Just as I was late to the party with the Beastie Boys, I was (very) late to the party with Black Sabbath. I didn’t catch the “classic rock wave” that all my friends jumped on in the summer between eighth and ninth grades. While looting my father’s record collection during college, I got into groups like Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin, but I probably continued neglecting Black Sabbath simply because my Dad didn’t have any of their albums. Not too long after this though, I managed to land an original pressing of their debut self-titled for six bucks from Last Vestige, my local record store back in Albany (it was a green-label Warner Bros. U.S. pressing, for all your record nerds out there). While I sampled the title track for my own music around that time, it would be over a decade before I would explore their entire catalog.
