Don loved it… So, suddenly I find myself having to do the bloody thing. I overexposed it, stuck the horns, nails, fangs into the equation, used the most outrageous color combination that acid could buy, bastardized a bit of the Olde English typeface and sat back, shook my head and chuckled. One of the ideas was the baby, and the first image that I found was from the front cover of a 1968 magazine called Mind Alive. As I didn’t want to lose my gig with the Osbournes, I thought the best thing to do would be to put some ridiculous designs down on paper, submit them and then get the beers in with the rejection fee, but oh no, life ain’t that easy. ![]() His plans included recruiting Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan, getting Bill Ward back on drums, and stealing as many of Sharon and Ozzy’s team as possible, and as I was designing Ozzy’s sleeves at the time, I got asked to submit some rough designs. He subsequently decided that he would wreak his revenge by making Black Sabbath the best heavy metal band in the world. Basically what had happened was that Sharon and Ozzy had split very acrimoniously from her father ’s management and record label. “The Born Again album sleeve was designed under extraordinary circumstances. Here’s Born Again sleeve designer Steve “Krusher” Joule speaking in 2004: That bloody artwork-what in the name of Satan were they thinking? I could give you my take on the situation, but it’s probably best to get the story straight from the horse’s mouth. Actually, it’s not, but we’ll leave that part of it for another day.īorn Again has something in common with my other attempts to “justify my shitty taste:” As with both My Dying Bride’s 34.788%…Complete and Paradise Lost’s Host, the problems start before we even get to the music. In my view, the worst thing that can be said about Born Again is that it tipped Ward back into alcoholism, but that’s another story. And, we told ourselves, whatever happens, with Bill Ward back behind the kit, it’s still three-quarters of the original band. Sure, he could sing the roof off a cathedral, but could he cut it performing “N.I.B.,” “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” et al? The real test, of course, would come when the next Sabbath album appeared. Ian, God bless him, with his aversion to leather and lack of facial hair-to say nothing of his back catalog-seemed at first glance uniquely unqualified for the job. Still, it didn’t make Gillan’s appointment seem any less bizarre.ĭio had been a perfect fit for Sabbath. The uncle of one of my school chums back then was none other than Paul Clark, Sabbath’s road manager at the time, so our little circle had a bit of advance warning about all this. “What the hell is that gonna sound like?” was the overwhelming response, prompting the aforementioned Deep Sabbath jibe and much head-scratching. At the suggestion of the band’s manager, Don Arden (father of Ozzy’s wife Sharon), former Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan was recruited as Dio’s replacement, much to the surprise and consternation of, well, just about everybody. For the uninitiated, however, a quick recap may be in order: After two successful studio efforts-1980’s Heaven and Hell and ’81’s Mob Rules-frontman Ronnie James Dio split from Sabbath during the mixing stage of their 1982 live album Live Evil. So, it gives me enormous pleasure to defend-nay, celebrate-a criminally overlooked work that I’ve adored since the moment it first blew my teenage head off.Īs a product of probably the most notorious phase in Sabbath’s long career, the saga of Born Again is well known. Fortunately, recent years have seen something of an upswing in sentiment in its favor, and if there’s a Sabbath album ripe for revision and revisiting anew, it’s this one. Evidently there are those who genuinely detest the sole release from the lineup dubbed Deep Sabbath by detractors, but too many of the haters, even today, hate Born Again because the guy next to them says he hates it, and so on. Today, Greg Moffitt deconstructs the holy hell out of Black Sabbath’s Born Again.Īs with several other entries in this series, Black Sabbath’s much-maligned 11th studio album is the victim of received “wisdom.” Pundits and punters alike-sometimes even without hearing it-have, since its release on August 7, 1983, happily lined up to put it down based on secondhand opinions. Well, every Wednesday morning, a Decibel staffer or special guest will take to the Deciblog to bitch and moan at length as to why everybody’s full of shit and said dud is, in fact, The Shit. Almost every band has that album: you know, the critically and/or commercially reviled dud in an otherwise passable-to-radical back catalog.
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