50 years ago today Black Sabbath released their first album, Black Sabbath, and it's universally accepted that Black Sabbath’s debut album marks the birth of heavy metal music. How do we celebrate such an occasion? With tattoos and facts about these heavy metal pioneers.
Black Sabbath was once known as Earth instead, but their manager told them to change it for fear of sounding too generic. The inspiration for their new name came from a movie theater near their rehearsal space which happened to be showing the 1963 horror film Black Sabbath. (Other popular horror films from that time include The Birds, Diary of a Madman, and Kiss of a Vampire)
Ozzy wrote in his autobiography, the audience freaked out the first time the band played Black Sabbath (the song) live. He recalled, "All the girls ran out of the venue screaming".
Tattoo by: Uncle Scoob Tattoo
Black Sabbath band members are evidently fans of fantasy films. In fact, "The Wizard" was inspired by Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings.
Tattoo by: Char Small
Throughout their career, the band received its fair share of criticism but Ozzy thought bad reviews just made Sabbath cooler. For instance, when they were criticized by The Rolling Stone Ozzy responded, "being trashed by Rolling Stone was kind of cool because they were the Establishment, we'd made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us".
The song Black Sabbath (as the story goes) was written in "a couple of hours". Ozzy spontaneously sang the lyrics. Then Tony topped it off with a brilliant, menacing riff. When asked about this tune, the band has explained it totally represented each one of them.
Tattoo by: Erich Rabel
Will you be headbanging to Black Sabbath today? Comment below!
Tattoo by: Manos Skaros