RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

[Holy Ghost]

13 minutes ago, sgcim said:

The next day I went to TSS and bought If's first album. They were even more obscure than Sabbath. Many years later (pre-internet ), I only met one other person who was an If fanatic. We were doing a week-long gig with Al Martino in Connecticut, and he was the bass player on the gig, and we drove up together. It turned out that he didn't even know of the existence of the first If album, so I invited him over my place, and sat there in shock, listening to their first album on Capitol.

 

This band, If?

Seems logical to me: Imagine a reunion tour, they can rename themselves "Then" and start a rock 'n' roll conditional! 😎

[felser]

If were a great group.  Not sure when I discovered them, but it was after they had disbanded.  

[Stompin at the Savoy]

Back in the 80's I used to occasionally listen to a Tommy Vance program on the BBC.  I forget what it was called but it was music "on the heavy side" as he would say.  In my view it was kind of lightweight musically but these bands often put on an impressive display of electric guitar virtuosity which could be enjoyable in and of itself, the tunes and lyrics largely simplistic and barely audible.  OK a lot of it was repetitive tricks and pentatonic cliches but it had a certain cocky majesty in its braggadoccio.  

I don't know if my tastes have changed over the last 40 years. I still find the occasional shredder exciting but when I went through several notable Black Sabbath tunes mentioned in the newspaper, and when I listened to the excerpts that Rick Beato played in the clip linked above, I was struck by how rudimentary, obvious, and unswinging it all is.  The combination of third-hand blues mixed with English music hall and camp satanism, hyper-masculinity blended vaguely with an ethos hinting at drag-queens - not that there is anything wrong with that - does little for me.