The Sound of Pure Evil

This is simply to inform you that the disc 2 of Black Sabbath's Past Lives album is the most evil live album ever recorded. (actually it is pieced together from a number of shows they did in the US before 1978 or so.) Every time I listen to Master of Reality or Vol. 4 and start to want to just pick up the guitar, turn the distortion and volume way way up and just make the same notes much heavier and crashier, well it turns out Ozzy and the boys were way ahead of me on that thought, and that's how they made their live shows sound. Whether it was deliberate or a product of the sound facilities they had, the low-fi, sheer electric fright effect they created in these live recordings really has the effect of making you believe you're in an old warehouse in the middle of industrial London with a leaky roof and live wires on the floor and this insane force at one end of the room creating the most charged and emotional music you've ever heard are there and they're scaring you to death but you love them all the more for it. And then there's the fact that Ozzy was so drugged up at the shows (At one point in the album he just starts yelling “Are you high? Are you high? so am I!!”) that you think he might just believe himself that Iron Man might come crashing through the wall and crush everything, and he was simply providing the proper soundtrack for something like that to happen. After Sabbath, and after about 1980 or so, the idea of heavy metal music became codified and the rules were set out, and it ceaces to carry the force of a thousand peace-and-love destroying warheads that a single dark image painted in an old Sabbath song would have. The low-fi production and sound of the time was exactly what I always wished I had the ability to hear live, so I'm loving this album.

The opposite side to it all, however, was the fact that Ozzy, even back then, really souned like he loved the fans who came out to see their shows. When he'd say "I love you all" you really felt like he meant it, that he was thanking them for being there. You never quite got that feeling from singers who didn't venture near the precipice of dark imagery that Ozzy did. They would sing about love but didn't feel that love in their hearts for the people watching them perform. Now, that certainly isn't a requirement to make good music, and I'm usually the one decrying too much importance being placed on musician's personalities, but it really is striking in this case, and is what made Sabbath unique, that Ozzy especially just felt as lost and disillusioned with the world as the people who often discovered his music back then, and that it was a totally symbiotic relationship. Do you think Robert Plant would ever start gushing back at a hysterical fan, both telling each other how much they mean to them? Likely not.

Anyway, I don't usually find I can listen to live albums when I can hear the studio album songs much more clearly, but this is an exception and it captures everything that you miss just by hearing the well-crafted studio albums.
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