Rat Salad
Black Sabbath: The Classic Years 1969-1975
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Black Sabbath are one of the most outrageous yet longest-lived bands in the history of rock 'n' roll. This informative, idiosyncratic and beguiling book paints a vivid picture of their colourful early history - interwoven with all the most crucial news stories of the time: from Vietnam to Bloody Sunday and the space programme.
Where Rat Salad diverges from routes taken by most rock biographies, however, is in its detailed analysis of the band's first six albums. These chapters - think Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head meets Spinal Tap - occupy about half the book and persuasively explain the appeal of the music, its compositional artistry and its frequently audacious inventiveness.
Original and passionate, Rat Salad embraces a remarkably diverse cast of characters - from Ozzy Osbourne himself and the other members of the band through to Edith Sitwell, Breugel the Elder, John Milton and Doris Day. The author's hand looms large in the piece. We see him both as a boy and man - from schoolboy ingenue to inveterate devotee - as he looks back at a life populated with love, sex, drugs and death played out against a backdrop of crucifixes and power chords.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The instant popularity and phenomenal sales of Black Sabbath's first two albums in 1970 created a generational divide within the rock music audience, with teenage listeners too young to have experienced the "Summer of Love" responding to Sabbath's dark vision of a violent world in songs like "War Pigs" and "Iron Man." In this witty and musically sophisticated appreciation, first-time author Wilkinson forcefully argues that Sabbath produced "six truly exceptional albums about which remarkably little of consequence has been written." Album by album and song by song, he shows how the gloomy tone of Sabbath's music resulted primarily from guitarist Tony Iommi's repetitive use of "the minor key tonic/subtonic shift of E and D" and the "frequent adoption of semitonal intervals." His short chapters on the historical and biographical context of each album will entertain his stated audience, "the grown-ups who were there at the time and who lived through it." Best of all, Wilkinson is never dull in his assessments, dismissing one song that "dissolves into a turgid and repetitive 4/4 riff on a B power chord," praising another that mixes "spectacularly intricate and weighty guitar work with passages of surprising, and enduring, melody" and noting that yet another is "breathtaking in its alternating ugliness and beauty."
