Ozzy Osborne, the lead singer of pioneering heavy metal band Black Sabbath, died on Tuesday at the age of 76. Two and a half weeks before his death, on July 5, the band had given their final performance, part of a ten-hour extravaganza in their home city of Birmingham, England. In front of 40,000 fans, their heavy-metal progeny, from Guns ’n’ Roses to Metallica, paid tribute to both Ozzy and Black Sabbath, the band that more or less invented the genre in the early 70s.
In the videos that I saw Ozzy did not look good, to put it mildly. He performed — both his solo work and then with Sabbath — sitting on a black throne, because he was apparently in too much pain to stand up.
Black Sabbath only performed four songs, at the very end of the concert. They opened with “War Pigs,” from their second album, Paranoid. It is an anti-war song, but it is most certainly not a peace-and-love song. Nor, despite its recognition that politicians will not fight the wars they start, but will instead “leave that role to the poor,” is it a no-war-but-class-war call to revolution. Instead, it is a song of judgment. The war pigs will get their comeuppance, not from an aroused populace, but from Satan, who “laughing, spreads his wings” in the song’s final lyric. Written in 1970, as the optimism of “the sixties” ebbed and the war in Vietnam ground on, it is perhaps even more appropriate for our own time, as, in Sabbath’s words, the war machine keeps turning, poisoning our brainwashed minds.
I was never much of a Black Sabbath fan — my time as a metalhead wannabe was thankfully brief, perhaps six months when I was around eleven or twelve, and entirely based on the hair-metal bands like Twisted Sister that got Top-40 airplay — but at some point in high school I acquired a fairly scratchy, used vinyl copy of Paranoid.1 It was probably one of the $1 albums at Alley Cat Records that my friends and I scooped up as all of the boomers converted their music collections to CDs in the 1980s.
I likely purchased the album because I had a certain fondness for the title track, which I think was the only Sabbath song that got airplay on the classic rock stations that I listened to in my mid-teens, when I would tape songs off the radio onto Maxell XL II 90 cassette tapes. Like most Black Sabbath songs, it has somewhat depressing lyrics. (I remember a friend of mine had a couplet from the song — “Happiness I cannot feel / And love to me is so unreal” — inscribed on one of his school folders in junior high. For what it’s worth, he is now a tenured professor of English at a prestigious university.) Despite the downer lyrics, though, it is an uptempo, almost proto-punk rocker, and it probably appealed more to my fondness for pop hooks than to my adolescent angst, which tended to express itself in a more melancholic vein.
Everything else on the album — from the opener “War Pigs,” to “Iron Man,” with its iconic duuuh, duuuh, DUH DUH DUH, nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh DUH DUH DUH riff, to the spacey and psychedelic “Planet Caravan” — is much more downtempo. Even the bluesy shuffle of the album’s closer, “Fairies Wear Boots” (which is either about the long-haired Sabbath boys being called “fairies” by some skinheads or about LSD, depending on whom you ask) seems more dark and menacing than loose and sensual. Drummer Bill Ward swings, certainly, but he has taken the swing of dancing hips and turned it into the swing of a hangman’s noose.
Birmingham, at the time that the members of Black Sabbath were growing up and inventing heavy metal, was Great Britain’s preeminent manufacturing center. Known as the country’s “second city,” it was Pittsburgh and Detroit to London’s New York and Los Angeles. It was a major target of German bombing during World War II. Like Pittsburgh and Detroit, it had a kind of rough-and-tumble reputation. (In 1972, interviewed in Detroit, Ozzy told the rock critic Lester Bangs, “My hometown Birmingham is just like this place, violence and such, and I’ve been through it all. I’ve been in fucking prison.”) Also like those cities, it suffered grievous economic devastation during the deindustrialization of the 1980s.
Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi is exactly the kind of character you might expect to see in, say, a movie about a band from one of those cities making good: the son of Italian immigrants, he lost the tips of two of his fingers while working at a sheet-metal factory. Reputedly, Sabbath’s dirge-like sound, which comes in part from Iommi tuning his guitar strings down a full step, owes its origin to this industrial accident — strings tuned lower are looser, and less painful on injured fingers.
“War Pigs” is not structured like your typical rock-and-roll song, with two or three verses, a chorus that repeats after each verse, and a bridge and/or guitar solo after the second chorus. Instead, it is structured in what one could call “movements” like a classical rondo, with an instrumental overture, a A/B/C/B/C/A/B structure of the song proper, and an instrumental coda.
The song opens in a slow 6/8 tempo, with the guitar and bass alternating between two low chords while a recording of an air-raid siren plays above them. Fifty seconds in, the band shifts to a hard 4/4 and begins to play the minimalist two-chord riff that defines the song, Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler playing those two brutal sixteenth notes, then waiting as Ward marks the rest of each two-measure phrase on his hi-hat like an anxious population awaiting the next bomb blast.
Into this space Ozzy begins singing the first verse, with a vocal melody that ascends and then descends a full octave in each of four rhyming2 couplets, reminiscent less of pop or blues music than of liturgical chants or laments. Then, with the exclamation “oh lord, yeah,” he leads the band into the explosive next section of the song, which retains the two-note DUH-DUH riffs but fills the space between them with thunderous drum fills, a descending chromatic guitar-and-bass line, and high-pitched squeals from Iommi’s Gibson SG Special.
In the middle section, the band vamps on an E-major chord while Ozzy describes politicians’ cowardice in “making war just for fun” and “treating people just like pawns in chess.” The beat is syncopated, but it is the syncopation of artillery, or of tanks rolling unstoppably over uneven terrain. After a return to the descending chromatic riff (what I would describe as the “B” section), the rhythm section comes back to this middle “C” section while Iommi plays a guitar solo made of uneven phrases, which, once you hear it as the whistling of anti-aircraft fire, you can’t unhear.
