A Love Letter to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Sometime in the ‘90s, I came across an interview with Page Hamilton—founder and bandleader of the alt-metal quartet Helmet—where he recalled the first time he heard Aerosmith’s “Back in the Saddle” as an adolescent. Hamilton described being so swept away by the music that he felt like he was being lifted out of his body. Of course, I knew exactly what Hamilton was talking about, and I imagine you do, too. Undoubtedly, all music lovers can point to a formative experience that runs along these lines, where music induces a kind of extrasensory response that verges on the mystical.

In my case, Black Sabbath wasn’t the first music that gave me that kind of feeling. But their song “A National Acrobat,” the second track on their 1973 opus Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, remains one of the most powerful examples I’ve ever come across. As someone who’s basically spent a lifetime immersed in music—a lot of which I’ve loved deeply—that’s saying a lot. To this day, even thinking about the extended middle section of that song sends chills rolling up my body. And, for whatever reason, it’s one of the few pieces of music that always transports me back to the time I first heard it, so many years ago.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, which just reached its 50th anniversary, kicks off with arguably one of the heaviest songs in the venerated British band’s catalog—depending, of course, on how you define “heavy.” Black Sabbath gave us several definitions to work with. It may not be entirely accurate to say that Sabbath invented heavy metal, but it’s indisputable that they were the first to fully realize it, as if metal hadn’t fully constellated until these four individuals found a way to channel it into being. And there isn’t another band that looms so large over the entirety of the genre. If the primordial seeds of metal were already there, Black Sabbath provided the big bang for an ever-expanding musical universe we now take for granted.

Across the first four Sabbath albums, you’ll find songs that exude a sense of foreboding so thick and enveloping they’ve become universal shorthand for the very idea of heaviness. Even after five decades, songs like “Sweet Leaf,” “War Pigs,” “Cornucopia,” “Into the Void,” etc. sound monolithic. I can only imagine the impression they made on listeners hearing them in real time during the early ‘70s. Guitarist and bandleader Tony Iommi’s signature riffing style—power chords with a diminished fifth resulting in evil-sounding tritones, or “the Devil’s interval”—has been influential to such a massive degree that he singlehandedly sired entire sub-genres like stoner rock, doom and sludge metal.

In a very concrete sense, we can look at bands like Soundgarden, The Melvins, Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age, Tool, Down, Corrosion Of Conformity, Deftones, Boris and countless others as Black Sabbath’s musical children and grandchildren. Those bands simply would not exist without the seminal sparks of inspiration that one finds in abundance across Black Sabbath’s 1970s output, which features the classic lineup of Iommi, bassist and chief lyricist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne. Basically, any metal or metal-adjacent musician since 1970 owes a great debt—if not their entire musical paradigm—to Black Sabbath.

Far less emphasized in the Sabbath story, however, is that they both embodied heaviness and simultaneously stretched past the limits of what heaviness could encompass. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was their most audacious example, up to that point in their career, of their willingness to indulge a total sense of freedom to experiment. The crawling, down-tuned riff that gurgles up in the second half of the title track drips with sinister vibes, as if foaming bile straight from the depths of hell were oozing into your room from under the crack in the doorframe. (Or, say, an acid trip was about to take a turn for the worse.) That said, the song packs the punch that it does, in large part, because of the sheer variety the band managed to cram into every nook and cranny of this album.

All told, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath incorporates mellotron, harpsichord, bagpipes, bongos, timpani, a string section, layers of acoustic guitars and myriad synthesizers, including a mini-moog performance from none other than Yes keyboardist and prog-rock avatar Rick Wakeman. The ear candy in the mix, coupled with the adventurousness of the music, in my opinion rivals the most celebrated studio wizardry by the likes of Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. And I would strongly encourage fans of the most studio-centric work by The Flaming Lips and Radiohead to regard Sabbath Bloody Sabbath as a trip they should take at least once, an exotic soundscape ever beckoning to seduce new travelers.

When the album fades out with soft crowd noise over a gentle bass figure and a lilting acoustic arpeggio, you might think you were listening to Fleetwood Mac if you didn’t already know better. The signs of a new direction show up early. By the time you get to that middle part of “A National Acrobat,” it’s clear that, after so many pummeling riffs, Black Sabbath had decided to take a decisive step out on a limb, only to take flight and reach for the stars. When Osbourne sings “Don’t believe the life you have / will be the only one,” his voice echo-trails across a cosmos of sound bathed in the shimmering wash of Iommi’s circular guitar figure. Here, Iommi dials-down the beefy distortion in favor of a more resplendent sheen of wah and fuzz.

I’m not sure what it is about this passage, but it always feels like being spoken-to from something deep within the heart of the universe—something unseen and unknowable. In fact, even after all these years, I have no idea what is being communicated. I just know that it feels like it’s there—speaking, for lack of a better word, through sound. Since first hearing “A National Acrobat” around the age of 12, I’ve never had the slightest clue what Geezer Butler’s lyrics were supposed to mean. It’s never mattered. I didn’t know, until sitting down to write this piece, that Butler wrote the lyrics from the point of view of a spirit that doesn’t get incarnated into earthly form because the child it was going to become never gets conceived.

