Aerosmith bounces back through relentless touring with the help of the New York Dolls’ engineer. The sorcerers of madness descend into a haunted dungeon for “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.” Led Zeppelin travels time and space to top “Stairway to Heaven.”
Columbia debated whether to drop Aerosmith from the label as their debut album languished, selling around thirty thousand copies. Guitarist Joe Perry recalled, “There was nothing at all: no press, no radio, no airplay, no reviews, no interviews, no party. Instead the album got ignored and there was a lot of anger and flipping out.”1 Steven Tyler yelled that Perry cranked his amp too loud and was going to blow out his ears. Tyler rode Joey Kramer so hard about his drumming that Kramer developed a facial tic.
But Jack Douglas was intrigued. He was the engineer who served as de facto producer on the first album by the Dolls, the band that shared the same management team as Aerosmith. “I’d seen the Jimmy Page Yardbirds, and [in Aerosmith] I thought I saw the American Yardbirds—not a copy, not an imitation, but the real thing. A hard-rocking blues, R&B rock group. I’m thinking to myself, ‘this is a great American rock band!’ … My attitude was: ‘What can I do to make them sound like themselves?’”2
They went into the studio mid-December for Get Your Wings. The title was a nod to the insignias of the bikers who populated the club the band frequently played in Massachusetts, Scarborough Fair. They offered up their own take on the R&B standard the Yardbirds performed in the movie Blow-Up, “Train Kept A-Rollin’.” Perry came up with the riff for “Same Old Song and Dance,” and Tyler scatted along till he found words that fit—“automatic writing” he called it.3 The pimps of Times Square outside the Record Plant studio inspired “Lord of the Thighs.”4
Perry judged, “Of all the ballads Aerosmith has done, ‘[Seasons of] Wither’ was the one I liked best.”5 Tyler wrote it on barbiturates and incense with a guitar salvaged from a Dumpster, depressed by winter and taxes. The “oooo” bridge presaged the monster ballad hooks that set high school gyms slow-dancing when glam metal conquered MTV a decade later.
But it was during the opening of “Woman of the World”—with its ringing arpeggios, pulsating bass, and Kramer hanging back half a beat—that Aerosmith relaxed into their swagger and forgot their fear of the red recording light for good. For those first twenty seconds, the best-sounding record of the decade (“Sweet Emotion”) flickered on the horizon.
Touring was paying off. After the first album they still rode to high school dances, university gymnasiums, and ski lodges in their station wagon. But more kids started trying to jump onstage. The audiences grew from two hundred to two thousand. In September fans at Boston College smashed the bathroom windows to get into the hall. That month the band left Massachusetts to play the rest of the New England states, then headed down south, then back up to the Midwest, farther up to Canada, over to the northwest coast, then down to LA. By 1974, Tyler said, they’d played every state in the country three times.
Even though they were from Boston, Tyler wrote in his memoir, “our core audience was always the Blue Army—the hard-core kids from the Midwest. They were the Blue Army because they all wore denim jackets; the place was a sea of blue.”6
“Detroit, Cincinnati, Cleveland. We felt like if we could win the heart of America, the rest of the country would follow,” Perry said. “And through constant touring we learned what kinds of songs and grooves went over best. As a songwriter you start thinking in terms of: ‘If I was sitting in the audience, what would I want to hear?’”7
Tyler wrote, “Judy Carne—the English comic who starred in the iconic TV show Laugh-In and dated Joe for a stint in the early seventies—thought we were the voice of the mills and the malls. And those working-class towns were the places that embraced us early on.”8
Rolling Stone called the band’s music Wrench Rock, labeled them greasers. Their fans were the same auto-shop kids that would have dug “Train Kept A-Rollin’” back in 1956 when Elvis’s neighbors Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio recorded it. The only differences were denim instead of leather, bad acid and Quaaludes, more distortion—and long hair down the back instead of greased-up ducktails, perfect for whipping while you lost yourself in the new sonic cataclysms. An early sighting of the new tradition was the DVD for the 1970 Zeppelin gig at the Royal Albert Hall where fans headbanged in the front row.9 Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne and Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan did the move onstage.10
Lester Bangs had promulgated his concept of “punk” by cramming the term into many of his reviews throughout the first half of the ’70s. Presumably his fellow critic Mike Saunders (later of the punk band Angry Samoans) took notice, because he began using the term “heavy metal” with equal vigor, perhaps derived from a lyric in Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild,” or from Beat writer William Burroughs’s character The Heavy Metal Kid from his early ’60s Nova Trilogy. A blogger named A. S. Van Dorston chronicled all the times Saunders used the term in his reviews in the early ’70s.11 In a 1970 Humble Pie review for Rolling Stone, he brandished the term as an insult, but by 1971 in Creem he was using it positively for Sir Lord Baltimore. The following year he used it in multiple reviews in Rolling Stone and Phonograph Record magazine for bands like Deep Purple and Uriah Heep (and even Fanny), dubbing Sabbath the “Dark Princes of Heavy Metal.” That year other writers like Dave Marsh in Creem started picking it up as well. By 1973 NME followed suit, as did Melody Maker in 1974.
