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Acting Like Black Sabbath
The Kootenays’ premier tribute to the Founding Fathers of Heavy Metal perform live in Cranbrook
By Ferdy Belland
“As far back as my young pre-teen years, a friend gave me a mixed tape with tracks from Ozzy Osbourne’s live album Speak of the Devil on it. That was my first introduction to Black Sabbath,” explains Mike Hodsall, the Kootenay-Boy-Done-Good who’s known worldwide as the longstanding bass player for Canada’s globally-beloved hardcore-punk heroes DOA and now carving out a secondary career path with Acting Like Black Sabbath, Nelson’s exciting tribute act to the Founding Fathers of Heavy Metal – who take the stage at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub on Saturday, May 13 to crush us all with the primeval Doom Rock we all know and love.
“I played that tape over and over and over again, and it was quite spooky and alluring to me then! Eventually, when I was about 11 years old, I went to a lacrosse tournament over on Vancouver Island – I was browsing in a record store and came across the cheap-cassette bin, where I found Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Never Say Die. And from that moment on, Black Sabbath was my absolute favourite band. I mean – NOTHING compared.”
Indeed, nothing quite compares to Black Sabbath, in terms of sound, style, influence, and legacy.
Formed in the gritty industrial British slums of Birmingham in 1968, the juvenile-delinquent band members of Black Sabbath (vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward) quickly tossed away the pedestrian electric-blues repertoire that first brought them together and crafted a striking style and a sound that captured the dark side of the hippie counterculture that stood alone at long length from the over-optimistic sunshine pop that most of their longhaired musical siblings chirped out at the time. Tony Iommi’s musical composition took dark inspiration from ominous, sinister medieval influences, along with minor-chord key signatures and deafeningly loud, distorted power chords.
Geezer Butler’s lyrics explored ‘bummer-man’ concepts of madness, social protest, environmental destruction, nuclear holocaust, superheroes, depression, and stern warnings against demonic temptation, while his nimble, oftentimes frenetic bass playing filled in the sonic gaps under Iommi’s rifferama and connected tightly with Bill Ward’s jazzy, thudding drum grooves – propelling the songs along either at a terrified sprint or a zombie lurch.
The charismatic stage presence and wailing, despairing singing style of Ozzy Osbourne (who became one of the Grand Old Men of Rock and Roll) provided ceaseless aural tension and anxiety throughout, creating a unique experience both unsettling and exhilarating.
The original lineup of Black Sabbath produced a swift series of eight classic albums that carved and hammered out the groundwork for decades of heavy metal to come.The band became one of the most popular British rock bands of the 1970s and enjoyed huge audiences across North America and Europe and the Far East.
An unending crazy-party atmosphere (that usually killed lesser rockers) contributed to Osbourne’s ejection in 1978, after which he followed an ultra-successful multi-platinum solo career that soon eclipsed his erstwhile bandmates (and continues to this day).
The band entered a brief, if equally exciting secondary phase with the acquisition of the charismatic Ronnie James Dio, the powerful vocalist formerly with Rainbow.
After Dio’s 1983 departure for his own lucrative solo career, Iommi (and a revolving cast of anonymous sessioneers) dutifully trudged deeper and deeper into heavy metal obscurity, overshadowed by dozens of younger bands who owed their contemporary careers to Black Sabbath – until a late-1990s reconciliation with Osbourne led to several enthusiastically popular reunion tours, before the band finally closed their iron-bound rock and roll book in 2014 with earsplitting dignity.
There was no other band in all of the Classic Rock era like Black Sabbath. And for the past half-century-plus, the band has been universally lauded by the critical intelligentsia as the one band who emerged from the darker depths of the psychedelic underground to create the sound, the mood, and the look of the musical sub-genre that would later be called Heavy Metal – more so than even their other globally-popular UK peers such as Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple (who often are termed heavy metal bands when they truly follow the path of mainstream Hard Rock). Their memory still echoes off the rafters of arenas worldwide.
“When I was deeper into my teens and got interested in playing guitar, Black Sabbath songs became the things that I would learn,” said Hodsall. “I would sit for hours in my bedroom and play along to Volume 4 and Paranoid and all those albums. For some reason, in my young guitarist’s mind, I could just emotionally and technically understand what Tony Iommi was doing. Everything else I was listening to, that I tried to emulate on guitar, seemed tricky and confusing, but Black Sabbath just made sense.
“The music flowed through me comfortably. Bands come and go as your musical tastes change and evolve over the years, but something about Black Sabbath hit me somewhere deeper than other bands did, and it never let go. To this day, in my spare time I’ll sit and play along with an entire Sabbath album or play along to the Never Say Die live video, just for the sheer joy of doing so. I can’t even explain it. They’re just one of those few bands which, ever since the beginning, has never left me. They flow through my blood. I love them so much.”
Listening to Hodsall gush excitably about his favourite band, one might think he didn’t need anything else in his musical life to keep him happy.
“A few years back, I was asked to join the Sack Grabbath tribute, and I happily played with them for almost two years. But when that band folded, I wasn’t finished! I wasn’t done! I loved doing it and didn’t want to quit. As a professional musician, you’re always looking for other streams of revenue, since there’s never enough to pay your bills. And I was no stranger to playing long-term in tribute bands, what with BC/DC and all. A good tribute band is a good earner. So I decided to create another Black Sabbath tribute to fill in the gaps when I’m not on the road with DOA.
