It had always been John’s group so if anyone was going to bring it to a close it would be him. He felt his involvement with Yoko, both romantic and artistic, was changing him; if this new expanded, improved version of Lennon could no longer fit into the mould of the Beatles then he would have no problem cracking that mould. There never has been and there probably never will be a band whose gossamer internal balance can survive the introduction of one member’s husband or wife.
In this week in May 1968 the two key Beatles started out on new lives and effectively brought to an end the gang that was the Beatles. They had passed through five years that had utterly transformed their lives and now some of them at least were prepared to throw all that in the air for love. Through the decade up until then their greatest intimacies had been shared between themselves; their primary loyalty had always been to the people who stood alongside them on stage, their greatest confidants and most important critics. That had applied no matter what it said on the certificate of marriage. Now John and Paul were embarking on new lives with new partners. They were behaving like men who no longer needed each other in the way they had since meeting at Woolton village fete eleven years before. They now identified as strongly with the women in their lives as they had once done with each other. One of them thought he could take the Beatles with him into this next phase of his life. The other already knew he couldn’t. One cared. The other didn’t.
1968 PLAYLIST
The Rolling Stones, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’
The Beatles, ‘Hey Jude’
Joni Mitchell, Song To A Seagull
Simon & Garfunkel, Bookends
Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin
Van Morrison, Astral Weeks
Otis Redding, ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay’
Jimi Hendrix, ‘All Along The Watchtower’
The Byrds, Sweetheart Of The Rodeo
Hair soundtrack (Broadway cast)
9 AUGUST 1969
BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND
The devil’s business
FOUR DOLEFUL LONGHAIRS, all around the age of twenty, were unloading their ancient Commer van outside the Newtown Community Centre in Aston, Birmingham, in the middle of England’s industrial heartland. All four were members of a band called Earth. Earth was not a particularly striking name. They had recently discovered to their dismay that they weren’t the only band to have chosen it. Of the two skill sets involved in running a band, these four longhairs were more comfortable with the tangible side of things, such as dealing with the equipment, than with image, which was harder to get a grip on.
All four men, each with a naturally defensive expression framed by a curtain of unmanageable hair, came from homes and schools which in the usual run of things held out few prospects. All four came from the kind of backgrounds from which the only traditional escape was war. They had all left school at the age of fifteen to follow the only occupations open to unqualified youths with strong backs and low expectations: abattoir worker, machine operator, plumber’s apprentice. As they pursued these tough, dirty jobs they daydreamed about their real passion, which was playing the kind of loud rock and roll that made the players feel they were settling scores with the world.
The four were neither gilded youth nor nature’s flower children. Guitarist Tony Iommi had changed his playing style after losing the tips of his fingers in an industrial accident and had spent a short time in Jethro Tull; singer John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, who was clean-shaven and, next to the rest of them, pretty, had spent a few weeks in prison after his father decided to teach him a lesson by not paying the fine he’d incurred for a bungled burglary; bassist Geezer Butler wasn’t given a guitar for Christmas so he took out his tool kit and made one himself; and drummer Bill Ward smoked the residue from banana skins in the belief that this would get him high. In Birmingham you made your own entertainment.
For the four members of Earth, who at the beginning of August 1969, just as the stage for the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival was being erected thousands of miles away, had recently returned from playing a village hall in the wilds of Cumbria, nothing had come easily. But fate was about to vouchsafe them one single, self-sufficient thought, one transformational shaft of insight that would eventually make them rich and famous. On the 9th, as they were loading their equipment into the local community centre where they assiduously rehearsed, Geezer Butler pointed to the title of a movie on the marquee of a nearby cinema. It was the English name of an Italian schlock horror film that some sharpie in the marketing department had decided would do better in the UK if it were called not Three Faces of Fear but Black Sabbath.
It’s funny, Tony Iommi remarked, contemplating the sign, how people will pay money to be frightened. The actual expression he used was ‘shit scared’. Standing on that Birmingham pavement, Tony had the key insight of a lifetime. An insight that led directly to other thoughts. What if you could prosper by making music that didn’t set out to delight the audience in the traditional way? What if you took a darker route? What if you made music that dealt in something different? What if you made music that at least pretended to strike fear into an audience’s heart, much as Hammer Films had done for a generation of British moviegoers? What if, like the best-selling thriller writer Dennis Wheatley, you placed a chill hand on the cosy English soul? What if, like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, you arrayed yourselves in the habiliment of horror? Wouldn’t that be a thing?
In their rehearsal hall Earth set to work on transforming that thought into a song. Actually, to call it a song was underselling it. Earth had already learned that they didn’t deal in tunes milkmen could whistle or sentiments housewives could share. The composition they came up with was less a song than a short drama, a penny-dreadful playlet such as might have provided Edwardian music-hall audiences with a salutary shudder between the soprano and the patriotic finale. It began slowly and ominously. It took its time, to ensure its signature riff had bludgeoned its way into the listener’s subconscious well before the vocal began. The lyrics, when they arrived, were delivered as if by one who stared, wide-eyed with terror, at a ghastly apparition. As this apparition drew near the tension in the music built until the guitars went fortissimo. At this point Ozzy screamed, ‘No, no, please God help me!’ The way he screamed it caused you either to laugh out loud or nod in sage recognition, depending on what age you happened to be. The song was called ‘Black Sabbath’. The members of Earth looked back on their day’s work and were well pleased.
