![]() Sabbath had already put a little distance between themselves and reality. The love-ins and protests were all in vain.” A lot of my lyrics were my disappointment that the love era was just a pipe dream. But by the time we wrote the Paranoid album reality had set in. I went to the love-ins at Woburn Abbey in sixty-seven and sixty-eight, with kaftan, beads, and flowers in my hair. “I was really into flower power in the sixties. His long-running blog is MayoNoise (opens in new tab), where this article was originally published.“I was scared stiff that we’d be dragged into Vietnam, and World War Three seemed a very real event,” Sabbath’s bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler says, a half-century later. Let me know what you come up with.īob Mayo was the frontman for thrash metal legends Wargasm (opens in new tab), and is currently planning a third album from his Robot Monster Army (opens in new tab) project. And if anyone out there wants to take a crack at it, go for it. The inexplicable disappearance of these titles from subsequent US pressings, and the fact that these titles never appeared on any album covers (just on the labels) has made these ‘songs’ the stuff of legend and added to the dark mystique of early Black Sabbath.įor you skeptics and/or agnostics who would prefer your Sabbath remain dark and mysterious, I will submit that I have not examined these titles for secret messages, biblical codes or mathematical formulas. ![]() ![]() ![]() These troublesome titles have caused confusion and consternation among fans and collectors for decades – at least for those who were aware of their brief existence – but no more. So there you have it: we’ve cracked the Sabbath Code, solved a decades-old riddle and uncovered hidden dimensions in the understanding of Black Sabbath’s essential catalog. To save you the trouble of learning how to read music notation and/or spending fifteen bucks a pop on the songbooks, I’ve provided a rundown of Sabbath’s mystery songs, along with some pointers to understand exactly where and when they occur on each album.Īs you’ll see, some of these tags make perfect sense, while others seem quite random… the intro riff from Lord Of This World gets a title, but the intro riff from Under the Sun doesn’t?īut again, the band only needed to choose two or three sections to name in order to reach that magic number of ten titles per record. While the titles and their sequencing on the early Warner Brothers record labels provided clues, understanding exactly where these ‘songs’ reside is a futile exercise… unless you can read music. Through the precise language of music notation, the Hal Leonard songbooks express these delineations explicitly, marking exactly where all of these ‘songs’ begin, end, and in some cases, reprise. Where does The Elegy end and After Forever begin? Hal Leonard Publishing, the music notation juggernaut, produced ‘easy guitar’ songbooks that were published concurrently with each of the Sab’s first five albums, and are still in print today.Īll of our phantom songs are included in these books, each of which provides ultimate confirmation of exactly where these musical mysteries reside. So: Extra song titles were added to each of Sabbath’s first five US releases to satisfy a stateside publishing deal. Ward was likely referring to their US publishing deal, as each Sabbath album that had less than ten titles listed on the UK version contained ten or more titles when released in the US.įor confirmation that these ‘extra’ titles were added after the albums were recorded, one only need to check out the handwritten track notes on the original tape boxes for the Sab’s first three albums (reproduced in Sanctuary’s 2009 CD reissues), which indicated that these titles were not in use during the recording sessions. The Warner’s deal for the US afforded the band an opportunity to negotiate a new publishing deal, and more songs = more publishing money, for both band and publisher.īill Ward has himself once responded to an interview question regarding these titles by stating that the band needed a minimum of ten songs per album to satisfy the requirements of their publishing agreement.
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