Black Sabbath and Tony Iommi

Where did the term "Heavy Metal" come from? Most people point to the lyrics of the 1968 Steppenwolf song, "Born to be wild."

Specifically, this line:

"I like smoke and lightning...heavy metal thunder..."

Ultimately, who knows!

More importantly, who cares? Even if the term came from the Steppenwolf song, I know who hammered the nails into the coffin and sealed the fate of the music world inside of it...that "hard rock" or "heavy metal" would endure basically forever, much to the ire of music critics who were in love with Led Zeppelin but looked down their nose at the likes of Black Sabbath.

In the early days of Hard Rock there was a concept of Heavy and Light, the band names "Iron Butterfly" and "Led Zeppelin" instantly spring to mind as examples. On the first two Black Sabbath Albums, there was a whole lot of "Iron" and "Led," but very, very little "Butterfly" and "Zeppelin." No, it was, as one reviewer in a guitar magazine I once read, "Sturm und Drang." (Not to be confused with the Finnish metal band "Sturm und Drang" which probably took their name from that article on Black Sabbath.)

The man with the hammer in his hand, that would influence so many other people in the years to come was none other than Black Sabbath's Guitarist, Tony Iommi. Along with Bassist Terence "Geezer" Butler and Drummer Bill Ward, both of which had a hand full of nails in their hand in their own right - they changed "Hard Rock" forever. Ozzy Osbourne, Vocalist as everyone knows, also played a large part in securing the whole Heavy Metal concept and he, possibly more than anyone else up to that time, defined what a "Front Man" was going to be in years to come. He also played Harmonica better than Jim Morrison. 8-)

Mr. Iommi has been called, "The Godfather of Heavy Metal" and anyone who has heard The First Four Black Sabbath Albums might tend to agree if they are honest. It doesn't matter if you like that genre of music, "Heavy Metal," the fact remains, it was the bludgeoning riffs and power chords from Tony Iommi that would spawn hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other people to pick up a guitar and try to figure out what this unique British Gentleman was squeezing out of a thin Gibson SG and a Laney Amplifier cranked up to ear-hemorrhaging levels. A few of those inspired people went on to make music of their own.

One online interviewer asked Tony Iommi if he ever met Jim Morrison of The Doors. Iommi said that he was too stoned to remember. Another interview with an "expert" on The Doors stated that Black Sabbath was billed to open for The Doors on August 31, 1970 at the Montreux Casino in Montreux, Switzerland but The Doors canceled the show. They were canceling a lot of shows back then, primarily due to Jim Morrison's personal excesses, as usual. I have been unable to find out if the concert ever took place at all. It would have been an interesting show, to say the least. Two guys with very distinctive guitar styles both playing Gibson SGs, Robbie Krieger of The Doors and, of course, Iommi. Oh, and enough gloom and doom between Black Sabbath and The Doors to easily fill a mental institution.

I cannot remember if I was six or seven years old, I heard this song on Baltimore's premier (at the time) rock station, WKTK. It started out with these heavy bass drum beats, like a heartbeat...or footsteps... Then the strangest thing happened, this incredibly bizarre sound came out of the speakers.

I'm sitting there and the hook was in me and I didn't even know it yet. After those nine bass drum beats there are three reverse bends on the E string (open).

You pre-bend the E string, open, by placing the index finger of the fretting hand behind the nut at the top of the guitar's neck. And you pick the note and slowly release the tension on the E string. Then you can give it a slight shimmering vibrato by vibrating that string behind the nut. When you combine this with a screaming high gain amplifier that is distorting, you get what you hear at the beginning of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man."

That was it man! The power chords that came after that, just this stomping song the likes of which I had never heard before...and I was hooked forever.

I grew up listening to OLD COUNTRY MUSIC which is totally different from the pablum-like Pop-Meets-Poop that passes for Country Music today (With a few noticeable exceptions, of course...).

Songs like, "Young Love" by Sonny James, "I Never Picked Cotton" by Roy Clarke AND Johnny Cash, "He Stopped Loving Her Today," by George Jones and so many more I could list them for the next hour and not cover half of them.

Being thoroughly indoctrinated into the syncopated, popping, CHUGGA-CHUGGA and TWANG! of the country guitar, I was most intrigued by this distorted, dirty and incredibly sinister sound that a guitar could be coerced, if not tortured, into blasting out.

I still love Old, Classic, Country Music to this day which, in my opinion, has more to do with Hard Rock than new Country Music does with anything...

