Black Sabbath: Born Again

Black Sabbath: Born Again

1983

Warner Bros Records

Format I Own it on: Vinyl

Track Listing: 1. Trashed  2. Stonehenge  3. Disturbing the Priest  4. The Dark  5. Zero the Hero  6. Digital Bitch  7. Born Again  8. Hot Line  9. Keep it Warm


This cover is considered to be one of the worst album covers of all time...Man, I can't disagree with this enough...I'm telling you this is my favorite album cover ever...Just looking at that garish red demon-baby against the most purpley purple background I've ever seen, makes me so deliriously happy...I might just write a novel on how much joy it brings me...

I think it has so much impact on me, because I can recall, as clearly as if it were yesterday, my first time seeing this cover...I was probably about 7 or 8 years old, and I remember staring at it with a mix of awe, revulsion and sheer wonder...It was so beautiful..It felt so primal,  forbidden and funny...

As for the album itself, this was released after "Live Evil" (which I've never heard, because the thought of Dio singing Ozzy songs is a horrifying thought, for some reason...)....



There was some band dispute (rumor has it over mixing "Live Evil") that resulted in Dio and Vinny Appice leaving the band, and Sabbath replaced him with ex-Deep Purple front-man Ian Gillan. Bill Ward was back also, after sitting out "Mob Rules." The resulting album is a bit of a mess...Sometimes in the best possible way and other times in the worst...

Listening to it immediately after the sleek n' shiny "The Mob Rules"  just about spun my head around...The guitars and bass are stirred together into some thick, black soup, the drums sound so over-echoed and lost...Like they're being played from the bottom of the Grand Canyon...But against all odds the muted, sludgy production is a big plus...It sounds so grimy, dank and evil...After the  theatrical menace of the Dio years, this sounds a bit like the old black magic they used to summon back in the  early Ozzy days...

The biggest problem with the album is that sometimes the band doesn't play to Ian's strengths, and  he comes across as either lost or unintentionally hilarious...But that said, I honestly love the blazing opener "Trashed." Easily, one of my favorite Black Sabbath songs...I think it works so well because it comes across as the scuzz-rock version of "Highway Star."  It's a style that is a perfect fit for both Ian and Black Sabbath...

Really, all of side one is cool..."Disturbing the Priest" starts off with Ian's evil cackles, that remind me of the guy in the local haunted house that's trying too hard to scare you, and comes across as cute instead...But once the song gets going it rules...The odd production was such a smooth fit for "Trashed" that it's easy to overlook it, but on this track things are beginning to get strange...It marks the moment when you have to  grapple with the reality of the record..This is where you'll either find yourself sufficiently  intrigued to keep exploring  or where you're going to shut it off and throw it in the trash...

Good call on not shutting it off...The bizarre "Zero the Hero" is next...The "What's it gonna be Brutha.." chorus summons "The Macho Man" Randy Savage to mind. but the endless lanscape of towering riffs is your true reward...

Toss in some of Ian Gillan's trademark hilariously surreal lyrics and you have a wonderful conversation piece for your Friday Night Record Party....

"Your face-down life ain't so much of a pity
But the luv-a-duckin' way you're walkin' around the city
with your balls and your head full of nothing
it's easy for you sucker but you really need stuffing..."

WTF?

 A fascinating side one to be sure...Now what's odd is that I'm scraping to find anything good to say about  side two..."Digital Bitch" is good for a laugh but that's about it...One of the worst Black Sabbath songs...I'd rather listen to "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" or "FX' than this...

(I didn't mention it in the "Vol.4" post, but I actually kind of enjoy :""FX"...It seems like it would fit in pretty good at the end of side one of Sun Ra's "Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy"...

)

The title track is pretty cool actually...Sounds like one of Deep Purple's more atmospheric epics...Big and icy...And again, the lyrics...

"The grey and plastic retards all floating in circles
And as you taste the fruits of new sensations ..."

When you hear this delivered so emotionally over the chilling,watery backdrop it's so wonderfully surreal...Every time I hear this track it becomes more enigmatic and fascinating...

