Sabbath continued to blow the unholy horn of plenty with albums three and four. Paranoid also afforded Sabbath their first measure of controversy after an inquest was made regarding an American nurse who committed suicide while listening to the LP for many, the name Black Sabbath would become synonymous with Satanism throughout the '70s and '80s. Deeper yet no less immediate cuts like the air-raid siren-led, politically charged "War Pigs" and the trippy, mellow doom anthem "Planet Caravan" revealed a group that had far more creative gas in the tank than its detractors would have cared to admit. charts and sold over four-million copies in the U.S. Released just seven months after their debut, Paranoid, the very antithesis of the sophomore slump, would spawn two of their biggest singles in "Iron Man" and the nervy, hard-hitting title track, the latter of which would be the band's only Top Ten hit - the LP went straight to the top of the U.K. With the surprise success of Black Sabbath, the band wasted little time in getting back into the studio. Top 40, eventually going certified platinum. Top Ten and hold court for over a year on the U.S. Flush with eventual genre classics like "The Wizard," "N.I.B.," and the aforementioned title cut, Black Sabbath was initially dismissed by critics - retrospective reviews were far more reverent - but it managed to reach the U.K. The record was released on Friday the 13th, which helped kick-start the band's reputation for populating the fertile crime scene that is history with plenty of blood spatter. Only a handful of guitar overdubs - Iommi's signature sound was lent considerable gravitas by the fact that he tuned his guitar a half-step down to provide some slack for a pair of fingers that saw their tips removed in a factory accident - along with the rain, thunder, and tolling bells that so effectively introduced the group to the world, would be added later. Released on Vertigo Records, the more progressive subsidiary of Philips/Phonogram, the bulk of the Rodger Bain-produced LP was recorded in a single day. The resulting "Black Sabbath," a funereal slab of blast furnace-forged dread built around the augmented fourth/tritonic interval, better known as the devil's interval, would serve as the opening volley on their explosive eponymous 1970 debut.
The transition from Earth to Black Sabbath took place the following year, after Osbourne and Butler penned a song that was inspired by the 1963 Boris Karloff horror film of the same name. They enlisted the services of Butler and Osbourne, both of whom had played together in a group called Rare Breed, and by the end of the year they were operating under the moniker Earth. The band formed in 1968 under the ill-fitting name the Polka Tulk Blues Band - Iommi and Ward, who had just left the pub-blues outfit Mythology, were looking to take the genre in a more robust direction.
There were various reunions and partial re-formations of the first Black Sabbath lineup, aiming to recapture some of their early evil energy on later period outings like 2013's 13. This untouchable original lineup was responsible for metal masterpieces like 1970's Paranoid, but when they splintered in 1979, Black Sabbath soldiered on with a cast of various, different singers while Osbourne applied his prince of darkness persona to a successful solo career that would span decades. From the end of the '60s and throughout the entirety of the '70s, the band became legendary for the doomy chemistry between its players: Ozzy Osbourne's primal vocals, Tony Iommi's seismic riffing, Bill Ward's bluntly powerful drumming, and Geezer Butler's thunderous basslines all congealed into a sinister breed of hard rock and occult-fixated songcraft the world had never heard before. A metal institution whose influence cannot be overstated, Black Sabbath pioneered the genre as they constructed the framework for subsequent subgenres within metal, with entire movements rising from blueprints laid out in single Sabbath songs.
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