The band who wiped the floor with classic Black Sabbath in 1978: “We hit a wall”
While the lifespan of a band can vary from case to case, it’s very rare that their time in the spotlight will last forever.
This even applies to those who are considered to be innovators in their field, and despite having introduced heavy metal to the world, it was only going to be a matter of time before Black Sabbath were surpassed by some precocious young upstarts who did everything they were doing, but better.
Of course, the argument can be made that nobody ever topped Black Sabbath if you’re looking at what they were producing at the peak of their output. From Black Sabbath to Sabotage, a six-album run that lasted as many years at the start of the 1970s, nobody could touch the Brummie foursome. Nobody was making music that sounded quite so fearsome, yet technically sublime, nor were they able to come up with anything that appeared to be pushing their innovations in new directions.
The trouble is, when you haven’t really got anything in the way of solid competition, then what or who is going to push you to improve? By the end of the ‘70s, with very little in the way of successful contemporaries, the fact that nobody was brave enough, let alone talented enough, to touch Black Sabbath meant that they inadvertently let their quality slip.
Now, while you might assume this could easily have been avoided through the band tapping into the secret recipe for success that they’d clearly been using for so long, they were evidently tired of using the same formula that had worked for them in the past, and were desperately in need of a change being made.
That said, this also wouldn’t come easily. The band, having constantly been at work perfecting their craft, had grown weary of each other, with tensions rising between members contributing to an unpleasant atmosphere, and all members were separately having to deal with growing substance abuse issues alongside the immense fatigue that comes with the demand for the band to constantly be firing on all cylinders.
But who was actually going to prove themselves capable of kicking Black Sabbath while they were down, showing them up in every which way possible? After the band had released two albums that came across like pallid interpretations of their former glory, 1976’s Technical Ecstasy and 1978’s Never Say Die!, the band embarked on a tour that all but confirmed their downfall was in full swing.
While very few people knew who Van Halen were at the time, especially in the UK, where they’d travelled to from Los Angeles to be the tour support for Black Sabbath, they’d rapidly make a name for themselves as the new heroes of hard rock and heavy metal, more than ready to take the crown from their forefathers. Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler claimed in a retrospective interview with Classic Rock that Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t best pleased with the fact that his opposite, David Lee Roth, appeared to be copying his every move, but the real issue, as Tony Iommi would point out, was simply that Van Halen were better.
“Van Halen were really hot to trot,” Iommi mused, “whereas we were burning out. They were great musicians, energetic on stage. Eddie [Van Halen] was a great player. But that tour was difficult. We hit a wall.” As much as they would likely have felt aggrieved by the fact that some youngsters from LA had usurped them and taken over as the most exciting force in heavy metal, upon reflection, it was perhaps a necessary changing of the guard, and one that allowed Black Sabbath to go away and reconsider where they were in their career and what needed to be done to help them escape this creative drought.
As for Van Halen, they’d flourish in the spotlight for some time, and then the same misfortune would befall them after almost a decade, with them beginning to show a decline that allowed the new guard to step in.
