How Jethro Tull inspired Black Sabbath to create their debut album
Looking back over the past century, it is difficult to pinpoint the most critical moment in pop music. In the 1950s, rock ‘n’ roll first appeared thanks to Elvis Presley and his peers. That was certainly a pivotal moment, but how does that compare with The Beatles’ impact in the 1960s and that of the punks a decade thereafter? Ultimately, it is an unanswerable question, but we can all agree that the 1960s was home to some of the most innovative transformations. The decade began with raunchy rhythm and blues but ended with psychedelic rock and the heavy metal innovations of Black Sabbath.
Heavy metal has roots in the raw urgency of garage rock and can be traced back to Dave Davies’ distorted chord progression in ‘You Really Got Me’. From these foundations, rock bands seemed to incrementally raise the bar in a game of chicken: who can be the loudest and heaviest? Some deem The Who’s 1966 song ‘Boris the Spider’ as the first heavy metal song, while others (mostly Americans) attribute the honour to San Francisco band Blue Cheer for their 1968 cover of Eddie Cochran’s ‘Summertime Blues’.
Wherever you place the bar, it is difficult to deny that Birmingham’s Black Sabbath were the first band to truly own the heavy metal banner. With thick black curtains of hair, black leather jackets and crucifix necklaces, Sabbath defined the genre’s dark, devious aesthetic and swept heavy rock innovations of the late 1960s into one seamless and coordinated package at the very beginning of the 1970s.
Impressively, Black Sabbath released three masterpiece albums between 1970 and 1971: Black Sabbath, Paranoid and Master of Reality. This trilogy of highly influential albums established an identity for the band and, alongside the work of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin, consolidated Britain’s position as the epicentre of heavy metal.
It is perhaps no surprise that Britain would host the first wave of metal, given the genre’s foundation in psychedelic rock. After The Beatles, The Beach Boys and The 13th Floor Elevators pioneered psych-rock in the mid-1960s, leading proponents like The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Cream in London and The Doors and the Grateful Dead in the US further developed the style with heavy distortion and energetic vocal work.
When Black Sabbath first formed in 1968, they heeded recent developments at the psychedelic vanguard and sought to oust all colour from the style, leaving a punchy, dark mass of unholy rock music. In their 1970 debut album, the band not only defined metal but also released what many musicologists deem to be the first ever doom metal song, ‘Black Sabbath’.
The members of Black Sabbath came from various musical backgrounds. In 1967, guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward joined the hard blues band Mythology. Meanwhile, Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler played in a blues quartet called Rare Breed. Following the Mythology’s disbandment in 1968, Iommi and Ward looked to form a new heavy rock band. After enlisting Osbourne and Butler, they initially named the band The Polka Tulk Blues Band.
As the new band found its footing with several early demos, Iommi received an offer to replace Mick Abrahams in Jethro Tull. “All the rest of the guys were like, ‘This is a great opportunity, you should do it.'” Iommi reflected in a conversation with Classic Rock. “But I wasn’t sure.” Ultimately, Iommi headed to London to join Ian Anderson’s progressive rock group, which had recently released the successful debut album This Was.
Iommi made only one appearance with Jethro Tull at a shoot for The Rolling Stones’ film Rock And Roll Circus. The guitarist sensed that the new band didn’t suit his artistic vision. “It just didn’t feel like a proper band to me,” Iommi said. “So I talked to Ian and said, ‘Look, I’m gonna leave. I miss my old band.'”
Despite returning to The Polka Tulk Blues Band after a couple of weeks, Iommi remembers his brush with Jethro Tull as crucial in the genesis of Black Sabbath. “I tell you what, it changed our career,” he continued. “I said to Geezer, ‘Let’s get back together again and fucking get some work done and make this happen. We can become big too.'”
After renaming themselves Black Sabbath, the four-piece had the wind in their sails. Iommi was impressed with Anderson’s work ethic and powerful leadership in Jethro Tull and brought that energy into Sabbath as they recorded their debut album with renewed enthusiasm. “I realised that’s what we had to do,” Iommi concluded, regarding Anderson’s whip-crack mentality. “It really helped. It got us into writing our own stuff, and it just worked from then on.”
