One of my favorite books about Black Sabbath

books:

	• Rat Salad: Black Sabbath, The Classic Years, 1969--1975 Paul Wilkinson Thomas Dunne Books, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 7 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

One of my favorite books about Black Sabbath

First of all, don't let the title 'Rat Salad' scare you off, for if you do, you will be missing a great book. There has been many books written about Black Sabbath, but none of them go into such detail about the songs (from their debut album to Sabotage) as this book does. The author does give a background on Black Sabbath and does throw in many other personal details about the band. He also lets us know what else was going on in the world at the time that these albums were released (both politically and musically), as well as talking about himself (though I'm not sure if the tidbit about his baby sitter was necessary!). But...the main focus here is on the songs themselves. I like that he states very clearly in the beginning of the book why he only goes up to the album Sabotage and why he didn't interview any of the Black Sabbath members for the book.

I sing and play guitar and percussion, but am hesitant to call myself a musician and I feel that I learned quite a bit from this book. After reading it (or even WHILE reading it), I have found myself going back and listening to the first six Black Sabbath albums again and trying to listen more carefully. I'm not put off that the author uses big musical terms that I have never heard of (but should have), like 'subtonic' and 'pentatonic', but at no point in the book does it ever feel like he is talking down to the reader. Wilkinson uses a very smooth and flowing conversational tone, which makes the book both informative and entertaining and fun to read. Besides, if one does feel a little overwhelmed by some of the big musical terms,he does explain all of these in the back of the book. And...by using all these big musical terms, he shows exactly WHY Iommi's guitar riffs were so unique and so special.

As a huge Black Sabbath fan, I really enjoy this book and I'm sure many other Black Sabbath fans will as well. A must have!!!

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Great Introduction

I had never listened to Black Sabbath. When I was young I had an idea of Osbourne as a guy who bit the head off a bat, and the whole "satanic" thing didn't do anything for me. I picked up this book in the library a couple of months ago and started flicking through it and it completely sold me on the band, I decided I had to hear them properly and bought the Paranoid album, and will seek out others.
People who are already fans may be familiar with some of the stuff in here and probably don't need convincing as to Black Sabbath's merits.
It includes some personal memoir from key points of the author's early life and potted summaries of what is going on in the world, band history and reviews of each song on the first six albums. The author writes with an engaging style and manages a great range of reference without losing humour or getting pretentious.
It is a love letter to the band, unlike many other books by fans of various groups he puts music ahead of band history, and gets across the feeling of the way music can be important in someone's life. Anyone who has been consumed by any kind of music be it Bach or the Beatles will recognise a kindred spirit and appreciate why he puts himself in the frame - in that sense it is a book for anyone.

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A Great Read

A very funny and charming book. The author writes in a witty, human voice, and much of the book is about his own travails growing up, a trait that makes this book much more than the usual rock bio, often a dull overview of the band's ups and downs. Well worth a read, even if you don't care that much for Black Sabbath. I didn't, but after reading this book, I gained much more of an appreciation of their work.

Passive agressive, maybe, but a fun read

I loved Sabbath when I was a teen, got Paranoid and Master of Reality when they came out and consider the first album, Black Sabbath, their best. This book helped me understand why the music meant so much to me then and why it still sounds so powerful. I think the author did a fine job of putting the band's story in context with what was going on in the world and what was going on in the minds of youth looking for something cool to call their own at that particular time. Ozzy and the lads weren't bleeding genius types, but they developed a wonderful concept and ran with it. The author pretends he's dissecting Shakespeare. There are footnotes on practically every page, with allusions to more literary and serious pop icons than you could shake
a proverbial stick at. Yeah, he is poking fun at Sabbath, but he's also poking fun at himself because he was so taken by the band as a kid. If you think of Sabbath as God, you might find this book blasphemous, but if you like the band, have a sense of humor and have a high school or higher level of education, this should prove to be a pleasant diversion.

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reviews: page 1, 2

A brand-new look at Black Sabbath, one of the most outrageous bands in the history of rock music

This information-rich, idiosyncratic, and beguiling book paints a vivid picture of Black Sabbath at its beginning, from 1967 to 1975---the time in which the band made its greatest albums: Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol. 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and Sabotage.
But Rat Salad diverges from routes taken by most rock biographies---its detailed, song-by-song analysis of the band?s masterworks is interwoven with a personal account of the news stories and culture of the time, from Vietnam to Bloody Sunday to the space program. These narrative chapters---think Ian MacDonald?s Revolution in the Head meets Spinal Tap meets Nick Hornby---persuasively explain the appeal of the music, its compositional artistry, and its frequently audacious inventiveness.
Original and passionate, Rat Salad embraces a remarkably diverse cast of characters---from Ozzy Osbourne himself and the other members of the band through to Edith Sitwell, Breugel the Elder, John Milton, and Doris Day. The author?s hand looms large in the piece, as he grows from schoolboy ingenue to inveterate devotee and looks back at a life populated with love, sex, drugs, and death and played out against a rich sonic backdrop of crucifixes and power chords.

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