven and Hell period; he left when Butler returned.

As for Appice, he had to fill the shoes of none other than Bill Ward as Sabbath’s drummer in the middle of the band’s tour backing Heaven and Hell. He had to learn the songs on the fly as Sabbath was preparing for a huge outdoor show in Hawaii. As time went on, Appice and Dio grew close, understandable considering their similar East Coast backgrounds.

“We’d always say, ‘I’ll kick you in the ass.’ He’d kick me in the ass onstage. We had the same New York attitude,” said Appice.

On the other hand, Butler and Iommi were British, born and bred. And when arguments erupted over the making of Live Evil, it was Iommi and Butler on one side and the Americans, Appice and Dio, on the other. So, when Dio left Sabbath, it was only natural that Appice would go with him, even though, according to Appice, he didn’t really take sides in the dispute and had gotten along with everybody in Sabbath.
In Dio, Appice saw something special, and it wasn’t just that magnificent voice.

“First of all, it’s just the way he sang, you know,” said Appice, when asked what it was that made Dio such a unique talent. “I’ve never been around anybody who sang like that – just soul and heart, you know. The way he sounded, the sound of his voice, and then he was just totally into his music – totally loved it. And it was just nice to be around somebody so strong. He was a great leader, and just an incredible voice. It made you feel secure. You know, if I stay with this guy, nothing’s going to happen. That’s why his death was a shock. Man, this is one of the strongest persons I’ve ever met in my life. He was a leader, a father figure, a brother, musician … it was like he was going to live forever. Or if he got sick, he’ll beat it. And that’s why it’s a shock. Man, he went down. He had so many qualities. It was so easy to be drawn to him.”

As so many people were, be they fans or fellow musicians who idolized Dio. Not surprisingly, Appice has wonderful memories of his days with Sabbath, Dio and Heaven and Hell. And, as expected, over the years, Appice has accumulated many prized mementos from those halcyon days.

“Obviously, I got gold and platinum records,” said Appice. “And then I got different things that were given to the band, one from Madison Square Garden in 1980 [that marked how the band] sold a million dollars worth of tickets, cool stuff. Years ago, you used to get a lot of swag; there were Black Sabbath bags that only the band had, Black Sabbath robes … it was like that kind of stuff, some old posters, not a lot. And Dio, I got a lot of the same kind of stuff, plaques and different things like that. There are some pictures, but that’s about it. Not a whole bunch of stuff.”

What are the pieces that mean the most to him?
“Well, all the gold records,” says Appice. “So, all the gold records and platinum records; those are priceless."

As has been reported recently, Appice has a new project going called Kill Devil Hill with former Pantera bassist Rex Brown “ … and two unknown guys – Dewey Bragg on vocals and Mark Zavon on guitar. And this stuff kicks butt. Right now it’s called Kill Devil Hill, but we might change the name, so we’re working on that right at this moment and it’ll be out next year. So there’s a lot more stuff coming along.”

And Appice isn’t closing the door on his days with Sabbath’s survivors. “We might continue. Who knows?”

  

Hands Of Doom: Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward looks back on ‘Paranoid’

A storm was brewing on the northwest coast of England around 1969 and 1970, and it was moving inland fast.

The origins of this tempest, however, first stirred in the industrial wasteland of a city called Birmingham, where four scraggly, but wildly creative, young men were transforming the heavy blues of such legends as Cream and Blue Cheer into a new kind of minor-key sonic monster, a ponderous beast capable of pummeling of great pillars into pebbles with immense, explosive guitar riffs, pounding rhythms that buffeted and followed those powerfully struck chords to hell and a singer whose pained howl expressed horrors both real and imagined.
It was a scary, almost apocalyptic sound that both shocked and awed rock audiences in Cumbria, an English county that relied on the bounty of the Atlantic Ocean to eke out what was at times a meager existence. And they loved the devastatingly loud, sludgy dirges and hallucinogenic jams that were blasting out of the rugged amps of a then-unknown Black Sabbath that toured the area hard.

“We’d done a lot of work in northwest England in what they call Cambria,” remembers Sabbath drummer Bill Ward, “and without realizing it we built up quite a fan base in northwest England.” Playing to increasingly packed houses in the region, Sabbath cultivated a rabid, extremely loyal following that Ward believes put its collective shoulders to the band’s foggy, drug-addled, yet crushingly powerful and disturbingly spooky, self-titled debut, released in May 1970, and helped nudge it into the U.K. Top Ten album charts. All of which set the stage for Sabbath’s master stroke, Paranoid, also unleashed in 1970, in September of that year, and the subject of a new Eagle Vision “Classic Albums” series DVD as we approach its 40th anniversary.

