7
Black Sabbath, Black Widow…What’s the Difference?
Back in 1970, Black Sabbath did enough to garner attention as a satanic rock act. There was the witch on the first album cover and the inverted cross in the gatefold, not to mention the lyrics therein enclosed and no less than the name of the band. Protest as much as they like that it was more about being scary, spooky, like horror movies, but the devil is in the details.
Still, they got more piled on that they personally didn’t have a crook’d hand in, and that came from the Sabs getting confused with a much more wicked act of the day, namely Black Widow, who, oddly, were also managed by Patrick Meehan. O’er stateside, and actually a year or so earlier, there was a band called Coven doing just as much dastardly as Black Widow (and, as you’ll see shortly, more dastardly than anything Sabbath would do onstage). Essentially, both bands performed black masses live as part of their shows, but neither was a heavy rock band per se. But with the Manson murders and the release of Rosemary’s Baby thrown into the mix, a narrative was being formed from which Sabbath were implicated and then were beneficiaries, exactly the way the guys and the label would have wanted it.
In any event, as Black Widow’s Clive Jones explains, Black Sabbath indeed weren’t alone in playing up this devilish angle for what it was worth and worthy.
“Well, we started off as a soul band, and then the whole scene changed to psychedelic, so we went along that route,” says Jones. “But we were just one of the bands, so we actually came up with the idea of doing black magic, but not just singing songs and every so often putting the word hell or devil in. We decided to take it a lot further than that, and met up with a guy named Alex Sanders, who was at the time the king of the witches, and his wife Maxine, and we learned as much as we could about it and then had a little story, and then based the whole first album Sacrifice all around this black magic act. And of course the sacrifice that we used had to be naked, and of course in 1970 that was quite shocking, and we were sort of billed as, ‘Don’t let your kids see this act!’ And they flocked in like mad, and we had lots of publicity. I mean yes, it just happened to be a publicity thing, but we were doing it correctly, and the important thing for Black Widow was that we were the first.
“It was quite a big time for horror movies,” continues Jones, underscoring the influence schlock cinema would have had on the Sabbath youth—both the band and the fans, for that matter. “Sort of the black-and-white things with Vincent Price and things like that. In fact, Vincent Price gave me…because he was on CBS, whenever he released an album, he gave me an album, which I still use to this day, of him talking about black magic and the war, and how black magic was used for good causes, as well as worshiping the devil type stuff.
“Yes, it was a good time, because we were the first to do it. It did bounce back against us. I mean, Black Widow had the most bad luck that any band could ever have. First of all, the BBC wouldn’t play our records, because preaching the occult to the kids is not a good thing. And ‘Come to the Sabbat’ would’ve gone to #1, but if you don’t hear the song—that’s the end of the story. And we were also going to tour the states, and then Charles Manson did the black magic murders over there, and they stopped us going to the states, and, as you know, we were sort of rivals—or in the press anyway—with Black Sabbath. And our management also took on Black Sabbath, which got very confusing. And when we couldn’t go to the states, who did they send? Who didn’t have anything to do with black magic! [laughs] So they actually went on our tour, with our road crew, would you believe! Which was a bit naughty, but fair enough. We always got on well enough with them.”
Interesting historical point there. Even though Black Sabbath were notorious, figures Clive, they weren’t notorious enough to get nixed from a visit stateside.
“And the other thing that happened to us,” continues Jones, “we recorded a live album. I’m sure you know Deep Purple’s ‘Smoke on the Water’ was about Montreux, Switzerland, burning down, and the smoke going over the lake, which inspired them to make ‘Smoke on the Water.’ Well, half of that smoke was our live album, because we played there before, and we had done the most fantastic show we’d ever done in the Black Widow career. So there it was, going up in smoke on the water. As I said, we had an awful lot of bad luck [laughs].
