Black Sabbath this morning – recorded by the band’s soundcrew at the Asbury Park Convention Hall on August 5, 1975.
Amazing, fifty years on and the sentiments are still the same – I’m talking about one hour in and the somewhat prophetic War Pigs.
To be honest, I never took the band seriously when their first album came out. Not that I thought they were a joke, but I felt they were over-the-top in what they were expressing. In retrospect they were probably more spot-on than I realized at first. Their fanbase grew and they quickly represented a genre that seemed to reflect the times more accurately (and certainly more viscerally) than many other bands were at the time. They became the embodiment and poster children for Heavy Metal and generally acknowledged as the first ones to do it.
Black Sabbath have sold over 70 million records as of 2013, making them one of the most commercially successful heavy metal bands. The band have been referred to as being part of the “unholy trinity of British hard rock and heavy metal in the early to mid-seventies”, along with Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. Black Sabbath were ranked by MTV as the “Greatest Metal Band of All Time” and placed second on VH1’s “100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock” list. Rolling Stone magazine ranked them 85 on its “100 Greatest Artists of All Time”. They were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2005 and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. They have won two Grammy Awards for Best Metal Performance, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
Hey, I don’t get it right a lot of the time – although I make no claim at being anything resembling an arbiter of mainstream taste.
This concert, coming during the time of Sabotage (which was released in July) was part of a tour that featured Kiss as opening act. The tour that was cut short in November due to Ozzy’s motorcycle accident.
Heavy Metal was definitely part of Rock’s lexicon and it was here to stay.
In case you missed it, here is what they were up to in August of 1975.
