By Jimmy “Explosive Diarrhea” B
In the days of before, that time in my life when I was sticking my toes in the waters of adulthood, when everything was a first, I heard Black Sabbath for the first time. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a friend’s El Camino in the middle of a pine forest, parked next to the creek where I spent a lot of time fishing and talking with my father as a lad. My friend and I were fairly new adherents to the thrash metal sound that had popped up a few years earlier. We were obsessed with Metallica, who had not yet turned to shit, Metal Church, Exciter, Anthrax, and Slayer. I lived in an area where access to heavy music was difficult. FM radio had only happened a few years before; cable television was not the norm, and, for kids like me, it wasn’t available since I lived outside of town in the mountains. The nearest record store was almost an hour away, which was an insurmountable distance due to not having a driver’s license and parents who didn’t understand my musical needs. It seems incredible that I had Exciter records a few years before I obtained my first Black Sabbath album. I assumed Sabbath had a dated sound that had nothing at all to do with the metal I was mail ordering through ads in magazines.
My friend, the El Camino commander, had a youngish father who was into Sabbath, so my friend decided to bring a cassette copy of Paranoid on one of our poorly planned camping trips. I may have been one or two beers into our music listening night when he put Paranoid into the cassette deck. In that moment, the walls I had constructed in my brain crumbled, and my musical journey took a giant leap forward. I couldn’t believe how fucking heavy it was, heavy and accessible. This was such a monumental moment for me that I can still remember almost everything that happened that night, and the excitement I felt when hearing “War Pigs” and “Fairies Wear Boots” for the first time, sometimes I still feel it.
I have a hard time naming favorite songs, albums, and bands, and, when I do, they never match reality. For example, I frequently name Iron Maiden as one of my top two favorite bands, but the reality is that I listen to The Fall, CAN, and New Model Army more than Maiden. Nostalgia is powerful, and for that reason Maiden will always be one of my favorites, but Black Sabbath will always be my favorite band, Paranoid my favorite record, and “Planet Caravan” and “War Pigs” in the upper echelon of my favorite songs.
As a side note, I am writing this after Ozzy’s death. Other than a handful of songs, I haven’t been a fan of Ozzy’s solo career. The duet he did with Lita Ford is among the worst songs of the 1980s. His concert series, Ozzfest, in my opinion, did a lot of damage to heavy music, by promoting shitty pseudo-metal bands. I have mixed feelings about Mr. Osbourne, but I cannot imagine “Planet Caravan” without his voice. For that, I will remember him fondly.
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