Black Sabbath Debut Album Rare 1970 Warner Bros. Records Original Vinyl LP

$

50

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Black Sabbath Studio album by  Black Sabbath Released 13 February 1970 Recorded 16 October 1969 Studio Regent Sounds (London) Genre Heavy metal[1] Length 38:08 (UK) 39:24 (US) Label

• Vertigo (UK)
• Warner Bros. (US)

1. "Evil Woman" / "Wicked World"
   Released: 2 January 1970

Black Sabbath is the debut studio album by the English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, released on 13 February 1970 by Vertigo Records in the United Kingdom and on 1 June 1970 by Warner Bros. Records in the United States. The album is widely regarded as the first true metal album, and the opening title track, "Black Sabbath", was named the greatest heavy metal song of all time by Rolling Stone and has been referred to as the first doom metal song.

Black Sabbath received generally negative reviews from critics upon its release but was a commercial success, reaching number eight on the UK Albums Charts and number 23 on the US Billboard Top LPs chart. It has retrospectively garnered reappraisal as one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time. Black Sabbath is included in Robert Dimery's 2005 musical reference book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Recording

The album was recorded at Regent Sounds Studios on Denmark Street, London in a 12-hour session on 16 October 1969. Iommi said: "We just went in the studio and did it in a day, we played our live set and that was it. We actually thought a whole day was quite a long time, then off we went the next day to play for £20 in Switzerland." Aside from the bells, thunder and rain sound effects added to the beginning of the opening track and the double-tracked guitar solos on "N.I.B." and "Sleeping Village", there were virtually no overdubs added to the album. Iommi recalls recording live: "We thought, 'We have two days to do it and one of the days is mixing.' So we played live. Ozzy was singing at the same time, we just put him in a separate booth and off we went. We never had a second run of most of the stuff."

The key to the band's new sound on the album was Iommi's distinctive playing style that he developed after an accident at a sheet metal factory where he was working at the age of 17 in which the tips of the middle fingers of his fretting hand were severed. Iommi created a pair of false fingertips using plastic from a dish detergent bottle and changed the string arrangement of the guitar. Iommi replaced the second string with the first, the third with the second, and so on. In place of the first, he added a banjo string, to make it easier for him to bend the strings. Later, Iommi would downtune the guitar on the album Master of Reality, to make its playability even less painful. "I'd play a load of chords and I'd have to play fifths because I couldn't play fourths because of my fingers," Iommi explained to Phil Alexander in Mojo in 2013. "That helped me develop my style of playing, bending the strings and hitting the open string at the same time just to make the sound wilder." In the same article, bassist Geezer Butler added, "Back then the bass player was supposed to do all these melodic runs, but I didn't know how to do that because I'd been a guitarist, so all I did was follow Tony's riff. That made the sound heavier."

Iommi began recording the album with a white Fender Stratocaster, his guitar of choice at the time, until a malfunctioning pickup forced him to finish recording with a Gibson SG, a guitar he had recently purchased as a backup but had "never really played". The SG was a right-handed model, which the left-handed Iommi played upside down. Soon after recording the album, he met a right-handed guitarist who was playing a left-handed SG upside down, and the two agreed to swap guitars; this SG became Iommi's main guitar that he modified and later "put out to pasture" at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne has always spoken fondly of the recording of the band's debut album, stating in his autobiography I Am Ozzy, "Once we'd finished, we spent a couple of hours double-tracking some of the guitar and vocals, and that was that. Done. We were in the pub in time for last orders. It can't have taken any longer than 12 hours in total. That's how albums should be made, in my opinion." Drummer Bill Ward agrees, telling Guitar World in 2001, "I think the first album is just absolutely incredible. It's naïve, and there's an absolute sense of unity – it's not contrived in any way, shape or form. We weren't old enough to be clever. I love it all, including the mistakes!" In an interview for the Classic Albums series in 2010, Butler added, "It was literally live in the studio. I mean, (producer) Rodger Bain, I think he's a genius the way he captured the band in such a short time." In his autobiography Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven & Hell with Black Sabbath, Iommi plays down the producer's role, insisting, "We didn't choose to work with Rodger Bain, he was chosen for us... He was good to have around, but we didn't really get a lot of advice from him. He maybe suggested a couple of things, but the songs were already fairly structured and sorted."

Artwork

The cover photograph was shot at Mapledurham Watermill, situated on the River Thames in Oxfordshire, England, by photographer Keith McMillan (credited as Keef), who was in charge of the overall design. Standing in front of the watermill is a figure dressed in a black cloak, portrayed by model Louisa Livingstone, whose identity was not widely known until 2020. "I'm sure (McMillan) said it was for Black Sabbath, but I don't know if that meant anything much to me at the time," Livingstone recalled, adding that it had been "freezing cold" during the shoot. "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 said.