“I was just amazed,” exclaims Ward. “I think [our debut] came in at No. 26 out of the Top 30. It was just like, ‘Oh my God.’ And it was something that, after all the years that you are playing on the stage and playing all the clubs, playing all the different places we had to play, comes as a surprise. So it was enormous, really. It was like, ‘Oh, wow. We’ve actually accomplished part of a dream,’ if you like. That was a big part of the dream, to get a hit record.”

But, why Cumbria? What was it about Sabbath’s bleak musical black magic, still in its infancy but growing more and more mature with each performance, that appealed to denizens of the area’s sparsely populated towns?  

Ward explains that, “On the west coast, the northwest coast of England, they’re mainly fishing villages. However, they’re very hard. It’s a very hard life, and it’s very hard weather. It’s a really tough place to be, working in Aspatria, Whitehaven … these are all tough towns. They’re granite. The houses are built of black granite. And so they actually look quite dismal when it’s raining with these black, monolithic houses that exist up there. They paint the landscape with granite silhouettes if you like. But at the same time, you can see the beauty in that as well, but there’s almost a sense of morbidity there that was … I know we were very attracted to playing there. We wanted to be there all the time (laughs). The biggest city in that specific area is Carlisle, and Carlisle is a fortress. It’s a fortress town. It’s right on the border of England and Scotland. So it’s got a lot of pagan history, and it just goes way back in time. And so [Sabbath guitarist] Tony [Iommi] and I used to live in Carlisle. We were in another band, but when we had Black Sabbath, we all loved Carlisle. That’s where a lot of our roots were in the beginning, to play our music. So, I don’t know. The people just, you know, really liked hard-core music.”

That’s putting it lightly. Ward compares Sabbath’s original fans in that area to the more intense ones you’d also find in places like New Jersey and Philadelphia. In other words, they’re extremely passionate about what they like.

“I think it was great in the sense that not much came up to that part of northwest England,” says Ward. “You know, there are rolling hills; it’s called the ‘lake district.’ There are lots of lakes there. There’s not a large population. It’s quite isolated. So, being up there, it was a real treat when a band went up there, and I loved the audiences around that area. And they loved it when rock bands would go up there and visit these different small towns and so on and so forth. It’s just a very fanatical crowd, and I like the Scots. The Scotsmen were the same way.” 

With momentum building among the black masses, Sabbath, true to its blue-collar roots, continued working. Touring was constant, and on the road, the quartet of Ward, Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and iconic metal vocalist Ozzy Osbourne jammed and wrote during the hours when they weren’t onstage. There was a bit of a break, though.

“Yeah, well, what was happening was, as we were playing more and more, we became more and more intuitive toward one another, and so, by the time we’d done our first album, we were continually on the road,” says Ward. “It didn’t stop us from jamming out. You know, we could jam out in hotel rooms. So we’d get ideas all the time.”

Their fertile imaginations working overtime, the men of Sabbath were becoming more and more cohesive as a unit, and when they did get a little window of time to exit the road, they decided to go to Monmouth in Monmouthshire, Wales, for more work.

“We actually took a week or maybe 10 days to rehearse some of our songs,” says Ward. “I’ll give you an example of that. I’ll always remember, we rehearsed ‘Electric Funeral,’ ‘Hand Of Doom’ and I think we did some of ‘War Pigs’ there as well. So we actually had - which had never happened to us before – rehearsals, just writing material for what was to be Paranoid. So, with the combination of having licks and different things in our heads and what have you, and also by now being a very intuitive band, when we played, we knew almost … I can’t describe it. We knew where the other person was going to go. We would often sit down and write something, and we’d all go to the same place at the same time. It was actually a little strange, a little scary. But without being too analytical, it was just something we had as a band that we were able to do that. We knew intuitively when to change, when we were going to go into a different place, you know. So it was really quite a ride in making a Black Sabbath track, you know.”

Deciding on a driver for the trip was easy. Everyone followed Iommi’s lead, the guitar wizard who seemed to be able to pluck innovative, instantly memorable riffs out of thin air. Ward and Iommi, both of them heavily influenced by what Ward called the “incredibly rich soil” of the British music scene of the 1960s, began playing in bands together at the age of 16. In Birmingham, Iommi was, even at that tender age, was as good as any guitarist in the city. In quick order, he moved past them all, fluidly navigating more complex pieces than the blues and rock standards of the day.

