Children of the Grave

The riff arrives at a gallop. This is not the slow, suffocating doom of early Sabbath. “Children of the Grave” drives forward. Tony Iommi downtuned his guitar a step and a half, pulling the pitch toward C, making the strings easier to bend and the sound heavier than anything rock had produced. Bill Ward’s drums push underneath rather than plodding. The song moves. Ozzy Osbourne called it “the most kick-ass song we’d ever recorded.” He was not wrong. The riff goes where it wants to go and nothing slows it down.

Iommi had lost the tips of two fingers on his right hand in an industrial accident. It happened on his last shift at a sheet metal factory in Birmingham, the day before Black Sabbath were to start their career as a full-time band. He nearly quit music entirely. Then he listened to Django Reinhardt, the jazz guitarist who rebuilt his technique after a caravan fire destroyed two fingers on his left hand. Iommi fashioned prosthetic fingertips from a melted plastic bottle and fitted them with thimbles. He tuned down to reduce string tension. Every riff Iommi wrote after that came through pain and the workarounds it forced.

Master of Reality peaked at number five on the UK Albums chart and number eight on the Billboard 200. Critics dismissed it at the time. Rolling Stone’s Lester Bangs called it “monotonous.” Within a decade those same critics would watch Sabbath’s influence reach everywhere. Billy Corgan later said Master of Reality was the album that “spawned grunge.” Rolling Stone eventually ranked it number 234 on their list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The album came out fifty-five years ago today. They called it monotonous. They were wrong.