2009年 Jun 8日 Monday, 10:02

Black Sabbath / Killing Yourself To Live (unreleased)

The 35th Anniversary of California Jam* was April 6th, and I failed at the time to mark it. So this and the next two posts honor that milestone event as a "California Jam Weekend"

Black Sabbath were the first of the three groups that I'll highlight in these posts to take the stage, playing four songs: War Pigs, Paranoid, "Killing Yourself to Live" and Children of The Grave, though I'm not sure of this order. (I didn't actually see this show, living in Cleveland and being just 3 years old at the time…)

Unlike some of the other massive rock festivals that marked the late 60s and 1970s, California Jam was not recorded. A good portion of it was simulcast live ABC (can you imagine that today, other than the big charity events?), but to my knowledge, the footage of Black Sabbath's performance has never been released in its entirety.

You can scrounge around on youtube and the like for interview clips and some of Sabbath's performance, but it sure would be nice to get the complete set on DVD. I was actually hoping that would be an element of Past Lives when it came out and would have made a great companion for those two discs, but we're still waiting.

The closest we get is on the 1992 documentary The Black Sabbath Story, Vol. 1: 1970-1978, which includes the performance of "Children of the Grave"

Here at least is the performance of today's selection:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq9weV01nu8

Black Sabbath were arguably at the peak of their popularity and prowess at this time. Amazing how lucid and intelligible Ozzy is, isn't it? Bill Ward is an amazing maniacal, hairy monster! And look! It's Tony Iommi totally sans facial hair! Also somewhat amusing juxtaposition of Sabbath's dark themes and music with the bright sunny day, performing under a shiny, happy rainbow! All of this after having just arrived the night before direct from England.

\m/ (ò_ó) \m/

*This is a link to Scott Lifshine's site, which is apparently somewhat suspect and controversial! Hopefully we'll be getting something with a bit more verifiable provenance before too much longer. Stay tuned for the next two posts…