In Saunders’s April ’73 article “A Brief Survey of the State of Metal Music Today” for Phonograph Record, he declared, “When you get right down to it, the story of heavy metal rock has been the tale of Led Zeppelin. As indicated by its name, heavy metal has been an evolution of heavy rock—you know, the stuff that emerged back in 1967.”12 Bands he included in the genre were Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Grand Funk, Uriah Heep, and even the Stooges and Blue Oyster Cult.
Sabbath’s guitarist Tony Iommi said, “The term heavy metal came about from a journalist when I came back from America (in the ’70s). He said, ‘You’re playing heavy metal,’ and I said ‘No, it’s heavy rock—what’s that?’”13
Bassist Geezer Butler said, “At first we didn’t like being called heavy metal. But everyone likes to put you into certain pigeon holes, so we sort of got used to it. And then instead of it being derogatory, it became a whole lifestyle.”14
Black Sabbath knew exactly what the burnouts, heshers, stoners, and dirt bags wanted because they were their audience. Osbourne dropped out at fifteen to work in construction, in plumbing, and at the slaughterhouse, serving ninety days in prison for robbing a clothes store, briefly becoming a skinhead.15 Iommi worked in a sheet metal factory where the tips of two fingers were sliced off. He believed his dreams of being a musician were destroyed until the factory manager played him a record by guitarist Django Reinhardt, who also lost the use of some fingers. Iommi began using banjo strings because they were lighter and tuned the guitar low to compensate, creating his unique sound.16 Early on the band called itself Earth. (Also one of Springsteen’s early band names. His group Steel Mill later opened for Sabbath.)
Their ominous odes to marauding iron golems, paranoia, “hands of doom,” and “burned out confusion” were perfect for the average day of a zitty delinquent: sulking through high school, getting suspended, scoring weed at the arcade, fighting at the Brownsville Station concert, screaming at parents, finally retreating to the bedroom to write poetry about nuclear apocalypse under black light posters of sword and sorcery.
The surprising thing for those put off by the group’s Boris Karloff vampire-movie name was how Osbourne clowned like a Keith Moon sheepdog onstage. Cute but schlubby, though he could care less, he tripped onstage bare-chested, clapping and yelling, “Are you high? Let’s have a party!” He mostly left the lyric writing to Butler, as he was too busy destroying bathrooms with sledgehammers, setting money or drummer Bill Ward’s beard on fire, or almost killing Ward by spraying him with gold paint, blocking his pores and causing a seizure. Osbourne boasted of sleeping with seven women a night on tour, without concern for being politically correct. “Other bands’ roadies got better looking groupies than we did. They would be so bad you’d have to put a bag over their head. The really bad ones we called Two-Baggers. One bag for her head, to stop you seeing what you were doing, and one bag for your head—in case anyone came in, so they wouldn’t know it was you.”17
But Iommi brooded that the band got no respect from the music press. The critics resented that Sabbath’s LPs flew off the shelf from the moment of their debut, without radio airplay or media coverage, due to both the satanic imagery and their sound, which, even more than Zeppelin, split rock into the era before the band and the era after. Younger metal fans no longer consider Zeppelin metal, but Sabbath’s minor-chord sludge still sounds heavy. Yet their music was surprisingly nimble and jazzy, even prog, their signature “Devil’s tritone” tuning derived from classical music. For their fifth album, Iommi was determined to make a record the critics could no longer dismiss.
