"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."
--H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key
He was the face of heavy metal, and its soul. If not its brightest talent its center, the sun around which the rest of the metal universe revolved. His charisma was off the charts. The world turned out to see him and Black Sabbath off in Birmingham, which you don’t do for assholes.
I think some of Ozzy’s solo material is overlooked. Certainly not “Crazy Train,” “Bark at the Moon,” “Mr. Crowley” or “Mama I’m Coming Home,” but how about “Fire in the Sky,” “Mr. Tinkertrain” or “The Ultimate Sin”?
As I noted in my Black Sabbath post our metal heroes are dying off, and the list is getting longer. Lemmy, Dio, EVH, Paul Di'Anno, and now Ozzy. That’s how it goes, none of us are getting out alive.
It makes me sad of course, but also reflective, and expansive. Paradoxically death opens my heart. See enough of it, and you realize life is too short for grudges and pettiness and trying to “own” each other. How about more celebration of the good, of reading and taking a few notes from the “Diary of a Madman” who wrang every fucking bead of sweat out of this life?
Maybe if we can all stop hating each other for five minutes and realize that we’re walking a finite and short path on a spinning ball of rock in the darkness of an unfathomably massive void we’d all be … a little happier? Or at least more appreciative of the miracle of our own lives. Ozzy had his dark moments and transgressions and addictions, but the outpourings of support confirm a few common traits: He laughed a lot, he cared about his friends, and he was hopeful.
My grandfather had fabulous foresight. After WW2 he and his buddy bought a piece of property in the lakes region of New Hampshire and built a pair of cabins that still stand today, with modifications. It’s an inspiring story of wartime service and family sacrifice you can find here on the blog.
We still have the cabin. It’s passed through a couple generations and today I’m a 1/5 owner. My extended family splits the cost of utilities, taxes, maintenance, etc, and we all put in for vacation weeks in the summer.
I’m currently in the midst of our week away. I didn’t realize how much I needed it until I saw the lake, and felt an unseen load lift from my shoulders. It had been too long.
My company has an unlimited PTO policy, which means you can take as much time off as you want (with approval). What this ideal scenario means in practice is often less time off. Guilt and the protestant work ethic are powerful forces. I hadn’t’ taken anything beyond a few scattered days off this year. But right now I’m enjoying a whole lot of little. Pontoon boat rides, Old Fashioneds, the mournful wails of loons.
I’ve put blogging on hold too, but this morning as I was sitting out on our deck listening to the wind sighing through the maples and ripple across the water I was inspired to write something I could reasonably shoehorn onto the blog.
Here’s a few swordly and sorcerous updates.
I enjoyed a visit from Tom Barber. Tom and I get together at least once a year but typically at his house. This year I invited him to the camp and took him out on a leisurely pontoon boat cruise. We got caught up on everything in his life, including the loss of his beloved partner Terri. Tough times for Tom but he seemed to leave in good spirits.
After a span of more than a decade I watched The Whole Wide World with my wife and daughter. I loved it; they liked it although they found themselves annoyed by Bob’s erratic behavior and creeped out with his relationship with Hester. This is a very well-done movie and it left me choked up, but I can see the issues it can cause for an outsider with no context for Howard’s life. For example, there is no mention of the extremely late payments from Weird Tales, which we now know greatly impacted his mental health. But you can't expect too much from a 106 minute film and there is some fabulous acting by Zellweger and D'Onofrio. I enjoyed this revisit of Cross Plains.
I’m reading Andrew J. Offutt's Sword of the Gaels and finding it fun. The first two chapters are absolutely fantastic, setting up the reader for a late Roman Empire/Viking Age historical … that suddenly takes an unexpected left turn into the weird. Cormac and his crew are shipwrecked on a seemingly deserted rocky isle and discover a fortress that seems out of another era, evoking deep ancestral memories of Atlantis and snake-men:
Unfortunately some 70 pages later I can feel a bit of sag that plagues so much long-form S&S. It seems hard to sustain swordplay and fast pacing and lack of character interiority over a few hundred pages. We’ll see what else Offutt can do with the rest of the book.
I read a draft of David C. Smith’s Cold Thrones and Arcane Arts. This is a new title in the works from Pulp Hero Press that offers analysis of what makes sword-and-sorcery fiction tick—what it is, and what it does well when it’s at its best. Interestingly Smith spends most of the page count on new S&S, authors like John Fultz and Schuyler Hernstrom and John Hocking and Howard Andrew Jones and many, many others besides. I suspect this will be well-received in the community although I did offer up a few ideas for expansion and revision. Some inspired stuff here.
