Magical Moment Photos

Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath. Photo by Ben Upham.

“Black Sabbath Scores”
by Deniese Kusel
The Press Telegram
Long Beach, Ca.
September 10, 1975

Black Sabbath’s claim to fame was that they were louder than any other rock band around. That was in 1970 when they first got together.
Sunday night at the Long Beach Arena they proved, once again, that if you pump out the decibels with enough force, people will cheer for anything.
In their first concert in two years, Black Sabbath kept the audience on their feet well after the second selection, “Hole in the Sky.”
It was obvious that the fans had missed the flamboyant group and were excited to have them back.
With the exception of a good lick sprinkled here and there and some rapid rhythmic changes on the lead guitar, Black Sabbath is just “another loud rock
band.” They were colorful, but prerdictable. The audience response was tremendous and the band worked. Their driving, hard rock sound was reminiscent of early Led Zeppelin.
Tony lommi, lead guitar, is one of few really good left-handed leads around on his customized Gibson. Vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, hot after a successful
European tour, spiked his lyrics with shouts and screams. The audience ate up the fleecy costumes and theatrics.
“Snow Blind” and “Symptom of the Universe” — the latter featuring lommi — were highlights of the concert. Bass player Geezer Butler’s fluid movements and showy stage style was a dynamic force in creating the visual imagery for Black Sabbath. Drummer Bill Ward falls into the same league as the hard-hitting Ginger Baker during his days with Cream. Hanging above his drum kit, an acoustical shell captured the sound and held it together.
Clearly, a lot of effort was put into putting the group back into action.
They drew heavily from their new album “Sabotage” for their concert material. Black Sabbath is a working band and seems destined to continue their present success. If hard rock is your bag, then dig them. They go deep.

BLACK SABBATH DISCOGRAPHY:
1970 Black Sabbath
1970 Paranoid
1971 Master of Reality
1972 Black Sabbath Vol. 4
1973 Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
1975 Sabotage
1976 Technical Ecstasy
1977 We Sold our Souls for Rock ‘N’ Roll
1978 Never Say Die
1980 Live At Last
1980 Heaven and Hell
1981 Mob Rules
1982 Live Evil
1983 Born Again
1986 Seventh Star
1987 The Eternal Idol
1989 Headless Cross
1990 Tyr
1992 Dehumanizer
1994 Cross Purposes
1995 Forbidden
1995 Cross Purposes Live
1998 Reunion
2002 Past Lives
2007 Live at Hammersmith Odeon

Click the links below to see Rare Black Sabbath Photos:
BLACK SABBATH FINE ART AMERICA IMAGES BY BEN UPHAM
and
BLACK SABBATH CONCERT PHOTOS BY BEN UPHAM

OZZY OSBOURNE OF BLACK SABBATH BELTS OUT A SONG IN SPOKANE, WA. ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1978. PHOTO BY BEN UPHAM.

BLACK SABBATH
“TOGETHER AGAIN” (1997)
BY KIRA L. BILLIK
THE WINCHESTER STAR
WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA
AUGUST 16, 1997

