17
Onetime Black Sabbath Manager Sandy Pearlman Genuflects on His Subjects
Not only has Sandy Pearlman distinguished himself as a globe-trotting prof and sage on the origins of hard music as well as the links between classical and rock, but yes, he was Black Sabbath’s manager during the Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules era, as well as Blue Öyster Cult’s for most of their recording career. In between harnessing the power of these giants, he also managed the Dictators and Shakin’ Street, was one of the original rock critics (penning and grinning for Crawdaddy), and found time to produce the Clash’s classic Give ’Em Enough Rope opus, a record denounced in some quarters at the time as too rockist, but now celebrated as a work of brilliance, second only to London Calling in the band’s punk-politico catalogue.
Pearlman shows up—engagingly and aptly—in our chapter about the Black and Blue tour, but in our most recent chat, he also fired off a few amusing remarks about Black Sabbath’s wider impact and context.
“You look at Black Sabbath at the time,” begins Sandy, in typical manic fashion. “Tony Iommi I believe is one of the five greatest guitar players in the history of the world. And what they brought to the table was the fact that the first Sabbath album is unrelentingly bone-crushing, right? There is nothing that does not participate in the exploitation of what we have come to regard as the definitive basic elements of metal: modal, extremely distorted, overdriven, chordal. And in fact, they prove a point that I feel I also prove, and have proven in spades, that heavy metal is kind of a fusion of all of those trend lines of the mid- to late ’60s, plus something else, which is the influence of horror-film and science-fiction music, written for film, that started being made in the ’30s, and then were made in the ’40s and the ’50s and ’60s, through the ’70s, when horror films changed radically and they were no longer doing the same horror and science-fiction films. They started to do very different things from the things they did before the ’70s. But my point is that every adolescent male who is not completely lame, in the UK and in North America grew up watching Creature Feature and Elvira and Chiller, whatever it is, and that includes the UK, on Friday and Saturday nights. They would just stay home and watch this stuff.
“And the music and the films that were being shown, in the horror film subculture, or the reissue subculture on television, or rerun subculture on television, characteristically had scores written mainly by German and Austrian émigré composers who had come to the U.S. and the UK before World War II, or during World War II. Many of them were Jewish, and of course on the run from the Nazis. These composers had all studied in conservatories that were extremely, heavily influenced by the Austrian late-nineteenth-century composer Anton Bruckner, and of course this is why the dean of the music faculty at McGill University and I teach this course called Bruckner: From Chord Power to Power Chord: How the Gigantic Late Romantic Symphony Orchestra of Anton Bruckner Is Modeled by the Single-Player Crypto-Orchestra of the Heavy Metal Guitarist, in the Quest for Sonic Ecstasy.
“And the point is that Bruckner’s scores are extremely complex, with whole vast stacks of overtone series, and distortion; it’s all built into the performance instruction and the composition. Bruckner was very aware of hall compression and the K space, things that heavy metal is completely reliant on for its impact. Even a band like Slayer, which kind of turns the idea of the K space on its head by playing so fast that they don’t allow for much apparent K in the K space. But having said that, there is the K occurring, in the K space, and it complexifies and masses up the texture further, and it’s a really neat trick. And so when we teach this course at McGill, some people say, ‘You know, Slayer, they’re just lame—they just play fast.’ And we say, ‘No, let’s slow this down and take a listen to what Kerry King is really doing here before you ladle out the contempt for Slayer.’ And I’m able to convince them, in my finest moments, that this is as metallic as sludge metal is, and it’s just that they are distorting these resources that metalists use.
“But having said that, they couldn’t do what they do without the entire metal resource panoply, which was created in the late ’60s, by the people I’ve just discussed. So Black Sabbath is the first place where this is a disciplined ideology, and everything they do is working off of this resource base. And not really going outside of the universe. Not until Dio gets there do they stray much out of the universe.
“Having said that, Heaven and Hell is awesome anyway, even though it has acoustic guitars in it,” laughs Pearlman, who signed on with the band in time, in ’79, to see this record pieced together in complication and under conditions of all sorts of emotional turmoil.
“So Sabbath is where the ideology is laid out with absolute discipline, complete fidelity, and the resource base is exploited as well as it will ever be exploited by anybody, and again with extreme discipline, which most people aren’t capable of. And they don’t need to get out of the resource base to complete a completely perfect series of sonic events, songs, all of which have tremendous impact, all of which sound as good, maybe better now, as they did in 1969, when the first Black Sabbath record was being made. Does that answer your question?
“And also, you’ve got to realize, that what I’ve just said about science fiction, horror, and heavy metal, is completely proved by Black Sabbath, the very name of Black Sabbath. And that’s derived from…I think it’s a horror film made by Mario Bava, an Italian horror film. And ‘Iron Man.’ I mean, I could go on, but I don’t have to go on. Their obsession with the horror film, and science fiction and literature, is readily apparent in the song titles, and their obsession with Hammer films and the occult. I could go on, but it’s basically like, these guys must’ve spent every Friday and Saturday in Birmingham, staying up as late as the BBC was on in those days, which was not that late, absorbing this stuff. And it was a youth well spent, in my opinion.”
