Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath - Black Sabbath

There probably aren’t many albums where the band, album, and opening song all share the exact same name. And somehow, Black Sabbath made that work perfectly.

Released on February 13, 1970, the self-titled debut album opens with the song “Black Sabbath,” a 6:16 track recorded in London in October 1969. It would go on to become one of the defining songs of heavy metal—and an early blueprint for doom metal.

The story behind the song is almost as dark as the music.

According to the band, bassist Geezer Butler had become fascinated with the occult while the group was still known as Earth. He had painted his apartment black and surrounded himself with occult imagery. Ozzy Osbourne eventually gave him an occult book written in Latin and filled with images of Satan.

Butler read it, put it beside his bed, and went to sleep.

When he woke up, he claimed there was a large black figure standing at the end of his bed, staring at him. The figure disappeared, and when Butler went looking for the book, it was gone.

He told Ozzy about the experience—and Ozzy turned it into the lyrics for the song.

Then there’s that riff.

Tony Iommi’s opening guitar figure uses a tritone, an interval historically associated with the ominous diabolus in musica (“the devil in music”). It creates that incredibly unsettling sound before the song has even really begun.

Interestingly, the idea for the riff came from Geezer Butler playing a fragment of “Mars” from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. Iommi took that inspiration and returned with the now-famous dark tritone riff.

And that’s what makes this song so important.

It’s slow.
It’s heavy.
It’s ominous.
It’s uncomfortable.

There was nothing quite like it when it appeared.

The song helped establish the darker, slower sound that would eventually become doom metal, while simultaneously helping define what people would come to recognize as heavy metal.

In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked “Black Sabbath” #1 on its list of the 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs of All Time.

So when that bell rings at the beginning and the rain starts…

Metal has officially arrived.???