2017 - September 23 - Embryo/Children Of The Grave

1971 also brought us the third album from Black Sabbath. There are several standout tracks on this album, but I have chosen one that really highlights Bill Ward, the unsung hero of Black Sabbath - and the only member not present on the final tour due to a contract dispute. It got ugly. But his drumming is a huge reason they were as successful as they were. Just listen to the tom work on Children of the Grave - although you have to enjoy the intro, simply known as Embryo first. .

August 7 - Black Sabbath

I don't remember how old I was, but was visiting my good friend Stig Erik when his brother Jan Olav come in to his room with music we needed to listen to. I am assuming I was around 11 or so, and it was going to change my musical taste forever. The album was Black Sabbath's debut album, named Black Sabbath, and the song also happened to be called Black Sabbath. Thunderstorms and church bells. It was a sense of doom I never had experienced before.

Fast forward a few years, and my cousin Stein was spending some time with us in the summertime. We ended up in the bargain basement of Playtime, the best record store Trondheim ever saw, and while he found a leather bound copy of No Remorse by Motorhead, I picked up a 4 lp box of Black Sabbath's first four albums called Hand of Doom. It was a Spanish pressing, so I believe the song titles were listed in Spanish as well.

Today's song is that very first song that Black Sabbath presented to the world on their debut album. Please enjoy Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath, originally released in 1970.

January 26 - Holy Diver

So Sunday, Jimmy Bain died. He was 68. Now, I am thinking that some of you might never have heard his name before, but he was a very influential bass player, who stood by Ronnie James Dio's side on some of the most significant moments of Dio's career.

When Ritchie Blackmore walked out on Deep Purple in 1975, he initially teamed up with Ronnie James Dio and the majority of Elf, which was the band Dio was fronting. Elf had been produced by Roger Glover and Ian Pace of Deep Purple, and Blackmore had ample time to get to know them as they were a support act for Deep Purple. After recording their first album, Ritchie Blakemore's Rainbow, Blackmore fired everyone except for Dio, and started recruiting new members: Tony Carey on keyboards, Cozy Powell on drums, and our man of the day, Jimmy Bain on bass. This lineup only lasted for one studio album, but what an album it was! Rainbow Rising is one of the best hard rock albums ever released, with long and intricate songs, great musicianship throughout, and Dio's voice soaring. I am even willing to forgive the lyrics because of the greatness of the music.

In 1982, Dio had spent a couple of years in Black Sabbath, but as they were mixing Live Evil, tensions mounted and he decided to leave, taking drummer Vinnie Appice with him. Vivian Campbell took on guitar duties, and when it came to finding a bass player, Jimmy Bain was the one he turned to, and this is also when I started discovering Dio.

I believe it was in 1984 that my school marching band, Strindheim Skoles Musikkorps, went on a band trip to Stavern, a small town in the southern part of Norway. As usual we stayed at a school, which I remember as a having white stucco-like exterior. One of the sax players, Bård Olsen, was also developing into a great guitar player, and he brought his guitar, which I believe was bright green, and a practice amp, and he and another of the older kids in the band (in Norway, the marching bands are often tied to the elementary schools and completely extracurricular and volunteer run) were playing and singing. At one point, Bård was playing this incredibly catchy riff, clearly in a minor key, but more menacing than sad (I wasn't aware of key signatures at that point - that awareness has come later), and the singer belted out lyrics that stuck with me from that very day: "Holy diver, you've been down too long in that midnight sea..."

A little later I picked up the album because that song kept on playing over and over in my mind. Dio's début album was called Holy Diver and had hit the record stores in 1983 - but by the time I had picked it up, it was available in the bargain basement of Playtime for NOK 49.50. I know this price by heart, because a majority of my records were purchased at that price. That's also when I started reading record covers - and thus I found Jimmy Bain.

So today I am saddened by the loss of a great bass player. According to his Wikipedia entry, he co-wrote the title track, Holy Diver, although in the credits, only Ronnie James Dio is listed. Since this is the song that introduced me to both Dio and Jimmy Bain, I leave you with Holy Diver.