“Everyone got us mixed up,” confirms Clive, on a phenomenon underscored all too ridiculously over here by a Rolling Stone reviewer who couldn’t even get the two lead singers straight, calling Sabbath’s lead singer Kip Trevor. This did much to cement fans’ low opinion of Rolling Stone’s lack of hard rock know-how, a bitter divide between the mag and the headbanging masses that’s lasted since the inception of the rag to this day. “Because Black Sabbath had the upside-down cross on their cover, and their music was in a slightly heavy and evil direction and sounded evil, and because we both have ‘black’ in the name, everyone got us mixed up. And when Sacrifice was released, we were on CBS; it came out the same week as ‘Bridge over Troubled Water’ by Simon and Garfunkel, which was such a phenomenal seller that CBS didn’t press anything else for week afterward. So our album went from #76 to #32, and I thought, ‘It’s going to be Top 30 next week, at least,’ and the week after it was something like #77, because nobody could buy it. They were going into the shops and asking for the music by the black magic band, and people were giving them Black Sabbath. And I’m not saying that Black Sabbath wouldn’t have sold—I’m sure it would [laughs]—but people were getting it mixed up.
“And the press was just unbelievable,” says Clive. “Even at gigs, people were shouting out, ‘Play “Paranoid!”’ And actually, occasionally, for a laugh, we did. I have no recollection that Black Sabbath ever played ‘Come to the Sabbat,’ but they were asked for it in early days. You have to remember, nobody recognized Black Sabbath the way they do now, and the only time we played on the same bill, on the second day, was the New Festival in 1970; we were on different days, and we had driven up in a car, got out of the car, and there were these four guys meeting us. And we didn’t realize they were Black Sabbath. We thought they had come to take our bags [laughs], ‘Okay, see you guys, thank you very much.’ ‘No, no, we’re Black Sabbath!’ So we always have a laugh about that. But we didn’t recognize them, because their pictures weren’t so much in the paper back then. So that was a funny little story I’ve told. We thought they were people just hired to like open the door, you know what I mean? Let us into the festival. Because you always had guys telling you where to go and stuff like that.”
As mentioned, less tied to this situation (but, as we’ll learn, somewhat linked) is the story of a band called Coven, keepers of three albums, one of them called Witchcraft Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls, which sounds amusingly like a warning, something akin to Geezer’s “Christian” song “After Forever” or indeed the intended vibe of anything Geezer wrote that was supposedly satanic.
“Some people say doom, but it’s hard, because the genres came after,” explains an enigmatic Jinx Dawson, leader of Coven, when asked to articulate what Coven was doing musically. “An occult sound, maybe. But I don’t like that word psychedelic, because psychedelic, to me—I was there—was the Airplane with flowers and little kids running naked in the forest [laughs]. That isn’t really what we were.
“I think it was a little more not known about,” continues Jinx, on whether the climate seemed more open to the occult in 1970. “I think at that point it was more like curiosity. That’s how we did manage to even get the first album made [laughs]. Because a lot of people were like, ‘What the hell is that?’ So it really wasn’t out there. Arthur Brown was more like a show person, too, more like shock rock, but I think we were a little more on the serious side.”
Jinx Dawson doesn’t get the credit she deserves for bravely pioneering the idea of rock combined with Satanic content.
Whereas Black Sabbath’s label practically drove the occult slant, through unilaterally coming up with the album cover and turning the cross upside down (ha!—as a Swedish band called Oz was wont to say a dozen years later), Coven’s imprint took Jinx’s self-driven idea in stride, understanding the marketing possibility, and, one would imagine, ignoring the downside in those permissible times.
“They thought it was something that was totally brand-new that they had never seen before. So they were really excited. Ampex put quite a bit of money into the situation. They thought it was just something really brand-new and I think what happened was, you know, when the Manson situation came out, and also being a female in a band…females weren’t big back then—they really weren’t. There was Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, a few others, and now females run the business. But I don’t think they saw a female doing this role too much, which is ridiculous, because what are witches? They’re females [laughs]. There’s warlocks and there’s witches. If you don’t have a girl in there, what the hell do you have? But I think that’s why we had a hard time. And I think they thought, ‘Well, maybe men should be handling this’; it was pretty male-dominated back in the late ’60s. But no, I think the label was pretty interested in the project, because they knew that it was a landmark situation, a scholarly work. It was kind of half in the rock genre, or whatever—it was something different. So they were pretty excited about it.