That said they probably should have ended the album here...Made it  a mini-album or something..."Hot Line" is unbearably irritating...All of Ian's faults are on full display here...When he relentlessly pours on that hammy, banshee wail for the last couple minutes of the song it takes all my power to not life the needle form the record and toss it...."WOHHH-HHH-HHH-HAAAA-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-A-!!!!!"

Your enjoyment of  "Keep It Warm" will directly correlate with your enjoyment of Guns N' Roses power ballads...If hearing "Patience" or "November Rain" makes you wanna throw your bra onstage, then you'll probably enjoy this...I'm going to wait until they play "Disturbing the Priest" to throw mine...

...Oh yea, I almost forgot to mention the band's legendary "Born Again" tour...



This was the tour when the band decided to build a replica of Stonehenge for the stage set and dressed a  dwarf  as the demon-baby...There are two different (and equally hilarious ) takes on what happened....First we have Ian Gillan's side of the story:

"We were up at a company called LSD (Light and Sound Design) in Birmingham, and the lighting engineer asked if anyone had any ideas for a stage set. Geezer Butler suggested Stonehenge. "How do you envisage it, Geezer?" asked the engineer. "Life size, of course," replied Geezer. So they built a life-size Stonehenge. We hired the Birmingham NEC to rehearse in and they couldn't get these bloody things in there. We opened in Montreal and Don Arden had hired Maple Leaf ice hockey stadium for a week, so they shipped the set over there and could still only get a few of those damn stones up, one each side of the stage, one behind the drums and two cross-pieces. The album was called Born Again and had the most vile cover I've ever seen, a new-born baby painted red with yellow finger nails and two little yellow horns sticking out of his head.

Now, I've not been able to remember a single word of any of the Sabbath songs, I don't know why but they won't go into my head. So I did myself a prompt book and wrote out the first lines of each song. I don't normally use monitors but I had two wedges put at the front of the stage just to hide my book, and I'd practices turning the pages with my foot at home in the kitchen. No problem. On the last day of the rehearsal we're wondering what this dwarf is doing hanging around backstage. When we do the dress rehearsal the dwarf emerges in a red leotard, long yellow finger nails and little yellow horns. He's going to be the baby.

Then we hear this horrendous screaming sound — they've recorded a baby's scream and flanged it—and suddenly; we see this dwarf crawling across the top of Stonehenge, then he stands up as the baby's scream fades away and falls backwards off this 30 foot fiberglass replica of Stonehenge onto a big pile of mattresses. Then dong, dong — bells start toiling and all the roadies come across the front of the stage in monk's cowls, at which point War Pigs starts up. By now we can see the kids are either in stitches or wincing in horror.

After spending 40 grand a day to achieve all this, someone had economized by not actually trying out the dry ice in the afternoon run through. So as I stride confidently towards my prompt book, not even knowing the first word of the song, I'm suddenly shocked to see a chest-high cloud of dry ice is berating me to the front of the stage. So there I am after this big opening, kneeling down, swatting the air and trying to read me line, popping my head above this cloud every now and then. Someone shouted "It's Ronnie Dio!"

  Alright..That' pretty great...So according to Ian it was Geezer's fault for saying he wanted the Stonehenge to be "life sized." So what does Geezer have to say?

"It had nothing to do with me. In fact, I was the one who thought it was really corny. We had Sharon Osbourne’s dad, Don Arden, managing us. He came up with the idea of having the stage set be Stonehenge. He wrote the dimensions down and gave it to our tour manager. He wrote it down in meters but he meant to write it down in feet. The people who made it saw fifteen meters instead of fifteen feet. It was 45 feet high and it wouldn’t fit on any stage anywhere so we just had to leave it the storage area. It cost a fortune to make but there was not a building on earth that you could fit it into."

Either way they constructed a 30 foot tall Stonehenge just to celebrate an atmospheric instrumental that's under 2 minutes long...That's why this album is so great..Ian Gillan's one and only Black Sabbath album is spotty, but at the same time everything about it is so interesting...

So let's check out "Trashed" by Black Sabbath...Enjoy...