Heaven And Hell is the title track of Black Sabbath’s ninth studio album, released on 18 April 1980. It was the first album to feature vocalist Ronnie James Dio, who replaced original vocalist Ozzy Osbourne in 1979.
The song’s main guitar riff and overall music was written by guitarist Tony Iommi with inspiration and input from Geoff Nicholls, but – as with almost all Sabbath albums – credit is given to the entire main band. The lyrics and vocal melodies were written by the newly arrived Ronnie James Dio.
Everybody involved with the song cites it one of the defining songs from the band. “That was on our initial album [with Dio]”, Iommi said. “That track has stood the test of time. Even Ronnie, when he went out on his solo thing, he’d always play Heaven And Hell. It became a very popular song.”
The initial sessions for what became the Heaven and Hell album started after the Never Say Die tour, with Ozzy Osbourne still in the band. The band convened in Los Angeles for eleven months to record a new album, a process described by guitarist Tony Iommi as a “highly frustrating, never-ending process.” The last few albums Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die had been less successful, embracing a more experimental style that Osbourne in particular was fed up with. He preferred the band’s earlier, more direct and heavier sound. Iommi revealed in his memoir that he still possesses a recording featuring Osbourne singing an early version of what would become the track Children of the Sea with different lyrics and a totally different vocal melody.
Ronnie James Dio was introduced to Iommi in 1979 by Sharon Arden, who later married Osbourne. In speaking with Eddie Trunk about how his tenure in Black Sabbath came about, Ronnie James Dio said: “It all really started with a conversation I had with Tony on the phone at a time when he was about to leave Black Sabbath. I was introduced to him by Sharon Arden, as she was named then, and one thing led to another.”
Initially, Dio and Iommi discussed forming a new band rather than a continuation of Black Sabbath, without anything concrete happening. The pair then met again by chance at The Rainbow on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles later that year. Both men were in similar situations: Dio was seeking a new project and Iommi required a vocalist. “It must have been fate,” Dio recalled, “because we connected so instantly.”
The pair kept in touch via telephone, until Dio arrived at Iommi’s Los Angeles house for a relaxed, getting-to-know-you jam session. Dio said, “I was invited into the studio that they were using. Tony said ‘I want to play something for you’ and so they strapped on their instruments and played me the beginning of the song that would become Children of the Sea. ‘Could you anything with this?’ I said, sure, give me a few minutes and I’ll see what I can do. I put something together, we did the song. Tony then said, ‘I want to play with this guy,’ and that was the beginning of it.”
The ease with which Children of the Sea came together was a real eye-opener to everybody involved. They had struggled to make something of that music for months, but with Dio it had come together extremely quickly and naturally. It also surpassed everybody’s expectations for the song, which had nearly been abandoned prior to Osbourne’s firing.
“Sabbath was a band that was floundering,” Dio observed. He was enjoying the immediate musical chemistry with Iommi in particular, but still had to consider if it was the right move for him. “It took me a while to make that decision – do I want to do this, because I really didn’t know them as people. Do you want to go into a situation that has not been successful for a while? There must have been reasons why it wasn’t successful, and did I want to make myself part of that unsuccessful pattern? So I thought about that a little bit, but it wasn’t that for me. It was never that for me, it’s always ever been about the music and the people that I’m playing with. People first. If I don’t like them I don’t want anything to do with them, so that was a consideration. And musically of course was a consideration as well. I loved what Tony’s ideas were. I loved where he was coming from. […] We pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps, cared a lot about each other, and knew that we could do it again – especially under the banner of a band that had been so successful.”
Iommi and Dio saw mutual greatness in what they could do together and quickly became committed to the project. The rest of the line-up, however, was in a state of chaos. Drummer Bill Ward was battling personal issues that would eventually see him leave the band shortly after the start of the Heaven And Hell tour. Bassist Geezer Butler was going through a divorce and also seemed to lose heart after Ozzy left. He left the band just as Dio was slotting in.
