Flush with eventual genre classics like 'The Wizard,' 'N.I.B.,' and the aforementioned title cut, Black Sabbath was initially dismissed by critics - retrospective reviews were far more reverent - but it managed to reach the U.K. The record was released on Friday the 13th, which helped kick-start the band's reputation for populating the fertile crime scene that is history with plenty of blood spatter. Only a handful of guitar overdubs - Iommi's signature sound was lent considerable gravitas by the fact that he tuned his guitar a half-step down to provide some slack for a pair of fingers that saw their tips removed in a factory accident - along with the rain, thunder, and tolling bells that so effectively introduced the group to the world, would be added later. Released on Vertigo Records, the more progressive subsidiary of Philips/Phonogram, the bulk of the Rodger Bain-produced LP was recorded in a single day.

The resulting 'Black Sabbath,' a funereal slab of blast furnace-forged dread built around the augmented fourth/tritonic interval, better known as the devil's interval, would serve as the opening volley on their explosive eponymous 1970 debut. The transition from Earth to Black Sabbath took place the following year, after Osbourne and Butler penned a song that was inspired by the 1963 Boris Karloff horror film of the same name. They enlisted the services of Butler and Osbourne, both of whom had played together in a group called Rare Breed, and by the end of the year they were operating under the moniker Earth. The band formed in 1968 under the ill-fitting name the Polka Tulk Blues Band - Iommi and Ward, who had just left the pub-blues outfit Mythology, were looking to take the genre in a more robust direction. There were various reunions and partial re-formations of the first Black Sabbath lineup, aiming to recapture some of their early evil energy on later period outings like 2013's 13. This untouchable original lineup was responsible for metal masterpieces like 1970's Paranoid, but when they splintered in 1979, Black Sabbath soldiered on with a cast of various, different singers while Osbourne applied his prince of darkness persona to a successful solo career that would span decades. From the end of the '60s and throughout the entirety of the '70s, the band became legendary for the doomy chemistry between its players: Ozzy Osbourne's primal vocals, Tony Iommi's seismic riffing, Bill Ward's bluntly powerful drumming, and Geezer Butler's thunderous basslines all congealed into a sinister breed of hard rock and occult-fixated songcraft the world had never heard before. A metal institution whose influence cannot be overstated, Black Sabbath pioneered the genre as they constructed the framework for subsequent subgenres within metal, with entire movements rising from blueprints laid out in single Sabbath songs.

Black sabbath band members