MASTER OF REALITY
A book review / extract.

“I don’t know what’s happening
My head’s all torn inside
People say I’m heavy
They don’t know what I hide”

- Black Sabbath, ‘Cornucopia’

I.

Let’s begin with what (appropriately enough, given the lapsed Catholic foundation of the band’s work) amounts to a confession: I can *really relate* to Black Sabbath songs. I mean, when I put on ‘Master Of Reality’ or ‘Volume 4’ (my personal favourite), I don’t think to myself “wow, this is some awesome, imaginative heavy metal with crazy OTT lyrics”, I think “fuck yeah, they’ve NAILED IT”.

What ‘it’ is, I’m not sure – the apocalyptic, melodramatic feeling in the back of the mind of every weirdo adolescent male perhaps? – but it’s something ‘Sabbath manage to communicate through the very bones of their music, whether they’re singing about religion, deep space or some weird robot stomping people in boots of lead. And, as a grown up with a job and a certain amount of education and a fairly sedate existence, I feel like I shouldn’t really be going so far as to share ‘it’ with them, even as I, like all people of taste, enjoy their incredible music. ‘It’ is not there for me. I should be getting my jollies listening to some dreary alt-country loser crafting thoughtful songs expressing mature concerns, or something.

Well, maybe it’s just another obvious signpost of emotional immaturity, but fuck that. At the end of a crappy, uninspiring day as I trundle on toward my late ‘20s, it’s still ‘Sabbath who’ve got my number.

Strangely, I never got into Black Sabbath when I actually WAS a confused, miserable teenager. I didn’t really discover them until I was nineteen or twenty and beginning to take my by then well-established musical tastes on a forced march back through the ‘60s and ‘70s in order to break away from punk and indie-rock and take in the near endless catalogue of earlier wild sounds awaiting appreciation.

It’s probably just as well I waited actually. As a thirteen year old, idly picking over the bones of grunge and hair metal in search of traces of GNARLY LYRICS and BIG RIFFS, I’m sure one listen to Iron Man would have killed me – I mean, flat out heart-attack-on-the-spot dead.

And a few years after that of course, it was The Ramones rather than Sabbath – and by extension, punk rather than metal – that anchored my darkest teenage years. Thinking about it, the two bands actually have a LOT in common. They definitely provide each other’s analogues in their respective genres, both in terms of making simple, powerful, timeless music, but also by means of helping to create a unifying identity and instant aural comfort zone for disaffected, suburban kids across the decades and across the globe.

The similarity even extends to the roles and personalities of the bands’ members. Think about it: a really strange looking singer who "can’t sing" and has no conventional stage charisma, but who is nonetheless clearly THE MOST AWESOME GUY IN THE WORLD in the eyes of fans; a taciturn, workman-like guitarist with a style so singularly brutish and uncompromising that it went on to define the entire future of heavy music, leaving a rainbow of entirely new sub-genres in its wake; an eccentric, wildman bass player with a killer groove who wrote loads of the lyrics….. I guess the similarity breaks down when we get to the drummers though, in that Bill Ward’s jazz-inflected swing (a vital ingredient that stops ‘Sabbath from ever slipping into the kind of trudging heavy blues sludge that idiots and detractors often deride them as) doesn’t really bear much comparison to Tommy & Marky’s relentless 4/4 perfection…

…but I’m getting off the point here. What was the point again? – Oh yeah…

Black Sabbath rule. That was it. To anyone who is still apt to consider them foremost as a corny millionaire heavy metal band rather than as authentic avatars of youthful defiance, watch this video of them performing ‘Paranoid’ on Belgium TV in the first flush of their fame. The sheer, singleminded *otherness* of the band hits me every time. It’s a wonder the British establishment let these guys *walk the streets* in 1970, let alone ok’d them for international TV appearances. The look in Ozzy’s eyes alone must have been enough to see elderly uncles crashing to the ground before they could choke out “god help us if there’s a war”. But how many frustrated teenagers must seen this and witnessed their own position in the world reflected straight back at them for the first time?



II.

I’ve always kept the 33 1/3 series of books at a distance. The concept behind them has always seemed a thinly veiled excuse for writers and readers alike to indulge in the worst kind of reverential music geek blather. Not that there’s anything wrong with that once in a while, but trust me, I really, really, really don’t need another excuse to spend yet more of my time consuming trivial facts and observations regarding the genius of ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ or ‘Exile On Main Street’ or whatever.

But then, it seems the editors of the series have been doing some good work recently – getting some good writers in, commissioning some daring (by the conservative standards of music book publishing anyway) pieces of writing on some interesting records.

Chief among these for me, needless to say, is John Darnielle’s book on Black Sabbath’s ‘Master Of Reality’.