Dio told Eddie Trunk, “The most devastating thing happened two or three days after we had decided that we were going to do this together, and that Ozzy would be gone. Then Geezer left. Suddenly it was Tony and Bill and myself, so that made it a lot more difficult. I mean, I thought we were a full band and that it would go smoothly. Who knew whether he was ever going to come back or not. At that point we didn’t think he would. Tony was still very positive about it, as was Bill, so we started to do some more writing.”
As the band buckled down to write music, Iommi called a friend to ask if he would come out to Los Angeles to help out. Multi-instrumentalist Geoff Nicholls had played in The World of Oz (signed to The Beatles’ Apple label) in the 1960s, after which he joined Starliners before making waves with the Birmingham-based hard rock outfit Quartz. Iommi befriended that band, gave them advice and even produced their first album. Quartz would then go on tour as Black Sabbath’s opening act. Nicholls and Iommi had struck a close friendship, had kept in touch, and Nicholls was happy to oblige when Iommi called.
“Tony phoned me up and asked me to go over to California to help them out with some songwriting,” Nicholls later told Garry Sharpe-Young for the book Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: the Battle for Black Sabbath. “He had Ronnie already at this point, and I was asked to come in as second guitarist.”
Initially, Nicholls was led to believe that his jaunt to Los Angeles was temporary, just to do Iommi a favour. “Provisionally this was supposed to be just for two weeks, but very soon after I got there Tony asked if I wanted to join the band full time. Of course, I was very interested because Tony was just great to work with and with Ronnie he had a fabulous voice, but told him that I had to go back to the UK to tell everybody what was happening, make arrangements, etc. Tony said, ‘no, you have to stay here.’ So I did. Two weeks somehow turned into twenty years!”
Geoff Nicholls ended up working with Black Sabbath for nearly 27 years, making him the person with the second longest stretch in the band after Iommi. He was an associated member from the end of 1979 to 1996, playing keyboards on all albums and tours in that timeframe. He was never listed as a full band member (1985 excepted, when Iommi’s would-be solo album Seventh Star ended up being released under the Sabbath moniker), destined to feature in the “additional musicians”-section for the duration.
Butler’s departure had led Dio to double as bassist and vocalist for a short time. He was used to that from his time in Elf in the early 1970s, but that was never going to be a permanent solution. Eventually, Nicholls would start playing bass during these writing sessions, as well as adding keyboard parts.
“They already had Children of the Sea [when I arrived],” said Nicholls. “Geezer wasn’t there by that point so I had to play bass at first to start getting the songs worked up. The very first song we did was Heaven And Hell – not bad for a first go, eh? Tony had a riff which he put over my bass line. I had used a very similar chugging bass line in Quartz for the track Mainline Riders so I just did that. I was just messing about with this bass riff and suddenly everything started to build up from there. It was very, very simple but it really worked.”
RELATED ARTICLE: Artist spotlight on Quartz
Drummer Bill Ward remembers that day when the song started to come together, and he ran into the rehearsal room to add a drum track to the ongoing jam. “I can remember when we actually got Heaven And Hell together,” he said during an episode of his radio show Rock 50 in 2016. “Things had been slow all week. We had been writing, but we hadn’t really connected with anything that I can remember; we hadn’t really connected too much. But it was a Friday afternoon. I was hanging outside, and Geoff and Tony were in the living room. And I heard that famous riff [hums the main riff of the song], and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I just came walking into the living room immediately and I sat down behind my drums. I started playing, and I just went into the backbeat behind Tony’s riff, and Geoff was already starting to groove – he was already on top of that as well. And Ronnie was either in the kitchen or he had just appeared out of nowhere, like a flash of lightning or something, and Ronnie showed up and immediately he started jamming on some lyrics. And about thirty minutes later, we pretty much had Heaven And Hell… not literally as you hear it, because we did change just a couple of things around, but it was there on that Friday afternoon. I remember actually coming back down here into Orange County. We were up in Beverly Hills when we first wrote the song. And I remember coming back down and going, ‘Oh my God! We’ve got one in the bag.’ It was a great feeling. It just kept around my head, like, ‘Oh, wow! This is very nice.’“
Crafting the title track provided a moment of alarm for Geoff Nicholls though when in mid flow Tony Iommi promptly fell asleep on him. “I had only just joined the Sabs and in the first few days Tony and I were both sitting in the sofa in the living room at home, playing guitars on little amps, trying out ideas for what later became Heaven And Hell. Tony started to feel a little unwell so I asked his roadie, Roy Lemon, to fetch some antibiotics in a bottle by his bed. So Tony takes two tablets from the bottle, swallows them and we carry on working on the song. It was sounding really good and we both knew this was a great idea that was developing. Almost twenty minutes later we started to run through the ideas again in order to record it when all of a sudden there was an almighty clunk, banging, and lots of feedback! Tony had passed out. His head had fallen back on the sofa, his guitar was still screaming, but he was fast asleep! We tried to wake him but all we got was a mumble. The roadie had given him sleeping pills instead of antibiotics! That was Tony done for the rest of the night, but what a great song we had to work on the next day!”