“I just watched him all his life, you know; observing from his later teenage years, he just shot up,” says Ward. “He just grew into this young songwriter, this riff master. His uncanny ability to come up with parts and pieces, and just even sometimes [with] three notes, and then they were so devastatingly good, they would just blow the rest of us away. I mean, just playing drums, as far as playing drums to the notes that he was playing, it was a drummer’s dream. It was the best job in the world. But then, of course, it was all about talent [allowed] to flourish when we started making more and more music. But it was a prime growth period for all of us, and definitely for Tony.”

However brief, that short rehearsal period, plus the nonstop gigging, prepared Sabbath well for the tight studio timeframe the band had to record Paranoid. Having booked just two days, Sabbath was ready and willing to work long hours to get the job done, going from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Undaunted, Sabbath was up to the challenge.

“God, we were so weird,” laughs Ward. “I don’t recall us being savvy enough to put that together. It’s almost like we were told that this is what it is, this is what you have fellas. This is what you do. It was like, okay, well, we’ll just do it then. So we just showed up and did it.”

Having engineer Tom Allom and producer Rodger Bain, real recording professionals, onboard helped Sabbath stay on schedule. Allom, for his part, says on the DVD that he knew exactly how to record Sabbath.
“With what he had, and with what Rodger had, I think that they used the tools very well,” says Ward. “You know, we tried to scramble everything to put it all together the best we could. We had some fairly decent microphones, which was the case back in the late ‘60s, around ’69, early ’70. So, I think with the tools that they had and the equipment that they had, they were able to capture at least part of what we sounded like.”
Time being an issue, Sabbath laid down tracks in three takes or less. “I don’t think we’d ever [gone beyond] that,” admits Ward. “I think if we were in Take 4, we’d probably forget the song, you know, because we knew we were on a timeline, and we intended to keep to that timeline, much to Tom Allom and Rodger Bain’s efforts to keep that tight. We knew that’s what we were being given, to try to take every advantage of that. So in that sense, we encouraged each other. We were very pushy towards each other.”
And Sabbath, being the force of nature they were live and always pushing to play at a volume that was troublesome to manage, had trouble adjusting to the confines of the studio.

“This was like the band’s fifth day in a recording studio, ‘cause we were only a couple days with Black Sabbath and now we were doing Paranoid and it was like a few more days for Paranoid,” says Ward. “We were very inexperienced, but what we were at the time was we were a touring band. We were playing live and we were playing loud and we were playing very aggressively. So, for anybody to capture that in a very small studio, with the baffles and the microphones of the day … I remember just my snare drum, they were trying to just get the microphone to not just go into the red and just overpower the microphone, ‘cause I was just playing full strength. You know, I didn’t know how to play in the studio.”

Being young and somewhat naïve about the recording process, Sabbath decided, whether consciously or unconsciously, to sort of mimic the chords and notes Iommi was churning out, and in doing so, they added incredible heft to the overall sound.

“It was whatever Tony was doing, we’d try to enhance, fill and do that,” says Ward. “That was the priority: getting as big a sound as we possibly could. And so, in doing that, keeping that in mind, then we would look at how to create that bigger sound that we had to make it dramatic or dark or hard or critical – any of those things. So, that would be our focus. Whatever we needed to do, whatever the ingredients were note-wise or rhythmically to get to those places, of the latter that I just mentioned, whatever we would do, we’d go wherever we needed to go to get that and just pour all that out.”

That flood intensified tracks like “War Pigs,” the title track and Ward’s particular favorite, “Hand of Doom.”
“It’s just raw and naked, and Ozzy’s phrasing is superb,” says Ward. “I like the fact that we got some of our little jazz things going on in there (Ward being a big fan of drummer Gene Krupa and Iommi being heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt). And we go from our little jazz things to a wonderful dynamic of sheer volume. When we played that live, we used to blow everybody away, because we were playing very, very soft and then suddenly you can hear the amps just rise up, baarrangg … you know, so to me, that’s pure metal.”

If “Hand of Doom” was “pure metal,” the trippy, acoustically sketched out space travelogue “Planet Caravan” was something altogether different.

“I think it was something that we would go to when we needed a bit of peace, and I strongly suspect it was the same formula, as always, which was that Tony had, you know, some kind of a riff going on or some kind of chord, because that’s how things would normally start,” says Ward. “When I listen to that, it sounds like Ozzy immediately caught on to the guitar and interpreted a melody straightaway, so even after 30 seconds of it, we could turn it into a song. Yeah, it was a nice resting spot.”