Ozzy Osbourne, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans and purple-tinted glasses that sat slightly askew on his nose, sipped from a cup of tea and rolled and smoked a cigarette.
A pile of free weights lay in the corner; an exercise bike stood in the hall. His dressing table was laden with medicine to treat the asthma and allergies he suffers. He looked fit despite doing two shows a night for the past month, although fatigue showed a bit in his eyes.
“The last few gigs have just been, ‘Am I going to get through the first one, because if I get through the first one, then the second one’s a breeze,’” he said. “You have to have a little bit of reserve for the second show — you can’t give all your wind out on the first one.”
Osbourne was backstage at Ozzfest, the massive metal marathon he created. And Black Sabbath, a band Osbourne left eight years ago, is headlining the tour — with Osbourne once again doing vocals.
After being plagued by personal problems that sabotaged several prior reunion attempts, Black Sabbath, widely credited as one of the creators of heavy metal, is a band again.
Hundreds of bands were influenced by guitarist Tony lommi’s sludgy black riffs, Osbourne’s nasal wail, and bassist Terry “Geezer” Butler’s tales of Satan, war and Armageddon. They released a series of classic albums starting in 1970, such as “We Sold Our Soul for Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “Mob Rules” and “Paranoid.” Sabbath also was honored with a tribute album, “Nativity in Black,” several years ago.
But if its place in music history is set, its lineup has been anything but. Osbourne left in 1978 after eight years in the band and was succeeded by Ronnie James Dio, who stuck around for three albums, then left. Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan and Tony Martin sang on Sabbath albums in the 1980s and early ’90s; Dio came back for “Dehumanizer” in 1992, only to-leave again.
The original four members — Osbourne, lommi, Butler and drummer Bill Ward — played Live Aid in 1985 and jammed together several times since, but then always went their separate ways.
Osbourne and lommi recently had been working together. So when a vacancy opened up on the Ozzfest roster, Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy’s wife and manager, suggested a reunion. Ward wasn’t included this time. Faith No More’s Mike Bordin, who also played in Osbourne’s band, handled drumming duties. “When Sharon came to me with this and said, ‘Do you want to do it?’ I said, ‘Listen, my answer’s yes and that’s as far as I’m going to go with it,” Osbourne said backstage at Ozzfest’s Philadelphia- area stop. “Before, when I used to get involved, I used to get so irate, because I’m not a businessman — I’m a rock and roll performer.”
The band’s difficulties, which have always seemed to involve Osbourne and lommi, are behind them, lommi said. “You begin to realize when you fell out then, it was over silly stuff which seemed important at the time,” lommi said. “I think you’ve just got to have respect for each other, which is probably what we didn’t have in the early days.”
lommi, 49, who sat on the edge of a sofa, was a bit fidgety prior to the show. He wore his usual black, and a large silver cross on a cord around his neck, and hid his eyes behind blue-tinted sunglasses. His dark hair, mustache and goatee are only slightly gray. In the background, the sounds of Paul McCartney’s new album came from Osbourne’s dressing room. lommi has always been the constant in the band throughout as members have swirled around him. And he admits he may have made some wrong decisions in selecting players. Critics and fans have been more and more critical with each version of Sabbath and each deviation from the original. “I think it did go off-track to a point,” he said, “but you don’t realize it when you’re involved in it. You start doing more different sorts of material and then you look back at the old stuff and you think, ‘Blimey, it’s really changed.’ “It’s that unique unit that made that sound and there’s no getting away from it. So anybody else I’ve had in the band, even though they’ve been great musicians, it’s not been the same because it can’t possibly be the same,” he said. Whether Sabbath continues as a band is up in the air. “We’ll have to see when this finishes — whether they loved it, whether they hated it,” Sharon Osbourne said. “Ultimately, there’s always been this invisible thread that keeps them all together — you can’t just cut somebody out of your life totally that’s been there from day one.”
Osbourne takes the same wait-and-see attitude. “I’ve put my foot in my mouth so many times before by saying, ‘Oh, yeah, we’re going to do an album, we’re going to do another tour, we’re going to do another Ozzfest.’ Let’s just get this one out of the way and see what happens,” Osbourne said. “It would be nice to do a Sabbath album as the original (lineup),”lommi said a bit wistfully. “My ultimate thing would be to do our own tour.”

BLACK SABBATH DISCOGRAPHY:

1970 Black Sabbath
1970 Paranoid
1971 Master of Reality
1972 Black Sabbath Vol. 4
1973 Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
1975 Sabotage
1976 Technical Ecstasy
1977 We Sold our Souls for Rock ‘N’ Roll
1978 Never Say Die
1980 Live At Last
1980 Heaven and Hell
1981 Mob Rules
1982 Live Evil
1983 Born Again
1986 Seventh Star
1987 The Eternal Idol
1989 Headless Cross
1990 Tyr
1992 Dehumanizer
1994 Cross Purposes
1995 Forbidden
1995 Cross Purposes Live
1998 Reunion
2002 Past Lives
2007 Live at Hammersmith Odeon

CLICK THE LINKS BELOW TO SEE BLACK SABBATH PHOTOS:
BLACK SABBATH PHOTOS BY BEN UPHAM
AND
BLACK SABBATH FINE ART AMERICA IMAGES BY BEN UPHAM

BLACK SABBATH performing in Spokane, Wa. on September 28, 1978. PHOTO by BEN UPHAM

BLACK SABBATH AT TEN: NOT A HALLOWEEN SHOW
by DAN WARFIELD
S&S ENTERTAINMENT EDITOR
“European Stars and Stripes”
Hesse, Germany 10-31-78

BLACK SABBATH guitarist Tony lommi was in a fine mood in his Frankfurt hotel, taking a day off from the decade-old band’s heavy schedule to catch up on his rock-star press duties. With a new album out and doing well, the four Englishmen are keeping busy.
“We spent three months in Toronto recording,” said lommi, reviewing the band’s schedule, “then a British tour, a couple of weeks off, six weeks in America coming up, come home for five days, then come here, seven days off, back to America for six or seven weeks, have a break for a short while. . .”
He and the other Sabs — lead singer Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward have adapted to the grinding life on the road that goes with stardom, successfully combatting the centrifugal forces and the tendency to 24-hour-a-day lunacy that have taken their toll on so many other groups.
“All the people see is the hour and a half you’re on a stage,” said lommi. “They don’t see the travel, the interviews, press, writing songs, recording”.
“But you’ve got to keep getting it out — and I enjoy it anyway. We certainly wouldn’t do it if we didn’t enjoy it. It keeps you young.”
He isn’t worried about how long they can keep it up. “Everybody asks that question,” he said. “Years ago people used to think if you’re over 20 you’ve passed it. Who knows? Could last a week, could last another 20 years.
“There’s a lot of bitchiness that goes on, it’s all turned round the wrong way. It’s like boxing. People say if you’ve been around 10 years you’ve had it.”
Among the most relentless critics of Sabbath and their ilk have been the artsy-trendy British rock press, which generally has nothing good to say for styles that happen to be out of fashion, and which has an impact on British
record sales almost equivalent to the power of radio airplay in America. In spite of that, the group continues to draw sellout crowds and to sell records at a respectable level.

