Dehumanizer (Black Sabbath, 1992)

Whatever side you take in the Ozzy vs. Dio debates, there is no denying that whenever Tony Iommi and Ronnie James Dio teamed up, it was certainly a more productive experience. Nowhere was this more obvious than the recent "Heaven and Hell" project, an unlikely Dio-era reunion of Black Sabbath, all because Dio and Iommi got together to compile The Dio Years, which led to recording three new songs, then an entire album, all in the space of a couple years, with only Dio's death in 2010 ending the project. Meanwhile, the "reunion" with Ozzy Osbourne resulted in two songs over 15 years, a couple stints in rehab and a stupid MTV reality show for Ozzy, and a never-ending drama over whether or not Bill Ward was still in the band.

Of course life is unfair and when the Ozzy-band finally got their act together and released an album, it blew away the sales of all the Dio-era stuff combined and was touted as "the first new Black Sabbath album in 35 years!" (which basically ignores 10 or 11 albums). While 13 was a decent album, I still side with professionalism and prefer the version of the band that actually got down to business and recorded new music when they got together. Of course, Black Sabbath Heaven and Hell's The Devil You Know and the three bonus tracks (performed under the actual Black Sabbath name!) from The Dio Years wasn't the first crack at a reunion with Dio at the helm. By 1991, a rudderless Black Sabbath and a weakening Dio decided that, ten years after the mixing debacle over Live Evil that split the band in two, it was time to bury the hatchet and record a "real" Black Sabbath album.

Sabbath had been stumbling along for the past five years. After Dio left the band in 1982, taking drummer Vinny Appice with him to form Dio (the band), the band squeaked out one more album, the odd Born Again, with ex-Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan and, for one last time, original drummer Bill Ward. Ridiculed as "Deep Sabbath" or "Black Purple", the lineup quickly fizzled as Ward once again fell off the wagon and Gillan made a "surprise" return to Deep Purple. Iommi and faithful (to this point) bassist Geezer Butler tried to reconstitute the band with Ward (yet again) and a couple of questionable and mostly-unknown singers (Dave Donato? Jeff Fenholt?) before disbanding. Aside from an appearance in their original form at Live Aid in 1985, the band was effectively dead until 1986.  Under label pressure, Iommi's debut solo album became Black Sabbath's twelfth album, Seventh Star, an album that featured no other band members from the 1970-1984 period. Other than Glenn Hughes, another ex-Purple to grace a Sabbath album, the rest of the band was largely unknown. Over the course of the next few albums, Iommi and new frontman Tony Martin carried on with a weird roster of supporting musicians, such as Laurence Cottle, Jo Burt, Terry Chimes, and Dave "The Beast" Spitz (best known as the brother of Anthrax's Dan Spitz). Even though the revolving door rhythm section had finally scored some top-level talent by 1990's Tyr with drummer Cozy Powell and bassist Neil Murray, the band was just a wispy shadow of its old self.

Meanwhile, Dio became a veritable legend of the early 1980's with blockbuster albums Holy Diver and The Last in Line. Unfortunately the formula lost its potency a little on Sacred Heart (1985) and a lot more with Dream Evil (1987), even with a change of guitarist. A dramatic attempt by Dio to shake up the sound and lineup for 1990's Lock Up the Wolves didn't pan out as hoped, and by 1991 the chance to work again with Black Sabbath didn't seem like such a bad idea.