There wasn’t much rest for the wicked, though, on Paranoid. The album starts with the raging anti-war epic “War Pigs,” which, perhaps surprisingly, has some basis in Sabbath’s appreciation for the Latin-tinged poly-rhythms of a band called The Shadows, whose influence on Sabbath, according to Ward, is subtle but omnipresent.

“That was one that we had rehearsed before, so it wasn’t something that was brand new that we built in the studio or anything,” says Ward. “And we’d already been playing that out, playing it in front of audiences. I thought it was just such a good song live, very compelling. But yeah, I like the way we did play the grooves, especially the top groove … you can feel the jazz influence, only it’s played extremely f**king loud.”
Another song that was honed to perfection live was “Jack The Stripper/Fairies With Boots.” Ward says, “It’s one of the band’s favorites. It always has been. I think it was fairly well recorded. We’d been playing that for quite some time. And it was a fun song to play. Onstage, we got really, really raucous with it.”

Speaking of raucous, the stinging, frenetically paced title track, a classic song that describes, in horrifying fashion, a struggle to maintain one’s sanity, was something unexpected, a last-minute fill-in that Sabbath put together in under half an hour. It all started with an idea in Iommi’s head. As Ward, Ozzy and Butler went to lunch that last day in the studio, Iommi excused himself. He wanted to work on what’s become one of the greatest riffs in rock history, “ … and we followed about 10 minutes later,” recalls Ward. “He was playing the top 30 or 40 seconds of what was going to be ‘Paranoid,’ and so, we didn’t say a word. It was quite subdued actually. I got up there on my drums, Geezer got on his bass, and Ozzy [got] behind the mic, and we just slammed in and took about 20 minutes to do it. And again, I think that’s one of the good things about being a band sharing everything equally and being intuitive to each other. And that’s what can come out. And I think it was 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, from beginning to end. We recorded it, and then there was an overdub the next day, I think, where Tony played through it, and I played through it.”

Firing on all cylinders, Sabbath, in just two days, had created not only an album for the ages, but they had also drawn up the blueprints for what a genre that become known as heavy metal. Critics, at the time and for years afterward, loathed Sabbath, but they got the last laugh. Paranoid went straight up to #1 in the U.K. and the songs “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” marched into the lower reaches of the U.S. charts.
As for Sabbath, the realization of what they’d accomplished took a while to sink in.

“I guess we must have stopped to enjoy the party and congratulate each other for being No. 1, but I don’t think any of us knew even when we were doing it what that meant,” says Ward. “It must have meant something different for everybody, like ‘Oh, we’re No. 1’ and I was expecting something to happen, like there’d be a bolt of lightning out of the sky or something, you know, and I’ll be invited to see the Queen. The only thing we really thought about was getting a little bit of sleep and making sure we had some food. It’s strange because when it actually happens, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, right. What do we do with this now?”
Sabbath was about to find out.


- Peter Lindblad

More Surprises in Store for Ward and Black Sabbath



Black Sabbath’s early days were marked by poverty. Singer Ozzy Osbourne, at one point, couldn’t even afford a pair of shoes. And any food the four had was shared equally among the band mates, remembers drummer Bill Ward. So, understandably, their appearance was somewhat shabby and rough. To say the four looked like street people wouldn’t be too far off the mark.


Musically, Sabbath’s voluminous riffs, punishing rhythms and eerie, macabre lyrics failed to make a good first impression with critics. Not at all sunny or uplifting, Sabbath in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s was more attuned to the dark side of humanity, unable to turn a blind eye to the horrors of the Vietnam War, mental illness or the breakdown of civilization. Theirs was an unrelentingly aggressive sound, massive and raging with an undisguised frustration, furious angst and equal sympathy for both angels and the devil that, perhaps, even outdid that of The Rolling Stones.