lommi took a stand against Melody Maker columnist Allan Jones in May, by delivering what Jones described as “a finely judged left hook” to the writer’s lip at a Glasgow meeting. “Yes,” said lommi, “I hit him.” But, says lommi, it wasn’t because Jones speaks less than kindly about the musical powers of the band (“musically Black Sabbath are an Irish joke”) or of their stage show (“looked like Mott the Hoople groupies masquerading as gay Cossacks”), nor even about the way they talk (“that comical accent that so afflicts those unfortunate enough to have been born in the colourful vicinity of Birmingham”) — it was, says lommi, for a more personally offensive bit of prose.
Their previous meeting had been four years before, when lommi agreed to an interview in his home, about 70 miles north of London in Leicestershire.
“I said I’d meet him at the station. Took him back to the house, had dinner. It was fine. He talked about my house in his story, because I collect antiques. He expected me to live in a cave. He ran it down because I collect
antiques and paintings. I said to him be careful of the dog, he put that the dog attacked him. It wasn’t to do it with music. It was to do with my own private life.”
lommi doesn’t spend much time at home, but in mocking his personal art collection, Jones hit more of a nerve than he expected to. “When you go back it’s fresh. You go back and look at it . . .” Words failed him for a moment at the thought. The house is full of art and antiques, including several highly crafted copies of works hanging in the Prado near Madrid, and many originals. “I’ve got some from big estate sales — large paintings, that most people wouldn’t have the room to put in their homes. “It’s a creation, like music. I can appreciate things like that. I buy them because I really do like them. Old French antique furniture — you’ll never, ever see that again. In years to come, hopefully somebody else will have it in another 100 years who can appreciate it. It isn’t really mine. I’m preserving it for future generations.”
The roots of his reverence for the art and artisans of the past may have had some connection to his first choice of profession, as a typewriter repairman.
Black Sabbath , known as Earth to begin with, started as a workingman’s band in Birmingham. England a decade ago. lommi, Osbourne the slaughterhouse worker, truck driver Ward and accountant Butler lived for their after-hours gigs in the clubs of Birmingham, blasting the workaday blues away with heavy-metal ecstasy.
The name change to Black Sabbath, inspired by a Boris Karloff horror film — and the development of a wild stage show that mixed up rock music, stylized black masses, devilish incantations and witch-cult carryingson, gave the band enough of a boost (and a bizarre reputation) to let them make a fulltime go of it.
Their first single, “Paranoid,” was a surprise hit . Both in England and around the world, and within a year their status as a cult band, in more ways than one, was assured.
But the black magic image, insists the band today, was a gimmick, not a call to devil-worship. The idea was to become known as musicians, not as an art theater troupe. They still haven’t totally lived down their early theatrics.
In the years that followed, the band moved into the center ranks of the sixties-style heavy metal band parade, and as the ranks have thinned, are coming to be pegged as survivors among an endangered species. In a sense, the band is a free-floating anachronism in which the sixties energy remains unabated. Most of their personal friends from the early days are out of touch, said lommi, with a slight trace of regret. “You lose a lot of contact. People move away, and we’re away all the time . . . ”
The central themes of their music haven’t changed radically over the years, but Sabbath has always tried to play something besides 100 percent rock.
“The new album has one called ‘Airdance’ that has a jazzy feel,” said lommi, “another called ‘Breakout’ where we’re using brass gives some light and shade to the album.
“I’ve done an acoustic thing with an orchestra, used a choir and a harp, we always do one sort of different thing on each album.”
One thing that’s remained constant is the cross that hangs from lommi’s neck. They all have one. “It’s like a lucky thing,” he said, fondling it. “I’ve gone out on stage without it a couple of times and I’ve run back to get it. It’s like a lucky charm— it’s the symbol of the band.”

BLACK SABBATH DISCOGRAPHY:
1970 Black Sabbath
1970 Paranoid
1971 Master of Reality
1972 Black Sabbath Vol. 4
1973 Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
1975 Sabotage
1976 Technical Ecstasy
1977 We Sold our Souls for Rock ‘N’ Roll
1978 Never Say Die
1980 Live At Last
1980 Heaven and Hell
1981 Mob Rules
1982 Live Evil
1983 Born Again
1986 Seventh Star
1987 The Eternal Idol
1989 Headless Cross
1990 Tyr
1992 Dehumanizer
1994 Cross Purposes
1995 Forbidden
1995 Cross Purposes Live
1998 Reunion
2002 Past Lives
2007 Live at Hammersmith Odeon

CLICK ON LINKS BELOW TO SEE BLACK SABBATH PHOTOS:
BLACK SABBATH FINE ART AMERICA IMAGES BY BEN UPHAM
AND
BLACK SABBATH PHOTOS by BEN UPHAM