Children Of The Sea

The Zoo Crew is dropping the needle on "Children Of The Sea" tonight, that slow, wide-open second track from Black Sabbath's 1980 album Heaven And Hell, and if you have never heard how this one got born, settle in. This is the song that walked Ronnie James Dio into the band. Tony Iommi had the riff sitting around while the Ozzy years were coming apart. He has said they had already demoed the idea with Ozzy, who put a melody on it, and that tape has never turned up. By the time they called Ronnie, that riff was about all they had ready. Geezer Butler remembers it as a blues thing they had been kicking around. They set up in a garage they had turned into a rehearsal room at the house in Bel Air, soundproofed it as best they could so the neighbors would not come knocking, and played Ronnie what they had. He liked it on the spot. Tony asked if he could do anything with it. Ronnie said give him a few minutes. They pretty well wrote the song that quickly.

Ronnie later told the story in Precious Metal like a man who had not gone over there looking for a job. He met them at the house to say hello. As far as he knew, Ozzy was still in the band. Tony walked him into the studio, Geezer and Bill Ward picked up their instruments, and out came the figure that became "Children Of The Sea." Ronnie has said he does not audition, but that afternoon was an audition both ways. He tried them on as much as they tried him. Geezer's version is shorter and louder. They had been sitting around for months with nothing finished, Ronnie walked in, and he nailed it. Tony has said the same thing with a laugh. They started with "Children Of The Sea" because it was the only one they had.

The picture Tony had in his head was a giant ship rowed by galley slaves. Somewhere in the telling that turned into monks. He has laughed about it since, the idea of actual chanting monks on a Sabbath record, and the thought came out wrong when he first said it. What landed on the album is still that wide, rolling thing, mist on the water, a rising sun gone missing, a captain somewhere out past the edge of time. Ronnie took the words into the fantasy lane Geezer had never quite walked. Geezer has said he always liked listening to those lyrics because they were so different from what he would have written himself. Ronnie said nobody in the band questioned what he was going to write. He questioned it more than they did. That was the deal from the first afternoon. He was not there to copy Ozzy. He was a different animal, and the songs bent with him.

There is a stranger footnote hanging off this record. The band had talked, more than once, about what would happen if one of the original four walked. The feeling was that whatever was left should not keep the name. What kept the name on the sleeve was a contract. They still owed Vertigo and Warner Brothers one more album. So the thing that nearly ended Black Sabbath became the thing that restarted it. Iommi has said plain as day that if Ronnie had not come along, he thinks the band would have stopped right there. Eleven months of nothing, then a singer who could sit in a room, hear a riff, and sing a part back before the coffee got cold. Tony has also said they had never gone into a studio that prepared. With Ozzy they were never quite sure what the vocal would turn into. With Ronnie they already knew.

The album itself moved around. Early work happened at Criteria in Miami, then they shifted to that house in Bel Air and turned the place into a studio because the garage was too hot to work in. "Heaven And Hell," the title song, got built in the lounge. Bill's father died while they were trying to finish the record, and Bill stayed in Britain for a stretch. The album still came out in the spring of 1980, with "Neon Knights" up front and "Children Of The Sea" right behind it, and a lot of players who came up later have said this was the Sabbath record that got them in the door. Dave Grohl has told Ronnie, more than once, that Heaven And Hell is a wonderful album. Ronnie's answer was that they wrote strong songs and they presented them well, and it was not Sabbath with Ozzy. It was something new, and it worked.

If you want the longer road that led to that garage, it starts in Birmingham, not in a mansion. Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward were factory-town kids looking for a way out of the shops. They had already passed through local outfits, Rare Breed and Mythology among them. Ozzy, hard as it is to picture now, had been a short-haired Mod with a serious love of soul music. The four of them pulled together out of the pieces of those bands, picked up a saxophone player and a second guitarist for a minute, and took the name Polka Tulk Blues Band off a shop sign in Handsworth. Geezer has said they passed the place on the way to a gig and the name just stuck. It stuck for about two shows, a caravan park and a ballroom in Carlisle, and then the extra players were gone. The name shrank to Earth, sometimes written out as the Earth Blues Band, a straight blues-rock outfit in the shadow of Cream, John Mayall and the early Zeppelin records everybody in town was hearing.

Earth was going nowhere in particular until Geezer brought in a song. He had been reading Dennis Wheatley and watching horror pictures, had flirted with the spooky stuff, and one night thought he saw a dark figure at the foot of the bed. That ended the dabbling. It also handed the band a lyric. They set it to music, called it "Black Sabbath" after the old Boris Karloff film, and the rooms they played went quiet in a way no blues shuffle had managed. There was already another band called Earth, so the name had to go. They took the song title and kept it. Tony told writer Mick Wall that the name sounded mysterious, gave people something to think about, and gave the band a direction. They cut the first album in one session in November 1969, live set, small studio, a bell and a thunderstorm dropped on the front. Paranoid followed close behind. Heavy metal, as a name people actually used, grew up in the shadow of those two records.

Tony's own start inside that story is the factory accident that took the tips off two fingers on his fretting hand. He built thimbles, dropped the tuning so the strings would bend, and the Sabbath sound got heavier because a working guitarist from Birmingham refused to quit. By 1978 the road, the habits and a rough Never Say Die! tour had split the original four. The contract kept the name. The riff in the Bel Air garage gave them "Children Of The Sea." The rest of Heaven And Hell followed, and the band had a second life.

You can hear the whole ride, deep cuts and all, over at THE ZOO. The band's own history, which names Heaven And Hell among the records that kept the flag up after Ozzy, sits on the official Black Sabbath website. Their official pages are right there with it: Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the listeners who keep the old sleeves alive, Black Sabbath Online has the full Heaven And Hell track list, with "Children Of The Sea" in the second slot and notes on the Ozzy demo that never surfaced. The long-running fan circle Black Sabbath (Facebook's ONLY, COMPLETE BLACK SABBATH Page) covers every era, Dio years included. Spin it again if you want. The mist is still out there on the water.