Black Sabbath, "Fairies Wear Boots"

I have an ambivalent relationship with metal. When I’m asked to explain why, the stock answer I tend to give is that the kids who wanted to beat me up in high school were full-metal, and I’m still working through how I feel about that.

I should be clear: I never actually felt physically threatened in those days. Now and then I’d piss somebody off, sure. This was ordinary high-school friction bullshit, like when there were no free chairs in the cafeteria and I took one that a tough guy had “reserved,” and then his friends ratted me out. This turned into a thing, and over the next week or so I had this clown starting in with me every day in the lunch line. Throwing down in the cafeteria wasn’t an option—there were too many adults looking on. So the conflict never escalated beyond a simple exchange of words, thank God, and I was pretty good with words. It took a few days, but after taking enough hits, watching his friends give me high fives, the kid ultimately let the matter drop.

Conflicts like these were low-stakes, and I was never in real danger, never jumped in any parking lot or running for my life to the school bus. The metal kids wanted to beat me up is more of a shorthand for a more speculative existential dread, felt most acutely as I passed by one or more jean jackets and thrash-metal T-shirts between classes. In those moments I knew—in the most profound and complete way a teenager can know anything—that I dressed the wrong way, walked and talked the wrong way, had the wrong friends, and listened to the wrong music, and if at any point the civil order should break down and the rules went out the window, I’d be first against the wall.

The notion of said civil order breaking down wasn’t entirely far-fetched. There already wasn’t a student restroom in the school a civilian could use. Stoners and metalheads had taken them over a generation earlier, and no enduring counteroffensive had been mounted in the time since. There were reports that the withered and withering typing teacher, Regina Marto, having finally attained the age of I don’t give a shit anymore, had gone in one Tuesday morning and rousted a handful of stoner chicks out of the Girls’ Room across the hall from her classroom. But there was no ready garrison to deploy into the reclaimed territory, and the same crowd was back lighting up a week later, after they served their suspensions. If you couldn’t hold it until the end of the day, you went to the school nurse and begged her to let you use her private lav.

The Baluchistan-style enclaving of the public restrooms into semi-autonomous states was what it was, but at least there the threat was out of view and sectioned off from GenPop. Study hall in the sub-basement was a different story. I remember sitting down there picking at the I LOVE BON SCOTT inscription on my wooden desk, sizing up Mr. Eschmann in the front of the room and assessing his fitness for monitor duty. Eschmann was in the Social Studies Department. He was all of five feet tall, and if the rumors were true about the accident at the donkey basketball game a decade earlier, he was operating with only half of an intact adult male’s level of testosterone. Yet he was the last man standing between the low-level uproar we were presently experiencing and a full-on fourth-period prison riot. First up against the wall, I kept thinking. I asked for and was issued a pass to study in the library.

At this point it’s important to note some distinctions between the stoners and the metalheads. The two camps were loosely aligned, in that both fell within the broader denim-jacket confederation, and they exercised a collaborative, shifting administration over the bathrooms. It seems likely there were cross-memberships, and maybe even free passage back and forth between the groups.

The stoners were into ’70s hard rock. The Led Zeppelin Icarus tour tee was by far the most popular stoner shirt. Short of that you might also see them sporting the Houses of the Holy album cover, or the Dark Side of the Moon prism logo. Zeppelin reigned supreme, but Pink Floyd would do in a pinch. The stoners had a pair of reddish-brown fringed suede boots in circulation—I say “in circulation” because every school day someone different took a turn wearing them. We always assumed they kept some kind of schedule for this, but none of us took the time or trouble to reverse-engineer it. We supposed, too, that these boots had been handed down by older brothers, going back at least twenty years to when a retail store might actually have stocked them. The stoners had longer hair than the metalheads—parted in the middle, feathered back on the sides—and were considerably more chill.

The metalheads started out in junior high wearing Iron Maiden T-shirts, because what bad-ass kid wouldn’t want Eddie on his chest? But by ninth grade Metallica had fully penetrated middle America: louder, faster, and harder than anything the Brits were doing. Metallica spun off Dave Mustaine into Megadeth, then Anthrax came along, then Slayer after that, and we were off to the races at 160 bpm and counting. If you weren’t wearing Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, or Slayer, you weren’t keeping up. The Master of Puppets T-shirt had a track listing on the back. That shirt was everywhere, and there came a point where even I could recite all the song titles on that record:

“Battery,” “Master of Puppets,” “The Thing That Should Not Be,” “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)” …

The thrash metal kids wore mullets. Short in the front, long in the back: a confrontational you want to make something of it? coiffure for confrontational people.

