The band Henry Rollins called the best rhythm section: “You will sprain your mind”
Henry Rollins has never been one to suffer fools every time he made a record.
He wanted to have some of the most earnest music that anyone has ever made, and even if he wasn’t the most technically gifted singer in the world, you knew when you were listening to someone who had the same piss and vinegar that all great rock stars are supposed to have. But the best part of any great rock band comes from the groove, and Rollins knew when he was listening to absolute masters of their craft.
Because for someone who was born and bred in the punk tradition, Rollins always had far more sophisticated taste than anyone else around him. Not many punk bands would have claimed to have the same love for someone like John Coltrane as much as they did for The Clash, but Rollins knew that it was all about the expression that someone created on record whenever they laid down their tunes.
And a lot of the best songs that he ever made revolved around those same principles too. A lot of Black Flag’s early work did have a lot of manic moments throughout their discography, but there are also more than a few times on a record like My War where that sludgy sense of tempo made everything sound absolutely menacing. Rollins was practically doing an impression of a lunatic on those songs, but he also knew the importance of the rhythm section every time he played.
He didn’t need to know the first thing about the technicalities of drumming or playing bass, but he did understand when someone wasn’t playing their instrument correctly. He was seething with anger every single time he heard someone talk up the rhythm section of U2 like they were one of the greatest gifts to rock and roll, because why would anyone need anything else when you have a rhythm section like Black Sabbath?
That’s not even to say that Geezer Butler and Bill Ward were doing anything all that flashy. Those first Sabbath albums are fairly simple as far as instrumentals are concerned, but the magic comes from how they use everything. And when Rolling heard what they could do on a track like ‘Iron Man’, he knew that these were musicians who had time to gel and really listen to what their partner was playing.
Any drummer and bassist need to be joined at the hip, and Rollins felt that Butler and Ward were the best anyone could ask for, saying, “That rhythm section, I cannot overemphasise how important that rhythm section is to the way those albums sounded. If you listen to Paranoid for the first time, it’s all about that guitar and that crazy singer.”
Adding, “But you don’t have any foundation to build upon unless you have this rhythm section that can really hold that pocket. On ‘Iron Man’, they play a descending bridge that turns into an ascending bridge on a dime. Listen to that and try to do that yourself, and you will sprain your mind.”
And even if a lot of their songs are based on riffs, the real musicality of the rhythm section comes out of them going for the opposite of heaviness. ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ might be one of the better songs from the band’s first period, but no one would have expected one of the biggest heavy metal bands in the world to somehow have a song that was all based around a swinging rhythm.
But that’s the beauty of what Sabbath was all about. A lot of their songs dealt with dark subjects and had riffs that would have scared away many a grandma back in the day, but when you start to critically listen to what they could do, there was always much more to them than being one of the most foreboding rock and roll stars in the world.
