How Black Sabbath got their name from Boris Karloff
Every iconic band has to start somewhere. Even acts like The Beatles cut their teeth playing the bar band circuit before becoming the loveable moptops. As for Black Sabbath, they found themselves in a much different world when they got the ball rolling.
Before Tony Iommi got in touch with his dark side, he was originally a disciple of the blues world. Performing with Geezer Butler in the first incarnation of Sabbath, Iommi was known for playing blues jams in clubs around England.
While everything changed when Iommi met with Ozzy Osbourne, it wasn’t exactly musical soulmates from the word go. When Iommi first heard Osbourne singing, he had dismissed him as a singer before he stepped in front of the microphone. After coming across an ad for Osbourne in a store, Iommi originally recognised him from school and was not secure in his abilities as a singer.
Once Butler and Iommi went down to see Osbourne, though, Iommi left, saying: “This is probably a dead end. As far as I can tell, he can’t sing”. Though Osbourne would eventually join the band in their first start-up group Earth, things still didn’t fall into place.
Before Sabbath even got off the ground, Iommi was already ready to pack it in, accepting a gig to play with Jethro Tull and even performing with the prog legends in the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. While Iommi credited Tull with giving him a new appreciation for a band work ethic, the King of Metal returned to his old bandmates to finish what he started.
When putting together the first real Sabbath songs like ‘Wicked World’, Iommi found his calling writing the band’s namesake track, whose dissonant interval Iommi enjoyed. When Bill Ward first heard the main riff to Black Sabbath, he talked about how unsettling it was: “Geezer was trying to play Holst’s Mars, and then Tony comes in and plays [mimics the riff to ‘Black Sabbath’]. It sent shivers down my back.”
Now that they had a horror-themed song, the wheels started turning to give themselves a demonic-sounding name as well. As Osbourne recalls, the band’s rehearsal space was right across the street from a movie theatre which was showing horror movies. Osbourne thought that the band should take a similar approach saying, “Isn’t it strange that people would pay money to be frightened? So why don’t we make scary music?”
The band turned to an old horror movie that they had heard about called Black Sabbath, starring famed horror actor Boris Karloff. Though the horror of the band may have sounded ostentatious at the time, the origin behind the song was no laughing matter either. When writing the band’s first song, Butler found inspiration after a terrifying night reading books on the occult.
While Butler insisted on reading these books solely for astrology, he mentioned getting spooked by a spirit one night after reading: “I woke up in a dream world, and there was this black thing, staring at me. It just lasted a second, but it freaked me out. As a child, I always had a lot of psychic experiences. That was one of the very last ones I had. That was before I did drugs—maybe doing drugs killed that part of my brain.”
Despite the living nightmare lasting only a second, it was enough to convince Butler to throw away all of his occult reading material as well. While there has been plenty of songs made about being in love with the devil, Sabbath had an instinctual attraction to the dark side.
When Osbourne laid down the opening lines of the song ‘Black Sabbath’, Ward said that the swampy rhythm that he lays down was what came out naturally: “When Ozzy sang ‘What is this that stands before me,’ it became completely different. I knew where I had to go with the tom-toms. I could have played a more straight-ahead beat. It would never have worked.”
Old habits die hard, and Iommi did sprinkle in a little bit of the blues across Sabbath’s first album as well. Although the seeds of metal were being planted, Iommi is also wearing his Eric Clapton influence on his sleeve, turning in riffs that sound like a demented version of what Cream were doing a few years earlier.
Then again, the blues and the dark side have always been one and the same. Just like Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil for his talent, Sabbath were mining something that was a lot more demented than what you were getting out of acts like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. The blues may have been about the sad aspects of everyday life, but Sabbath had a more direct contact with the sounds of the underworld.
