Tony Iommi nearly left them before they could get signed. Jethro Tull was looking for a guitarist, and in 1969 they invited Iommi to sit in. Iommi appears with the band in the Rolling Stones' aborted Rock 'n' Roll Circus extravaganza. However, Iommi and Jethro Tull didn't take a shine to one another, and within weeks, he was back in Black Sabbath.

Their stage shows continued to generate a lot of word-of-mouth, and in late 1969 they were signed to Phillips records, who released their first single on the Fontana subsidiary, "Evil Woman (Don't Play Your Games With Me)", originally done by an American band called Crow. The single appeared in January 1970 and failed to chart, but Phillips went ahead and released their debut album on another subsidiary, Vertigo, a month later. This time, the record caught hold, and eventually wound its way up into the top-10. This attracted the attention of Warner Brothers in the U.S. who released the album in May, 1970. Building slowly, and without radio airplay, the record would ultimately reach #23 in America, and sell over a million copies.

Black Sabbath captures the band as they were making the transition from jazzy-blues to heavy metal. There are still some wisps of psychedelia in the music, a certain jazzy swing in Bill Ward's drumming, and a number of very long guitar improvisations from Iommi. Osbourne is a ringer for Jack Bruce, except that here he sings of witches and satan and sleeping villages and wizards and lucifer and warnings and magic and other mayhem. "Black Sabbath" is indeed the frightshow it's supposed to be, with Ozzy the tortured soul facing damnation. "The Wizard" opens with an eerie, bluesy harp before launching into its power riffs. "N.I.B." is the darker cousin to "Black Sabbath", where the former camps it up a bit, the latter is deadly serious. "Warning", originally by Aynsley Dunbar's Retaliation, is a lengthy suite featuring the longest Iommi solo on a studio record; he noodles and drifts and almost stops playing altogether, yet the song keeps within the atmosphere of the album. While subsequent albums would see their sound mature into the genre defining brontosaur it would become, there are those who prefer the loose, hazy feel of this fine debut.

Wasting no time, the band quickly returned to the studio for a follow-up, Paranoid. In England, the album went to #1 and the title track reached the top-5 as a single. In America, the album peaked at #12; two singles charted (Black Sabbath's only U.S. chart singles of their career), "Paranoid" at #61, and "Iron Man" at #52. While those numbers may seem unimpressive, they were achieved with virtually no radio airplay whatsoever; this lack of airplay helped bolster an underground atmosphere around the band that only strengthened their appeal; the more the critics hated them, the more their fans loved them.

Paranoid is generally considered the band's masterpiece, although all four of their first albums have fans in each corner. Paranoid certainly defines what the band had become. "War Pigs" comes closet in sound to the debut with Ozzy's blues voice singing about war machines and bodies burning. Iommi's low register, high-volume riffing reaches the ultimate limits of heavyness; a coda at the end shows hints of progression in the band's core sound. "Hand Of Doom" is a drug addict's nightmare as it spirals into oblivion, Ward playing the jazziest drums of his Sabbath career while Iommi and Butler get a workout. "Iron Man" makes the band's sense of humor explicit -they were in on the joke all along- with its mega-doom chords and tale of a comic book hero turned arch villain, gleefully sung by Osbourne. The riffs are heavier here than on any Sabbath album, the tempos leaden, Ozzy borders on hysteria, Butler's bass is mixed up front in the mix, where it inerplays with Iommi's guitar. this is the foundation from which much subsequent heavy metal would come; one might consider this the quintessential heavy metal album.

The success of Paranoid left the band with a familiar dilemma; what to do for an encore? They took perhaps the wisest course of action by leaving well enough alone, and essentially repeating the formula for the 1971 album, Master of Reality. If Master of Reality suffers in comparison to its predecessor, it's only because the surprise factor is lost. It opens with a hacking cough, electronically sampled and repeated, before Iommi launches into one of his best ultra-heavy riffs, kicking off "Sweet Leaf". Osbourne sings with relish the praises of said leaf, as the riffs keep pummeling. "Children of the Grave" features another of Iommi's best riffs; elsewhere, he dabbles in short acoustic instrumental interludes, including the sinister sounding "Embryo" and the diabolical sounding "Orchid". The album reached #8 in the States, their highest charting album ever in America. In the 1980's one new metal band would pay the ultimate tribute by naming themselves Masters of Reality.