“You get a few weekends of playing Sabbath, and what’s wrong with that? And whether I’m playing shows or not, it’s a process of sheer enjoyment for me. Just to be in the same room with a bunch of high-caliber musicians and play Sabbath tunes? Now THAT brings joy to my dark heart (laughs). So in the fall of 2022 I decided to assemble another Black Sabbath tribute, and I gathered up the guys I was already playing with in the Hi-Watts, and then Roger Swan. We got together and rehearsed a few times and it clicked immediately and felt really good. So I started booking shows and the whole project’s been picking up a head of steam really fast. The goal is to ride it out. Why not?”
Even though Hodsall and Co. have a whale of a good time with this side project, they certainly take it seriously.
“At the moment, with these first round of shows, we’ve been doing all Ozzy stuff. The entire second set we play at our gigs is the entire Paranoid album straight through, front to back. Our first set is a collection of all their great songs from the entire Ozzy era. However, we’re talking about learning a mini-set of songs from the Ronnie James Dio era, maybe four of them, stuff like “Mob Rules” and “Neon Knights,” maybe “Voodoo” and “Turn Up the Night” – I don’t know, “Sign of the Southern Cross,” maybe…there’s a lot of good material on those Dio albums. As for later stuff like “Zero the Hero?” You never know. I actually have that Born Again album, being a Sabbath completist and all, and it’s really quite good. Well, half of it. I don’t think “Digital Bitch” is one of their finest moments, so we’ll probably skip that one. Ultimately, if any suitable Sabbath songs fits Graham’s vocals then we’ll consider it. He says the Dio stuff is actually easier to sing than the Ozzy stuff!”
The layers of intent to Acting Like Black Sabbath run deep and deep, like a sonic lasagna channeled through a pinned-open distortion pedal.
“Our intention was to gradually learn other complete Sabbath albums in full and play them live, one at a time, one a show, show after show. There’s a lot of active tribute bands these days. It seems that since the turn of the century that’s the modern-day version of an old-school cover band. I haven’t seen many Sabbath tributes. Not many good Sabbath tributes, anyway. We all thought that if we performed a complete album in full, it draws the audience in to what you’re doing, rather than have them space out in the crowd and have their minds wander while you’re playing a song they might not care about.
“So we started with learning Paranoid, seeing how that’s still pretty much the most popular Black Sabbath album ever. That’s the album most people out there know. Even those who aren’t Sabbath worshippers who know all the deep cuts. Everyone knows the tunes that make up the first half of that album – “War Pigs,” “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” – we’ll draw them in with that and that’ll be a good start! We all really, really want to learn Volume 4 as the next full-album project, being one of the greatest rock albums ever written. Why wouldn’t you? We usually open the night with “Wheels of Confusion,” so we go deep right away. We get far into the catalog and get into the songs we love and adore. Eventually, we’ll learn all of them. Every album Black Sabbath ever made. There are worse hobbies to have. It’d be really cool to see a band do Technical Ecstasy all the way through, wouldn’t it?”
And the eagerness never stops with Hodsall, which is charming and infectious.
“I’d love to do Never Say Die – that’s one of my favourite Black Sabbath albums ever. There are so many good songs there – and so many people just shit on that record. I don’t understand why. Probably because they read some hipster op-ed piece years ago that told them to shit on the record. There are Sabbath fans out there, and even Sabbath fans from back in their heyday, who didn’t like it when they expanded their sound beyond what they were doing on their first three albums, the doomy stoner stuff. But that’s first-phase Sabbath. That’s their starting gate. They didn’t just freeze in place creatively. For me, they really picked up steam on Volume 4 – that and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath are the two masterpieces for me.”
Hodsall wraps up his testimony and testament by gushing about how well his tribute act is embraced by complete strangers here, there, and everywhere.
“It’s just great music that you can’t help but love, but for the Sabbath purists – when you dive deep into the catalog, you really light up a room! We wondered at first at how well us playing the Paranoid album would be received. As we mentioned, the first half of that album has all the classic hits, but once you get into Side Two…are people going to dig “Electric Funeral” and “Hand of Doom” and “Rat Salad?” As it turned out – YES THEY DID! People just eat it up! Even when we play “Planet Caravan” – our version of it is still trippy and mellow, but it’s a little different than what everyone knows from the record. Graham actually plays second guitar on some of the songs, like on “A National Acrobat.” And he adds to the intro and outro of “Wheels of Confusion.”
“We identify the stuff on record that you never see live onstage – the egg shaker that’s shuffling around under the solo section of “Into the Void,” or tambourines even! That’s the sort of stuff you don’t normally see in a Black Sabbath tribute – being able to emulate studio harmonies and such. Usually there’s only one guitarist in every Black Sabbath tribute I ever came across.
“We try to do better. We pay attention to the details.”
What is this which stands before me? Arctic Front Productions presents ACTING LIKE BLACK SABBATH, who unveil a long program of all your favourite Black Sabbath songs live in concert at the Cranbrook Hotel Pub (719 Baker Street) on the evening of Saturday May 13.
Admission: $15 advance (tickets available at the Pub during regular business hours), $20 at the door. Doors open 8 p.m., Showtime 10 p.m.
Don’t miss out on this unique event, and don’t forget to throw the horns.
Lead image: Acting Like Black Sabbath live at the Royal on Baker, Nelson: guitarist Mike Hodsall and vocalist Graham Tracey pictured. Photos courtesy of Mike Hodsall