I love music. I don't care what kind of music you love as long as you love something musical. I don't have much use for people that hate music. How can you have a soul and not love music?

Some of us have been through unpleasant things and we don't necessarily enjoy happy music which is more like ingesting Zoloft than simply living with the way things are combined with our own personal experiences.

Who is this Man with the Gibson SG?

This Gentleman is not Tony Iommi, nevermind the Gibson SG and the almost spooky similarity in appearance the way this guy's head is turned. This is none other than Donald "Buck Dharma" Roeser of Blue Oyster Cult. Blue Oyster Cult was always a bit more progressive in some ways, more than I had a taste for...however, songs like "Don't Fear (The Reaper), Godzilla" and "Burnin' for You" are Heavy Metal Classics. I happen to love them. "Cities on Flame (with Rock and Roll)" and Blue Oyster Cult's cover of The Doors "Roadhouse Blues" are favorites as well.

"Godzilla," in particular, almost pays homage to Black Sabbath's stomp-festival song "Iron Man." As a matter of fact, when Blue Oyster Cult has played Godzilla live, they start the song off with heavy bass drum stomps, footsteps...they play it much in the way Iron Man starts out. The power-chording in Godzilla has such a similar feel to Iron Man. I'm not saying that they ripped Sabbath off, either. As a matter of fact, they toured together in 1980 - what could possibly be one of Heavy Metal's most wonderfully titled shows, "Black and Blue."

Donald Roeser actually sang Don't Fear (The Reaper), Godzilla and Burnin' for You, very talented man.

Today...

I remember walking out of the bedroom and into the living room and seeing that second plane slice into that building. I cannot even remember if that was one of the multiple replays, I believe I watched that live on television. If not, it was within five minutes of it happening because it felt like an eternity before I watched that first building come straight down into the ground.

I was not really surprised because it had to happen sooner or later. Pearl Harbor wasn't the last, after all. I was stunned at the magnitude of it all.

Then the second building came down.

I turned to my Wife and asked her if she had filled out a money order for some bill we had coming due and when she said she had not, I told her we better go and cash it in. We did, we went outside and it was just such a beautiful sky. They had already started to shut the airspace down across the country, we did not know that yet. I believe we heard about the Pentagon being hit when we were in the car and that ratcheted up our own anxiety quite a bit as they could have flown over our apartment on the way to striking that target.

The news reports of that morning had us looking up, there were reports of three, then two and then...finally...one more plane unaccounted for as I recall. I wondered if they would shoot that one down, surely they had to be doing something along those lines.

We cashed the money order so we would have the extra money in case this was an extended, catastrophic incident. We went to the grocery store and purchased even more food and other necessities just in case but everything turned out all right for us. For a few thousand American Citizens, the day did not end well.

Here is to remembering them. No empty jingoism, no nothing else except remembrance and sadness for the loss.

Cheapskate Survival Kit for 2008-2009

Back about eight or nine years ago, I wrote an article for my website titled - "The Cheapskate Street Survival Kit." It has been one of the more popular articles I have written.

Originally, I was reading about young women being attacked at colleges across the country and, in general, people complaining that really excellent gear...well, it costs a lot of money!

Now, thanks to one arsch-hut hurensohn, going on a killcrazy rampage at Virginia Tech...I don't know that I could suggest that you carry anything in that environment (college) now. That is to say, I don't want to be held responsible if you get caught but the general idea a long time ago was this, campus police, like all law enforcement, cannot be everywhere at once. They're not god, after all. To further that line of thought, there was a micro LED light from Inova at the time, an extremely inexpensive fixed blade and a Comtech Stinger which is a rather interesting and very effective little impact weapon.

The continuation of the idea was to use the light to check things out in your general area and if someone jumped up in your face or otherwise tried to drag you off, hit them with everything you had in the face, when they covered up, keep hitting them, kick them - do whatever you have to do! Immediately escape from the area and as you are doing so...you have the fallback of something even more serious in the form of a knife.

That's a condensation of ideas that were going on when I wrote it, the basic idea was...try to make people safer. I know the criticisms abound, "They should be taking Krav Maga!" Or insert your martial arts flavor of the week, month, year or decade...that's true. But you can get some degree of safety now and something like boxing or Krav Maga can then make you hell on wheels with a Stinger in your hand...or perhaps a Kelly Worden Designed "Travel Wrench."

