The song that changed Ozzy Osbourne’s life: “We should write scary music”
As the Summer of Love got started, it felt like rock and roll could start to change the world. It started off as a fad that would have probably worn out its welcome after a few years, but the minute artists like The Beatles started branching out into different territory, what was once an average pop song became something that could be appreciated on the same level as high art. While most of it was positive, many bands were looking to explore the darker side of life, and Ozzy Osbourne knew that something had changed when Black Sabbath made their first song.
Out of all the instances when people claimed that the hippie movement died off, there’s a good case to be made that Sabbath put the final nail in the coffin. The riots happening in America didn’t help matters, and the tragedy at the Altamont Festival marked the end of idealism, but as soon as bands started making songs about dealing with black magic and devils, it seemed like every great hope for humanity had finally been snuffed out.
But was that really a bad thing? Black Sabbath may get the credit or the blame for tearing down the era of Flower Power, but their tunes were just the wake-up call many fans needed to move on with their lives. Whereas everyone else was practising love and freedom, Sabbath was given the cold, hard truth about what was really going on on the ground floor.
That wasn’t where life started for Osbourne, though. He had grown up wanting to be a Beatle just like every other singer at the time, but even when he started singing in the pre-Sabbath band Earth, a lot of the music they were playing was 12-bar blues numbers, typically the kind of thing that you would find in early Led Zeppelin records.
During one rehearsal, though, Osbourne said that the group’s entire mentality seemed to shift on a dime, telling Rolling Stone, “We rehearsed at a community centre near Tony Iommi’s house, across the road from a movie theatre. It was showing something like The Vampire Returns. [Iommi said], ‘Don’t you think it’s weird that people pay money to be scared? Maybe we should write scary music.’ That’s when we came up with ‘Black Sabbath’. That was the fucking change of my life.”
The tune’s foundation was still centred around blues tropes, but as soon as Iommi hit the tritone on his guitar, it was enough to send shivers down anyone’s back. Despite artists like Jimmy Page flirting with occult imagery in his live shows, Sabbath’s ode to a figure in black taking Osbourne down to hell marked a massive change in what rock was supposed to sound like.
While they weren’t critical darlings by any stretch, everyone lisening to Sabbath followed in their footsteps, making songs that tried to out-heavy one another in terms of raw aggression of how dark they could get. Whether it was the sound of heavy metal, goth, industrial, or any genre in between, Osbourne probably didn’t even realise that that one song didn’t just change his life. It changed the entire course of rock and roll.