The bass player situation needed a solution, as Nicholls was not a contender for filling the bass position on a more permanent basis. At one point Iommi contacted close friend Frank Zappa for help finding a bassist. Zappa offered his bassist for the Heaven and Hell sessions but Iommi preferred a permanent member. Dio eventually suggested former Elf and Rainbow bandmate Craig Gruber, and he ended up coming in to rehearse with the band.
Dio told Eddie Trunk: “Craig Gruber stayed with us all the way through going to Miami to record the album. At that point Geezer called Tony, really miserable, and said ‘if you think you guys would want me back again, I would really love to come back.’ Tony approached me and said, Geezer called, what do you think Ronnie? I said it’s not the same without Geezer – of course! – and so Geezer came back. That made life easier. But it was difficult before that, because we were now writing almost without a plan. We were just writing… ‘Is that good?’ ‘Umm, sounds good to me.’ It’s nicer when you have all the parts of the puzzle together, because then you can make those judgements together.”
The extent of Gruber’s involvement is unclear. In a 1996 interview, Iommi stated that Gruber participated only “for a bit”. Gruber often stated that his contribution was quite substantial, that he co-wrote a lot of the album’s songs and that it was he and not Butler who played bass on the album. In a 2009 interview, he modified himself and stated that the only song he was involved in writing was Die Young. Gruber was not credited for any of his contributions, but has said that he and the band reached “a suitable financial arrangement.” Iommi conceded in his 2011 autobiography that Gruber had indeed recorded all the bass parts on Heaven and Hell, but Butler had later re-recorded them upon his return without listening to Gruber’s bass tracks. Versions featuring Gruber’s bass parts might be stored in the Iommi vaults.
Rejoining the band after a period of not being there gave Geezer Butler a chance to get an objective perspective on his band’s capabilities. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he listened in awe to the songs his bandmates had worked up with Dio. “I heard Heaven and Hell and Die Young, and I thought they were absolutely incredible,” he said decades later. “So just hearing them for the first time as an outsider would hear them, I was just blown away with them. I thought they were great.”
Unfortunately, Geoff Nicholls would not get a writing credit for his massive contribution to Heaven And Hell. Sometimes writing credits is as much band politics as anything else. Black Sabbath songs had always been credited to everybody in the official band line-up, and that song would also carry an “Iommi-Dio-Butler-Ward”-credit. That’s just how it was. It did not matter that one of them hadn’t even been there when the song was created.
Nicholls would take issue when people later attributed the bass line to Geezer Butler. “Nah, no way” he objected. “Geezer wasn’t even there. I can remember the first studio jam of that song as clear as day. It was all very spontaneous too. By the time Tony, myself, Bill and Ronnie had finished we had this song that was eight and half minutes long! It worked and we all had some big smiles on our faces that day.”
Iommi has also debunked that Butler was present during the initial writing of the song. Then again, he also claims that Nicholls wasn’t even there yet when the song first came together. “At that point, when we did that, Geezer wasn’t even involved in the band. I hadn’t even got Geoff over at that time. That is actually Ronnie playing bass on that… And that was just in the lounge recorded on a cassette.” Nicholls was confident enough with his own contributions to avoid arguing the point. He was by now regarded as an esteemed employee (although not full band member) in the Sabbath organisation, switching to keyboards on a permanent basis after Butler returned on bass.