Then Ozzy sings the second (and last) proper “verse” of the song over the “A” section, with its two-chord riff and hi-hat timekeeping, describing how the “hand of God has struck the hour” and brought a “day of judgement” for the war pigs. This is followed by another return to the “B” section’s chromatic riff. (As in many Sabbath songs, the riff plays the role that a hook-laden chorus would in other popular music.)
Finally, almost six minutes in, the song transitions into its coda, named as “Luke’s Wall” on my vinyl copy (though apparently not on UK pressings of the record). The more than two-minute coda begins and ends with Iommi playing a ten-note riff which alternates between the first, fifth, and flatted seventh of an E chord, maintaining the song’s ambiguity between major and minor keys. But sandwiched in between that somewhat ominous riff is a beautiful major-key guitar melody that would not sound out of place in a nineteenth-century concerto or symphony or, perhaps more appropriately, a requiem.
A couple of days before the July 5 concert, the official Black Sabbath YouTube channel released a video tribute to “War Pigs” by fellow metal pioneers Judas Priest — a full-on music video for an almost note-for-note cover of the song. Also from Birmingham, Judas Priest was in many ways responsible for mainstreaming heavy metal music in the late 70s, at least in the UK, and they popularized the black-leather-with-metal-studs look that became ubiquitous among hair metal bands in the 80s.
What struck me most about the video was not only how old they looked, but how little effort they made to hide it. Singer Rob Halford plods awkwardly around the stage, shifting from one foot to the other like someone who has had one too many hip surgeries (or perhaps one too few). Closeups of bassist Ian Hill’s face show him to be, well, a grizzled 73-year-old man.
It seems incongruous for a rock-and-roll video, but not incongruous for the song. After all, the war machine has been turning for far longer than rock and roll has existed, and by all indications will continue to turn long after rock and roll has faded into obscurity, its furious metal warriors long dead and forgotten.
In “Bring Your Mother to the Gas Chamber!”, a long piece written about Black Sabbath in 1972 for Creem magazine, Bangs, the rock critic, asserted that Black Sabbath “are probably the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption: the traditional Christian dualism which asserts that if you don’t walk in the light of the Lord then Satan is certainly pulling your strings, and a bad end can be expected, is even imminent.”
In that piece, Bangs quotes the final verse of “War Pigs” alongside a verse from Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and an excerpt from William Burroughs’ novel Nova Express, making the point that “Despite the blitzkrieg nature of their sound, Black Sabbath are moralists — like Bob Dylan, like William Burroughs, like most artists trying to deal with a serious situation in an honest way.”
It is easy, in the full flush of revolutionary optimism (youthful or otherwise), to dismiss the moralist (Catholic or otherwise) as a reactionary, as an impediment to the protagonism of an aroused people, as someone who distracts the populace from their historic mission of collective liberation by waving before their eyes fantasies of a vengeful and judgmental God doing that work for them. But in dark times, when it is easy to slide into a corrosive nihilism, the simple reminder that minds that plot destruction are, in fact, evil, that the war pigs that seem all powerful now might one day be on their knees crawling, begging mercies for their sins, can be, at least for this poor sinner, a welcome tonic.
Filed under: Music
On a somewhat cheerier note, I’m happy to report that a short anecdote of mine will be included among the hundreds of reminiscences from friends, fans, and fellow musicians in Billy Bragg: A People’s History, which will be published this fall by Spenwood Books in the UK. My story is about taking a Republican on a first date to see the socialist singer-songwriter. (There was no second date.)
If you’re interested in getting a copy (which I think would be worth your while even if I didn’t have an anecdote in it), you can pre-order here, but shipping costs from the UK are fairly high. The book is being distributed in the U.S. and Canada by Continental Sales Inc of Barrington, Illinois; I am told that you can ask your neighborhood independent book store to place an order with them. The book’s ISBN number is 978-1-915858-36-8.
Colin Meloy has a nice tribute to Ozzy Osborne and Black Sabbath over at his Substack Colin Meloy’s Machine Shop, buried about eighty percent of the way down his most recent tour diary (which is worth a read in its own right):
I didn’t come around to Ozzy and Black Sabbath till I was in my mid-twenties. I eschewed metal in my teens, right when most kids, I think, have the aorta best suited for pumping Black Sabbath straight to their souls. I was into punk and new wave — this nascent “alternative” music — and metal was too straight for me. I learned the error of my ways much later. I first really listened to Paranoid, Sabbath’s second record, sometime in college and I was kind of exhilarated by it. The riffs are so catchy; the recordings so bare-bones and dry. And all of it supporting some of the greatest melodies of all time — Paranoid, War Pigs, Children of the Grave. I realized I hadn’t really listened to Black Sabbath. I’d never known what I was missing. I now count Black Sabbath as one of the chief inspirations behind a lot of the Decemberists music. There would be no Odalisque, no Tain, no Hazards of Love without Ozzy & Co’s pioneering creations.
A copy of the first U.S. pressing, I believe, based on the track listing.
Though in the first couplet, Ozzy pulls off the ultimate ballsy singer/lyricist move, rhyming the final word of each line (in this case, “masses”) with itself.
My first concert ever was Judas Priest. 1986, the year Heavy Metal Parking Lot was filmed. Have no idea why my/how mom let me go lol. Anyway, I wasn't aware they did a War Pigs tribute. They nailed it and yeah...they're old but still putting on the leather and out there touring, apparently. Glenn Tipton is my mom's age! Good to see him in this video, he's has Parkinson's Disease.