Coven: the band that predicted Black Sabbath?
“The prince assumed the person of the goat, reigning upon his throne distant and far remote.” – Coven
Rock ‘n’ roll has always been deemed the devil’s music. Partly, this is because it arose during the time of The Great Depression. Amid that crisis of faith, downtrodden folks were torn between turning towards the healing spiritualism of the blues or relying on the faith of the church. Thus, pastors condemned these guitarists, redirecting dollars from the collection box to their own open guitar cases, as ungodly. In turn, they decided that was actually pretty good marketing to buy into, basking in the lure of their outsider status. And so, the myth was born that Beelzebub lingered somewhere in the blues.
Thus, when rock ‘n’ roll finally got swinging in the 1960s, it needed a genuine devil to pop on the poster… and there he was, perched between Sri Yukteswar Giri and Mae West on The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s cover: Aleister Crowley. The savvy madman who proclaimed the doctrine: “Do What Thou Wilt” had a profound position in the pop culture boom.
He was adored as a far out kick in an era when that was all the rage; people wanted to make a change, which meant doing things differently, and few were more different than Crowley. However, there were also those who felt a sense of liberation in embracing his darkness. Enter a band called Coven. Their debut album was titled Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls, and it spawned one of the strangest coincidences in the history of music.
The record was recorded in early 1969, and very unusually in that era, it dealt with occultism in a very unmistakable manner. A producer by the name of Bill Traut had approached the songwriter James Vincent to help bring the band’s satanic vision to life. “Bill brought me a large box full of books about witchcraft and related subjects,” Vincent recalls in his memoir Space Traveller: A Musician’s Odyssey. “He told me to read them and start writing some songs … Sometime before the sun came up, I had completely written all the material requested of me for the entire album … Coven also contributed four songs to the project”.
Now, that alone might sound slightly spooky, but it gets far stranger. The band’s bassist and songwriter, Michael Gregory Osborne, is credited on the album sleeve by his nickname: Oz Osborne. However, things get truly uncanny when you look at the tracklisting. The first song on the record is titled ‘Black Sabbath’.
Meanwhile, over in England, the bat decapitating Ozzy Osbourne we know and love was performing with his bandmates on Earth. However, these working-class cronies kept getting mistaken for another English band of the same name, so they decided that this need for a new title should also serve as the impetus for a heavier, darker direction, and so they called themselves Black Sabbath.
They have always maintained that they knew nothing of Oz Osborne, the song ‘Black Sabbath’, and the satanic ways of Coven at this point in time and that the freakish similarities are merely a quirk of fate. This is likely true as Coven’s record didn’t see much light of day in England because it was removed from the market when occultism became embroiled in the horrific Manson Family fallout. Thus, this has led many crystal skull owners to prognosticate that Black Sabbath’s revolution of heavy metal was actually awoken from a spell, and these coincidences reveal the tendrils of the fickle fingers of fate weaving a new darkness into place.
