Great Moments on Video №13: Heaven And Hell - Lady Evil

(Radio City Music Hall, New York, March 30, 2007)

Heaven And Hell – Lady Evil

(Radio City Music Hall, New York, March 30, 2007)

I have never actively disliked Black Sabbath’s Dio period of 1980-82, but I do remember very well — and can still re-experience it if I work hard enough — the feeling of acute disappointment upon seeing how the departure of Ozzie and introduction of Ronnie led to such a significant change in the band’s image and style. Before Dio, Sabbath were very much what you’d call a true «working class band», whose music was in no small part fueled by Birmingham’s industrial waste — and for all of Geezer Butler’s crude quasi-Satanic or horror show lyrics, the music felt very much grounded in life’s harsh and uncomfortable realities, which is one of the main reasons classic Sabbath has such a massive popular appeal (matched only by Metallica, I think) when compared to the average fan bases of the average heavy metal band.

With Dio, everything changed, because Ronnie’s chief occupation in life (at least, in artistic life) has always been the construction of a parallel universe — mythology and fantasy are the oxygen that he used to breathe, and if we all get a choice of our personal Heaven after death, I’m sure he’s now kicking it off somewhere in the halls of Valhalla. The worst thing that his addition did to Sabbath was remove their near-universal appeal and chain them to a niche — a specific one that would be favored by fans of fantasy-tinged hard rock and heavy metal — from which this «new» Sabbath could never again escape even after Dio’s departure. And while I liked some of the songs on Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules, and have always admired Dio as one of the very few metal singers who knew how to make overblown pathos sound classy rather than corny, on the whole, I was saddened by that change, and thought that the only reason why the rest of the band would go along with it was that all the remaining members were simply too stoned to resist, whereas Dio is well known for never having touched drugs in his life.

This is, however, precisely one of those moments where your gut feelings are in need of a little adjustment from intellectual analysis. This is, after all, not literature, where the realistic novel is commonly evaluated on a different level from high fantasy; this is music, where it does not, or, at least, it should not really matter if you call your song ‘Rush Hour Reflections Of An Overworked Bus Driver On The Capitol Riots’ or ‘I Need A Shot Of Henbane (To Even The Odds With That Confounded Level 82 Arch-Wyvern)’. And occasionally, what helps you come to terms with it is simply time — not just your time, during which you get used to and become more comfortable with ideas and values that seemed ridiculous and offensive at first, but also the timeline of the music itself. Does it linger on? Is it still played on the radio? Is it still performed? Do the songs evolve? Can they be appreciated in a different light from before?..

When the original Dio-era Black Sabbath briefly reunited in the late 2000s as «Heaven And Hell» (taking the title of the 1980 album, since it would have been inappropriate for them to call themselves Black Sabbath at a time when the original Black Sabbath with Ozzie would occasionally get together as well), the feeling I got from watching and hearing their live recordings was very different from the feeling I get when wading through the catalogs of all those power and fantasy metal bands that owe a great debt to Tony and Ronnie, from Queensrÿche to Blind Guardian etc. etc. Even if they played no songs older than 1980, this was still the trusty old guard, playing a simpler, rock’n’rollier, deeper-reaching version of fantasy metal than all their followers — kicking ass in old-fashioned ways and, amazingly, doing a much greater job at it than the bands who would overtake them as far as the complexities and the paraphernalia of those alt-universe metal rituals were concerned. To put it short, they were a lot of FUN.

With only one highlight to concentrate on from their excellently recorded and filmed concert at Radio City Music Hall, most people would probably choose one of the big radio classics from the 1980-81 albums — ‘Heaven And Hell’ or ‘The Mob Rules’, something like that — but the one track that really stuck with me was the limited-ambition musical character portrait of ‘Lady Evil’, by all accounts a relatively minor inclusion on Heaven And Hell that few people ever bother talking about when plunging into Dio’s grand metaphysical concepts that dominate the record. As far as I’m concerned, though, this particular live rendition of it could make them want to change their minds after all!

Sometimes, in order to make a great impression, your musical piece does not have to induce catharsis or reconnect you with your personal God — all it has to do is paint a bright, vivid picture in a corner of your brain. Mussorgsky’s ‘The Gnome’ is a wonderful piece of music not because it reveals The Ultimate Truth, but because it is a perfect musical "sketch depicting a little gnome, clumsily running with crooked legs". All it does is expand, just a little bit, your ability to appreciate both the real and the imaginary wonders of the universe, reconnecting you with your inner curious child rather than the aforementioned personal God. This is precisely the same thing Black Sabbath were trying to do with ‘Lady Evil’ back in 1980 — and, to be honest, this return to the same fantasy thirty-seven years later blows the original out of the water.

For one thing, the entire performance is a strong middle finger in the face of agism. Yes, as a rule, 60-year old rock musicians cannot sing, play, or have a stage presence at the same level of energy and creativity that they had before the age of 30. But compare this performance to whatever you hear on the 1980 studio album, or the preserved live recordings from the same period, and tell me in which particular department has the quality gone down rather than up. The rhythm section of Geezer Butler and Vinnie Appice; the power of Tony Iommi’s riffage and soloing; the depth, clarity, and range of Ronnie James Dio’s voice — yes, the same Ronnie James Dio who would only have three years left to live before cancer got him — everything is, at the very least, on the same level as it used to be, and in some respects, it is actually getting better.