“We used to come out in coffins,” explains Jinx, on how the band backed it up live. “Let’s see, we did part of the mass on stage. It was very theatrical; I’d call it a rock opera, basically. And nobody was doing this. Nobody! Arthur Brown had some fire on his head, but…[laughs], that’s about it, you know? So we did actual real ceremonies and included the music in that and it was just something that wasn’t done. I came from an opera background and I also came from a family that was left-hand path, and that is for real, you know what I’m saying? That is not a made-up thing. They had a dias on the farm, they had a big mansion on the farm, and when I was a kid I grew up in all of that. And it was something they wanted to hide. I got in a lot of trouble with my family for even doing the first album and letting out secrets that nobody had known before, like the sign of the horns. I mean, you can tell, the inverted rosaries, nobody was doing that. I mean, find me one [laughs]. Find me somebody who was doing it before Coven. Nobody did the inverted rosaries. Nobody did a black mass. We were the first recorded black mass. Nobody did the sign of the horns. Again, it was just something that I felt I wanted to get out, even though I had grown up that way. But I had a lot of problems getting it out.”
Ronnie James Dio is of course credited in metal circles with the sign of the horns, but its origins go way back…“That was done for years,” offers Jinx. “When I was a little kid, growing up in this big mansion with my two great-aunts and my great-grandfather, they were members of secret societies. And they were members of the AOD, the H Order of the Druids, and they also had their own secret society, some of it touching on the sonic, but it was separate. And they would do the sign of the horns when people would come to the door who were part of the group. And I saw that as a child, and I started imitating it, and they were always slapping my hands: ‘Don’t be doing that.’ So it’s something that has been done for years as a sign of greeting. It’s not a hex-removal thing. It’s not the mano cornuto—that is a thing that goes toward your eyes. The sign of the horns is a sign of greeting to people who are in your group. And that’s where I first saw it. And I thought that would be a great thing to do in the band, and of course my family didn’t like that. So I was kind of estranged from the family for about a decade until we did reunite finally.
“Obviously we lost Dio, so he went to the grave with that secret,” says Jinx. “You know, I’m sorry, the mano cornuto and the sign of the horns are not the same thing. Italians do have that little gold necklace that goes down with the hands, and they do a thing. Because I was married to an Italian, from Queens. With a very Italian mother and family. And they used to do a thing that was a similar hand sign, but they would point the fingers to your eyes, and it would be the mano cornuto to ward off—like Ronnie used to say—to ward off evil. Well, the sign of the horns isn’t what Ronnie really did, with the fingers up, and that is a greeting, of a secret society member. And I’ve tried to straighten this out on the Internet, and it’s like, I’m giving up. Well, if you don’t believe me, I don’t know what to tell you.”
This link to the sign of the horns is graphically documented. As Jinx says, with respect to the Blood on the Snow album cover, “That’s an old painting, that, if you notice, the demon that is playing the violin, he’s doing the sign of the horns in that painting. While he’s playing the violin.
“I would say that I started it the most, obviously, because I grew up in that,” continues Jinx, on whether the rest of the guys in the band were as onboard as she was. “The other guys fell into it because they enjoyed it, and they enjoyed researching and they liked doing the rituals. I mean, we lived this, and we lived this every day; this wasn’t just a stage act. There were a few times later down the line when we would lose people and have somebody step in, and they weren’t into it as much and it kind of scared them, so they left. Like the guitar player came back and forth about three or four times.”
Coven? Black Sabbath? Had the two ever crossed left-hand paths? “We did one gig that I remember, at the Whisky A Go Go in the ’70s.”
This is the same Black Sabbath that put a song called “Black Sabbath” on their album a year after Coven had a song on their album called Black Sabbath. “Well, of course [laughs]. That was the record company. If you look at the record company labels and the association there, they were on a label that was off of Mercury. Vertigo—that’s a small label off of Mercury. And also if you notice the first single that they did, it was from Dunwich Publishing, which is our management office.”
And that would be “Evil Woman,” by Crow. “Right—it was Ugas Music, our same publisher, so that was a connection there. To me it’s obvious. We also have down the line King Diamond, Mercyful Fate, who did admit they took something from us and were nice to us. And you have the Kiss story, where Kiss was a put-together band. We were the band that was supposed to do that deal; we didn’t want to take that deal, we didn’t want to put the makeup on and not get paid for seven years. I was very good friends with Neil Bogart. I just have this information on everybody and all these years they have not been saying anything, because we pretty much disappeared from Los Angeles. I was disgruntled with the music business. It was not what I wanted to do; I didn’t want to do commercial work that didn’t interest me, just for the dollar. Black Sabbath was connected with the record company. At the time of the Manson murders there was of course Sharon Tate and she was a lovely girl; they didn’t want to see a girl in that kind of band, and I’ve even talked to the label people who worked with Mercury since then, and they kind of shoved it on Black Sabbath. As a matter of fact, they put an inverted cross on one of the album covers, which Black Sabbath didn’t like. And the name, where they got the name Black Sabbath, I mean, you’ll have to ask them. Martha Quinn tried to get something out of them on one of her interviews on television, and then she showed them the album, and they said, ‘We’ve never seen the album.’ And I’ve talked to the road manager, and they had the album back in the day. We had copies that were distributed all through Europe, and they had a different cover on a single, not on the album, but on the singles. And they just kind of shoved us under the carpet because they took a lot of their…I would call it shtick for them, not for us, but shtick for them.