Following the recording of Tyr, Sabbath enjoyed a little blip of nostalgia, and during the supporting tour folks like Ian Gillan, Geezer Butler, and Ronnie James Dio made special guest appearances. From this, a new lineup with Butler and Dio organically came into being (Martin sort of awkwardly disappeared and I have no clue what happened to Neil Murray). Cozy Powell was initially retained as drummer, but later dropped due to an injury, leading to....surprise!....Vinny Appice making his grand return to the band. Dehumanizer, the resulting album from this first-ever Black Sabbath "reunion", was a surprisingly fresh and remarkable album. The band seems to have consciously jettisoned the past decade's experiments and picked up where The Mob Rules left off, featuring the same musicians (although Vinny Appice and Dio parted ways after Dream Evil, he rejoined while his replacement in Dio, Simon Wright, went on to AC/DC). I won't go so far as to say it's wall-to-wall hits. Giving the disc a careful listen, certain tracks stood out more than others: "Computer God", "After All (The Dead)", "TV Crimes", "Master of Insanity", and "I". Meanwhile stuff like "Letters From Earth" and "Buried Alive" are sort-of filler. Not bad songs, but they just don't stick. The songs have pretty crunchy production without a lot of bells and whistles, though "Time Machine" in the "Wayne's World Mix" form is a little more glossy than the rest (as well as a reminder of what year it was). Content-wise, the album is fairly "real", without much sword-and-sorcery type lyrics, that had worked pretty well for Dio up until this point.

Unfortunately, there was just too much drama among all the players for the reunion to last more than a single album. In fact, the tour crashed and burned when, facing with the humiliation of opening for Ozzy's solo band, Dio quit the band, with Appice quickly following. A two-day-long lineup featuring emergency fill-in vocalist Rob Halford helped avert a total disaster. By 1994, Tony Martin-fronted Black Sabbath and Dio as a solo band were once again in effect, as if Dehumanizer never happened. Oh, but it did! Two notable developments occurred in the fallout from the reunion. First, Geezer Butler remained in the band, making their next album, Cross Purposes, probably the most "legitimate" of the Tony Martin albums. However, he would be coaxed away by Ozzy Osbourne of all people following that album. While Dio probably suffered terribly in the financial department in quitting Black Sabbath again, he emerged from the experience with a much heavier sound that maintained the more realistic lyrical themes brought forth by this album. Though his new guitarist, Tracy G, never really fit with the fans, Dio himself was clearly invigorated in the post-Dehumanizer era and pretty much all of his output until his death had more poise and energy than his peers. Unfortunately for Tony Iommi, Cross Purposes didn't help the band's fortunes, and, although he valiantly reunited the Tyr lineup, the next album, Forbidden, was a bust and marked the end of Black Sabbath as a recording band (aside from one single and the Dio Years bonus tracks) until 2013. Until recently, for most casual Sabbath fans, Dehumanizer really was the last hurrah of a once-mighty brand name. More seasoned listeners though know better. If you aren't prone to being hung up on a name brand, Iommi's actual solo albums and Heaven and Hell continued the story during the recording-bereft reunion with Ozzy.

Big Hits: High Tide and Green Grass (The Rolling Stones, 1966)

As I previously noted, the pre-Aftermath Rolling Stones albums, which largely depended on ample cover material, can be a bit confusing for the novice to navigate. You could do worse than start with Big Hits, which doesn't add any value to a complete Stones collection, but helps introduce listeners to the early material. Like all compilations of this nature, it will generally fall into disuse once you build a complete collection. Since I haven't been in any hurry to gobble up the early albums, I've gotten a fair amount of mileage out of this, the "original" Rolling Stones greatest hits album.

Although the band during this era was largely fueled by covers, many of which they could probably have played live in their sleep they are done so tightly, most of the songs on Big Hits are originals, with all but three of the twelve songs credited to either Jagger/Richards, or "Nanker Phelge" (which was easier to write than Jagger/Jones/Richards/Watts/Wyman). Just to totally confuse the crap out of everyone, there is also a 14-song British edition (not in my possession) which includes much later chronological songs like "Paint It, Black" and "Lady Jane" alongside earlier material not in the American release, and did not seem worried about observing any chronological boundaries. I would stick with the US edition, which is more tightly bound to their earlier sound.