What’s the secret? The secret is that this performance is very, very little about the show, and very, very much about the music. It’s a secret I sure wish so many aging rock’n’rollers were more conscious of — when you’re nearing or past 60, it is not that much more difficult to play great music on stage, but it is that much more difficult to put on an energetic, crowd-pleasing, make-a-fool-out-of-yourself stage show. Much to his credit, Iommi — unlike, say, Eddie Van Halen or even his older pal, Ritchie Blackmore — never gave much of a hoot about doing anything on stage than simply playing; and while the same cannot be said of Dio, nobody could ever accuse him of putting his «acting» before his professional approach to singing. He still remains the most «bodily-expressive» member of them all, but he keeps his antics firmly reined in — for instance, never trying to steal away the public’s attention from Tony when it is the guitarist’s turn to step into the spotlight.

But let us not rush things, because there are quite a few individual moments here I’d like to savor. Compared to the shorter studio original, they repeat the opening drum-and-bass bars twice — and Geezer’s bass sound is just so thicker and more reverberating here! — to raise the suspense level a bit; then, at 0:27, Vinnie does that perfectly timed "all rise!" drum fill, and in steps Tony with the main riff — which was just a cool blues-metal riff in 1980, but here, with a little help from the sound engineers, it sounds as if it were double-, triple-, and ultimately n-tuple-tracked: that deliciously evil sound envelops you from all around, even if it’s just our man Tony bending those strings. Already the intro, even before Ronnie steps in, gives you the proper Mussorgsky feel — the sensation of you having just stepped into something you may never get out of. Rarely does a guitar tone feel precisely like the flames of Hell rising up to spit-roast a poor unfortunate sinner who just happened to lose his way in a corner of the world he was never supposed to visit in the first place. But this one does.

And when Ronnie does begin to sing... wow. I do not love everything he does. He can get inadequately pompous and religious on some of his more pretentious numbers. He can go overboard with ad-libbing. He can occasionally experiment on stage in the wrong direction, like any artist tired of singing the same material for too long in the same way. But here, throughout all the three verses of the song, he is simply spot-on, doing precisely that thing which has always made me single him out from the crowds of ridiculous «power» metal singers like David Cover­dale or Glenn Hughes: combining fantasy-style «power» with actual «threat», mixing clean, operatic singing with that punkish guttural growl that makes all the difference. Listen to him barking out "SHE CAN’T FACE THE LIGHT!" at 2:07, then try to repeat it the same way — staying in perfect pitch and spitting out a piece of your lung at the same time.

But at the same time, I think that I also sense a tiny smidge of irony in Ronnie’s performance, something that hardly ever comes across in the 1980 studio performance (or, for that matter, in earlier live performances — like in this, unfortunately really poor quality, footage from Hammersmith 1981). You can catch a sly, quirky, smug little smile on his face at the very end of the song (5:01) which perfectly summarizes this feeling: Ronnie gives it his all, yet he is also finally aware that he is putting on a show, occasionally stepping out of the frame to take a more detached look at himself. It’s as if he is still living in that imaginary universe, but also shows us tiny signs that he is aware of the Matrix factor, whereas life in 1980 might have looked like full-on and utter commitment. As per my own values, this is a huge improvement, even if I’m sure that some of the more zealous fans might dislike the transition.

Yet for all the awesomeness of Dio’s performance, the primary hero for these five minutes is Mr. Tony Iommi. For most of the song’s duration, he is happy enough to provide the powerhouse riffage, but when he steps forward at about 2:30, the result is a dramatic improvement on the «evil-melodic» solo from 1980. Again, I love the modesty — "hey guys, I’m only moving out to the front of the stage because I can’t reach that pedal with my foot otherwise!" — but I also adore how lovingly the camera captures those metallic fingertips of his smoothly running all over the fretboard as he extracts what is possibly the most authentically ghoulish-sounding solo I’ve ever heard in my life; next to this one, the solo on the original studio record is like a demo version that only hints at its impressionistic potential.

I mean, Mr. Iommi might have lost the ability to churn out truly awesome metallic riffs by the dozen at about the same time that Ozzie got replaced by Ronnie, but his technical skills and fluency have only been improving since; he is a far, far better soloist in 2007 than he was in 1970 or even in 1980. And it’s not just bare, hollow technique and fluency — whether he is sustaining a particularly evil, «cackling» note for a couple of seconds or using the same couple of seconds to get in a lightning-fast arpeggiated run, it all serves the same purpose, mimicking the trajectory of some evil spirit playing with her doomed prey, cat-and-mouse style. It’s just the way I like it, perfectly pre-rehearsed and disciplined yet containing subtle elements of spontaneity. And, perhaps through a little bit of uncontrolled distortion seeping in, it happens to end, at around 3:20, in a couple bars of THE MOST EVIL-SOUNDING GUITAR TONE YOU’RE EVER GOING TO HEAR. I mean, like, oh God, what even is that in the first place? «Evil old witch hag with TB-punctured lungs cackling at the sorry state of the universe» — a perfect counterpart to Mussorgsky’s Hut On Fowl’s Legs if there ever was one, given that I’m up to my neck in Pictures At An Exhibition references anyway. I found myself a couple bootleg-quality renditions of ‘Lady Evil’ from the same tour and none of them end the solo in quite as spectacular a fashion, so count this as one of those happy tonal accidents.

Of course, I can heartily recommend the entire DVD for everybody who cares a bit about old-school heavy metal like this, but there is little doubt in my mind that ‘Lady Evil’ tends to get singled out by it precisely because it is the least, let us say, moralistic and the most vividly descriptive song played during the show. There is nothing «pretentious» or «spiritual» about it; the only thing it wants to do is transport you to a dark, grim swampy forest for a few minutes, like the Three Witches opening of Macbeth — and it does precisely that without even a need for a change of onstage decorations, just through the sheer power of four old guys giving out 100% while completely focusing on the task of creating an illusion for the audience, rather than on feeding their own egos or compensating for the lack of musical ability with showmanship or special effects. Cherish it while it’s still there.