January 15 - Paranoid

I really had hoped that I would have a song about a mixtape I could put in here, because that is really what this project is all about. As I stated on January 1, my goal is to bring you one new song every day - and hopefully tell you something more about me with each song. That way I hope this blog really lives up to its tagline: The music of my life - or my life in music. The entries from 2016 should really be the soundtrack to my life. That soundtrack would be something like my ultimate mixtape.

I have set some rules for myself - but not too many, and please don't hold me to them.

1. The songs need to be meaningful to me
2. The songs need to be triggering a post - although I will let the posts trigger my songs as well
3. I need to own the songs myself (they are a part of my personal record collection)
4. The songs I share are officially released versions

#4 is by far the most difficult to follow for me, as YouTube is filled with audience recordings that often are far more interesting than studio recordings or officially released live recordings, which often include overdubs and are not representative of what the band truly is capable of on stage. Also, I won't always have personal anecdotes to share, so I have to take brief breathers from time to time with respect to how much I put out there.

All that being said, the song that represents my ultimate mixtape today is a song I originally had on one of my less planned and more "accidental" mixtape. Back in 1984, the Cosby Show was on TV at home, but I also had a radio show to listen to. Every Saturday night (or early evening, to be precise), the radio show Heavyrockmagasinet aired. And every Saturday, I made sure I had a tape with at least some blank space in the radio/tape deck. On one of my first mixtapes like this, I distinctly remember having the song Paranoid by Black Sabbath (I am thinking it might still be around somewhere in my parents' basement. This last year, the song Paranoid showed up on a new release - but this time by Kylesa, a sludge metal band from Savannah, Georgia I discovered right around the same time I discovered Baroness. If you wonder what sludge metal is all about, just remember the tempo of Black Sabbath's Paranoid - and then compare that to this:

Intermission

Yup. I know I want to write more about my radio days - and it is coming regardless of whether you want it or not. However, Ronnie James Dio recently passed away, and I thought it necessary to spend a couple of minutes with this little giant. He was always the size of an Elf, which also happened to be the name of one of his first bands, but he packed a giant voice in that little body of his.

I first encountered Dio very indirectly. It was on a band trip to Stavern, in the southern part of Norway. We stayed at a school, sleeping on the floor in a class room. I believe the school was white, and against this white backdrop, a long-haired guitar player who I believe played the saxophone and a short-haired (read buzz cut) singer (also a sax player, I believe - although I am a little more fuzzy about that) ended up looking like silhouettes. The guitar player was playing a riff that was as powerful as it was simple, and the singer belted out lines that have been with me ever since: "Holy diver, you've been down too long in the midnight sea..."

I was hooked. Instantly. I didn't buy the album right away - as this would have been around the time it was released, but I ended up buying the record in the basement of Playtime, which also set the stage for my second chance encounter with Dio. I wrote about both Playtime and this chance encounter with Dio in an earlier entry. Later I discovered that Dio not only had played with Ritchie Blackmore (in Rainbow), but that he also sang for Black Sabbath on two studio albums and one live album, making him one of three singers who spent time with both Ritchie Blackmore and Tony Iommi, two of hard rock/heavy metal's early guitarists who developed and set the standard for what heavy metal guitars should be all about. The other two are Ian Gillan and Glen Hughes, who both spent time in Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Dio immediately made his mark on Black Sabbath as well, as is evidenced by the song Heaven and Hell from 1980:

When Ronnie James Dio died after a fight with stomach cancer on May 16, he finally lost the fight against the dragon. This image has been recurring in many of his songs and albums - heavily inspired by fantasy and wizardry long before Harry Potter made it fashionable. I remember trying to decode the lyrics to The Last in Line, and I could not understand what he meant by "we're off to the witch, we may never, never, never come home but the magic that we'll feel is worth a lifetime." 25 years later and far more proficient in English, it makes more sense, although I sometimes do believe he lost meaning in the imagery in his songs.

I never met him. I never even saw him in real life. But I still feel his loss. A great voice is silenced, but his music will live on.