Black Sabbath: Forging a Genre

Band Photo: Black Sabbath (?)

The St. Petersburg TImes' Philip Booth caught up with Geezer Butler on their Pittsburgh stop of Ozzfest and wrote an interesting article on the band's origins. Here's a snippet:

Jazz and blues, surprisingly enough, served as musical grist for the early Black Sabbath, as Ozzy Osbourne recently told Rolling Stone. The group, at one point, included a saxophonist and a bottleneck-slide guitarist.

So how did the quartet of working class teenagers from Birmingham, England, make the transition from tunes influenced by Cream, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Jethro Tull to the dark, bone-crunching likes of Iron Man and Paranoid?

In a word: jamming.

It was a matter of survival, Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler said recently from a tour stop in Pittsburgh.

Read the full article at St. Petersburg Times.