Wisely, Darnielle has realised that a wry re-evaluation of the merits of Black Sabbath by a learned, grown up music critic would, in a very profound sense, be missing the point.

Instead, he has decided the best course of action is to take us straight into the mind of one of the people Black Sabbath were REALLY speaking to, someone for whom their music – forever veiled in a distant layer of irony for so many of our culturally complacent indie brethren – meant fucking everything.

So, the book introduces us to Roger. It’s 1985, it’s California, he’s fifteen years old, and his parents have just had him forcibly committed to a secure adolescent psychiatric unit. Roger has been denied access to his walkman and his tapes, and, in a series of increasingly lengthy journal entries directed at his uncaring counsellor, he begins to try to explain, step by step, why he needs them back, beginning with his favourite, ‘Master Of Reality’.

In ditching rock-write expectations entirely and turning in a work of straight-up fiction, Darnielle has succeeded not only in telling us more about the cultural importance of the record than a more conventional treatment ever could, but also in producing one of the most emotionally effective pieces of writing I’ve read in recent years.

Drawing heavily on both Darnielle’s empathy for the fate of underdogs, outsiders and misfit teenagers, as extensively chronicled in his songwriting for The Mountain Goats, and also his own experiences working as a psychiatric nurse, the book’s narrative rings true as a bell, cutting straight to the heart of precisely how much music can mean to people as they’re growing up, of how deep the strange imagery, fantastical words and overpowering sound of rock n’ roll can penetrate our being, of how much we can build ourselves around it, finding strength amid the most shattered and dismal wreckage.

Recalling, and indeed standing alongside, Dennis Hopper’s masterpiece Out Of The Blue as an exploration of those issues, it is, needless to say, essential reading.

Oh, and it’s pretty funny in places too, and tells you loads of stuff about Black Sabbath and ‘Master Of Reality’, so don’t be scared.

III.

Rather than explaining further, I am instead going to spend the rest of this post quoting a couple of extracts from the book. I hope nobody minds. (My email is at the top of the page if you do.) I think they help to express the essence of ‘Sabbath far better than I ever could.

In entries dated October 24th and 25th, Roger tries to get to grips with the appeal of ‘Sweet Leaf’;

To be honest I don’t even know why ‘Sweet Leaf’ is on the album because it does not really belong. Soon when I talk about the other songs on the album, if you go back to ‘Sweet Leaf’, you will have to agree. On the album Paranoid or even on that first album all the songs seem to go together, all the things Ozzy is singing about are like pieces of the same puzzle. But ‘Sweet Leaf’ is just this song about how Ozzy really likes weed. My theory is, there’s no way they could keep the guitar riff hidden from the world, so Tony Iommi wrote it and gave it to Ozzy, and Ozzy was maybe high that day so he wrote about what was going on in his mind and the whole band was like “That’s what it is then.” If I was Ozzy I think I would have wrote the words differently and maybe made a song about living naked in a cave or being afraid that the house is haunted. But I am not Ozzy so I have to respect his decision!

[…]

But this is the thing about you guys and music here. You think that all we are doing when we listen to our music is either looking at the words like they were a bible for us, or looking at pictures of the singers like they were Jesus. It is not like that at all. When you guys talk like that, that is how we know that you are stupid and growing old has made you crazy. Because: music is like a whole world, and there are words and pictures and sounds and textures and smells probably, OK I didn’t actually mean that I just got carried away. Albums do have a special smell though. Old ones smell different from new ones. Anyway you gotta know what I mean about this! It’s like, when you sing “Row row row your boat,” do you really only focus on the boat and the rowing it? And think “Wow this is a song about some guys rowing a boat, fucken awesome!” No of course not. Only if you are totally weird do you think like that. When you are singing, you hear the song, the part that is more than the words, and is also the feeling of just the notes in the air, especially if you are singing it in a round with a bunch of other people. We used to do that in my Kindergarten. You hear a mood which is way higher (not “high” like that, come on) than the words, it is sort of always floating above the words. And that is why bands like The Beatles can be popular everywhere, even where people do not speak English, where to them The Beatles probably sound like trained monkeys trying to talk.

