‘Tomorrow’s Dream’: the band Black Sabbath worried they would become
Every band has to worry about the moment when fame starts catching up with them. Even if someone breaks through to the mainstream, it doesn’t mean they have the ear of their generation forever. While Black Sabbath were more than capable of pushing music forward whenever they played, they knew that some of their contemporaries were as liable to fall into a trap as they were in their prime.
Then again, one of the added bonuses of Sabbath’s fame was that they were so divisive. The critics never catered to their brand of spooky rock and roll, but the more they doubled down on making music that sounded scary, the more likely they were to gain a following from people who preferred something a bit more punishing than whatever Led Zeppelin was doing at the time.
While Sabbath themselves were major Zeppelin fans, they also knew there were some bases that they could tackle that others couldn’t. They had already set a precedent for tuning things down on Master of Reality, but by the time they got to work on Vol 4, they started looking for something new outside the confines of hard rock. And for anyone who was worried about Sabbath changing, things were bound to turn ugly when the keyboards came out.
‘Changes’ may have been the point of no return for some purists, but it wasn’t like they were suddenly going to sing about flowers and puppies. Geezer Butler was still willing to go to dark places, and listening to tracks like ‘Snowblind’ gave a better indication of where their headspace was. That is when they weren’t going through mountains of cocaine in between takes for the songs.
Of all the tracks on the record, though, ‘Tomorrow’s Dream’ was the first time they had a sense of unease with their fame. No Black Sabbath track could be considered light in subject matter, but when writing this tune, Butler had a specific target in mind when looking at the kind of artists that only managed to be in the spotlight for a second.
When speaking about the song later, Butler remembered Bay City Rollers as the kind of flash in the span that they were trying to steer clear of when discussing the song, saying, “It’s about how fleeting being in a band can be. The popularity. There were a lot of bands in the beginning of the ’70s – the Bay City Rollers and bands like that – who were absolutely massive for about two years and then nobody ever heard of them again. It was about how fleeting fame could be.”
Then again, time can be funny when it comes to a band’s legacy. Although Bay City Rollers are by no means on the same level as Led Zeppelin or anything, the fact that they were able to gain a foothold in the 1970s gave executives carte blanche when making their own versions of those bands years down the road when hair metal started to grow stale.
But let that be a lesson for anyone who tries to make it big by doing whatever the label tells them to do. It might be easy to make a few bucks at the moment, but the real challenge is trying to keep it for as long as you can.
