They called the album War Pigs and even commissioned a cover showing a soldier with a sword and shield. They also started smoking weed around this time, resulting in wild songs like "Iron Man" and "Fairies Wear Boots." After cutting nine songs, they felt they were done. Many of the songs were born during jams on the road during their first tour. The band's three most famous works, "War Pigs," "Iron Man" and "Paranoid," are all from this one record. The track listing of Paranoid looks like a greatest hits collection. Gillan left the group as soon as the tour ended, though he remains tight with Tony Iommi. The fusion of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath yielded some very nice songs. (They even had a mistakenly sized Stonehenge prop.) All that said, Born Again is far from a musical disaster. The demon baby artwork has been called the single ugliest album cover of all time, and the tour was such a disaster it inspired This Is Spinal Tap. This extremely brief period of Black Sabbath has been mocked for years. He was clearly the best man for the job, and in 1983 they entered the studio to cut Born Again. Luckily for them, Deep Purple were on hiatus at this point, and Ian Gillan was looking for a gig. Doing it a third time seemed virtually impossible. Scoring a huge album with a second singer was almost a miracle. This was their second high-profile vocalist to leave the band in just three years. Image Credit: Courtesy of Vertigo Recordsīlack Sabbath briefly went into crisis mode when Ronnie James Dio quit the group. "It was a bitter time for us." Despite the endless problems, the LP has some very nice moments, particularly the title track and "A Hard Road." "It's hard to relate to that album," says Iommi. They started from scratch, but nobody was really happy. "We have a studio booked and no singer!" They played with Walker on a single TV show and cut a few songs with him, but then Ozzy came to his senses and returned. "We were grasping at straws," Iommi wrote in his memoir Iron Man. A burned-out Ozzy quit the group shortly before recording, so Tony Iommi turned to Dave Walker. The Ramones opened for them on their last tour, and the band started to realize their sound was a little passé. It was their eighth album in as many years and they were simply tapped out, not to mention terribly hobbled by cocaine and alcohol abuse. Instead, Dio split when he refused to open shows for Ozzy Osbourne's retirement tour they used Judas Priest singer Rob Halford for a few shows, and then everyone left but Iommi and Butler, who stayed on to paste a new lineup back together for the marginally better Cross Purposes.The original lineup of Black Sabbath was on its last legs when they went into the studio to cut Never Say Die! in early 1978. Dehumanizer isn't terrible, but it should have been the sign for the band to call it a career. At least he doesn't sing about dragons, but it wouldn't be that much worse than what is here. "Computer God," "TV Crimes," and "Master of Insanity" are all decent songs that are tanked by his cheesy "contempt for humanity" lyrics. And instead of Butler's classic doom-laden lyrics making their triumphant return, Dio takes on the writing duties and manages to pen some true stinkers. The bandmembers do craft enough good riffs to make songs like "Time Machine" and "After All (The Dead)" at least sound interesting, but they don't deliver a "Heaven and Hell" or "E5150" like they could have. "Sins of the Father" is a good example they attempt a "Children of the Sea"-type slow jam with the same ringing guitar and up-tempo vocals, but the hook is just not there and the band sounds like its creative wheels are spinning in place. But they cannot seem to overcome the challenge of crafting classic Sabbath material, and it is this issue that haunts the recording from moment one. Ronnie James Dio delivers his strongest performance since the early '80s, and hearing Geezer Butler and Tony Iommi play together after nine years is inspiring. But with ten-year-old internal tensions still gnawing away at the band, they hastily created Dehumanizer, a weird side note in their long history. In a perfect world, they would have created a monster of an album and shot back into the limelight with a vengeance. Sabbath and Dio were dealing with a dwindling fan base, unsuccessful albums, and a longstanding creative rut when they decided to reunite the Mob Rules lineup.
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