The band's next release, in September 1972, was Black Sabbath Vol. 4. This rounds out the quartet of albums that make up the essential classic period of Black Sabbath. Vol. 4 is a world-weary sounding album. The tempos have slowed to a crawl, barely lurching forward at all. The album sounds weary, enervated, hazy, druggy, murky, fagged, and lost. Once again, they were critically rebuked for these transgressions, and once again, it is those same qualities that makes this album the engaging listen that it is. The band's reputation as hard-drinking, hard-drugging rock stars was catching up with them, and is reflected in the music. On "Wheels of Confusion" Ozzy sounds on the verge of surrender, lost and beaten, as he decries all that is beautiful in life as mere illusion, while Iommi plays like a truck spinning wheels in a blizzard; a smokey bad-buzz psychedelia also permeates this track. Elsewhere, on "Snowblind" Ozzy gives one of his most harrowing drug accounts yet. Indeed drugs are the overwhelming influence here; overshadowing the traditional Christian-Satan-Magic concerns. Which is what lends this album its atmosphere; the drug impaired tempos actually add to this album's allure. The misstep is "Changes", a loopy, syrupy ballad accompanied by mellotron that would ominously point towards future directions. It peaked at #12, representing some slippage from prior albums, but remains an essential part of their canon.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, from 1973, represents the turning point. While there are no reports that the band curtailed its drug consumption for its recording, it does sound as if they took stock of themselves and saw Vol. 4 as essentially a dead end. The band sounds more focused, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Even more significantly, on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, conscious attempts are made to turn the band in a progressive-rock direction. Rick Wakeman (ex-Yes) is brought in to play synthesizer; a whole orchestra contibutes to "Spiral Architect". Special attention was given to the cover art, which revived the satanic imagry that had receded over the last couple of albums. Arrangements were made complex, and arted up. Iommi's token instrumental, "Fluff" borders on easy listening with its tasteful string accompaniment. The album works despite itself; the best song is "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" which avoids the prog-rock trappings, and "A National Acrobat" and "Killing Yourself To Live" are top drawer. The Wakeman synthesizer workout "Who Are You" manages an agreeable menace. But too much of the rest of the album is lost among the studio trickery, and Black Sabbath simply didn't have the chops to pretend they were Yes. The album did all right, peaking at #11, but it didn't remain on the charts as long as previous albums had.

The band wound up sitting out most of 1974 due to a dispute with their manager. When they re-emerged in 1975, the musical climate had subtly changed. Heavy metal and progressive rock were both showing symptoms of running out of steam; sales were drooping, key bands were breaking up or changing lineups, the punk revolution was only a year away. Sabotage, their sixth album, showed signs of retreat from the progressive experiments on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Its best numbers are a pair of ragged, galloping riff-fests, bordering on an almost garage-band like primitiveness. "Hole In The Sky" is built around an uncharacteristically brisk, propulsive Iommi riff, and one of Osbourne's most tortured vocals ever; "Symptom of the Universe" is another winner. One attempt to match the synth experiments on the previous album was made, the sleek-sounding "Am I Going Insane (Radio)" whose title suggested the band was hoping for some airplay, which they still wouldn't receive. For the first time in their career, they were faced with failure; the album made it to a soft #28 before slipping off the charts quickly.

Warner Brothers, perhaps sensing the end was near, decided to release the profit-taking We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'n' Roll, a two disc anthology of the band's most essential moments. It is in fact an excellent introduction to the band, and was the avenue by which many second generation fans discovered them. The CD is abriged; leaving off some key songs to squeeze everything onto one disc, but even it is worth a listen. It peaked at #48, however, suggesting that interest in the band was beginning to wane fast.

Technical Ecstasy, released in 1976, shows all the signs of a band in advanced decline. Where once Iommi's riffs and Osbourne's vocals commanded attention, here they sound weak, lost, muddled, confused. There are no particular standout tracks at all; the best of the lot is "(All Moving Parts) Stand Still" which benefits from an oddly funky Butler bassline, and "Dirty Women" which was dusted off for their reunion tour. Elsewhere, the band seems uncertain how to proceed. Iommi continued to push for a more progressive approach, while Ozzy resisted, preferring to stick with tried and true metal; this confusion in direction is evident in the production; horns and other studio devices appear, and even Bill Ward gets to sing a song, as if that would help. Their fans had all but evaporated; the album peaked at a poor #51.

Ozzy pinned much of the blame for the album's failure on Iommi, and relations grew chilly between them. Osbourne even quit the group briefly in November 1977, and was replaced with Dave Walker (ex-Savoy Brown). However, he had a change of heart, and returned in January 1978. The band lasted together long enough to record one more album, Never Say Die!, which was released in September 1978. Never Say Die! shares the same schizophrenic tendencies as Technical Ecstasy; while the title track is worthy of the band's name, the progressive flourishes sound as out of place and vestigal as ever; the saxophone-led "Breakout" falls flat, the sythesizer on "Johnny Blade" sounds cheesy and misplaced, elsewhere are pianos and strings and other distractions Sabbath fans never signed up for. While the single "Never Say Die!" charted in the U.K., the album represented further slippage in the U.S., only making it to #69.

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