Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [103]
Since the band's name is what it is and the thematic content of this album, as well as its packaging, leaned so far toward this sort of thing, it's easy to see why people should stereotype the group as either exploiting for profit or living and promulgating the form of pop black magic which finds high school girls intently reading books on how to become a witch and trying out spells on prospective boyfriends (and a sharpie like Anton LaVey10 cleaning up) even as dead (literally)-serious organizations such as the Process carry out their grim rites in Los Angeles, Mexico, New York, and elsewhere, promoting total nihilism and the end of the world, engaging in incredible machinations to, yes, get people in their power (obtaining zombies fit for any job they don’t want to soil their own hands with) even committing murder in some instances with the ritualistic precision of absolute psychopathy. There are scheming salamanders like Manson everywhere, finding fantastic utility in this phase when it comes to their own less bizarrely “religious” ends. What black magic is about is absolute control; since rock ‘n’ roll is power music with strange effects on people, with undercurrent themes of almost fascist dominance and subjection running from the earliest blues through the Stones to Alice Cooper, there were bound to be some psychic and subcultural connections made. No doubt there are Black Sabbath fans who like the group because it seems to reflect their own preoccupation with hocus-pocus and supernatural manipulation, just as people once used the Velvet Underground as soundtracks for the hard-drug movies they’re living to the stone hilt.
But the band themselves will have no part of any of this, according to Ozzy: “We never have been into black magic. But one time, just to get a break, we decided to do a thing because it’d never been done before—the crosses and all that, the black mass on the stage, but we didn’t intend it to be a thing where you go onstage in a pair of horns, and yet even now people come up and think we’re going to put a fucking curse on them. Or if they’re not afraid they think we’re heavy, heavy heads. After the show once we went back to the hotel, and I could hear a lot of feet walking up and down the hall outside, so I went and opened the fucking door and there's all these weird people with black candles walking up and down and writing crosses on the doors and things, and they fucking frightened me, I tell ya. We all blew the candles out and sang ‘Happy Birthday’” he laughs. “They didn’t like that at all.”
When you begin to listen to their music with open ears, it quickly becomes apparent that rock ‘n’ roll sorcery is only a handle devised to make Black Sabbath into a concept more immediately graspable. As much as Satan, the righteously vindictive Old Testament God and spiritual-supernatural agonies recur in their music, they are almost invariably used to make a moral point.
The Black Sabbath vision of life on earth and the machinery of civilization becomes concrete on their second L P, Paranoid, whose very first song (“War Pigs”) takes the epithet applied so indiscriminately for the past half-decade to anyone the speaker happens to be in disagreement with, and carries it to its ultimate gross characterization in a vignette reminiscent in verbal content and unbridled bitterness both of Dylan's “Masters of War” and the firebrand rhetoric of agitprop pamphlets of the Socialist Workers and other parties farther left dating back to the First World War. I remember seeing old books with vitriolic cartoons of Capitalist Pigs (literally) strolling along in top hats and waistcoats with buttons ready to pop from the accretions of fat, lighting giant Havana stogies with $100 bills. Possibly the only difference between that and this or Dylan's song is that those cartoons were conscious, inflammatory propaganda