Written storytelling has a unique and curious aspect. If a story has a great enough impact, re-reading it can take you back to a distinct place and time in your life, even decades later. It’s a power that I don’t think movies quite possess, perhaps because of the images you form in your brain while reading.
After a span of 40-odd years I re-read Monster Tales, and once again was Werewolf Boy.
This proved to be a fun collection, obviously written for adolescents though it certainly has sharp edges. Every protagonist is a kid and few have happy endings. The 70s “hit different” man.
I enjoyed some of the stories more than others. The standouts included “Torchbearer” and “The Call of the Grave.” “Wendigo’s Child” by horror veteran Thomas Monteleone was pretty good too, if a bit telegraphed.
I also remembered “The Vrkolak” though I remembered it being better. It reads like a PG version of Friday of 13th with Jason swapped out for a giant toad, and murder replaced by scaring a nasty camp counselor half to death.
But the story that most captured my imagination was Nic Andersson’s “Werewolf Boy”, both now and then. I am plagued with a lousy memory but somehow I recalled most of the beats. I think what makes it memorable was my identification with the protagonist, Stefan, a young boy who is treated with a cruelty that stays with you.
(spoiler alert coming)
The story is set long ago in medieval Europe. Stefan is caught out in the woods coming home at night with a puppy. A sadistic local baron is out hunting with his cruel hounds Arn and Bern and tree the young boy. As he reaches for a branch Stefan drops his helpfless pup to the ground. And watches in horror as the hounds tear it to shreds.
To add injury to insult, the baron calls Stefan down, strikes him cruelly across the face with his whip, and rides off laughing.
That’s some callous shit and a shock for anyone to read, but especially when you’re eight years old or so.
But vengeance is Stefans. He encounters a hideous old witch in the woods (she’s missing her nose, which we find out is also the baron’s doing), and asks if she’ll cast a spell to grant him revenge. She does, but not without great cost. The spell turns the boy into a werewolf—and also costs him his soul.
Memory is not just a recall of facts, but also of feelings, emotions. It can be unlocked by a certain smell, a sound—or a story. It can even make you... transform.
As an adult, I found myself shape-shifting, into 10 year-old me. I remembered being shocked by the baron’s cruelty, then (and now). I remembered reveling in Stefan’s vengeance, and thinking how cool it would be if I could become a werewolf, and take care of a few childhood problems of my own.
The bits in the story of Stefan’s transformation from boy to beast and development of a shocking new power and inhuman sense of smell are well-rendered. The fights with Arn and Bern are a slightly less bloodless but no less ferocious version of something in The Call of the Wild. And so were burned into my memory, there for the retrieval--and re-living.
“Werewolf Boy” is an effective little tale and I was pleased to re-read it. And equally pleased to learn that it had the same effect on at least a couple other readers. While searching for details about the author I came across a couple threads where folks who had also read the story long ago were asking if anyone could recall it from its details.
Evidently this story holds a stranger power over more people than just myself.
Anyway, I'm glad I finally have a copy of Monster Tales, and equally pleased to become a werewolf boy once more.
This past weekend I was away celebrating the long July 4 holiday. My extended family is fortunate enough to own a seasonal camp on one of the small lakes that dot southern New Hampshire like lapis lazuli under the mountains. We watched fireworks on the beach, puttered around in the pontoon boat, drank spirits, and forgot about life for a while.
But my mind kept wandering. Far away, to Birmingham, England, where an old greying band dressed in black was taking the stage one last time. Saturday was “Back to the Beginning” and the beginning of the end for a band near-and-dear to my heart.
I’m talking about Black Sabbath, of course.
If you believe Rob Halford and Ozzy Osbourne (who wouldn’t? they are our metal gods, infallible, their word comes from on high), heavy metal’s distinctive sound and look derived at least in part from the sound of clashing steel machinery and billowing fire and smoke of the iron foundries of Birmingham. Birmingham was among the principal engines of the industrial revolution of the mid-18th/early 19th centuries. After the Luftwaffe bombed the shit out of it in WW2—which come to think of it is very fucking metal—it rebounded with a period of economic growth, before beginning a slow decline in the 70s.
Against this curtain of dirty steel and fire heavy metal was born.
Ozzy was born in Aston, a ward in the city, in 1948, growing up in a row of terraced houses. Not a lovely place to spend your childhood. “Unless your life’s ambitions was to work in a factory, killing yourself with all-night shifts on an assembly line, there wasn’t much to look forward to, growing up in Aston. The only jobs to be had were in the factories,” he says in his 2009 autobiography I Am Ozzy.
