Sabbath Roots & Influences:
going through allmusic.com Black Sabbaths influences include, not suprisngly, blue cheer, jimi Hendrix, cream, and the yardbirds
Hendrix for his obvious god like guitar, Blue cheer for their almost unheard of rapid sonic furry interpretation of psychedelia, a lot of which you can pick up in the furious rhythms of many Sabbath songs, the yardbirds and cream for their ability to bring hard rock to blues substance. Stangely enough zeppelin was the young phenom who was almost single-handedly put in charge of the yardbirds, initially as a bassist, but when jeff beck, clapton and co. fled the dying band his talent was put to use as lead guitar. I think they did one tour that included an early version of white summer and dazed and confused, i wonder if Iomi was influenced by page when he was in the yardbirds, cuz that'd be kewl.
Zeppelin Roots & Influences:
Zeppelin’s influences are totally different from Sabbath’s: elvis, otis rush, muddy waters, beatles and the rolling stones…
which isn’t suprising considering how varied Zeppelin was with their approach and how much of a gospel/blues freak Robert plant was, whereas Sabbath knew exactly what it wanted to create, the logical extension of acid rock and a direct backlash against hippie culture
Iomi's Guitar:
in terms of guitar play Black Sabbath represents the more rhythmic aspects of metal, with Iomi’s simple, hard, furious repetitive riffs inspired by the distorted, yet coherent and concise, repetitive bombast furry of blue cheer guitarist leigh stephens and the distorted but intricate guitar silliness of Hendrix …
Page's Guitar:
Page brought more complex, multi-layered, guitar solos to Zeppelin with a visible blues influence, a progression of what he did in the dying days of the yardbirds, although distorted and heavy, no where near the crude minimalism employed by Iomi and his finger tip lacking hand,
Sabbath's Rhythm:
There’s not a whole lot I can say about Black Sabbath’s drum and bass rhythm section, but that it worked well for them and seemed to compliment iomis seemingly primitive hard vicous riffs and ozzy’s equally vicious, almost nihilist like vocals
Zeppelin's Rhythm:
Zeppelin’s rhythm section with Bonham on drums and Jones on bass seemed unique, everyone in the band had an appreciation for good music, blues, jazz, and probably even classical, and Bonham could very well be the most cultured and worldy influenced member of the group. He played the drums hard, loud, and as creatively humanely possible, he made people hear him and keep them listening, try listening to a zeppelin song and concentrate just on the drums you’ll see what I mean. His drumming penetrates through everything, but on its own level. I don’t know who it was, but someone in the band in a recent interview referred to Bonham’s drumming like “having sex� and that bout sums it up for me. Mechanical, repetitive, hard, penetrating, but fucking good. Just listen to “Rock & Roll� on IV and be in awe of the best drummer in the world.
Bassist
Jones always seems under appreciated among zeppelin people, sometimes its hard to pinpoint exactly how important he was to the group, but think of “battle of evermore� without his mandolin, think of how the studio recordings and live shows would suffer if Page and Jones weren’t bouncing riffs and solos off eachother. I don’t know if it’s possible to do a bass solo, but if it is then jones has it down pretty damn good. Oh yeah, he did all keyboards for the group too and was pretty much the composer/conductor for the group it seems. Out of all the other members he seems to be the most disciplined
Now the vocals,
Ozzy:
To be honest with you, I don’t fucking know where Ozzy came from, I know he wasn’t out of a wealthy family and that might have something to do with his lyrical content, I also know he probably did a lot of LSD in his time. He might have been influenced by Coven, which was probably the first satan worshiping rock group in history, which oddly enough has a bassist named Oz Osbourne and a song on their debut 1969 album called “Black Sabbath� can you say bizzaro? This was a full year before Black Sabbath’s debut… fucking whacked. Ozzy is nothing without Sabbath and vice versa, fuck crazy train, solo careers suck, …
now back to Zeppelin,
Robert Plant: First time I heard him was on Kashmir and I think I thought he was a woman, to my surprise it was just a red headed skinny man in bellbottoms and an open shirt who hit notes so high that would cause most normal men’s balls to crawl up into their kidneys, and he did this thing with his hand that made me think he was gay, so he might as well have been a woman. … anyways, he was the staple of every other fucking high pitched lead singer of any hard rock or metal group that followed. Nuff said. But if you think about it, he wasn’t all that shocking, a little confused about his sex maybe, but his singing is deeply rooted in blues, like I mentioned earlier. He took blues lyrics and sung them as if it was gospel and as if he was a woman, that’s all. But this is my interpretation in 2003, think about the fucks who had to see Robert Plant and the rest of zeppelin perform communication breakdown for the first time at BBC, I think it was jimmy page who said that he’d never seen more terrified kids in his life. Aside from blues, plant, along with the others in the group were fucking fixated with mysticism, folk lore and fantasy. Which spawned shitload of copy cats in the coming years, but none would come off as genuine as zeppelin and their countless mystic, folk inspired masterpieces
All in all Sabbath and Zeppelin changed rock forever, and then some… did I just fucking type all this? OMG
Kthxreply/retortgg
and if you're wondering why i was compelled to bring this up, it was because i just recently saw some so called "metal expert" on a canadian show called "Play"
he wrote a book about the top 500 metal songs of all time and apparently, Iron Maiden, Slayer and Metallica round up the top 10 with the one saving grace being Paranoid at #1, and absolutely no mention of Zeppelin.. which is odd, because without Plant and Page I doubt you'd have all the shitty hairbands that people think are cool...
