Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [101]
We have seen the Stooges take on the night ferociously and go tumbling into its maw, and Alice Cooper is currently exploiting it for all it's worth, turning it into a circus. But there is only one band that has dealt with it honestly in terms meaningful to vast portions of the audience, not only grappling with it in a mythic structure that's both personal and universal, but actually managing to prosper as well. That band is Black Sabbath.
The band's first album made the Top 20 in England, their second went to Number One, the single of its title song made number three on the British charts, and by the time they came to America their record company was ready with a hype fronted by “LOUDER THAN LED ZEPPELIN” banners, though, as lead singer Ozzy Osbourne says, “They had to drop that fairly soon because we just told them not to fuck around.” The company has never really known what it has in the group or how to handle them. But it really didn’t matter at all, because Black Sabbath wasted no time in repeating their English triumph in this country; all three of their albums were on the charts at the same time for months on end.
The audience, searching endlessly both for bone-rattling sound and someone to put the present social and psychic traumas in perspective, found both in Black Sabbath. They were loud, perhaps, with Grand Funk, louder than anything previously heard in human history; they possessed a dark vision of society and the human soul borrowed from black magic and Christian myth; they cut straight to the teen heart of darkness with obsessive, crushing blocks of sound and “words that go right to your sorrow, words that go Ain’t no tomorrow,’” as Ozzy sang in “Warning” on their first album.
The critics and others who just couldn’t hear it, whether they were so far from it as to find their spokesman in a James Taylor or merely felt that the riff's essence had already been done much better by the Stooges or MC5, responded almost as one by damning it as “downer music.” Since much of it did lack the unquenchable adrenaline imperatives of its precedents and one look around a rock concert hall was enough to tell you where the Psychedelic Revolution had led, the charge seemed worth considering.
Lots of Black Sabbath fans take downs, but there are certainly many that don’t and just as many barbiturate and heroin casualties that have no truck at all with the group, including many of those devotees of the mellow acoustic sound who are supposedly into healthier lifestyles than the minions of the music of desperation. But somehow it's easier to picture the kid down the block, as fucked-up as we’ve watched him become, slumped in his bedroom gorged on Tuinal, listening to Black Sabbath prate of the devil and nuclear war and what a cruel kitchen the world is, nodding to himself as he nods along anyway and finding justification for his cancerous apathy.
That's the public myth. But it's not exactly Black Sabbath's myth, not really, and a consideration of the true vision inherent in their downer rock reveals that phrase for exactly what it is.
You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
Then you turn and run farther
when the fast bullets fly.
—Bob Dylan, “Masters of War”
Now in darkness world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs of the power
And as God has struck the hour
Day of judgment, God is calling
On their knees the war pigs crawling
Begging mercies for their sins
Satan laughing spreads his wings.
—Black Sabbath, “War Pigs”
Listen to my last words anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever…. And what does my program of total resistance and total austerity offer you?I offer you nothing. I am not a politician. These are conditions of total emergency. And these are my