Butler later admitted to Nicholls that he couldn’t have written the Heaven And Hell bass line: “Afterwards Geezer told me he would never have played that riff on the bass because it was so simple. It was funny though Geezer saying that about Heaven And Hell because he was right, he would never have played that bass line, which of course means that Heaven And Hell might never have happened in the first place. It was me messing about on bass that started the whole song off.”
Geoff Nicholls died in January 2017 after a long battle with lung cancer. He had thousands of tapes from all eras of his career in his archive, and recently fans got a taste of just how much gold that could contain when a very interesting version of the Heaven And Hell song was uploaded to YouTube in February 2021. The version of the song stemmed from the writing process sometime in late 1979, and features Geoff Nicholls on bass, with Iommi, Dio, and Ward in their usual positions. This is the first genuine work-in-progress track from those sessions that has ever been shared, and it caused a bit of a tremor in the metal community.
The uploader was Gary Rees – Geoff Nicholls’ stepson and executor of his estate. Rees is currently sharing music from his stepdad’s vaults with fans on a new Patreon site dedicated to Nicholls’ musical legacy. The YouTube clip gave people a taste, and hordes of people likely rushed over to Patreon to sign up when they realised what that archive might contain.
The text accompanying the upload on YouTube was: “I recently found this SONY C-90 tape cassette amongst the thousands in Geoff Nicholls’ archive. On the inlay card is written ‘ON & ON HEAVEN & HELL – ORIGINAL VERSION GEOFF PLAYING BASS.’ Inside the cassette case was a Maxell UD 90. On the A side again in blue ink ballpoint is written ‘LADY EVIL (crossed out) BLUES + SLAPBACK’. The B side is written ‘On + On HEAVEN HELL ORIGINAL GEOFF ON BASS’ Nowhere does it say that this is Black Sabbath on the cassette. At the end of the uploaded song you can hear talking that sounds to me like Geoff talking then laughing. I have uploaded the most complete version closest to the album version. This recording, in my opinion is from July 1979 in their rented house in Bel Air, California. On And On Heaven And Hell may have been the original working title.”
A week later, an additional track from that tape titled Slapback was also shared. This is a genuine rarity as it has never been available anywhere else. Geezer Butler confirmed that this was indeed Sabbath shortly after. Tony Iommi did the same a bit later, but added that he felt it was wrong of Rees to have put these tracks out the way he had done. The parties must have been in contact, as the videos featuring the songs have since been removed from YouTube. Obviously the song has been re-uploaded by others and is now circulating amongst fans. Speculation is ripe on whether this means it will be easier to give it an official release, and whether there are other ways recordings from this time could be released more officially – potentially as part of a box set. Those who wait will see.
Ronnie James Dio’s lyrics are obviously a huge part of Heaven And Hell. As huge-sounding as the music of the song is, the lyrics also genuinely shine. Dio felt they were some of the most important ones he ever wrote. The song is about the ability of each human being to choose between doing good and doing evil. Essentially, each person has the capacity for ‘heaven and hell’ inside themselves.
Sing me a song, you’re a singer
Do me a wrong, you’re a bringer of evil
The Devil is never a maker
The less that you give, you’re a taker
So it’s on and on and on, it’s Heaven and Hell
The lover of life’s not a sinner
The ending is just a beginner
The closer you get to the meaning
The sooner you’ll know that you’re dreaming
So it’s on and on and on, oh it’s on and on and on
So it’s on and on and on, Heaven and Hell
“That song was a chance for me to get all these things off my chest that I always wanted to say,” Dio said in an interview with Tommy Vance on BBC Radio 1 in 1987. “It was a song that let me say the one statement that was most important to me. I’ve always felt to be somewhat of a spokesman for kids – for people who maybe lonely, looked down upon, because they like the wrong kind of music – and, more importantly, the kids who play in bands. So I made the statement that I always wanted to make, which is, ‘The world is full of kings and queens, who blind your eyes then steal your dreams, It’s heaven and hell.’ And that all means is, beware of people who try to blind your eyes with promises… If you have those dreams, don’t let anyone rob you of those wonderful ideas that you have by stealing them and putting them in their pocket, and leaving you lonely by the side of the road. So beware those kings and queens out there, who blind your eyes then steal your dreams. It was very important for me to be able to make that statement. And that statement has been something that I’ve tried to live with since that time.”
