Friday Flashback

Hey! It's Friday! Here's a little ditty some of you might know. Crank this one WAY UP while you're sitting in your office cubicle.

40 years is a long time, but the roots of this next band go even deeper if you can believe it. Originally The Polka Tulk Blues Band, four veteran musicians, formerly of Mythology and Rare Breed, and later named Earth, formed a hard rock blues band in the style of that popular rock sound of the late 60's.

As it turned out, there was already another Brit band called Earth (wonder what ever happened to them?), so inspired by a Boris Karloff horror flick, the band changed names again. Shortly thereafter their unique sound was developed, and was considered alternative and progressive at the time. It flew in the face of the established Peace, Love and Hippy movement, and retained the band's blues roots.

The rest, as they say, is the stuff of legend. While receiving little or no radio play circulation at the time, the band managed to sell over four million copies of their second LP. This second LP is perhaps one of the five most influential LPs of all time, in my opinion. It's big single, the bands only ever Top Ten hit, was actually written at the last minute based on a guitar riff, and recorded in it's entirety in about 25 minutes. Unheard of in this day and age. That single? Paranoid, which became the name of this second LP.

Here's a clip from 1970 in their stripped down, bare bones days, performing one of my favorite songs.



Ozzy Osbourne: Vocals, Tommy Iommi: Guitar, Geezer Butler: Bass, Bill Ward: Drums. Black Sabbath went on to sell over 100 million records worldwide, and they're far from finished at this point. To call them the greatest Heavy Metal band of all time doesn't do them justice. They created Heavy Metal.

~Sham, Quixotic Referee