The first great metal song Ozzy Osbourne ever heard: “That was the beginning”
Everything great about heavy metal music seems to begin with Ozzy Osbourne.
Even though Black Sabbath weren’t the first band to make heavy music, you could tell that Osbourne took everything that was great about Led Zeppelin and channelled it into something a lot darker once he heard what Tony Iommi was doing with his demented take on the blues. All of the building blocks for heavy metal to stand on can already be found on that first album, but Osbourne kept on insisting that he never needed to be remembered as the one who started the genre back in the 1970s.
In fact, Osbourne actually made a compelling argument that Sabbath were never really a heavy metal band at all. Sure, they had their moments where they could get insanely heavy whenever they wanted to, but if you look at what the typical heavy metal acts are supposed to do, Sabbath weren’t always doing them. They didn’t talk about Satan all the time, and even some of their songs like ‘After Forever’ are pro-Christianity, but it’s hard to really argue that they are the originators whenever you listen to tracks like ‘Paranoid’.
All of them were looking to make something heavier than what had been going on at the time. If you think about it, the biggest names on the radio at the time were probably somewhere between The Guess Who and The Rolling Stones, and since Zeppelin didn’t reach the singles market, Sabbath and people like Alice Cooper were the ones truly making a dent in the charts at the time. But a lot of Sabbath will say that they were only following what their heroes had been doing.
And when you listen to their records, it’s not like they don’t wear their influences on their sleeves. They were all massive fans of Zeppelin and The Beatles, but there were also moments where they fit in more with the jazz world. They weren’t afraid to switch things up every now and again, and while heavy metal fans weren’t going to fall in love with a jazz breakdown, ‘Planet Caravan’ is the closest that Iommi ever came to emulating his heroes like Joe Pass on a record.
But while the band’s namesake track is still one of the most haunting songs of all time, you have to remember what was going on at the time. Jimi Hendrix had started making his tunes heavier, The Beatles had made ‘Helter Skelter’, and The Who had shattered everyone’s illusions of what a rock and roll song could be, but Osbourne felt that everything that heavy metal needed could be found in ‘You Really Got Me’.
Ray Davies didn’t envision himself being the originator of any genre, but when his brother Dave made that central riff snarl as it did, Osbourne figured that they would be considered one of the first heavy metal bands, saying, “Heavy metal has never really been accepted, yet there’s such a great following. The only thing that I can remember was when The Kinks put out ‘You Really Got Me’. I got this funny, creepy little feeling in the back of my spine. And that was the beginning of it for me. I wanted to be a part of something that created that spine-tingler. It’s great.”
It was a great moment in time in 1964, but being one of the originators of heavy metal wasn’t what Ray wanted to be known for. It was only a few years later that The Village Green Preservation Society gave us a more sophisticated side of what he could do, but the damage had already been done. Everyone heard that snarl and wanted a piece of it, whether that was Van Halen reintroducing it to a new generation or every garage rock band starting out with that song as their template.
It needed a bit more window dressing to be classified as pure heavy metal, but Osbourne figured that guitar riff had pretty much everything that any band would ever need for one of their songs. Nothing about it screamed ‘hit single’ or anything, but if it gave you that rush of adrenaline whenever it came on, that was enough.
