Coverocktober Song #16: "Black Sabbath" by Type O Negative

Well folks, we've reached the ultimate week of Rocktober, which means it's Halloween week!  And that means the Coverocktober songs from here on out will be songs that feature dark, macabre, or creepy themes.  So let's start with one of the all-time perfect Halloween week songs:  "Black Sabbath."

This is one of the rare examples of an eponymous song off an eponymous album.  As the title track and first track from Black Sabbath's 1970 debut album, "Black Sabbath" is just a creepy, badass song that announced a new genre of music.  Can you imagine what this must have sounded like in 1970?  Less than two months after the end of the '60s and flower power, heavy metal was born with this song.  It starts off with rain and some distant church bells, perhaps in a quaint village in the English countryside.  And then plunges into the devil's triad -- an inverted tritone (I have no idea what that means!) that was very rarely used in music because it was said to summon Satan.  It doesn't get any more metal than that.  But then it does.  Ozzy's voice is chilling, and the lyrics are chilling, describing a figure in black pointing at the narrator, who tries to run away.  Turns out it's Satan, and he's smiling.  That's never a good sign.  The lyrics were inspired by a now-infamous metal legend, experienced by bassist Geezer Butler a couple years earlier.  He had painted his apartment black -- as one does when he is obsessed with the occult -- and he had, among other things, a black occult book that Ozzy had given him, which was written in Latin (obviously) and contained various pictures of Satan.  Butler put the book on a shelf next to his bed before he went to bed one night.  Then he wakes up in the middle of the night to see a giant figure in black standing at the end of his bed and pointing at him.  After the figure disappeared, Butler got up and the book was gone.  Now I would have immediately painted my room a different color and removed all occult books from my flat, but Butler wrote a song instead -- and we thank him for that.

The original is a classic, but I assure you, it's not as creepy as New York goth metal band Type O Negative's cover, which closed out the 1994 Black Sabbath tribute album, Nativity in Black.  Type O Negative transforms the song with their cover, going full-on doom by ramping up the Satanic references, adding weird sound effects and chants, and slowing the song down to a snail's pace.  Lead singer Peter Steele's deep voice is the stuff of nightmares on this song.  Type O Negative's version makes you feel like you're trapped in a bog, trying to escape from some cannibalistic cult in the middle of the night, but you can barely move through the sludge, and they're closing in.