Is the album "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" heavy metal?

Album SBS - heavy metal or not?


  • Total voters
    17

Big Ears

Music Lover
Joined
Jul 3, 2011
Posts
5,195
Reaction score
136
Location
Hampshire, England
No. Both Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi have said they did not like the term, 'heavy metal'. The albums were just heavy; anachronisms are often imposed on the seventies. The Sabbath Bloody Sabbath title track and Killing Yourself to Live are very heavy, I think. The rest of the album, Fluff aside (possibly named after DJ Alan Freeman), is probaby heavy, but it does not work for me.

If the statistics I have seen are correct, Sabbath played Killing Yourself to Live and Sabbra Cadabra a lot, with A National Acrobat occasionally, but not much else from the album on the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tour. I could be putting two and two together here and making five, but the band may have been looking forward to the next album; they apear to have been playing it on the tour. Despite being delayed and management/record company problems, the follow-up was heavy from start to finish.

The band were on form at the California Jam, at least on Killing Yourself to Live:

 

Big Ears

Music Lover
Joined
Jul 3, 2011
Posts
5,195
Reaction score
136
Location
Hampshire, England
The brand of "Heavy Metal" that existed in the early-to-mid 70's might be primitive compared to the "Metal" genres of the 80's (Hair, Speed, Thrash), but Black Sabbath was considered Heavy Metal in the 70's (as was Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple), and just because Metal's sound has evolved since the early 70's, there's no reason to reclassify them as "Hard Rock" 40 years later.

Not everything that Zeppelin, Sabbath and Purple ever recorded was Heavy Metal, but there were certain songs (e.g.: Smoke on the Water, Highway Star, Paranoid, Sweet Leaf, Whole Lotta Love and Immigrant Song) that went beyond the parameters of what Hard Rock was at the time. That's the difference.

Though Jimi and Cream had their moments in the 60's with songs like Purple Haze and Sunshine of Your Love, which is why I mentioned those two songs as perhaps being the first Heavy Metal song in another thread.

I agree that it is uncomfortable renaming the heavy rock bands of the seventies, as hard rock, to draw a distinction between the later so-called heavy metal bands. If that is what you are saying? I do not agree that the bands of the seventies, or even sixties, were primitive. Jimi Hendrix used limited multi-tracking, by modern standards, on analogue tape machines, but the process was technically and musically complex. I think this was particularly on The Burning of the Midnight Lamp from 1968.
 

Schmetterling

Senior Member
Joined
May 11, 2014
Posts
202
Reaction score
82
Gotta agree with Big Ears above. The actual concept of "heavy metal" per se didn't exist in the 1970s and only came along with the advent of such bands as Metallica et al in the 1980s. In the 70s, music of this nature was usually termed simply as "heavy" or "Rock" , or of course "Heavy Rock" music, and in my own mind whenever I think of metal bands I tend to think of the above named and their cohorts rather than bands like Sabbath. I guess the music of the likes of Sabbath and some others, particularly Judas Priest, evolved into much more of a heavy metal nature as the 80s and 90s passed but for their 70s albums I would still classify them as rock with a decidedly heavy nature, but not really metal.

I don't think such bands as Led Zep, Montrose, Deep Purple or Cream and the likes can ever rightly be classified as metal either. Not in the purest sense of the word anyway.....
 
Last edited:

Dave78

Dave's not here, man
Joined
Nov 13, 2009
Posts
2,143
Reaction score
427
If that is what you are saying?
I think what I was trying to say is how Heavy Metal music was defined in the early 70's by those who were in the music business back then.

I don't think there was any harder, heavier rock music in the early 70's than Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin until Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and Van Halen came along in the mid-to-late 70's. It seemed like all the mainstream "rock" music in the early 70's was from bands like The Rolling Stones, The Who and Jethro Tull. Just middle of the road stuff, but not light, pop-oriented rock like Elton John and David Bowie. So I can see why Zep, Purple and Sabbath were deemed to be Heavy Metal in the early 70's. Their music overshadowed the rest of their peer group. And I think what made those bands even more "dangerous" is they way they looked. They were all loud, long-haired beasts compared to Elton and Bowie. So the term Heavy Metal set those three bands apart from everyone else at the time.

But to me it's all just Hard Rock -- with some being heavier than others. Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Aerosmith, Ted Nugent and Van Halen all fall under the Hard Rock genre to me (later to include UFO, The Scorpions and Judas Priest). I didn't coin the term Heavy Metal, so I won't disagree with it as a genre, but I will contend that there are only three 70's bands that have membership (and that doesn't include Bachman-Turner Overdrive -- a band who was mentioned to have Metal tendencies with their bass-centric 1974 Not Fragile album).


The many genres of 80's metal is a separate deal altogether, imo.
 
Last edited:

Riff Raff

Super Moderator
Staff member
Super Moderator
Joined
Dec 8, 2010
Posts
20,731
Reaction score
10,400
Location
No
Just because Ozzy and Iommi may not have liked the term doesn't make their music any less than what we hear it as. Heavy metal.
 

OldHippie

Resident Yooper
Joined
Mar 26, 2017
Posts
2,680
Reaction score
3,419
Location
Michigan
Yeah it’s metal. Sabbath was different though, I always thought of them as Sledgehammer rock.
 

Vader

Veteran Of A Thousand Psychic Wars
Joined
Jul 3, 2014
Posts
10,723
Reaction score
17,842
Location
Mother Gaia
Gotta agree with Big Ears above. The actual concept of "heavy metal" per se didn't exist in the 1970s and only came along with the advent of such bands as Metallica et al in the 1980s. In the 70s, music of this nature was usually termed simply as "heavy" or "Rock" , or of course "Heavy Rock" music, and in my own mind whenever I think of metal bands I tend to think of the above named and their cohorts rather than bands like Sabbath. I guess the music of the likes of Sabbath and some others, particularly Judas Priest, evolved into much more of a heavy metal nature as the 80s and 90s passed but for their 70s albums I would still classify them as rock with a decidedly heavy nature, but not really metal.

I don't think such bands as Led Zep, Montrose, Deep Purple or Cream and the likes can ever rightly be classified as metal either. Not in the purest sense of the word anyway.....


That isn't true..my friends and I ( and others ) were calling Sabbath, Priest, AC/DC, Motorhead etc. Heavy Metal when were in High School during the 70's.
79 was the start of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal....as opposed to the first wave which was Sabbath etc.
Metallica was a Thrash Metal band, belonging to another sub genre of the already existing genre Heavy Metal.
 

Schmetterling

Senior Member
Joined
May 11, 2014
Posts
202
Reaction score
82
That isn't true..my friends and I ( and others ) were calling Sabbath, Priest, AC/DC, Motorhead etc. Heavy Metal when were in High School during the 70's.
79 was the start of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal....as opposed to the first wave which was Sabbath etc.
Metallica was a Thrash Metal band, belonging to another sub genre of the already existing genre Heavy Metal.


Now that you mention it that would indeed seem to be the case especially as you cite the NWOBHM as evidence and there's no denying that fact. Funny though, I have no memory whatsoever of ever using the term in pre NWOBHM days or having heard it being used. Memory is failing somewhat, I guess I must be getting old....:(
 

Find member

Forum statistics

Threads
30,655
Posts
1,064,793
Members
6,354
Latest member
edmerka

Staff online

Top