{"id":804073,"date":"2020-02-11T14:21:25","date_gmt":"2020-02-11T21:21:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=950937"},"modified":"2020-02-11T14:21:25","modified_gmt":"2020-02-11T21:21:25","slug":"black-sabbaths-debut-5-things-we-learned-about-its-creation-and-cover-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/black-sabbaths-debut-5-things-we-learned-about-its-creation-and-cover-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Sabbath\u2019s Debut: 5 Things We Learned About Its Creation and Cover Art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Black Sabbath<\/a> changed the world of music 50 years ago this week with their genre-defining self-titled debut. To mark the occasion, Rolling Stone <\/em>put together a comprehensive account of the record\u2019s creation.<\/a><\/p>\n

We spoke with 12 original sources, including the Black Sabbath\u2019s guitarist Tony Iommi<\/a>, bassist Geezer Butler<\/a>, and drummer Bill Ward<\/a>, and several of their collaborators and peers. Judas Priest\u2019s Rob Halford recalled seeing the group when they were called Earth, Ten Years After\u2019s Leo Lyons remembers the band opening up for them, and Status Quo\u2019s Francis Rossi explained how all the bands at the time wanted to be \u201cheavy.\u201d We also tracked down the album\u2019s cover designer, Keith Macmillan, and the mysterious woman in the woods, Louisa Livingstone, for their first-ever interviews about the album art.<\/p>\n

Over the course of writing the article, the people we interviewed told us several stories that have gone either unreported or underreported, even after half a century. Here are five things we learned.<\/p>\n

1. Judas Priest\u2019s Rob Halford saw a big difference in the band when they changed their name from Earth to Black Sabbath.<\/strong>
The four members of Black Sabbath first played together as a six-piece group called the Polka Tulk Blues Band. They fired two members (a slide guitar player and saxophonist) and rebranded themselves Earth. It was around this time that Rob Halford, long before he joined Judas Priest, saw the band live.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cI have vague memories of seeing them as Earth in an obscure club in Birmingham and they were in a sort of heavy blues, jazzy prog mode musically,\u201d he recalled. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t much of anything going on visually to remember. I can only recall the very first Sabbath songs like [Crow\u2019s] \u2018Evil Woman\u2019 which was a cover. There was still some freeform noodling going on when they played live, but essentially the heaviness was dominating. When they became Black Sabbath, they had homed in on their identity more. Tony\u2019s riffs played an immediately stronger role, and they now had a unique character that set them apart from everyone else locally or any other band around. Ozzy looked and sounded special and the dynamic of Geezer and Bill set them up with a sound no one could match.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. The Black Sabbath <\/em>album was written mostly during office hours.<\/strong>
After a short stint in Jethro Tull, guitarist Tony Iommi came back to Earth and told the guys they needed to take things seriously. After seeing how Ian Anderson had led his prog-blues group with an iron flute, keeping regular daytime rehearsals, Iommi suggested Earth do the same. They often started rehearsing at nine a.m. \u201cTrying to get Geezer out of bed at that time in the morning was bloody hard, but we did, and we rehearsed, and we really worked at it then because it just felt that we had something to work for,\u201d Iommi said. \u201cI\u2019d left a big band at that time, so to come back to our band, it was like, \u2018Oh, blimey, he\u2019s come back. We better pull our socks up.\u2019 And I think everybody felt like that, including me.\u201d<\/p>\n

3. Geezer Butler wrote the lyrics to \u201cBehind the Wall of Sleep\u201d literally behind a wall of sleep.
<\/strong>The title of this quasi-psychedelic song echoes that of an H.P. Lovecraft short story (\u201cBeyond the Wall of Sleep\u201d), but the bassist said that nearly everything about the song came to him in his subconscious. \u201cI was reading \u2018Beyond the Wall of Sleep,\u2019 and actually fell asleep and dreamed all the lyrics and the main riff to the song,\u201d Butler said. \u201cWhen I woke up, I wrote down the lyrics, played the riff on my bass so I\u2019d remember it \u2014 we didn\u2019t have any recording devices back then, so everything had to be memorized \u2014 and played it to the others at rehearsal.\u201d<\/p>\n

4. Album cover artist \u201cKeef\u201d originally tried to make the sleeve sexy but decided that wouldn\u2019t work.<\/strong>
When Vertigo\u2019s in-house album art designer \u201cKeef,\u201d whose real name is Keith Macmillan, first heard the Black Sabbath<\/em> album, he was struck by how dark it was \u2014 and he knew exactly where he wanted to shoot the cover: a 15th-century watermill in the English countryside. For the past 50 years, Macmillan has shied away from interviews \u2014 he\u2019s done just two prior to speaking with Rolling Stone<\/em>, only because he had to \u2014 and he told us that this was his first \u201cvoluntary\u201d interview, because he liked Black Sabbath so much.<\/p>\n

Macmillan revealed that he had originally tried a few different setups with his model, Louisa Livingstone, where she was nude but then thought better of it.  \u201cShe wasn\u2019t wearing any clothes under that cloak because we were doing things that were slightly more risqu\u00e9, but we decided none of that worked,\u201d he says. \u201cAny kind of sexuality took away from the more foreboding mood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Livingstone, who also has never given an interview about the album cover, told Rolling Stone <\/em>that her most vivid memory of the shoot was how cold it was. \u201cI had to get up at about 4 o\u2019clock in the morning,\u201d she said. \u201cKeith was rushing around with dry ice, throwing it into the water. It didn\u2019t seem to be working very well, so he ended up using a smoke machine. It was just, \u2018Stand there and do that.’\u201d<\/p>\n

5. The album\u2019s recording sessions almost ruined a cartoon being filmed in the studio upstairs.<\/strong>
Audio engineer Tom Allom recalls that London\u2019s Regent Sound Studio was located beneath a prestigious studio that used to make TV ads. \u201cThey did a lot of animation, which meant the camera dolly had to stay totally still while they moved the objects that they were animating,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I got a phone call going, \u2018What\u2019s going on down there, Tom?\u2019 Geezer Butler\u2019s bass was playing havoc with this great, heavy film dolly. It was just waltzing across the floor. I had to say to Geezer, \u2018I\u2019m very sorry, but this studio is only \u00a310 an hour, but up there it\u2019s \u00a3100, and they\u2019re getting a bit cross.\u2019 I had to persuade him that we had to put his bass direct into the board, instead of using an amp, and he didn\u2019t like the idea of that until he heard the playback and he said, \u2018That\u2019s the first time I ever heard my bass on a recording.\u2019 Coming out of the amp, it just sounded like this great sort of big, flatulent, flabby sound.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more stories about how Black Sabbath made their world-changing opus, read our epically thorough deep dive on \u201cHeavy Metal, Year One.\u201d<\/a> <\/em><\/p>\n

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Popular on Rolling Stone <\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Black Sabbath changed the world of music 50 years ago this week with their genre-defining self-titled debut. To mark the occasion, Rolling Stone put together a comprehensive account of the record\u2019s creation. We spoke with 12 original sources, including the Black Sabbath\u2019s guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward, and several of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-804073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-23 00:55:42","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804073\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}