But the band was worn down by incessant touring, booze, and the coke they’d been introduced to by American roadies. Fisticuffs between members were not unusual. To Iommi’s dismay, Stevie Wonder had filled up their favorite room at the Record Plant with TONTO, the giant synthesizer. Iommi stayed up for days at a time trying to come up with riffs but got nothing. He cut his hair short and shaved his mustache off. Still nothing. “We almost thought that we were finished as a band,” said Butler.18
Finally, they decided Los Angeles’s tony Bel Air neighborhood was not a conducive atmosphere, and searched for a crumbling castle to record in like Zeppelin. They found one in Gloucestershire’s Forest of Dean: Clearwell Castle, built in 1728.
“We rehearsed in the armoury there and one night I was walking down the corridor with Ozzy and we saw this figure in a black cloak,” recalled Iommi. The year before, at the Hollywood Bowl, there had been a man who hid backstage to stab Iommi before security apprehended him (“one of these like Satanists or religious freaks or whatever he was,” Iommi said). So Iommi was particularly unsettled by the idea of nefarious strangers lurking about. “We followed this figure back into the armoury and there was absolutely no one there. Whoever it was had disappeared into thin air! The people that owned the castle knew all about this ghost and they said, ‘Oh yes, that’s the ghost of so and so. We were like ‘What!?’”19
Sabbath biographer Mick Wall recounted that the female ghost’s “modus operandi was apparently to enter locked rooms and leave them a mess, as though a strong wind had blown though the room.”20 (That was probably Osbourne’s MO, too.) She would also reputedly “sing lullabies to her ghost child on the landing at night while playing a tinkling musical box.”21
“We had to leave in the end, everybody terrified of each other because we were playing jokes on each other and nobody knew who was doing it,” Iommi said. “We used to leave and drive all the way home and drive back the next day. It was really silly.”22
“We weren’t so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing,” Osbourne wrote. “We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep. You’d just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second to shove a dagger up your arse.”23
Ward actually slept with a dagger. Osbourne, meanwhile, fell asleep with his boots in the fireplace and almost set the castle ablaze.
But the exercise proved fruitful. “We rehearsed in the dungeons and it was really creepy but it had some atmosphere, it conjured up things, and stuff started coming out again,” Butler said. “Once Tony came out with the initial riff for ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,’ we went, ‘We’re baaaack!’”24
The album’s title track boasted the most menacing chainsaw riff of the year. Guns N’ Roses’ Slash maintained, “The outro to ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ is the heaviest shit I have ever heard in my life.” But what took the song to the next level was the dynamic shift between snarling verse and lush, mellow chorus. Their LPs often had a soft track you wouldn’t expect from them, and here they captured both musical sides in one song. When Osbourne railed against bastards who lied “but you don’t want to know,” perhaps he was alluding to the manager they began to suspect was ripping them off (driving in a Rolls while they tooled around in VWs), though for the time being it was easier to get wasted than to confront him.
“Looking for Today” remade the song into an upbeat track you could dance to—if you ignored the lyrics about a band “rotting in decay” and doomed to fall because they just lived for the moment and didn’t think ahead. It was a galloping dry run for Osbourne’s later solo hit “Crazy Train,” with groovy acoustic chorus featuring flute and organ. There was an acoustic instrumental with harpsichord named “Fluff” in honor of Alan “Fluff” Freeman, a deejay who played them when others wouldn’t. Off duty, Iommi listened to softies like Peter, Paul and Mary or the Carpenters.25 Rick Wakeman, their friend from Yes, came by to play keyboards on “Sabbra Cadabra.” “Spiral Architect” closed the album with orchestra and bagpipes, the album’s second meditation on the cosmic implications of sperm (“National Acrobat” being the first).
The album sleeve, by future Star Wars and Indiana Jones poster painter Drew Struzan, recalled the covers Frank Frazetta created for horror comics like Eerie and Creepy. Both the front and the back featured men at the moment of their death. On the cover, an evil man is mauled by demons in a bed with the number of the beast on the headboard. On the back, a good man is tended to by his brokenhearted loved ones.26
Osbourne considered it their last real album as a functioning group. Iommi called it their pinnacle. It earned their first rave from Rolling Stone.