From this cauldron of crashing iron, molten steel slag and urban decay came Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, the alpha and omega of heavy metal. And others besides. Ozzy escaped the slaughterhouse in which he worked, and hitched to Tony Iommi his star quickly ascended.
Sabbath is regarded as the first metal band by almost everyone; if you think it was actually someone like Blue Cheer you are more than a little pretentious; if you think it was Led Zeppelin you’re an amateur but us metalheads can work with you, young grasshopper, and get you on the path to enlightenment. Those bands made metal sounds, sprinkled in metal chords, and sometimes wrote metal songs: “The Immigrant Song” is thoroughly metal, for example. But Zeppelin as a whole is not. They are blues-based rock. Likewise Blue Cheer may have made songs with heavy metal elements, but they did not start a movement. Black Sabbath did, by going all in with the sound and the look, consistently, album over albums. Their self-titled album debuted on Feb. 13, 1970, and with it heavy metal was born.
If a band is to be considered heavy metal it must embrace that identity all the way--thematically, visually, and most of all, unapologetically. Without irony, unless you are Steel Panther or GWAR. This describes Black Sabbath. The quartet of lead vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, founder and lead guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward, and bassist Geezer Butler, went all-in with crunching, guitar-forward riffs, demonic imagery and lyrics. To get a sense of his sound and how different Black Sabbath is than say, the Rolling Stones—who rock hard but are not heavy metal—you must listen. Words are inadequate. I recommend pulling up “Into the Void” on Youtube or Spotify. You might at first think you’re stoned; the drawn-out intro is downbeat, slow, murky. Coupled with a trippy album cover you might think you were listening to some obscure act who had their heyday at Woodstock and burned out on acid. But then, suddenly, at the 1:14 mark, the song takes a hard right turn into the primal. A primitive downshift to an entirely new type of thing altogether. If you have a pulse this is guaranteed to cause a few involuntary reactions. Your mouth will harden into a rigid, righteous attitude. Your lips will purse. In short order your head will begin nodding to Ward’s driving drumbeat. You may break out into air guitar, mimicking Iommi’s inimitable guitar tones, or you may air drum, swinging your arms to hit an invisible snare. No one seems to play air bass but if that’s your thing, have at it. Go do this now; I’ll wait here. If you experience no involuntary reaction to “Into the Void” or “War Pigs,” you are not metal and never will be.
Sabbath were the torchbearers for metal from 1970-1976, putting out classic after classic album including their self-titled debut, followed by Paranoid (1970), Master of Reality (1971), Vol. 4 (1972), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), and Sabotage (1975). Sabbath’s distinctive sound came from its tuned down guitars; Iommi needed to loosen his guitar strings after losing the tips of two fingers in an industrial accident (a story that is so metal it has passed into legend, or True Myth). Although they received little commercial airplay Black Sabbath built a massive following with hits like “Paranoid,” “War Pigs,” “Iron Man” and “Children of the Grave.” Their sound would influence subsequent waves of American thrash bands across the Atlantic, including the most commercially successful metal band ever, Metallica. Said Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich during Sabbath’s Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony,:“Bill, Geezer, Ozzy and Tony, if it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be here. Obviously if there was no Black Sabbath, there would be no Metallica. If there was no Black Sabbath, hard rock and heavy metal as we know it today would look, sound and be shaped very, very differently. So if there was no Black Sabbath, I could possibly still be a morning newspaper delivery boy.”
Sabbath was also the first metal band to feel the unending attacks of self-righteous and pretentious critics, who were unable to appreciate this groundbreaking genre of music because they had their heads jammed firmly up the Beatles’ asses. Rolling Stone critic Lester Bangs in September 1970 panned Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut—the same album that launched thousand metal careers and today remains a stone-cold classic—with the following bucket of ice water: “Over across the tracks in the industrial side of Cream country lie unskilled laborers like Black Sabbath, which was hyped as a rockin' ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap, something like England's answer to Coven. Well, they're not that bad, but that's about all the credit you can give them. The whole album is a shuck.”
55 years later the laugh is on him. Apparently all 45,000 tickets for the concert sold out in 16 minutes. I was giving the streaming pay-per-view serious consideration but again, family comes first.
Sabbath’s last live performance as the original four was at Ozzfest in 2005, although a new incarnation picked up in 2006 as Heaven and Hell (I do consider H&H Sabbath in all but name—Iommi drives the boat, Chief. Not Sharon).
But no original four for a stretch of 20 years. Until Saturday, when they took their final bow. Back in Birmingham, as it should be.