They say that life’s a carousel
Spinning fast, you’ve got to ride it well
The world is full of Kings and Queens
Who blind your eyes and steal your dreams
It’s Heaven and Hell
And they’ll tell you black is really white
The moon is just the sun at night
And when you walk in golden halls
You get to keep the gold that falls
It’s Heaven and Hell
Iommi found that Dio’s way of singing gave him new opportunities as far as bringing in melodies and passages. “Ozzy would sing with the riff,” he wrote in his memoir. “Just listen to Iron Man and you’ll catch my drift: his vocal melody line copies the melody of the music. There was nothing wrong with that, but Ronnie liked singing across the riff instead of with it, come up with a melody that was different from that of the music, which musically opens a lot more doors. I don’t want to sound like I’m knocking Ozzy, but Ronnie’s approach opened up a new way for me to think.”
The Heaven and Hell album was recorded at Miami’s Criteria Studios (where the band also recorded Technical Ecstasy) and Studio Ferber in Paris. Dio suggested that the band hire producer Martin Birch, who he had worked with as a member of Rainbow in the 1970s. Birch became Sabbath’s first outside producer since the band parted ways with Rodger Bain following 1971’s Master of Reality, with Iommi primarily producing the band’s albums since that point by himself.
The sessions went smoothly, but the band did not immediately feel confident that other people would embrace the new music and line-up. “I think we were probably all a little bit afraid of whether it would be accepted,” said Ronnie James Dio in an interview with Eddie Trunk. “We did not know. We would go to the local strip club after we recorded one of the songs. They would play it and the strippers would dance to it. If they liked it, we knew we had a good one. Heaven And Hell they loved! They just absolutely loved that one, they couldn’t wait to dance to it. And all the rest of the songs we brought in they loved as well, and so it was a great way for us to gauge what was going on. I think we were all a bit afraid about whether it would be accepted, and we were so lucky that it was right from the get-go. Everyone who heard it said that too – that this was brilliant. I don’t think we ever wanted to take the chance of believing that, because we didn’t want to be let down by that, but you know, in retrospect, hindsight is a wonderful thing. We knew it was going to be a smash.”
When Heaven And Hell was released on 18 April 1980, the album was met with enthusiastic reviews and seen as a mighty return to form. Metal albums did not chart highly, but it reached a highly respectable #9 in the UK and #28 in the US (where it was also certified platinum).
Performed live, the song was often stretched out with an extended guitar solo, audience participation, ad-libbed lyrics, or additional lyrics regarding angelic and demonic apparitions and personal judgment.
As mentioned earlier, the Heaven And Hell tour did not last too long before drummer Bill Ward bowed out. He struggled with personal issues, which included the death of both his parents and alcoholism, and his behaviour became erratic. While on tour, he began dictating long and rambling press releases to the band’s public relations representatives after every show, instructing them to “get that out on the news wires tonight.”
Personal issues aside, he also wasn’t completely happy with the direction Black Sabbath was moving in creatively. “Heaven And Hell for me wasn’t a turning point,” he recalled. “It was the beginning of a new band of which I had no idea what band I was in… Ron was capable of coming up with lyrics that seemed to fit his idea of how Black Sabbath ought to be, and I sensed a kind of… unrealness about the lyrics. My favourite song on Heaven and Hell was a blues song that we did, Lonely Is the Word – and that seemed to be real… But things like Lady Evil, they seemed almost like bandwagon-type lyrics… Lonely Is the Word, I definitely liked playing that song. And Children of the Sea – I did like to play that too. I thought Ronnie was a very good singer.”
Dio recalled answering the telephone in his hotel room one morning mid-tour to hear Ward say “I’m off then Ron.” Dio replied, “That’s nice Bill, where are you going?” “No, I’m off mate. I’m at the airport now,” indicating that he was incapable of completing the tour.
American drummer Vinny Appice was quickly brought in to replace him, and with Appice on board the next chapter of the Dio-fronted Sabbath line-up began… but that is another story.
Facebook Comments