Return of Black Sabbath, 1974

A Creem record review of "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath"

When my daughter Elizabeth began attending the State University of New York at Binghamton (class of 2012), she got a chance to bring her eclectic musical enthusiasms to the college radio station, for one semester. I used to listen to it stream, and I was delighted by her range. She liked the emo bands of her era: when she was in high school I took her two years in a row to the Van's Warped Tour, which always seemed to occur on the most oppressively hot and dusty days in New York. But she'd also play oldies from my generation, from "All Along the Watchtower" to early Black Sabbath songs such as "Sweet Leaf," which I recall sounding less like the foundation of heavy metal than a kind of genteel English folk music. I especially liked her inclusion of a signature artist for her show, outside the usual boundaries. Murray the K on WINS used to open his "Swinging Soiree" a Frank Sinatra tune. Symphony Sid would almost always play Nina Simone's "Four Women" amid his bop and salsa playlist in …