According to McMillan, Livingstone was wearing nothing underneath the black cloak, and some experimentation was done involving some "slightly more risqué" photographs taken at the session. "We decided none of that worked," McMillan 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.

The inner gatefold sleeve of the original release featured an inverted cross containing a poem written by Roger Brown, McMillan's photography assistant. The band were reportedly upset when they discovered this, as it fuelled allegations that they were satanists or occultists; however, in Osbourne's memoirs, he says that to the best of his knowledge nobody was upset with the inclusion. Iommi's recollection is somewhat different: "Suddenly we had all these crazy people turning up at shows," he told Mojo magazine in 2013. "I think Alex Sanders (high priest of the Wiccan religion) turned up at a gig once. It was all quite strange, really." The liner notes to the 1998 Reunion album state "Unbeknownst to the band, Black Sabbath was launched in the U.S. with a party with the head of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey, presiding over the proceedings... All of a sudden Sabbath were Satan's Right Hand Men."

In the years since the iconic cover photo was shot, Livingstone has released electronic music under the name Indreba.

Release and reception

Black Sabbath was recorded for Fontana Records, but the record company elected to switch the band to another of their labels, Vertigo Records, which housed the company's more progressive acts. "I got a call from a guy, Olav Wyper, at a newly set-up label, Vertigo," recalled Sabbath manager Jim Simpson. "Olav had been at CBS when I took the album there, and said he'd now like to do a deal. This was only because, for Vertigo's second tranche of new releases, someone had failed to deliver masters for [the release with catalogue number] V06. So they signed Black Sabbath as a makeweight, because we had finished masters, which could be delivered in a hurry."[28]

Released on Friday the 13th February 1970, Black Sabbath reached number eight on the UK Albums Charts. Following its United States release in June 1970 by Warner Bros. Records, the album reached number 23 on the Billboard Top LPs chart, where it remained for more than a year and sold one million copies.

Black Sabbath received generally negative reviews from contemporary critics. Rolling Stone's Lester Bangs described the band as, "just like Cream! But worse", and he dismissed the album as "a shuck – despite the murky songtitles and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge paying doggerel tribute to Aleister Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés". Robert Christgau, writing for The Village Voice, panned the album as "bullshit necromancy". He later described it as a reflection of "the worst of the counterculture", including "drug-impaired reaction time" and "long solos". In Mick Wall's book Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe, Butler reflects, "The London press absolutely hated us when we made it 'cos they'd never written an article about us, they didn't know of us. When our first album, the first week, went straight into the charts, the London press went, like, what the hell's going on here? And they've hated us ever since."

Retrospective reviews and legacy

Retrospective reviews of Black Sabbath have been positive. AllMusic reviewer Steve Huey said it was a highly innovative debut album with several classic metal songs, including the title track, which he felt had the "most definitive heavy metal riffs of all time". Huey was also impressed by how the band's "slowed-down, murky guitar rock bludgeons the listener in an almost hallucinatory fashion, reveling in its own dazed, druggy state of consciousness". In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), journalist Scott Seward highlighted Bain's grandiose production on "an album that eats hippies for breakfast." In the opinion of Mike Stagno of Sputnikmusic, "both fans of blues influenced hard rock and heavy metal of all sorts should find something they like on the album." BBC Music's Pete Marsh referred to Black Sabbath as an "album that changed the face of rock music." Canadian journalist Martin Popoff called the album "a landmark debut" and the only one in the discography to suffer "the transitional step towards the concept of full metal".

In 1989, Kerrang! ranked Black Sabbath number 31 on their "100 Greatest Heavy Metal Albums of All Time". In 1994, it was ranked number 12 in Colin Larkin's Top 50 Heavy Metal Albums. Larkin praised the album's "crushing atmosphere of doom", which he described as "intense and relentless". In 2000, Q magazine included Black Sabbath in their list of the "Best Metal Albums of All Time", stating: "[This album] was to prove so influential it remains a template for metal bands three decades on." In 2003, it was ranked number 241 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, 243 in a 2012 revised list, and 355 in a 2020 revised list. Rolling Stone ranked Black Sabbath number 44 in their list of the 100 Best Debut Albums of All Time, describing the title track as the song that "would define the sound of a thousand bands". Additionally, in 2017, the magazine ranked it 5th on their list of "100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time". The album was also included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Track listing

All songs written by Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne, except where noted.

European edition

• Larry Wiegand 
• Dick Wiegand 
• David Wagner

• Aynsley Dunbar 
• Alex Dmochowski 
• Victor Hickling 
• John Moorshead