Big Hits would spawn two "sequel" packages: Though the Past, Darkly (Big Hits, Vol. 2) covers the Aftermath through Let It Bleed period, then More Hot Rocks: Big Hits and Fazed Cookies which covered the less popular songs left off of the Hot Rocks compilation. The second volume is as useful as the first for its respective time period, while the third is only of interest for including a side of "rarities" on the second (vinyl) disc. If you are intent on collecting the studio albums directly, you can save yourself the time by skipping all of these, although the last few songs of More Hot Rocks has a few oddballs only found on the regular British releases. There are probably cheaper ways to track these down.

Democracy (Joan Didion, 1984)

So far I've enjoyed plowing through the Novels for Students (NFS) series in a way that the authors completely never intended in that I'm not actually reading those books (which mainly help teachers to "teach the book"), but using it as a guideline for what to read that may be considered a "classic". The result is a random-yet-not-random assortment of books I normally never would read by my own free will. Democracy not only fits the description, but has also, over the years, become sort of an obscurity in itself. Bear in mind that the third volume of the NFS series was published in 1998, when Democracy was only 14 years old and, until only a couple years earlier, remained Didion's last novel. (NB: The Year of Magical Thinking, still six years into the future, is nonfiction.)

As was the case with Annie John and some others, the NFS series tries to incorporate a certain amount of more recent literature, probably for schools with the luxury of getting beyond the dusty basics of your plain American or World Literature courses. The 1980's is still a fairly gray area as far as what is destined for classic status and what is not, especially in non-genre literature. The Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century stops chronologically with Ironweed from 1983 and don't think the 1980's got much more representation than that.

While I have the utmost respect for Didion, and I find her writing style intriguing, the sad truth is that Democracy hasn't aged all that well in the 21st century. This may explain why in all of the public libraries in San Mateo County, there was just one copy available for circulation. In fact, I had to check my spreadsheet to make sure it wasn't some other Democracy that made the list. I'm not exactly sure why the book sort of dropped off the radar in recent years, but perhaps more recent wars have clouded the American memory of the last days of Vietnam. On the other hand, we certainly haven't lost our national interest in the rich, famous, and powerful, especially when it all blows up in their faces. A lot of the reviews of this book I've seen express frustration at the "disassembled" narrative, which bounces about chronologically anywhere from 1945 to 1976 and frequently changes tenses, with the "I" being owned immediately as Joan Didion herself, not a surrogate "author". Yet I didn't find the book to be slow going at all. I think the secret may lie in just rolling with the changes, almost like a stream of consciousness rather than approaching it as "cinema in the mind's eye" which is so easy to do with straight narrative pieces.

So, is Democracy as classic? I think at one time it was, but it's importance ultimately turned out to be short-term. If you decide to read it, just keep this all in mind.

The History of Christian Thought, Volume 1 (Justo Gonzalez, 1987)

Thanks to a head cold which is turn aggravated an old back injury, I had more time than usual to read and nothing soothes a malady like reading about the ancient Christian heresies. It was three years ago that I found myself working in a seminary library with little to no theological education. In fact, in the past I had been pretty vocal about my preference for history over philosophy. Anything involving religion and philosophy really needs to have an historical component to get me interested. Right from the get-go Gonzalez states his intention to construct his three-volume history in such a manner. He easily could have adopted an achronological approach, working in themes, but that would have been far harder for me to follow. Especially when it comes to the early years, I think those who would have preferred a theme-based structure don't suffer too badly.

Before reading this, most of my exploration of the pre-Chalcedon patristics era was in two books by Bart Ehrman (see How Jesus Became God, and the other was Lost Christianities, read a few years back before the blog) and a Thomas Cahill's Desire of the Everlasting Hills. Also, from a history viewpoint, I knew theological debates (crossed with chariot racing) caused a lot of political turmoil, as chronicled in A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich. Justo Gonzalez is much better than any of these books (mainly by virtue of intent) at grouping various modes of thought, from the apostolic Fathers through the Trinitarian and Christological controversies. Also, the "heretics" are not branded as such by the authors. Although he doesn't endorse their views, he helps readers to understand how heretics certainly didn't see themselves as heretics, and he explains how they came to the conclusions they did. Overall, this is definitely a work targeting early students of theology and religion, so it isn't watered down into "popular" literature, but it also doesn't bury the readers in an avalanche of undefined Greek and Latin terminology.

