Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [109]
It must also be remarked that they don’t have the stage show of the century—Geezer Butler gets in some nice hunchover-and-rearback english on bass, Bill Ward is about average for drummer histrionics, but Tony Iommi plays guitar in a fixed stance with eyes glued to the frets, as if he were concentrating so deeply on what he was doing that he could be home in his Birmingham parlor and the audience a solitary titmouse. Ozzy has fun onstage, more than you might expect with material of the type they specialize in, confirming his earlier remark that “Our music to an extent relieves the tension which builds up in people. When I get onstage and start looning around, I feel a big relief, I know that something's getting released.”
Yeah, me too, whether I’m listening to your records stomping off a bad day with a bottle of wine in my own parlor, or watching your stage hop, which is pretty nifty kid. You ain’t no Mick Jagger, but you ain’t pretentious when it comes to wigglin’ either. In fact, your bouncy enthusiasm, confessing the same sense of ingenuousness that your manner and conversation do in person, is infectious, and I really wanted to have a good time even if my big Teenage Wasteland exposè piece was shot and even if the volume was on vacation and even though my back and feet hurt and I was tired and cold and basically bored. I wanted to have a good time not only because I like Black Sabbath but because you made me want to, and I guess that's why I’m pissed off, because except for a few minutes of churning and growling roar-along with “Children of the Grave” and the much-too-short “Paranoid,” I just killed time that set, I just sat and waited half-hearing like I usually do at these things, and it wasn’t really anybody's fault, not even my own. I almost wonder if I don’t prefer it when everybody's drugged and obnoxious.
When you took off your shirt it didn’t have quite the James Brown drama of Mark Farner's symbolic Unveiling of the Plowboy Rock Prince biceps, but it was a nice gesture anyway and one of the two crazy teenage girls behind me who squealed for you all night yelled, “Take it all off, Ozzy!” They were wearing dark-velvet suits with swirling Edwardian capes and black wooden crosses hanging on leather thongs around their necks (even though I noticed that of the band only Geezer was still sporting his lucky crucifix), and at some point early in the set one of them actually yelled, “You devils!”
When the human sea surged down the center aisle in a massive jam just as your set was beginning, I began to get my hopes up, especially when a dozen or so harried ushers and rentacops came scurrying from the open spaces at the sides of the stage and began to make a series of futile attempts to break up the bobbing Black Sabbath congregation by hand and accusing flashlight. The faithful stayed put, though (most of them couldn’t have moved anyway), and pretty soon a large crucifix made out of two boards wrapped in tinfoil and nailed together, which some dizzy zealot must have actually lugged down to this gig from Pontiac or somewhere, was hauled aloft near the rear of the congregation and passed from hand to hand, slowly and cumbersomely without doubt, up to the front until somebody was actually holding this big silver elephant of an icon right in front of your face as you sang, obscuring the view of people behind them and becoming a bit absurd in the urgency to do something that might provoke a sign of affirmative recognition from their heroes. Even if it's only because they think that you’re strange (but don’t change …) and must be at least incredibly eccentric and at