The metalheads were the truest and most consistent rebels in the school. You might have expected a punk rock contingent to make a competing case, but the scattered few punks we had at Howland never did. Oh, sure: they stalked around in their combat boots, projecting Johnny Rotten-esque disdain for everyone and everything in the zip code. But when it came right down to it, they never actually practiced the Get pissed! DESTROY! lifestyle the Pistols preached. It might have been they lacked the critical mass needed to lock arms and mount any serious challenge to The Man. More than anything, though, punk was exotic, and its appeal in Ohio was more about looking interesting than actually flipping the bird.

By contrast, the metalheads brought the heat every day. They would head-butt lockers, hard, at random intervals walking down the hall. Never breaking stride, they’d just swing over—BANG, bone on metal—and keep walking. You’d whip your head around, startled, to see what had happened, only to see yet again the back of that Master of Puppets shirt sailing on down the hall, possibly toward the In-School Suspension room.

… “Disposable Heroes,” “Leper Messiah,” “Orion,” “Damage, Inc.”

A lot of the metal kids were in my German I class. Whenever Frau Hrabowy took attendance and one of them wasn’t in the room, one of his friends would shout, HE’S IN COURT! To this day I’m not 100% sure if that was a joke. That German class was too big for Frau’s classroom, so the school moved it into Mrs. Kuntz’s room next door. My sister’s Italian class was in that room right after mine, and when she arrived she’d see the Frau scraping spitballs three inches in diameter off the blackboard. They’d put multiple sheets of notebook paper in their mouths to make them. It was like the bombing of Dresden.

One year Frau set up a Secret Santa gift exchange for the German Club Christmas party. The metal kids gift-wrapped condom boxes and cigarette cartons for the names they drew out of Frau’s hat. Inside the boxes were—chef’s kiss—dead batteries. From my place in the Land of the Collared Shirts, I looked on in quiet admiration, not so much at the audacity, which I saw every day, but at the sheer genius of the composition. It was The Breakfast Club’s John Bender meets Martha Stewart.

Jump ahead three decades to 2017. There’s a prompt going around Facebook: list ten bands you’ve seen live—nine truths and a lie. I take my turn and list the Ramones, Curve, Air Supply, the Ocean Blue, Buzzcocks, the Boo Radleys, Velocity Girl, Black Sabbath, Stereolab, and Sonic Youth. My two traps work almost perfectly: most everyone in the comments assumes I didn’t see Air Supply or Black Sabbath. Only one friend writes that “Sabbath has to be a fakeout,” but he then goes on to say “You must have seen them by accident somehow.”

The truth is ten years ago this August I saw Black Sabbath at the then-Comcast Center in Mansfield, Mass. I went entirely of my own volition—with Hell’s bells on, you might say (all apologies to AC/DC)—because I freaking love Black Sabbath. My roommate got me into them freshman year in college (see “Go Your Own Way”), and I’ve never looked back. The solos and riffs are unbelievable, the guitar sound is heavy, and the song structures and musicianship are just complex enough to be gripping, without jumping the shark into virtuoso bullshit territory. Ozzie is arguably the band’s weakest link, with his dopey rhyming lyrics. But then again, here he is at a live show in Paris in 1970:

Not sure if that was the moment where headbanging was invented, but it’s hard to say he’s not an entertainer.

I especially like Bill Ward’s drumming on the early records: fun as hell to bang out on the steering wheel while I’m cranking these songs in the car, and almost within my reach when I get sticks in my hand and sit down at the kit in my basement. Ward played that Paris show on a four-piece: high tom, floor tom, kick drum, snare—effortless and economical, by today’s metal standards. Consider that his substitute Tommy Clufetos played an eighteen-piece drum set when I saw them in 2013. When he introduced Tommy at that show, Ozzie cheekily explained that Bill was “too fat and old” to tour with the band anymore. But maybe Bill just objected to the notion that he needed fourteen more drums to play the hits.

