Experiencing Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath has often been credited with inventing heavy metal with their first album released in 1970. Their new style of music was loud, brutal, scary, innovative, and it has greatly influenced heavy metal bands since then. Their five decades of music cross generations of fans, and they remain relevant to this day, with their 2013 album charting #1 in the United States and at least five other countries. In Experiencing Black Sabbath: A Listener’s Companion, musician and scholar Nolan Stolz leads the reader through Sabbath’s twenty studio albums and additional songs, closely examining their music and the storied history of the band. Along the way, Stolz highlights often-overlooked key moments that defined Sabbath’s unique musical style and legacy. Band members’ own words illuminate certain aspects of the music, and Stolz makes connections from song to song, album to album, and sometimes across decades to create an intricate narrative of the band’s entire catalog. Experiencing Black Sabbath reveals the underappreciated genius of these heavy metal progenitors to all rock music lovers and gives even the most fervent Sabbath fans a new perspective on the music.

"A biography of British heavy metal band Black Sabbath"--Provided by publisher.

John Darnielle describesMaster of Reality in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric center in southern California in 1985. The narrator explains Black Sabbath like an emissary from an alien race describing his culture to his captors: passionately, patiently, and lovingly.

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.

Updated edition to include details of Ronnie James Dio, Geezer Butler and Vinnie Appice re-joining the band under the guise Heaven and Hell and Dio's illness and untimely death in 2010. Also inclues new interviews and analysis of the music and speculation about the band members' futures in Ronnie's absence. Joel McIver has conducted dozens of interviews with the musicians and those within the music industry who witnessed the rollercoaster ride of the band, as well as many other Sabbath musicians who have been and gone over the years.This is the ultimate guide to the Black Sabbath legend.

Decades before reality television was invented, Ozzy Osbourne was subversive and dark. Ozzy was the singer in the heavy metal band Black Sabbath, and they meant business. In an era when rock bands were measured by how 'heavy' they were, no one was weightier than Black Sabbath. All four founding members of the original Black Sabbath grew up within half-a-mile of each other in a tiny Birmingham suburb. Though all shared a deep love of music--The Beatles for Ozzy, the Mothers of Invention for Geezer, the Shadows and Chet Atkins for Iommi, and Gene Kruppa for Ward— they formed their group "as the quickest way out of the slums." This is the story of how they made that dream come true--and how it then turned into a nightmare for all of them. At the height of their fame, Sabbath discovered they'd been so badly ripped off by their managers they didn't even own their own songs. They looked for salvation from Don Arden—an even more notorious gangster figure, who resurrected their career but still left them indebted to him, financially and personally. It finally came to a head when in 1979 they sacked Ozzy: "For being too out of control--even for us," as Bill Ward put it. The next fifteen years were a war between the post-Ozzy Sabbath and Ozzy himself, whose solo career overshadowed Sabbath so much that a reunion was entirely on his terms. Or rather, those of his wife and manager—to add a further bitter twist for Sabbath, daughter of Don Arden —Sharon Osbourne.

The name 'Tony Iommi' sends shivers down the spines of guitarists around the world. As lead guitarist and songwriter of Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi is considered to be one of the most influential musicians of the past four decades and the inventor of heavy metal. From working class, Midlands roots, his unique playing style - a result of a disfiguring hand injury he suffered working in a sheet metal factory - created a dark and gothic sound unlike anything that had been heard before and which captured the mood of its time. Sabbath went on to become a superband, playing to massive audiences around the world and selling millions of records, and Iommi led the life of a rockstar to the fullest - with the scars from all the drug-fuelled nights of excess and wildness to show for it. Iron Manis the exclusive account of the life and adventures of one of rock's greatest heroes.