The band Eddie Van Halen thought changed rock history: “There wasn’t anything like it before”
A genre like rock would die if it refused to change. Even in the modern age, where the mainstream is dominated by people mimicking the trends of 20 years ago, a few artists are still willing to push the envelope and come up with something that no one has ever heard. Whereas the first major change in rock began with The Beatles, Eddie Van Halen believed that the second turn came when Black Sabbath debuted back in the early 1970s.
Then again, Sabbath themselves would probably say that they didn’t think anything they were doing was particularly groundbreaking at the time. They may have wanted to stand out amongst their peers, but it was most likely that a lot of their songs fell back on the same 12-bar blues jams that everyone loved to hear.
Even when they made their experimental projects like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath later on, a track like ‘Sabbra Cadabra’ can still be considered a decent bluesy jam that happens to feature a prog-metal keyboard solo in the middle of things. It’s one thing to play the blues, but Tony Iommi proved that it’s how you play the blues that really matters.
After discovering the eerie sound of the tritone, Iommi started coming up with the heaviest riffs imaginable on tracks like ‘Black Sabbath’ and ‘Paranoid’. That wasn’t really heavy enough, though, so the next period of their career saw them tuning their guitars down even lower to make it sound like the bellowing sounds of the underworld on tracks like ‘Children of the Grave’.
Despite Led Zeppelin introducing the world to what “heavy” music could sound like, Sabbath were the first to turn it into a legitimate style of music. They might not claim to be the originators of metal, but if you were to ask any metal band where they got it from, the Birmingham legends stand alone as the first to bring metal to the masses.
Eddie had already heard the likes of Zeppelin, but he knew that something different was happening with Sabbath, telling Biography, “There wasn’t anything like it before them. It’s funny that they would call Led Zeppelin heavy metal. Half of their stuff was acoustic. Rock and roll today wouldn’t exist without [Sabbath].”
While most people would stretch to call Van Halen a “heavy metal” band at their core, Sabbath ran through Eddie’s DNA whenever he sat down to write a song. Say what you want to about their mainstream tendencies, but just listen to the back half of Women and Children First like ‘Tora! Tora!’ and try to say that’s not heavy metal with a straight face.
Make no mistake, Eddie could clean it up when he wanted to, but Iommi could too. There might have been a ton of metalheads making fun of a piece like ‘Jump’ for bringing the keyboards into the picture, but considering where Sabbath went after their first few records, that could justifiably be considered their own uptempo version of a song like ‘Changes’.
But when Van Halen went out with Sabbath on their first major stadium tour, the writing was on the wall for where the classic version of the metal icons were going. Ozzy Osbourne was halfway out the door, and whether they knew it or not, Van Halen were about to occupy the same space where Sabbath once stood as leaders of the next era of heavy music.