I was directed to this series by one of the more scholarly-oriented clergy at my church, so I thank him for the advice. He was a little torn between this and Jaroslav Pelikan's own five-volume work. I will sample that one a little later this year, so stay tuned for that one.

Killing Is My Business...and Business Is Good! (Megadeth, 1985)

Not to long ago I spun up the three-song EP Symphony of Destruction, which included a "radio edit" (whatever that means - it's the same running time) of the hit song from Countdown to Extinction, plus two at-that-time unreleased songs. Not long after my blog post I had told a friend who got me into metal originally that I was patching the holes in my Megadeth collection, adding So Far So Good So What and Countdown to Extinction to my collection (and apparently addressing my aversion to the odd-numbered albums?). I added that I would have picked up Killing Is My Business, but that was maybe a bit too much to expect from the public library collections. He was outraged; in his opinion it was the purist and finest Megadeth album ever! Therefore, without even asking directly, this album was delivered to my virtual doorstep, and I finally listened to the "original" Megadeth.

I put the quotes around original because Megadeth had fairly rocky origins. When Dave Mustaine was booted from Metallica around 1982, he wasn't exactly in peak form to be leading a band of his own, especially in the vocals department. The initial concept involved borrowing a couple guys from Slayer to do a heavy end-run around his old band, but it was a lineup doomed from the get-go due to inevitable personality issues. For the non-metal inclined, this was about as ephemeral a lineup as the "Dirty Mac" featuring John Lennon and Mick Jagger that lasted all of one gig. Although Mustaine found his rock in bassist David Ellefson, the drummer and second guitarist roles were completely unstable, and ultimately filled by jazz fusion players Gar Samuelson and Chris Poland, who rounded out the first formal recording lineup of the band.

Now I've listened to the second album, Peace Sells...But Who's Buying?, for decades, featuring the same lineup, so there's been a substantial gap in time since I've heard anything else. My big takeaway is that this album is a far more low-budget affair. Even though Peace Sells also was born on an independent label (later adopted by Capitol), it shows off a more sophisticated production. Killing however is a more "pure" album, with virtually every track being bona fide speed metal. Unfortunately, thanks to the minimal production, where the music should rumble or gallop, it sort of chatters instead. Also Mustaine's voice hasn't quite fleshed out yet. Like his old bandmate James Hetfield, he's a guitarist first and singing was a learn-on-the-job experience. Eventually he would make his vocals and lyrics the focus of Megadeth, sort of a disservice for those of us who prefer emphasis on the instruments. Obviously that isn't the case here, with awesome (though tinny) solos and more-clever-than-Metallica riffs. Speaking of the Metallica connection, anyone with a copy of Kill 'Em All will recognize "Mechanix" as a rewrite of "The Four Horsemen", just sped up a notch and missing parts of the bridge. While Mustaine was co-credited on "Horsemen", he takes sole credit for "Mechanix" and I'll leave it to the lawyers to determine who wrote what and first. Even when it's not the same song, it's easy to see the similarities between this album and Metallica's first. Both are branches that are very close to the same trunk.

I think I've hammered through the "what happened next" part of the Megadeth story, but it is worth noting/repeating that Poland returned to the band about almost 20 years after being sacked following Peace Sells, but only in a session capacity, for The System Has Failed. Samuelson, who constantly battled substance abuse (as did Poland) and was also sacked after Peace Sells, died in 1999 from his addictions. As Dave Mustaine was hardly the paragon of clean living in the mid-1980's you have to wonder exactly to what epic level these guys were eating up the drugs to get fired!

