Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [102]
—William S. Burroughs,
“Last Words [of Hassan i Sabbah],” Nova Express
Despite the blitzkrieg nature of their sound, Black Sabbath are moralists—like Bob Dylan, like William Burroughs, like most artists trying to deal with a serious situation in an honest way. They are not on the same level of profundity, perhaps; they are certainly much less articulate, subject to the ephemerality of rock, but they are a band with a conscience who have looked around and taken it upon themselves to reflect the chaos in a way that they see as positive. By now they’ve taken some tentative steps toward offering alternatives.
In his book The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Roszak suggested that given the current paucity of social leaders worth investing even a passing hope in, the coalition made up of the young and the free-form wing of the Left should turn to the ancient notion of the shaman, the holy madman whose prescriptions derived not from logic or think tanks or even words sometimes, but from an extraordinarily acute perception of the flux of the universe. Well, we’ve reaped Roszak's script in spades by now, there's a shaman slouching on every corner and tinhorn messiahs are a dime a dozen. Some are “political” and some are “mystical” and some are building their kingdoms on a “cosmic” stew of both, and each seems to have his little cadre of glaze-orbed acid casualties proselytizing for him.
Then there are also the cultural shamans, Dylan being the supreme artifact: Biblical, rooted in the soil and tradition and his own Old Testament brand of conscience. Burroughs too, of course, and his “Hassan i Sabbah” is nothing more than a particularly malevolent form of shaman, while the “Nova Police” are the benevolent regulation agency out to save the universe from addiction and control. Burroughs has been one of the foremost moralists in American literature; his work amounts to a demonology for our times, portraying the forces currently threatening our planet's survival as evil gods operating from without.
Where Black Sabbath fits into this seeming digression is that they unite a demonology not far from Burroughs’ (if far more obvious) with a Biblical moralism that makes Dylan's look positively bland, although they can be every bit as vindictive as Dylan with the Jehovan judgments.
They are probably the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption: the traditional Christian dualism which asserts that if you don’t walk in the light of the Lord then Satan is certainly pulling your strings, and a bad end can be expected, is even imminent.
They may deny all this; Ozzy Osbourne responded to a question about how the band's concept came about with a vague “I don’t know. I met the guys, we got together and rehearsed for about two years, starved, bummed around hoping for a break and it just happened. You relate to me that it's about doom or something, but I can’t relate it to you because I’m in the middle of it.”
It really doesn’t make any difference how conscious they may be of what they’re saying, though. The message is there for anyone with ears, and it's unmistakable. The themes are perdition, destruction, and redemption, and their basic search for justice and harmony in a night-world becomes more explicitly social all the time. On their first album that quality only appears in one song, “Wicked World.” But the prevailing mood is a medieval sense of supernatural powers moving in to snatch the unwary soul and cast it into eternal bondage.
The band was named after an above-average British horror flick from Hammer Studios, starring Boris Karloff, and their namesake song actually opens with rain sound effects and a tolling bell that's echoed in the slow, dolorous fuzz guitar that will set the pace for