Black Sabbath Vol. 2...

Well, I got through the ‘Vol. 4’ chapters of “Rat Salad: Black Sabbath The Classic Years 1969-1975 by Paul Wilkinson and he gets it pretty right again. He made me chuckle when addressing the utter silliness of “FX”, choosing in the end to just let it go as something to be skipped over whether it be CD, LP, or Mp3.

Wilkinson now moves onto to the band’s next effort ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ his contention being that this record represents the band’s high water mark. His musical critique is so detailed that I had to again get out of bed late last night and grab the CD from downstairs (my iPod battery was dead). I also for the first time attempted to tune the acoustic guitar I keep by the bed down to “C” in an attempt follow some of Wilkinson’s track dissection. This did not work out very well at all. The strings were so loose due to the low gauge I use that it wouldn’t stay in tune even for a second. I got a good chuckle out of that since back in the day when my band wanted to play some of the tunes from these two records I remember pleading with them to tune down from standard tuning and was denied each time (I could have asked them to simply transpose the songs to their recorded key, but I would have had to know what transposition actually was). The shit was already a throat ripper to sing as it was, imagine trying to sing it two full steps higher than the recordings. Brutal…

Another motive for pulling the music out of the rack is that I’m unfamiliar with the song titles, even though I can recite every lyric from memory and can more or less play every song on both ‘Vol. 4’ and ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’. Both records were always on the turntable when I was a teen and since I’d listen to both from beginning to end, knowing the track listing by name was never a necessity.

‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ did once again raise the bar overall for the band, that I can agree with the author on, but this album also exposes a few chinks in the armor and is foreshadowing for those of us familiar with the decline and ultimate demise of the band. I maintain that Vol. 4 has a higher density of great songs (“FX”, if it’s even a song, is really the only thing ignorable), while on ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ the good songs are SO FANTASTICALLY good that they over shadow and more than compensate for the dreck (think “Who Are You?”). The fact that the band got their drinking buddy Rick Wakeman to spice up a few tunes with his mad skillz is amazing and he really adds a great deal to the songs he performs on.

I’ve been listening to ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ all day today (much to the chagrin of my fellow cube dwellers) and while I stand by ‘Vol 4’as the most worthy up to this point in the books continuum and the band chronological discography, I can easily see the arguments ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ pundits can make and it’s tough to deny them.

Onward to ‘Sabotage’…