The first time I laid eyes on Ozzie was around 1983, when MTV was airing his “Bark at the Moon” video. By then he was long gone from Sabbath—this was the title track from his third solo record. I remember being unimpressed. We all had heard the stories about Ozzie Osbourne: he was a Satan worshipper, he’d bit the head off a live bat at a concert, he’d had to get rabies shots to keep him alive. We had built him up in our minds—for my part I’d imagined him as some kind of Berserker figure, six-foot-six, ripped, covered head-to-toe in tats and possibly in blood. Then we sat down in front of “Bark at the Moon,” and it was closer to Rocky Horror than Faces of Death. The song didn’t really rock all that much, and Ozzie was a middle-aged man with jowls chewing the scenery. He looked like a grocery store manager on uppers. This was the bane of Christianity and the American Family? This guy right here? No wonder the door was wide open for Metallica thrash-metal.

Ozzie did come off a bit better in a live performance of “Iron Man” (YouTube) MTV showed from time to time. And we all heard “Crazy Train” (Apple Music, Spotify) all the time during junior high and high school. The other drummers in concert band used to play the opening riff on the bells. Even with our strong biases against metal, it was hard to deny that “Crazy Train” rawked.

But Sabbath was where it all started, and ultimately Ozzie would find his way back to Tony and Geezer because he (and they) understood that no single one (or even two) of them could make the black magic happen in isolation. It was the combined efforts of Osbourne, Iommi, Butler, and Ward that spawned classics like “N.I.B.” (Apple Music, Spotify), “War Pigs” (Apple Music, Spotify), “Paranoid” (Apple Music, Spotify), and “Sweet Leaf” (Apple Music, Spotify). It’s commonplace to say Black Sabbath—and specifically, the equipment adaptations Iommi made to compensate for the severed fingertips on his right hand—invented heavy metal. But that’s only obvious in retrospect, after they carried their tricks forward through the decades. Sabbath was stoner rock, first and foremost, or as Lester Bangs would write in a 1972 Creem article now banished from the Internet (alas, or you’d have the link here): music for kids on downers.

Let’s call them metal, though, so I can say there’s a metal band out in the world that I absolutely love. I’ll even offer the hot take that Sabbath is a better rock band than Led Zeppelin, because they knew better than to fall into the Tolkien hurdy-gurdy fairground folk trap. Sabbath was a blues band at the outset, and you can hear some of that in songs like “The Wizard” (Apple Music, Spotify) and the song I chose today, which is “Fairies Wear Boots” (Apple Music, Spotify). But for all that they were always rock-forward, aesthetically consistent, and never not kicking your ass.

“Fairies” is good, representative Black Sabbath, because it includes long instrumental stretches between and around what Ozzie’s doing with the vocals. On the Paranoid LP it’s given two titles, as “Jack the Stripper/ Fairies Wear Boots.” This track is a kick to play on the drums, even if I’m operating at a level of 80% of The Full Bill Ward on a good day. What I like best about it is the second verse:

So I went to the doctor to see what he could give me./ He said, “Son—son, you’ve gone too far./ ’Cause smokin’ and trippin’ is all that you do …”/ YEEEAAAAAAHHHH!

The oh-fuck-it-I-can’t-be-bothered meta genius of that fourth line is absolute perfection from Ozzie. It’s right up there with dead batteries in condom boxes. And maybe now, after all these years, I finally see what the metal kids saw in this music back in high school.¹ In the end it’s about optimizing for two competing imperatives: going too far and not giving a fuck. I wish I was better—and better practiced—at both of these things. For his part, Ozzie Osbourne has walked the tightrope between them for five and a half decades now, and Verse 2 of “Fairies Wear Boots” perfectly captures that mode of proceeding.

Add in the fact that this song—which I thought was a metal turn on Zep-style Anglo-Celtic folklore—is actually Ozzie’s clapback at a gang of skinheads who had jumped the band after a show, evidently because their hair was too long, and I’m sold. This is The Song Ozzie Wrote Because People Wanted To Beat Him Up. Of course I’m gonna pick it for this post.

Stoner rock/ metal forever. Or at least on every seventh day.

1. Even if I still think thrash-metal is largely unlistenable. But see “One” (Apple Music, Spotify).