Two days later they set off to play a series of dates in Germany, at Hamburg’s Star-Club, where many English groups, including the Beatles, had developed their act in front of audiences who demanded little more than to be taken out of themselves. That morning Tony pulled up outside Ozzy’s home to pick him up for the trip. The singer emerged wearing a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He was carrying his entire touring wardrobe, which amounted to a single shirt, on a hanger. Tony, who had already spent enough time with Ozzy to know that he could be as daft as a brush, asked him if he was aware they were going overseas. Ozzy said he was. Tony asked him if in that case he had enough clothes for the trip. Ozzy said he did. Tony shrugged, slipped the clutch, and pointed the Commer at the port.
On the ferry across the Channel the four men sat around a small table that was bolted to the deck and loaded with pints, much as thousands of English visitors had done before them. Here they entertained a further thought. What if they gave the group the same name as the song? There and then they decided they would become Black Sabbath. In practical terms they didn’t announce the new name until later in the month when they played a show in Workington, Cumbria, but their new identity did give them a renewed sense of purpose and the six shows a day they were contracted to play in Hamburg provided an invaluable opportunity to temper their new material on the anvil of performance. By the time they got into the studio in October they were so settled on what that sound should be that Tony overruled any attempts to correct the distortion in his guitar. The distortion, he pointed
out, was what he was after. The sound he was after was the opposite of uplifting. It was defiantly morose. It was innocent of ornamentation. It didn’t go anywhere. It wasn’t meant to bloody go anywhere. Instead it lent itself perfectly to planting your feet, bowing your head, closing your eyes and swishing your curtain of hair from side to side in blessed incognizance as the music simply swallowed you up. Most of the time these people were communing with their boots. If they did look up they saw Ozzy stationed at the side of the stage, getting out of the audience’s eye-line so that they could get an unimpeded view of what this performance was all about, which was serious young men operating heavy machinery, much as they had done in this part of the world since the industrial revolution.
Black Sabbath. It was the combination of name and sound that did the trick. In the late sixties the shape of band names was changing to reflect the shifting pretensions of both musicians and fans. A band’s name can be more instructive than the actual music when it comes to describing what’s in that band’s collective head. While the actual music will always be restricted by the abilities of the players, a band’s name is the one spot on the aesthetic spectrum where imagination can be permitted to run wild. Whereas sixties groups once had names like the Beatles or the Byrds or the Beach Boys, pairing the definite article with a category of person or creature for the chipper, matey vibe consonant with the age, the bands of this hairier era leaned towards terse single-word statement names like Earth or Cactus or Cream, names that also hinted at previously unplumbed depths of heaviosity. It was either that or deliberately incongruous conjunctions of noun and adjective like Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Such names sent off the warning message that this music was masonic in nature and primarily for initiates. Bands with names like these were not setting out to woo you. They were not there to entertain. They were animated by an altogether more serious purpose. The best you could hope for is that you would relish the experience of having them roll over you like so many tanks, that you would be pathetically grateful to them for doing you the service of blunting your senses, that you would stagger away from any live encounter feeling you had been ravished and would not have had it any other way.
Names like these were at the other end of the scale from African-American rhythm and blues acts. The Miracles, the Supremes, the Temptations – these hinted at a sensuality and delight any audience might share; names like Moby Grape, Blodwyn Pig and Frumpy hung out the shingle reading ‘members only’, ushering in a new era when both rock band and rock fans prided themselves on marking out a territory that no longer sought public approval. The change in name style was significant. In a period of six years bands had gone from being groups of musicians with broad repertoires, capable of entertaining most audiences they might be faced with, to highly specialized units who were proud of the fact that they purveyed one thing and one thing only. As Black Sabbath went forward in their new incarnation, playing exclusively material that came from the same well of fear, loathing and terror as that first song, they worked a narrower and narrower seam. The trick was to find the audiences who were quite happy with the narrowness of the seam and not to waste time on anybody else.
Their first album, recorded later in 1969, was of course called Black Sabbath. The members of the group hadn’t heard of branding but that’s nonetheless what it was. That first album was a stake in the ground from which they never wandered far. It came packaged in a cover featuring the ghostly figure of a woman standing in front of an ancient watermill. It began with the sound of rainfall and a bell notionally tolling in the background of this scene and then became the song called ‘Black Sabbath’. The imaginative world of Black Sabbath was not a reflection of the real world at all. It didn’t set out to reflect anything that the fans might experience. With Sabbath we move from the recognizable world of teenagers and teenage concerns, from dating and dancing and driving cars and learning how to fit in with your fellow man, to an entirely confected world of gloomy castles, passing bells and white-faced figures of foreboding. It was a world that played into the young male feeling that his troubles are greater than they actually are, that his emotional responses are more profound than they actually are, and that the greatest problems of life can be dealt with through the military application of sheer sensation. It was non-sexual, anti-glamour, and, best of all, nobody was going to ask you to dance to it. It was the point at which rock was successfully converted into ritual by giving a twist to some of the oldest and best-established rituals of all. Inside the cover of Black Sabbath was a picture of an inverted cross. This was just another symbol stirred into the prog rock pot by an art department that probably thought this one would be forgotten as quickly as the latest album by Juicy Lucy. Only this one wasn’t. Tony Iommi, who was (nominally at least) a Catholic, never stopped answering questions about that cross.