Well spent indeed, but I wanted to ask of Sandy, how does they dynamic in the band change once Ronnie takes over on vocals and on lyrics?
“You know, this is an interesting question, because I regard Ronnie Dio as basically Puccini in chains. And that’s not a criticism. I’m not making fun of him, because he is Italian [laughs]. He didn’t necessarily have to wind up doing what he did. Look at his melodies and his compositions and even the arrangements, and really, there’s a sense of operatic dynamic in him, right? So he’s like…it’s hard to remember, given Ozzy’s huge success, subsequently in the ’80s, but in 1979, Ozzy was deadweight. And they couldn’t finish…they just couldn’t get through their recording, as I recall. I heard some of the back-story when I started to work with them. They were having trouble doing anything, because Ozzy was kind of unfunctional. So they got rid of him.
“And they weren’t selling any records. When I first took over, the first thing I did is I went to Warner Bros. and negotiated a huge increase in their advance. And I remember, the vice president of Warner Bros., who liked me, with whom I negotiated this advance, said, ‘Sandy, you know, we’re going to give you this money, because it’s you’ [laughs]. ‘But if we just blow this money we’re going to kill you. You’re dead.’ I hoped…I liked to treat music that seriously, so they gave me the money, and of course the record went platinum and they were happy. But they were coming off of a sales base of around 200,000 units, which was like way, way, way below what they were selling. And in those days, 1979, 200,000 units was not much. Nineteen seventy-eight had been the biggest year in the history of the music business, because of the devil’s spawn, disco. But it had completely inflated what people thought of as realistic sales. It was one of these revolutions that occurs every once in a while in the music business, that will never happen again. Because there is no music business, thank God. From my viewpoint. But having said that, there was the Summer of Love, there was the English invasion, there was 1978, and there was Nirvana. And in each case, the sales horizons were tremendously inflated, from what they had been before, because new and shocking music was introduced into the repertoire, and the audience was more creative. You just had to have it, and it had not existed before, so they had to have something which was so shocking, including disco, that the audiences were radically enlarged, as the function of this new music. So where were we?
“Right, it’s Puccini in chains,” continues Sandy, not missing a beat. “It is the Ronnie Dio record sui generis. They couldn’t have made it without him. It was a very successful fusion of what he did and what they did, and interestingly enough, if you listen to it, which I’m sure you have, back-to-back with other stuff in their cavalcade of awesome recordings, it has the lightest texture of any record they’ve ever made. I mean, there are various reasons for this. Instead of recording in England and utilizing British recording practices, they recorded in Criteria in Miami [laughs]. My joke about Criteria Miami was that the studio was located near a dock so it was easy to bring the cocaine in. This was the Saturday Night Fever studio, right? The Bee Gees [laughs].
“But I’m not implying anything other than that the studio had a very different sound to what they were used to working with. And the engineering, even though Martin Birch engineered, it’s still the studio. It’s tape machines, it’s boards, MCI equipment, which was built in Miami, and MCI had a very intimate relationship with Criteria, as opposed to Ampex or Studer gear, and API consoles, or 80 series Neve consoles or Helios consoles. If you use an API or a Helios, or an 80 series Neve, you got one sound. But if you used Ampex, or a Studer tape machine, you got one sound, inherently, generated by the equipment—the equipment had a signature. If you used all MCI gear, and the modern monitors that were put into Criteria—I’m sorry I’m not to mention what it was; I think it was a Headway room, but I’m not sure. I don’t want to venture a guess on the monitors, but the whole equipment schedule at Criteria was very different from what they were used to. And you know, such studios would never be built in the UK, but such studios were built in the U.S., for better or worse.
“So they radically changed the piping through which their sound went, and by means of which their sounds were produced. And the record had a shockingly lighter texture compared to what had preceded it. It’s really amazing, how much lighter it is, and it shows up all the time, when I play stuff from Black Sabbath in a row in my classes, for example, if I follow up ‘Iron Man,’ or ‘War Pigs,’ or even ‘Snowblind,’ cocaine [laughs], with ‘Heaven and Hell.’ ‘Snowblind’…one of great guitar solos ever recorded, and it’s double-tracked as well, if you can handle it. I mean, I would sit around and listen to this over and over again and say, ‘This guy is just fucking amazing.’ And even if it’s double-tracked, how is he able to double-track it well enough so it doesn’t unravel the double-tracking, but not so perfectly that we actually get a huge impact from the double-tracking when the two threads of the solos, of the twin solos, diverge? It’s awesome.
“So you play that, and then you play ‘Heaven and Hell,’ it’s like whoa, big difference here. I don’t think for the better. I mean, the record was extremely successful. ‘Heaven and Hell’ was an awesome track, a pure Bruckner track, utilizing the scherzo rhythms of Anton Bruckner—it’s just amazing. If someone was to say, ‘I’m going to create a heavy metal song by sampling big chunks of Bruckner, lay some lyrics on them, and execute them with metal orchestration as opposed to Bruckner’s huge, supersized Romantic orchestra’…it’s actually a paradigm case of the translation of all this stuff, through the lens of the horror film, into…you know, from the nineteenth-century Romantic orchestra to the much smaller, but equally powerful, heavy metal crypto-orchestra.