The Boker "Camo Defender" is a steal at twenty bucks. It was also designed by Terry Trahan!The overall length of the pocketknife is 7 3/4 inches and has a blade length of 3 3/8 inches and it weighs just over 6 ounces. Aluminum scales with a steel liner, the knife is rock solid and has three opening devices, a cutout, a stud and a flipper than can be used in a wave-like manner if you are carrying it with the tip oriented up. With four carrying positions, a four position clip, you should be able to find something that suits you.

The bottom portion of the flipper is a guard, so this should put to rest the most paranoid among us when it comes to being cut by liner lock failure. The liner lock is not an easy lock to produce and this one looks really, really good and I have literally examined worse on knives that cost (literally) twenty times what this one costs. This one is sharp as a straight razor, just the way knives should be.

It also has areas where skateboard tape-like sections grip your hand. I modify knives all the time with a 3M product to gain a better grip on knives.

The pictures say it all!

Letalis Urbanus I

I just wanted to post some thoughts on the Urban Survival Series below. Those posts were written about three years ago or so. At least three years.

After I obtained them once again, I was going to edit them and take out the minor profanity which is real world and funny but not necessarily the right "feel" for a book.

I did not edit them before re-posting them here. I like them that way to be honest. I think people can handle a little adult language on adult subjects. Especially when the statement is not only true but humorous as well.

There are opinions that have changed and information in the Series that should be tweaked, for example...

Purell mixed with Aloe Vera is a better choice for an antibacterial hand wash because alcohol is a drying agent and it can crack your skin open which allows more germs to potentially enter your body. The spread of MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) makes this a very important thing to consider. Yet, the Purell with Aloe Vera in it as a skin moisturizer is not a very good emergency firestarter. So, you can carry both, it's really not that problematic to do so.

Flashlights are always changing, Nichia LEDs which can be found in Photon Freedom MicroLights and Energizer Penlights are really excellent lights to have in your kit. Now we have high output Cree LED flashlights which are performing at over 100 lumens for two hours or more on two AA batteries, yes, you are reading that correctly. This is amazing!

I posted the following on a forum August of last year.

Most of the time when you buy a flashlight from a company that makes batteries...well, it usually sucks in my experience.So, it was with much caution that I put down ten, hard-earned dollars on a penlight from Energizer. Like Steve McQueen, I toss pennies around like they are manhole covers.I am pleased to say that this little LED penlight apparently has a better switch than the Streamlight Stylus, it still has the exposed LED like the Stylus, but that's a small complaint.It sips power, as you would expect from an LED flashlight and the AAA batteries will be easier to obtain than the bizarre AAAA batteries of the Streamlight Stylus.The Energizer penlight is easily five to perhaps seven times brighter than the Stylus. In fact, I have a Chinese made Dorcy that is a monster (in size) for an LED and takes a carriage that holds three AAA batteries and this Energizer penlight is almost as bright as the Dorcy.I picked mine up at Office Depot, look for the Energizer Flashlight display, not just a battery display.You will NOT be disappointed with this penlight, it packs a wallop, you would be able to see someone hidden in a dark parking lot at 100+ feet with this thing.

RIGHT NOW, as of September 1, 2008, The Energizer Penlight is the BEST BUY for an every day LED flashlight. When I originally posted that, inevitably, someone had to come in and say, "So and So is selling a blankety-blank light and..."

This light is attractive because it is a penlight Oftentimes, hammerheads that frequent forums just start posting without thinking or they are defecating on everything in order to pump something for someone else. Penlights are attractive because they are in the form of a fat pen without being as cumbersome in diameter as a Mini-Maglite and the true penlight is sans head. That is not to say I don't use the venerable Mini-Maglite. I have converted the two I currently own to LED status and on one of them, I have the anti-roll accessory on the head and then I placed a flip-up red lens attachment from a circa-1992 Sure-Fire 9P flashlight, an Old Boy for sure...

A lot of the gear that is valuable to us like Messenger Bags and various daypacks from Maxpedition to Dana Design have something called pen loops, which, contrary to popular opinion, have nothing to do with Penn & Teller, magic's answer to Jay & Silent Bob. A blowhard and an enabler.

I paid $10.00 for one at Office Depot and I highly suggest you go out and get yourself a couple of them. You can see two of them in the pictures above - one next to the folding knife from Boker on the right hand picture and next to the Motorola Razor...more on the Boker folder...soon. There is a new Cheapskate Survival Kit for 2008...

8-)