Sabbath Sunday \m/

* I met Black Sabbath, but that's a story for another time

Looking back on music listening memories that standout most significantly, It's hard to beat my first introduction to Black Sabbath as a young little dork.

My first introduction to Black Sabbath as a young teenager was completely groundbreaking. I was at an age where I was becoming infatuated with heavy metal. Bands like Metallica and Iron Maiden offered me such a liveliness with the sheer speed involved in their sound. Of course that's all I thought I wanted, but then there was one band to change everything. The slow and sludgy offerings from the sound of Black Sabbath completely broke my brain, it felt like there was a very similar relation to these other bands yet they provided me with such a different sound. It was my first experience of this slower heaviness and of course it eventually led me down the rabbit hole of Sabbath worship in bands like Sleep. But all I heard for months on end during this time was one of Tony Iommi's impenetrable riffs, Geezer Butler's hulking bass lines, Bill Ward's thunderous drum fills or Ozzy Osbourne's haunting wails. This introduction of sound killed off mostly any craving I felt for just about anything else. The riff in "A National Acrobat", from the "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" album became as addictive as I'm sure any other mind altering substance that I had absolutely no experience with would. The same can be said about "Under The Sun / Every Day Comes and Goes" especially, and the entirety of the "Vol. 4" album is included. "The Wizard" from the "Black Sabbath" self-titled album added a killer harmonica into the mix to make things worse. I'm going to stop myself before I continue because I'll just list every track on the first 5 Sabbath albums as they all became completely polluted into my brain. Stumbling across videos like the Live Paris 1970 concert (which I've heard was actually a video of a performance somewhere else) was completely breathtaking. As a teenager who poorly played a drum set in the school band, watching Bill Ward beating the living christ out of his kit and simultaneously mimicking the sounds of firing cannons with his drum heads was all I could think about. I wished I had been the first person to ever stumble across such a sound as I wanted so badly to be nothing other than the cool and different kid. But of course, thousands of other teenagers could probably tell you about the exact same experience. I just wish I could hear it all again for the first time.

If you'd like your brain to be broken as much as mine was, see how Bill Ward somehow violently smacks his cymbal endlessly while also doing so to the snare drum at (7:58) in this video. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG1rTikLmQE)

Bill Ward is completely irreplaceable, and unfortunately he's the only original member of Sabbath that I haven't got to meet.