Looking over the words now, of course that makes sense. And the idea of children’s souls circling their potential parents before they’re born has a beautiful resonance to me. As a parent myself now, Butler’s wordplay resonates with the profound experience of spending nine months waiting to find out who this incoming little person is going to turn out to be. But I can assure you I wasn’t giving much attention to such matters as a 12-year-old. Sure, I caught the passing references to the afterlife, but—reflective kid though I may have been—I wasn’t dwelling on the mysteries of birth and reincarnation. I’m honestly not even sure if the line “the unborn child that never was conceived” ever consciously registered with me at all.

I’ve also never noticed, until now, that the song doesn’t contain a chorus. The band gives us two verses and then, without fail, I find myself in another realm. In all of rock and roll, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more romantic or imaginative lyricist than Butler. And, if you listen only at a surface level, his hippie-like musings can be easily obscured behind the band’s awe-inspiring wall of sound. But the place this song takes me is a place beyond Butler’s narrative. I can only experience it as a fragmented prism of images that spark intense feelings words can’t describe. In truth, it’s the combination of sounds that gets me—the song is mixed to convey a convincing sense of the otherworldly, but I always hear something almost supernatural in the playing, too.

Ward, for example, places his snare hits with judicious pockets of space between them, creating a stutter-stop sensation that feels something like breathing, albeit in an off-kilter pattern. That one single stretch of drumming alone gives me ample ammunition to make the case that Ward, for all his power, wasn’t just a drummer but an artist. Each member, in fact, brought something essential and irreplaceable to the music. And Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the high watermark for the undeniable four-way chemistry that made the original Sabbath lineup so magical. I could go on and on about how this reflects in other songs on the record, but suffice it to say there’s a lot there to dive into.

On Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the band took a step back from the density that first made their sound so compelling, revealing themselves to be enormously capable of texture, shading and mood—not to mention fluid when it came to genre. My sense of there being more to this band is so insistent that I can’t even stand to be in the same room when people talk about their music. Even fellow fans who love them as much as I do, I’ve found, tend to view them in the most obvious, stereotypical terms. I never expend energy arguing about it; I just get up and leave.

In his 2000 book, Smile, You’re Traveling Henry Rollins shares a hilarious story from a Kenyan safari trip he took in 1997. Rollins describes sitting at a breakfast picnic area while a “pushy high noise-level family” sits at the table next to his. “Armed with headphones,” he listens to Black Sabbath and mouths the words “fuck you” at the family’s nanny. “The child,” he writes, “is banging her cup on the table like a convict trying to start an uprising. I can’t hear it. I am being deafened by the roar of genius.” I can relate. Like so many other adolescents, I found my surroundings growing up stressful enough that I felt the need to retreat into music.

The out-of-body sensation I experienced over and over with “A National Acrobat” was, no doubt, partly just the standard music-induced rapture that’s so common in our youth. Looking back, though, I also recognize there was some dissociation going there on as well. I won’t belabor the point, or whine about my biracial experience. I would argue that anyone who finds themselves between two cultural realms—whether they be ethnically defined or not—is bound to experience distress along the same lines I did. I would also argue that there are huge benefits: that people who are conditioned to live with feet in disparate worlds reflexively end up with the ability to be adaptable, which I consider a kind of superpower. The truth is, I made friends and connected with people easily, and there was no question that I was loved, cared-for and appreciated.

Still, growing up in the South Bronx during the ‘80s presented its challenges, particularly for a fish out of water like me. Sometimes the pressures reached intolerable levels. In that regard, my case is hardly unique. But Sabbath Bloody Sabbath became a constant reminder that transcendence was always at my fingertips, even amidst the grinding day-to-day discomfort of a dense urban setting. To block out the psychic noise, all I needed was my headphones. And in the years since, I am being deafened by the roar of genius has become a kind of personal code, a shield with which I feel more capable of navigating the world.

When Osbourne sings in soaring tones about “silver ships on cosmic oceans” on the fittingly celestial-sounding closing track “Spiral Architect,” he and the rest of Black Sabbath provided a vehicle for me to lift my head up into the clouds. The fact that they’ve done so for millions of others across the world and across generations gives me a great sense of satisfaction—even if I can’t necessarily stay in the room when other people talk about it. A half-century after its release, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath stands as one of the most monumental achievements in a most monumental career. As I see it, it still towers over the landscape of heavy metal, and of rock more generally. I invite you to lose yourself in its many wonders.

Saby Reyes-Kulkarni wrote about the deluxe reissue of Black Sabbath’s Sabotage album for Paste in 2021. You can find more music takes on his YouTube channel and Substack. You can also find him on Twitter He will do his best to hear you out if you engage him about Black Sabbath.