Seated on his black throne Ozzy managed to summon some of his old power and haunting vocals, the unmistakable keening wail. I was pleasantly surprised by their performance, both the Sabbath final set and Ozzy’s solo material prior. Seeing him struggle through “Mama I’m Coming Home” brought a tear to my eye. I think he was struggling because of the words and what they represent, not the effort.
Some of the old guard summoned some great performances, too, pieces here and there I’ve been able to catch. Slayer was great. Steven Tyler was fantastic though he did not perform any Sabbath songs. Metallica rocked (“Johnny Blade”? Are you kidding? Awesome). Jake E. Lee, Nuno Bettencourt, and KK Downing shredded. I was also impressed by some young blood/Yungblud. Whew, that dude can sing. I’ve heard great things about Rival Sons cover of “Electric Funeral.”
I haven’t seen all the performances yet, just what I’ve been able to find on YouTube. I’m sure there will be some special DVD release and I’m looking forward to seeing it in full.
We also had some great recorded performances. Jack Black’s School of Rock version of “Mr. Crowley” made me smile, and nod… and cheer. He played it straight, rare for him. Over the top in an early 80s Ozzy tribute costume, but not straying into buffoonery or mockery, and he sounded great. I’ve already mentioned Judas Priest’s cover of “War Pigs,” which was sort of a separate thing though obviously timed for the show.
I don’t believe another metal band will ever receive this sort of all-star sendoff. Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and Metallica are rivals in influence (though I think Sabbath still gets the nod here) and Metallica is more commercially popular, but by the time Metallica retires—they are still in their early 60s and could have another solid decade ahead of them—the old guard will have slipped away, either into musical senesce or their mortal coil. We won’t have Slayer and Steven Tyler to perform; we won’t have Judas Priest to create a video tribute.
Metal is going, boys. Its passage had already begun with the deaths of Ronnie James Dio and Lemmy, but with Sabbath’s departure from the stage we’re truly seeing the beginning of the end.
And it makes me sad.
Classic heavy metal is tied to the romance of my life. Growing up I discovered its magic. For me heavy metal was a release from conformity. When I joined the ranks of metal warriors I wasn’t scared; I was part of something powerful, unique, wild, weird. I wore the denim, and the black.
“Myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, that you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a good average for that to happen—but actually, in the individual life, it differs greatly. Some people are late bloomers, and come to particular stages at a relatively late age. You have to have a feeling for where you are. You’ve got only one life to live, and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.”
I was reminded of everything I love about myth in a recent reading of The Power of Myth. Published in 1988, the book is an extended conversation between Joseph Campbell and television journalist Bill Moyers (who just passed away last month) that took place in 1985 and 1986 at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch and the Museum of Natural History in New York. Portions of the interview were aired in a six-hour PBS series, which proved wildly popular at the time and led to a Campbell revival. The interviews spanned more than 24 hours and The Power of Myth is the complete edited transcript.
Campbell passed away just a year after the interview and The Power of Myth serves as a repository of his thinking late in life. I’m glad we have it. I cannot do justice to his unique intellect except to say he understood humanity at a level few have before or since. His great genius was in comparative mythology. Campbell spent a lifetime studying the great myths of all the world and came to find they shared much in common. People across cultures and ages are different, but also struggle with the same concerns and problems—the aimlessness of youth, the difficult transition from childhood to adult responsibility, aging and death. And these common stories become encoded into myth.
The Power of Myth is not Bulfinch’s Mythology. It is not a history of the myths, but instead addresses their metaphysical aspects: What are myths? Why do we need them? How have they come to endure?
I spent much of my life walking around in a fog, consuming music, books, porn, social media, whatever. Never turning inward; never attempting to come to grips with my unconscious self that ruled my actions like an unseen hand on the tiller. Myths offer a way out, into a higher plane of existence, because they make you look within, where the answers lie, and where the dragon waits. This is the hero’s journey and one we all must undertake. I have personally experienced it, and see the same story and archetypes and patterns play out again and again in the broader culture.
Jung and Campbell have somewhat fallen out of favor today. We have a blossoming field of neuroscience plumbing the depths of the human brain at a physical, biochemical level. I suspect the scientific community would consider the idea of a shadow self or the collective unconscious unscientific, speculative, lacking empirical support. But they continue to provide a working model of the human psyche and development that speaks to me, deeply. I have to come to believe in dualism. Mind and body are separate though related. Although concepts like love and honor and pride are not physical objects they exist, and so are of no less import than physical matter. We need abstract symbolic language to navigate the concrete world. Myths offer the roadmap.
