Black Sabbath, "Heaven and Hell"

CJ tours the underworld and winds up in paradise

CJ’s Pitch:

Let’s say you were a metal head from another planet and you came to Earth in the year 1980. You meet me at a Uriah Heep show and inquire about our planet’s most legendary heavy metal band.

“Funny you should ask,” I say, “because that band (Black Sabbath) just fired their lead singer (Ozzy Osbourne) who is the most famous heavy metal personality on our little rock.”

Immediately, you assume that Black Sabbath is doomed. But, then I add this.

“They’ve replaced Ozzy with a diminutive man (Ronnie James Dio) who has a huge voice and believes that every song should contain dragons, kings and wizards or, at the very least, a magician.”

Your alien brain would think that Sabbath was slitting its wrists with its own cos-play sword.

Now consider that the remaining members of Sabbath—lead guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward—were all struggling with substance abuse issues and other personal demons. So, it was not a merry band of men that set out to record Heaven and Hell in late 1979.

And yet this album is on any serious headbanger’s list of Top 25 greatest metal albums ever.

Where Sabbath enjoyed writing about the occult, Dio trafficked in fantasy and you can hear his influence on the album’s first three tracks. “Neon Knights”, “Children of the Sea” and “Lady Evil” feature a full complement of LOTR-esque dragons, kings and perhaps a kraken or two. But, somehow it works. Iommi’s moody, mystical guitar and the pounding rhythm section of Butler and Ward pull these songs into the land of the epic. “Children of the Sea” is a great marauding song in the tradition of Thin Lizzy’s “Emerald.” Until Muse took over the mantle of “music to storm the castle by” these were your undisputed champions.

The album’s title track is quite simply one of the best heavy metal songs ever written. From the crushing opening notes to the lilting acoustic outro, it is an amalgamation of everything that I love about metal—sudden changes in tempo, soaring vocals, killer solos—all of it. Sabbath may have even spawned the whole doom metal movement with this one song and I’m not even mad at them.

Side 2 features a trilogy of songs that should have been the blueprint for all heavy metal ballads in the 80s. But, somehow those plans got confused with the sheet music for Warrant’s “Heaven” and the whole project fell apart.

“Wishing Well”, “Die Young” and “Lonely is the Word” are thematically dark and brooding without becoming melodramatic. There are some A+ metaphors in the lyrics and an edge to the music that never allows these songs to stray into the land of cheese.

In fact, the only misstep on this album is the throwaway track “Walk Away”, which sounds like Foreigner snuck into the studio while Tony Iommi was out setting fire to Bill Ward (Note: Iommi enjoyed lighting Ward aflame.).

Other than that, “Heaven and Hell” is some of the best metal ever created on this or any other planet.

---

Mitch’s Response:

Oh, no…here it comes again.

Thus begins our first descent into the realm of heavy metal - CJ’s natural domain - and my complicated relationship with the genre. On one cloven hoof, I have no interest in metal and there are precisely zero metal bands of which I consider myself a fan. On the other cloven hoof, my older brother Steve was a metal head when we were kids so I know more about the genre than most people and it does evoke warm feelings of a happy childhood home. See, complicated.

Everyone had a cassette copy of Paranoid growing in the ‘80s but the Clown Prince of Darkness never did much for me and the alleged biting of the bat heads seemed more unsanitary than scary. They lyrics were stupid and the music was sludgy, boring and depressing.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I fired up Heaven and Hell to hear such a well produced album. It just sounds incredible. The separation between instruments is perfect and the whole thing is bright, warm and welcoming. You can choose to focus on any instrument and be rewarded with a great riff from Iommi, a surprisingly fluid bass line from Butler or a powerful beat by Ward. They’re a much better band than I ever realized.

Of course, this is the Ronnie James Dio show, and he also brings the duality of metal to life: he’s an amazing singer, but it’s exhausting to listen to him constantly exploring his vocal range like Mariah Carey’s evil doppelgänger. His lyrics are interesting and evocative, but in the final estimation, quite stupid. He makes Sabbath better musically and yet more cartoonish at the same time.

All of the songs kind of blend together and even after a dozen listens I don’t know which is which, but surprisingly, I don’t care: this is a very good album, full of heavenly moments, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome. All of which is to say: Excelsior! Ceej, you’ve collected another soul for the dark side.

• Pitch Successful

---

Ken’s Response:

Dear CJ,

It’s not you, it’s me.  I’m sorry it has to be this way but I’m not ready for this kind of a relationship.  We’re just too different, you and me.  You’re a good person and I know it may hurt now, but you’ll find someone else to listen to Black Sabbath with, it just won’t be me.  

I appreciate the effort you made and I value the time we spent with Heaven and Hell.  Musically it’s much better than I anticipated and as you pointed out, the rhythm section is spectacular.  On the other hand, there’s clearly a formula that Tony Iommi uses in his writing, and while verse-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-outro (vamp) works for a while, it gets a bit repetitive.  There’s also very little variation in time signatures and tempo.  But if it was just that, I could get over it and we might be having a different conversation.  

What I can’t look past are the ridiculous lyrics.  In addition to the entirety of “Children of the Sea”, which has so many beginnings of imagery that never follow through with any context, and “Lady Evil”, with its strange weather patterns, the one line on the album that stands out most on the stupidity scale is “the moon is just the sun at night”.  I don’t know what sort of formal education Ronnie had up there in the middle of upstate New York, but no...it’s definitely not.  My advice to a young Mr. Dio would have been to turn off Beastmaster, Labyrinth, and Time Bandits and study for that 5th grade science test.

Maybe if time really was a never ending journey (I’d argue that it’s not), or if love truly was a never ending smile (anyone who’s ever loved anyone or anything will tell you that it is most certainly NOT), we could have made it work.  But for now, I wish you well. 

• Pitch Failed

---

Don’s Response:

I must admit, when CJ proclaimed a Black Sabbath record would be his next volley, I was immediately disinterested. I never got Metal, and Metal never got me. I’ve eschewed it my entire life. The only quasi-Metal I have ever willingly listened to is Spinal Tap, and mostly because it hilariously sends up the genre. I was in on the joke and the joke was, apparently, on CJ.

So after procrastinating a few days, I finally fired up Spotify and listened to Heaven and Hell. First reaction - hey, this isn’t Ozzy. That’s right, I had no idea Ozzy had been replaced by Ronnie James Dio. So I entered this experience with ears wide open.

Guess what? My head has been banging for a week. I get it now. 

Yes, the lyrics are ridiculous. Dio’s vocals couldn’t be cheesier. The lead guitarist thinks he’s Eddie Van Halen. Instead of laughing at metal, suddenly I’m laughing with it.

Whatever. Turn it up. To 11.

• Pitch Successful

---

CJ’s pitch was successful and Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell has ascended to the Newbury St. Collection.

---

Thanks for reading! Has CJ convinced you to spend eternity listening to Sabbath? Join the conversation:

---

Please join us next week as Ken drops three chords and some truth with Green Day’s 2004 punk rock opera, “American Idiot”.