“Out of all the groups Black Sabbath is probably the one who stayed away from us the most, and we weren’t as good a friend as other bands. When we played with them, Ozzy was quite taken with the fact that we were introducing the original Ozzy Osbourne to the new Ozzy Osbourne, and it was real uncomfortable. [Yes, believe it or not, right there in 1969, Coven had a bassist named Oz Osbourne.] And when they played that show, they were pretty much a blues band. There was no magic or occult in that show.”
But alas, Mercury tired of this black magic band called Coven band selling no albums. The pressure was on for results. “Oh, absolutely! Absolutely. I mean, they had a girl singer who could sing just about everything. I came from opera so I could sing that to pop to blues to country music, and of course they want to go the easy route, and so they thought, Well, pop music, this was too heavy for a chick to do. And plus that had not been around before. Now you have all sorts of stuff going on. But at that time it was more, Let’s just make the bucks and this is just too controversial.” The result was a single for the hit movie Billy Jack, and after that, there was no turning back, try as Jinx might.
“I’ve got scrapbooks to show they pretty much dug us,” sighs Jinx, asked about the fan response to the pure and sincere version of Coven. “We had big crowds and had big shows, and there was controversy, obviously, but usually the people liked us. Actually, they liked us less when I kind of recorded a film title song that became a hit, Billy Jack, and they were like, ‘What the hell is that?’ Well, it’s called trying to keep your band alive and under pressure from record companies, and just actually it was a session I did for a film that had managed to become a hit. Wasn’t any kind of Coven project. But they see that and they go, ‘Okay, let’s take you down that road.’ And I’m like, ‘No, I don’t really want to go there. That’s not in my heart and it’s not what I believe in,’ and you know, it’s not what I started to do. I started to do a scholarly work, and I believe the Witchcraft album was a scholarly work, and it was something that had never been done before. And that’s kind of how I wanted to go with things. I didn’t want to do the light fluff. Even for the money. It didn’t interest me. I came from money, so I wasn’t interested.”
Asked whether the occult trappings ultimately helped or hindered the band in a real sense, Jinx figures, “Well, when you are the first ones to try and cut a path, you usually don’t…those people are usually not the ones who get the credit or who do as well. It’s usually people who come behind the pack and just run through the path, you know what I’m saying? And I think being the first ones doing that, it was difficult. And I think other people picked up on it, and only because of the Internet now, a lot of people have discovered that a lot of these other people didn’t really come up with all this. Actually, I came up with nothing. I grew up with all this. So I came up with nothing, really. It’s just that I put it in a rock context, on an album, first to do all of that. So I can’t take credit for anything. So they certainly shouldn’t.”
The Manson murders most definitely slowed the momentum Jinx had built up for the band.
“Well, we didn’t break up until way after that, obviously, more like 1976,” figures Dawson. “But I think at the time, it did stop me and the band from doing what we wanted to do. But then in turn, after that kind of settled, there were all these other bands that rose from the ashes. And so it ruined us, basically, I think. I think that it did. I do blame Manson for that. And what’s interesting is that later I toured with the Beach Boys, and I got very close with them and I toured all through Europe, which sounds kind of odd, because it’s definitely not the kind the music we do. But we had an association because of the Manson situation, if you can understand that. And they had a hard time too, so we kind of had an affinity there and we became really good friends.”
Back to the metal…despite the recorded evidence demonstrating otherwise, Jinx says that she would have wanted Coven to be more of a hard rock act.