All this, as any good record label executive would tell you, is not exactly a formula for churning out hit records. But there was something about Sabbath that struck a chord with the disaffected, and their money was just as green as everybody else’s. Still, to drummer Bill Ward, the chart momentum Sabbath built with its self-titled debut and then, its masterwork, Paranoid, in 1970 was an absolute shock. And all of the success Sabbath has experienced since then has been no less surprising.
With a sense of bemusement and wonderment, Ward has taken all of it in. And so, the release of a “Classic Albums” series DVD, from Eagle Vision, on the making of the Paranoid LP is, again, one of those pleasant happenstances that keep filling Ward with pride and satisfaction over what Sabbath has accomplished.
“Well, I think it’s a nice surprise. It came as a surprise,” explains Ward. “I don’t have any expectations or leftover ideas of what Black Sabbath [can] do, other than possibly tour and make another album, which is always, of course, in my mind, as it is for all of us from time to time. So things [like this] are surprises, like [when] we were inducted into the [Rock And Roll] Hall Of Fame in New York. I kind of take it as it comes, and I tend to go with the ebb and flow of things that happen. So, you know, I’ve been enjoying it. It’s almost like receiving accolades after so many years of being involved [with Sabbath]. So in that sense, it’s been a very nice surprise.”
As for his thoughts on whether the documentary does a good in detailing the creation of an album that many believe drew up the blueprint for heavy metal, Ward was complimentary of its makers.
“I thought it was pretty good,” says Ward. “Yeah, I thought it was pretty good in the sense that it’s something different. For instance, I don’t think we’ve had an opportunity to see Black Sabbath quite like that before - you know, parts broken down. And it’s somewhat informal and yet very informative at the same time. So I think we’re joining the ranks of TV media (laughs). Finally, we’re getting there. So, in that sense, I think it’s quite good.”

And, in the end, a film like this that celebrates the often-maligned musical abilities and songcraft of Sabbath is confirmation that their critics had it all wrong from the start.

- Peter Lindblad

DVD Review: Black Sabbath "Paranoid" (Classic Album)

DVD Review: Black Sabbath "Paranoid" (Classic Album)

All Access Review:  B+

A seismic shift occurs in Black Sabbath’s monolithic, sci-fi revenge fantasy “Iron Man” that few, outside of former Black Flag front man and spoken-word terrorist Henry Rollins, would ever notice. Swarmed under by Tony Iommi’s panzer division guitar riffs and Ozzy Osbourne’s freakishly sinister distorted vocals, the absolute brilliance of this little treasure often goes unnoticed, getting lost in a storm of gloomy power chords born of the factories of Sabbath’s home of Birmingham, England. Rollins, however, is amazed by this incredibly agile movement.

In the latest edition of Eagle Vision’s highly acclaimed “Classic Albums” series, a documentary that details the making of Sabbath’s archetypal heavy-metal LP, Paranoid, Rollins describes a slow, tantalizing descent in the bridge that shifts into a steep, sure-footed ascent that, according to Rollins, would “sprain” the brains of amateurs, and many professionals, who try to duplicate it. And he might be right.

Giving these small, but crucial, moments in a given work of genius their just due is part of what makes the “Classic Albums” series such vital companion pieces to transcendent albums like Paranoid and this one, in particular, goes to great lengths to make a case for the artist in question and the underappreciated musicality of Sabbath. Whether it’s sitting down with Iommi to dissect some of his most influential guitar parts or watching engineer Tony Allom replay tapes of Ozzy’s lyrical riffing over “Paranoid” in an attempt to refine the melody, this DVD offers incredible technical insight into how Sabbath constructed its undisputed masterpiece, even going so far as to explore the jazz influences of Iommi and drummer Bill Ward – namely, Django Reinhardt and Gene Krupa, respectively - and how they furtively plant these subtle trip wires to alert people to the fact that there’s something more at work here than just massive volume and power. Sabbath is out to blow your mind with how this fearsome foursome is in absolute control of its dynamics.

And lest you think it is all studio reconstruction and jargon that only a musician would understand, think again. As always, the makers of the “Classic Albums” series take pains to put Paranoid in its historical context and study the events in Sabbath’s life to that point that led up to the album that would provide a blueprint for heavy, and at times mind-bending (see the medicated psychedelia of “Planet Caravan”), rock. All four Sabbath members tell fascinating, and often very funny, stories about this heady time in their lives, and in-depth talks with bassist Geezer Butler and esteemed music writers explore the almost unbearable realism of the album’s lyrics and how Sabbath mirrored the madness of the times, especially Vietnam, as the dream of a hippie utopia died in a cruel, tortured fashion.

Again, “Classic Albums” has done what it set out to do, and in the process, it garners a little more respect for a band that was, at first, eviscerated by critics but in the end, has endured as one of hard rock’s most revered quartets. Maybe it ends a little abruptly, but that’s hardly reason to avoid picking this up.

- Peter Lindblad

Eagle Vision:  Black Sabbath:  "Paranoid" (Classic Album)

Be sure and check back in the coming week to read our interview with Bill Ward