During the Heaven and Hell era, Ronnie’s stage attire was similar to what we might have seen during his Rainbow days.
Photo by Rich Galbraith
“He’s obviously a songwriting genius,” begins Sandy, asked for his impressions of Geezer Butler. “Because what people don’t realize, it’s Geezer and Tony, right? It’s not Ozzy and Tony who wrote all the stuff. As a lyric writer, Geezer is, in my opinion, I’m on record as saying, from an interview I did with NME probably in 1972 [laughs], once we got past talking about the Grateful Dead, we talked about Black Sabbath, and I described Black Sabbath’s lyrics as sheer genius. I mean, ‘War Pigs,’ who else could do that? [laughs]. And he’s an awesome, fantastic bass player. I hope that there is no Craig Gruber on Heaven and Hell, and I really question whether there is or not. There is some nonsense that is going around on the Web that Craig was so afraid of my lawyers and Don Arden’s lawyers—give me a break—that he would dare not advocate for his rights. I do remember that there was some sort of controversy, which I was not really a party to, when I got there, about Craig Gruber.
“But as I recall, Geezer was in the studio when I got there, and I presume he played all the parts. I mean, they sound like Geezer Butler, mind you, a little faster and less heavy. But a lot of it was actually designed before he got there. So I mean, a lot of it was designed by Dio and Iommi before he got there, or Dio and Iommi and Martin Birch before Geezer got there. But as I said, the studio setup is a major factor in the sound of the record; 80 series Neves or APIs or Helios kind of give you one sound, and MCI consoles…we used to call MCIs More Cuban Incompetence. I can’t remember all that was associated with the room, but there was a particular run of monitors that were used in this room, all in all, which give you a very different sound, and you have to work very hard to work your way around the sound values of that kind of equipment as opposed to the Helios/API/Neve/Studer/Ampex sound value, all of which I love. So those are my values, as opposed to MCI values.”
Asked what Martin Birch brought to the table, Sandy notes that “he certainly brought discipline. Martin Birch is really good at concentrating the minds of the people he worked with. I mean, look at the records he’s made. The next production, of ‘Burning for You,’ was awesome. Now it’s true most of it existed before he showed up to rehearse with the Cult, but he nailed it and made it even better, and I’m very familiar with ‘Burning for You’ [laughs]. And so, given the bands that he’s worked with—the Cult, Sabbath, and Maiden—yeah, I’m not a big Maiden fan, but I think Martin Birch has a tremendous amount of discipline, great engineer, he knows how to extract the most out of the raw materials. He extracts different things out of the raw materials than I would. That’s okay—I can’t argue with his success. Actually, it would have been interesting to see what a recording of Iron Maiden, as recorded and/or produced by Martin Birch, would have sounded like without him. Because the Cult has a whole different sound, all different number of ways, right? And the sound of Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell, is way different from any Black Sabbath album that preceded it. But I would’ve loved to see what he would have done with Iron Maiden, with all the guys, and how he would’ve dealt with that texture, and whether they would’ve actually allowed him to deal with the texture the way he had dealt with it with Sabbath and the Blue Öyster Cult. I mean, with Sabbath, it really is a sea change, if you listen to it back-to-back with the other stuff.”
Next, I asked Sandy if the guys ever expressed any rancor over the sudden success of Ozzy as a solo artist, which we would have started to see about the time of Mob Rules, or certainly six or twelve months later, given that Ozzy’s second solo album, Diary of a Madman, was issued three days after Mob Rules and was soon to be a monster hit.
“I never heard from them. I never heard any jealousy about Ozzy’s success from them, but I heard it from the wives. I heard it from the wives and the changers. But I never heard it from the band—never once, never remotely, did I hear it. But a lot of stuff came from the retainers, because they were their loyal yeomen who had been there since like 1969. They were the Birmingham guys.”
And how does Sandy think Mob Rules stands up to Heaven and Hell? “Well, you know, I don’t know how to compare it with Mob Rules. As much as I love the cover, I don’t think it’s that great. I don’t think it has the same depth of material that Heaven and Hell has. So it’s difficult for me to really evaluate what that all meant. What do you think?”
Proggier perhaps? “Yeah, well, of course, that is, as they say in Italy, getting back to Dio, that’s bacio della morte [the kiss of death], when you say proggy. Yeah, that’s one kind of music that I don’t like. And Tony played in Jethro Tull! I never actually knew this until I was working with them. [Note: Tony was in the band for about two weeks in 1968, documented for all to see in the filmed footage of the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus.] In an unguarded moment, he said, ‘Believe it or not, I was the guitar player in Jethro Tull.’ And I just refused to deal with it, because I was like…Jethro Tull got the metal Grammy, and I have a real problem with the very existence of Jethro Tull, let alone one of my five favorite, and five greatest guitar players, being the member of that…can I call it a band? Is that stretching the envelope a little too much? I don’t know, flute and Tony Iommi together on the same stage? Can you deal with it? [laughs].”