Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [107]
If his words at times seem like something lifted directly from one of the band's songs, that's only because the songs are so reflective of the general attitudes of young people in this country and Europe today. Ozzy Osbourne is somebody you could have gone to high school with. But I can’t totally swallow that the war in Vietnam and the specter of the draft are heavy enough to be an absolute factor in so many people trashing their lives with drugs; there's got to be something else. So I said that when I went to rock concerts I often had the impression that people were sitting in trenches almost as degraded and unpleasant in their own way, and asked him if he thought that they were doing all that they are doing to themselves to keep from sitting in a trench Over There, if people were actually killing themselves as a response to the possibility of having to kill someone else.
He thought a minute, straightened the towel wrapped around his hair (freshly washed for the evening's show). “I can’t really say. I think it's having to live in the city, because all cities are like a big garbage can. My hometown Birmingham is just like this place [Detroit], violence and such, and I’ve been through it all. I’ve been in fucking prison, I’ve bummed around, but it's only the city that makes you do things. I’m lucky—I could portray the way I was reared and brought up, I went through a lot of the stories your people are going through right now, violence, getting cut to ribbons and stabbed and everything … so a lot of this naturally comes out in our music. I don’t know if we’re always as close to the edge as people seem to think our music is, I would think not, but sometimes we feel pissed off, so we write that kind of song. Other times it just comes out, like ‘Paranoid’ just happened, we wrote that and recorded it in half an hour.”
Despite all their phosphorescent imagery, one of the distinctive things about Black Sabbath is that they do tend to think quite literally, and the ratio of artifice and contrivance, not to mention plain attitudinal dishonesty toward the audience, in their music is unusually small. Just compare them with someone like Alice Cooper, who is a great rock ‘n’ roller and true original and fine singer in the Freddy Cannon tradition and all that, but wraps himself in more tissues off the rotting haunches of P. T. Barnum every tour, who doesn’t really mean anything he says as far as I can see, and regards the whole thing with cynical good humor and high-energy professionalism as simple Show Business. Alice Cooper is selling a product; so are Black Sabbath, I guess, but they don’t exactly know it, or at least are far more concerned with sharing their understanding of the world than with being the flashiest, hardest-workin’ band in show business. And, raw as the product sometimes gets, this quality demands our respect. They say what they must and mean what they say, even if the collisions between their perception of the hurricane whose eye they ride in and the audience's reality can sometimes be jarring.
Ozzy remembers, “We did a gig once, and they were all sitting down at the front shaking their fists and scowling at us … gettin’ off on our downer music.” He laughs, but not too heartily. “I was holding the mike stand tight, shaking, and the first five rows all have fucking bottles in their hands. I had visions of somebody blowing me head off. I like to see people getting up, grooving around, dancing and having a good time. But sometimes I think