TURN UP THE NIGHT

‘‘The music you listened to when you were 16 stays with you all your life.” I’ve heard variations on that corollary so many times, it’s gotta have a load of truth in it. Yet there are always certain albums that transcend fans’ “point of entry” with a band (to quote the mighty Judas Priest), and Black Sabbath's Heaven and Hell is one of those records. In other words, I’m coming around to the reality — from having polled readers of my books over the years (including three on the Sabs) — that pretty soon Heaven and Hell is going to regularly win the ranking wars as the greatest Black Sabbath album of all time, despite it not being one of the first eight with Ozzy Osbourne, indeed despite the fact that Sabbath’s recording career spans 50 years of such potential introduction points to this band of Birmingham, England, legends.

Of course, what happened with Sabbath at this time is that Osbourne was replaced by ex-Rainbow druid of doom Ronnie James Dio, issuing Heaven and Hell in 1980 and Mob Rules in 1981 (also rising fast in these polls), a pair of records celebrated now 40 years later in deluxe-edition format through Warner/ Rhino.

There are no crazy non-LP studio tracks added to these expanded reissues, but we do get mono edits, remixes, both versions of “The Mob Rules” (album version and the earlier take from the soundtrack album), plus a plethora of previously released and previously unreleased live tracks. Of particular scholarly interest is the reissue, which allows one to quickly compare what these songs sounded like with Bill Ward drumming as well as with his replacement Vinny Appice, who is studio album and all the live material attached to the makeover version of that monster record.