Yesterday was the 50th Anniversary of Black Sabbath’s “Black Sabbath” and the birth of metal

“… but how could a young Tony Iommi ever predict that fashioning prosthetic fingertips for a damaged hand and detuning strings in order to make them easier to bend would lead to something so dark and mighty? And the fact that Iommi only opted for a backup Gibson SG because his preferred choice of a Fender Strat suddenly revealed pick-up difficulties was just, you know, a breezy coincidence. Adding to the mystique even further: the the wild reality that bassist Geezer Butler—a rhythm guitarist prior to Sabbath—had no idea how to play the meandering style of bass typical of rock at the time, so he simply mirrored everything Iommi did, thereby increasing the songs’ heaviness tenfold. Happenstance, all of it. “