The real quest is within, our foe to be conquered is the unexamined life, the un-individuated self. We believe our lives will be fixed if a certain politician gets into office or some bill is passed; we are mistaken. The hard truth is that no calvary is coming over the hill; we must accept the burden of accountability, which is paradoxically liberating. Says Campbell:
“Ultimately, the last deed has to be done by yourself. Psychologically, the dragon is one’s own binding of oneself to one’s ego. We’re captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon, break him up, so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships. The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down … Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That’s the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing.”
As Jung said in The Undiscovered Self, “A million zeroes joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit of our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations.” Adds Johnson: “You have to have some sane people as individuals before you can talk about community. Otherwise you have a community of sickness.”
This is not a call for selfishness; it’s a call for living an authentic life and then sharing the bounty outwards. Being curious about other people’s lives; expressing true empathy. This is the truth at the heart of the Holy Grail myth, in which the knights set out each on their own path, entering the Forest Sauvage at their own entry points. Per Campbell:
“The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste. It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. And that is what T.S. Eliot meant in his poem The Waste Land … the Grail becomes the—what can we call it?—that which is attained and realized by people who have lived their own lives. The Grail represents the fulfillment of the highest spiritual potentialities of the human consciousness.”
Once we have found ourselves, we help others. That completes the circle. Perceval recovers the Grail only after he formulates the question to the wounded Fisher King: “What ails thee?”
“The question is an expression, not of the rules of the society, but of compassion, the natural opening of the human heart to another human being,” Campbell explains. “That’s the Grail.”
It’s not easy, but life is hard, and has always been thus. But Campbell chose to play it. His lessons are worth reading. "I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera--except that it hurts".
On a bit of a lighter note, if you’re a Star Wars fan The Power of Myth contains some insightful analysis of the film. For example, Campbell describes Darth Vader as an unformed man, undeveloped as a human individual, but is instead a bureaucrat living for an imposed program (Lucas was a big Campbell devotee and Star Wars an homage to his teachings). Vader’s monstrous mask is a symbol; when taken away his “strange and sort of pitiful undifferentiated face” is laid bare.
They knew well enough what was happening. But even to themselves they pretended that all was well, for the food was good, they were protected, they had nothing to fear but the one fear; and that struck here and there, never enough at a time to drive them away. They forgot the ways of wild rabbits. They forgot El-ahrairah, for what use had they for tricks and cunning, living in the enemy’s warren and paying his price? They found out other marvelous arts to take the place of tricks and old stories. They danced in ceremonious greeting. They sang songs like the birds and made Shapes on the walls; and though these could help them not at all, yet they passed the time and enabled them to tell themselves that they were splendid fellows, the very flower of Rabbitry, cleverer than magpies. They had no Chief Rabbit—no, how could they?—for a Chief Rabbit must be El-ahrairah to his warren and keep them from death: and here there was no death but one, and what Chief Rabbit could have an answer to that? Instead, Frith sent them strange singers, beautiful and sick like oak apples, like robins’ pincushions on the wild rose. And since they could not bear the truth, these singers, who might in some other place have been wise, were squeezed under the terrible weight of the warren’s secret until they gulped out fine folly—about dignity and acquiescence, and anything else that could make believe that the rabbit loved the shining wire.
--Richard Adams, Watership Down
Generative AI = the shining wire.
Still time to escape to a new warren over the hill, if you are willing to brave the journey.
My friend Ken Lizzi, one of the dudes with whom I split a house rental at 2023 Robert E. Howard Days, is having his Cesar the Bravo fiction collected and kickstarted by Cirsova. Cesar, a sometimes-condottiero and a bravo by trade, has earned a reputation as one of the best swords for hire in the city of Plenum. If you need a foe humiliated before a cheering crowd, he’s your man!
This collection includes 5 previously published adventures plus an all-new full-length novel! Ken is a good dude and a good writer. Get in on that today.
I'm giving Old Moon Quarterly a shot. I bought one of their issues recently and now am kickstarting issues #9-10. One of these is Arthurian themed which ticks a lot of my boxes. I'm liking the aesthetic of this publication. As I write this entry I can see they've met their funding minimum and now we'll see what else they might unlock. Maybe Excalibur from the stone?
Digging the Celtitude.
Speaking of great aesthetics, DMR Books has published Celtic Adventures, with one of the best covers I've seen. This reminds me I still need to pick up Swords of Steel vol. 4. Some awesome reprints in this one, including the likes of REH and Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur, whose "Vengeance" in DMR Books' Viking Adventures I could not put down.