As the sixties turned into the seventies the times conspired to make their change of image seem spookily prescient. On the night of 9 August 1969, the same day that Sabbath glimpsed their future on a movie theatre marquee, four members of the so-called family that had gathered around jailbird and would-be musician Charles Manson broke into the Hollywood home occupied by film star Sharon Tate, wife of Roman Polanski, and three of her friends. They were acting on the instructions of Manson, who was motivated by malice, madness and the bitterness of seeing a potential record contract snatched away from him. He told them to slaughter everyone in the house. This they did, though not without terrorizing them first. Their leader that night, Tex Watson, woke up one of the people sleeping on the sofa. When asked what he was doing there he replied, with that combination of hideous malevolence and ghastly pretension which was to become the hallmark of the urban terrorist, ‘I’m the devil and I’m here to do the devil’s business.’
1969 PLAYLIST
The Rolling Stones, ‘Honky Tonk Women’
Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline
Led Zeppelin, II
The Band, The Band
Neil Young, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
Black Sabbath, Black Sabbath
Leonard Cohen, Songs From A Room
The Who, ‘Pinball Wizard’
Peter Sarstedt, ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’
The Temptations, Cloud Nine
24 JUNE 1970
NEW YORK CITY
Rock god embraces the occult
ON THIS MIDSUMMER day in 1970, only days after Brazil had defeated Italy in the final of the World Cup, Jim Morrison, the twenty-six-year-old singer with the Doors, stood in a small living room illuminated by candles in an apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. Morrison wasn’t in his normal attire. For the ceremony he was about to undergo he had been furnished with a long black robe. Perched on his forehead was a wreath of laurels. His hair was long at the time. His beard was full. The robes seemed of a piece with his classical appearance.
This room had been made ready by Patricia Kennealy, the twenty-four-year-old rock writer whose apartment it was. She was wearing a robe to match his and also some carefully chosen jewellery of antique appearance. Incense was burning in a cauldron on the side. A black-handled dagger had been made ready to cut the skin of the two participants. A silver chalice was at hand to catch and mingle the drops of their blood when the time came.
Officiating at this pseudo-marital rite of ‘handfasting’, which had its roots in Celtic lore and the practices of the Wiccans, were a couple of Kennealy’s friends. They were going, for the day, by the names Lady Maura and Lord Brân. They described the circle in the air into which the couple were invited to step in order to plight their troth. Jim was apparently startled by the change that came over him the instant he stepped through this very particular hole in the air. If it’s true that he and his Wiccan bride made love no fewer than six times in swift succession in the immediate aftermath of the ceremony we can take it that he also found the circle to have energizing properties. This was the minimum expected of Jim Morrison, who was said by the Village Voice to be ‘the bi
ggest thing to hit the mass libido in a long time’.
Jim Morrison was actually a film-school graduate who had drifted into music. What put his group the Doors on the chart back in 1967 was a song called ‘Light My Fire’. This was written by the band’s guitarist Robbie Krieger and boasted a trippy organ part over which Jim sang about what he took to be a higher state of consciousness but most of those listening took to be sexual intercourse, which, conveniently, seemed as if it had only just been invented. The Doors would have been consigned to the column marked ‘rock’ and long articles about their influences in Rolling Stone or Crawdaddy had it not been for Gloria Stavers. Gloria was a former model turned photo-journalist who edited 16 magazine, which was the most powerful conduit in the United States for the muffled thoughts and quickening desires of teenage girls. She had form. Gloria had been instrumental in establishing the personalities of the Beatles in print. Gloria was the one who made Peter Noone into the country’s most popular teddy-bear substitute. She could do a lot even with unpromising timber. When she saw Jim Morrison she realized she was looking at the most lubricious figure in American popular music since Elvis Presley.
Before he left the West Coast to fly to New York for a major publicity blitz off the back of ‘Light My Fire’, Morrison visited the celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, handed him a clipping of a photograph of a statue of Alexander the Great and announced that this was what he wanted to look like. Morrison was not handicapped by modesty. In New York, Elektra publicity man Danny Fields took the band to Gloria’s East Side apartment to shoot some pictures for 16. The other three were efficiently processed and let go. Stavers then took the singer into the bedroom where many of her most memorable pictures were taken and there she told him that the more he looked at the camera as if he wanted to ravish it, the better the photograph would turn out. She further encouraged him to adopt poses he never would have had the band been there to inhibit him. It was in her apartment that Morrison threw on her fur coat over his leather trousers. This single frame struck the androgynous note that secured him a picture session with Vogue – his first step to rock godliness.
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994 Page 14