“The thing of it is, when we played live, we had Marshalls. And we were one of the loudest frickin’ bands out there. I keep hearing this: ‘Well, Coven is not that loud.’ Okay, you’ve got a mix of an album—what are you going to do? But if you saw us live, I mean, it was so loud, I’m screaming the whole time. It’s not like we were a folk group. I mean, it was loud. That’s why we played with people like MC5. We were one of the loud groups. Coven was known as being a loud group in that area, Chicago and Detroit.”
Just as Coven crashed due to too much psychological heaviness, so did Black Widow, leaving the mighty Black Sabbath among this strange trinity of bands plying the dark side. Was that the formula then? I mean, if you go to far, will you get ostracized? Seems so…
“We all had an interest in it, and the guitarist, Jim, did a lot of research on it,” explains Clive Jones, who brings us back to Blighty and the intense form of hype that makes or breaks bands in Britain. “He wrote the main songs, apart from ‘Come to the Sabbat,’ the actual musical, and, like I say, we got everything right, and we were rehearsing for six months before we actually went on the road and did it. And yes, we were into it, but one thing that happened to us was—and I didn’t mind this—was that the black magic act took over the band. Jim and Kip, the singer, felt that nobody was listening to the music. They were just talking about the black magic act. Now I didn’t mind, but it caused a lot of problems in the band, and I think they thought that they were going to be wonderful musicians, you know what I mean? But people were coming to see the naked girl get sacrificed on stage. To me, that was what it was all about, putting bums on seats. But yes, I did believe a lot of black magic, and since then, I’ve come across various strange things that have happened to me personally. But I mean, we did have a lot of silly things in the press, like, double-decker buses were mounting the pavement and trying to knock us over, and a lot of silly nonsense from the press. But personally, yes, I do have quite a belief in the dark side, although I don’t sit there and practice it.”
And to be sure, the whole thing became more trouble than it was worth. “We played the Lyceum in London, which is a big venue,” explains Clive, “That’s where they put on the Miss World concerts. And it was run by a guy named Abe Mori, and we were going to play there, we did play there, and Abe Mori had heard about our reputation and said, ‘Well, you can play there, but you mustn’t do…the girl mustn’t be naked.’ So what happened was [laughs], quite mysteriously, the girl ended up naked on the stage, and all the bouncers rushed onto the stage to drag us off and cover the girl up, and the audience went mental. And people took photographs, and everyone was checked and had their cameras confiscated, apart from one person, who hid his camera somewhere, and it was in the News of the World the next day, and Abe Mori was furious because the Lyceum was tied up with nice things, shall we say. And there we were, sacrificing a naked girl on stage, and the audience went mental when the bouncers went onto the stage to stop the show.”
“When we used to do these gigs, we actually had priests turn up trying to stop the show, and holding crosses at the stage,” says Clive in closing, recalling an experience that mirrors that of the Sabs on occasion. “Like I say, we were banned. So sure, we weren’t allowed to tour the states because of the Manson murders, because they had the Manson murders and you’re doing black magic, and Manson was into that, and it tied into black magic, and I would say, yes, that was trouble [laughs].”
When all is said and done, both Coven and Black Widow lasted three albums each while Black Sabbath soldiered on, becoming a rock institution. Sure, Sabbath did nothing as shocking in their show as these two dark arts artists did, and in fact, it was partly from being confused with Black Widow, who the Sabbath guys found hokey, that Sabbath fretted over things like the inverted cross and the poem inside the first album, making sure that, where they had control (on the road, in the press), they would do as much to distance themselves from black magic as possible.
But then again, Alice Cooper performed all sorts of shocking stunts and took it to the bank, so going there was not without its careerist merits. Like I say, Sabbath, riding up and down Britain in a van, seemed to be having none of it, especially once they felt they were more in control and could assert their views. Basically, you’d have to ascribe weight to the wisdoms of Jim Simpson and Norman Hood, both of whom called the satanic angle in Sabbath a joke at best, an opportunistic dabble at worst. One imagines that as the steamroller rolled on, the Sabs couldn’t have cared less about the handful of connections they shared with Coven and Black Widow, both soon to fade, partly because, as Jinx articulates, both were simply too much for a sedate publics to handle. In fact, here up into old age, Tony, Geezer, Bill, and Oz would likely acknowledge this set of connections and coincidences with a half-interested raise of an eyebrow and then invite Jinx or Clive to the pub for a rollicking remembrance of the old days.