Zeppelin visited Sabbath at the castle and jammed, though Ward hated it when Bonham played his drums because he’d wreck them. Plant and Bonham grew up in Birmingham, England, as all the members of Sabbath had. Zeppelin was Sabbath’s favorite group; they were originally afraid to release their hit “Paranoid” because it was a reconfiguration of “Communication Breakdown.”27 Bonham served as Iommi’s best man in November.
Around that time Zeppelin reviewed the footage from their Madison Square Garden dates the previous July, the basis for their concert film The Song Remains the Same. Much of the footage was unusable, so they reshot some of the songs lip-syncing on an English soundstage (by which time Bonham was twenty pounds heavier) and also added some fantasy sequences. For a band that privately hoped to improve its standing with snobby outlets like Rolling Stone and The Village Voice, these Dungeons and Dragons–like interludes were surprisingly cheesy. On the plus side, they helped viewers stay awake when they watched the 137-minute film in midnight movie screenings, a grueling rite of passage for Zeppelin fans. (Even label head Ahmet Ertegun fell asleep when he had to watch the movie.28)
In the “Rain Song” segment, Plant sails a Viking boat, eats mushrooms, rides his horse to a misty ruined castle with a raven, and swordfights to save a maiden. Page climbs a mountain where he finds the Hermit from the Tarot deck (and Zoso’s album cover). The guru ages backward into Jimmy, then a child, then an embryo, then his wand casts a rainbow—2001: A Space Odyssey meets Spinal Tap. John Paul Jones menaces his wife in a Mr. Hyde mask to “No Quarter.” The band’s manager, Peter Grant, and tour manager, Richard Cole, play gangsters mowing down their enemies with machine guns. In real life, Grant drew on his past as a wrestler to force promoters to reduce their cut from 40 percent to 10 percent, changing the way the concert industry worked.29
Page proved himself to be a master of the art of guitar posing in the same league as Townshend and Richards with his double-necked ax, which gave him the ability to switch between six-string and twelve-string. He brandished his violin bow like a magus casting a spell over the audience. Plant threw his hair back, trusty bulge in jeans, and asked, “Does anybody remember laughter?” during “Stairway to Heaven.”
Plant composed the lyrics for that song after reading Lewis Spence’s The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain, partially improvising the lines one night beside the fire as Page strummed the guitar.30 Plant had the vision for their next epic as he was driving through the Sahara Desert while vacationing in southern Morocco after the 1973 North American tour. “It was a single-track road which neatly cut through the desert. Two miles to the East and West were ridges of sand rock. It basically looked like you were driving down a channel, this dilapidated road, and there was seemingly no end to it.”31
At the end of the year, Page and Bonham recorded a demo Page called “Kashmir,”32 inspired by his trips to India, so Plant incorporated the name into his lyrics about a wasteland of sun and sand. But when it came time for Plant to record his vocals, he found “it was quite a task, ’cause I couldn’t sing it.”33
After a bout with the flu in January, his voice had changed, and he’d undergone vocal surgery, not speaking for three weeks. Onstage he could no longer hit some of the high notes and had to sing a number of songs in lower octaves than before.
“It was like the song was bigger than me. It’s true: I was petrified, it’s true. It was painful; I was virtually in tears.”34
But ultimately, as the lyrics had it, “the father of the four winds filled his sails,” and he found himself wailing like a muezzin. Bonham’s drums led the Bollywood brass and strings like a stately march of prehistoric behemoths, their heads swaying far above in the distance.
And then, “across the sea of years,” almost four decades later, President Obama lowered medals around the necks of the three surviving band members for their lifetime contribution to American culture at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012.
“It’s been said that a generation of people survived teenage angst with a pair of headphones and a Zeppelin album,” Obama said. “Of course, these guys also redefined the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. We do not have video of this, but there were some hotel rooms trashed and mayhem all around, so it’s fitting that we’re doing this in a room with windows that are about three inches thick and Secret Service all around. So guys, settle down—these paintings are valuable.”