Well OK now that you got that check it out. In “Sweet Leaf,” if you can’t hear the mood that just the guitar and the bass and the drums make without anything to do with weed, you are prejudiced or you are not listening. Imagine that you are a man from space! And you don’t speak English and you never heard of weed, and you landed in California and the first person you met up with took you to his house and said “Hey check out this band.” And then he played you “Sweet Leaf.” In my opinion, the man from space would hear that song, just the crunchy guitar sound and those bass notes, Geezer Butler is the best bassist it sounds like his strings are made of lime jello salad, and he would start banging his head! Because the riff on “Sweet Leaf,” that is something anybody can understand. ANYBODY. It doesn’t really have anything to do with what Ozzy is singing about. The lyrics, that is just what Ozzy thinks of when he feels this groove. But it doesn’t have to mean that to everybody, and it means more no matter what, because it’s like a physical thing. So when I told you yesterday, that I don’t know how “Sweet Leaf” fits on Master of Reality, I think now I understand. It’s there because the mood is right, even if the words are weird. And the mood comes first. This whole album is just about that mood. That feeling.

Mp3> Black Sabbath – Sweet Leaf

IV.

The second half of Darnielle’s book rejoins Roger ten years later, as he tries to come to terms with his years of unnecessary incarceration and, rediscovering his old Black Sabbath tapes, tries to keep his head above water by tracking down his old counsellor’s new address and continuing his unfinished exegesis;

Pretty soon we learn that all the people we’re supposed to look to for guidance think we’re stupid, or dangerous, or “confused,” which is really insulting. And at that point we’re all out of role models, because any other possible role models are out there in the real world, which we can only visit when we get a daypass. The people we see every day seem to have been made from different parts.

And so we look up to Black Sabbath – to what we remember of them, in my case. Even after we’ve grown up, we do. Always. Because looking at Black Sabbath – at their album covers, at their handmade costumes, at their lyrics sheets, at the dumb faces they make in their videos now – we can see people like us. It’s nice. I don’t do sports, but with Ozzy I feel like I can understand the concept of the home team crowd. It’s like, I know that dude. That’s the guy that used to break into people’s houses. Now he’s making money and the whole block is safe. Good for him. Maybe every other band in the world has more brains and deeper meaning, but only Black Sabbath sounds exactly like what my friends and I might have done if we’d had the equipment.

Which, by the way, is the actual story of how Black Sabbath got started, although I can hardly stand to think about it now, because it’s dangerous to think about how things might have been different. Still. When Ozzy Osbourne was a teenager, he lived in Birmingham, England. When I was in treatment, I used to try to imagine Birmingham, but all I knew about England was the Queen and Buckingham Palace guards, really. And Shakespeare. Birmingham isn’t like that, I found out later. It’s a town that manufactured a lot of guns in the nineteenth century, and then tyres in the twentieth, and then it got the crap bombed out of it during the second world war. Ozzy Osbourne was born in the late ‘40s, so he probably grew up looking at a lot of bomb craters. I grew up in Southern California, so what I grew up looking at was a lot of strip malls. Same basic idea. The only difference is that my neighbourhood looked like it was waiting to get bombed instead of recovering from the bombing.

[…]

If Ozzy had come from California he would have been sent to treatment, and that would have been the end of that. Instead his dad bought him a P.A. system to keep him out of trouble, and he started forming bands: Rare Breed; The Polka Tulk Blues Company; Earth. Different guys who were also losers started to join up, and then they became Black Sabbath. And instead of trying to make important records that made a big statement, the band decided to stay exactly the same as they were when they’d just been angry young people getting hammered in bars.

This makes them role models. Real ones. Not unreachable dicks like Bon Jovi, who you know got into music with a business plan, and had a bank account under the band’s name before they played their first show. And not like Poison or any of those other bands they have now. When you listen to early Black Sabbath you know the main difference between them & you is that somebody bought them guitars and microphones. They’re not smarter than you; they’re not deeper than you; they’re a fuck of a lot richer than you, but other than that it’s like listening to the inside of your own mind. So when they write songs, they sing about wizards. And witches. And robots. When they try to write a love song, it always ends up being about getting rejected before anything really got started. And they sing about war too, like everyone else who’s making records at that time, but they don’t really have anything special to say about it, except that it sucks. They say they figure things would probably be better if we did not have wars. And they say how the world’s going to end, but we should all be friends.

By the time they make Master of Reality, they’re pretty famous, but anyone who says he can hear a difference between the Ozzy who wrote the song “Black Sabbath”, and the Ozzy who sings “Children Of The Grave” is a liar. It’s the same guy. Same dumb poor kid from a bombed out town in the middle of nowhere. That’s why Black Sabbath are special. They aren’t rags to riches. They’re just rags. All they have is themselves, and that’s turned out to be enough. For them.

Mp3>Black Sabbath – Into the Void

V.

Buy 33 1/3: Master of Reality from Amazon.

Read more stuff by John Darnielle at Last Plane To Jakarta.

Keep up to date with the rest of the 33 1/3 series (wow, check out that Alex Chilton interview stuff from the ‘Radio City’ book!).

Listen to Black Sabbath.

Labels: Black Sabbath, books, John Darnielle, METAL