As for this album's history after release, that makes for some good reading. Most of the drama centers around the creative cover version of the golden oldie "These Boots". Mustaine's addition of expletives and other racy content so outraged the original author that the song was pulled from the album to avoid a lawsuit. On the remastered edition (pictured here with smarter-looking artwork), the song was re-added (boosted the running time back over the half-hour mark!) but with all variant lyrics loudly bleeped out. For some reason this just seems to make the song even funnier, maybe because it really emphasizes there's some baaaaaad stuff being sung. My version has the uncensored version and frankly it's not that over the top. Not quite at the level of "unnecessary bleeping", but certainly not as vile as it was painted by its detractors. Nowadays it's a little hard to keep the genie stuffed in the bottle and interested listeners can readily compare versions from the world's favorite streaming video site. Needless to say, if you are going to invest in this album, make sure at least some version of "These Boots" shows up, otherwise it's like ponying up album prices for a six-song EP. I haven't heard the remastered version, so I'm not sure if the "chatter" issue was fixed. However I know from the remasters of later albums that the bass is probably turned way up, almost as if Dave was feeling guilty about his then-estrangement from David Ellefson.

The Information (James Gleick, 2011)

I have a Master's degree in Library and Information Science. Sometimes I think that the word "library" overwhelmed the other two and that I never gave the study of information theory the attention it deserved. While The Information is not a complete resource, it is an excellent beginning to a large and fascinating body of literature that can only bolster my understanding of the field.

The subtitle is important to the structure of the book: "A History, a Theory, a Flood". Gleick does not explicitly group the chapters in the table of contents, but the structure is clear. The history of information takes readers back to the "talking drums" of Africa, where elaborate messages were sent via drums. This in turn takes us into studies of language, though dictionaries and other methods of compiling language. As the history continues, things get more mathematical, introducing the thought of Newton, Leibniz, Babbage, and Turing. History and theory combine in the figure of Claude Shannon, just the latest in my list of names of great people very few people recognize. Finally, meaning returns with a vengeance to the discussion of information with the rise of Wikipedia and increasingly powerful computers and networks, a.k.a. "The Flood".

In my adult years I've been much more interested in mathematics and languages than I ever was in high school or college, but the damage was done. The middle section of the book frequently went over my head. The disassociation of meaning with information was hard for me to follow, though I knew enough to understand the ideas raised were profound. When the book moved to "flood" stage, however, I was back on board for the remainder of the ride. I came away from the book appreciating the recent, rapid shift from "information poverty" to "information overload". I also have a much greater appreciation for the role I play as a librarian during these unprecedented times.

Changesbowie (David Bowie, 1990)

Back when this was the only David Bowie disc I owned, Changesbowie served its purpose. Nowadays, except when I'm jonesing (no pun intended) for some post-Ziggy Stardust material, it is usually left as an afterthought, save for the inclusion of the non-album track "John, I'm Only Dancing". To this day I still haven't acquired a regular David Bowie album dated later than 1972. Back in college, however, this was all I had, so it served as a good introduction. Being a total novice, I didn't realize it was a replacement of two older compilations (Changesonebowie from 1976 and Changestwobowie from 1981) though a number of tracks were added or deleted and it is not strictly a direct lift of its predecessors. I think it was just enough to warrant not having to re-issue the old compilations directly during the Rykodisc catalog adoption.

Changesbowie on its own is a fairly standard-issue "greatest hits" package, including all the highlights from 1969's Space Oddity though Tonight (1984). Although it was a strong seller, particularly in the UK, coming out on the heels of the immensely successful Sound + Vision box set, it is pocked with a few glaring flaws. First off, like many of these compilations, the compilers felt the need to add a little "bait" to the tracklist to entice those already enriched with a lot of David Bowie albums. Unfortunately, the track is a remix of "Fame" (or, in its own right, "Fame '90"), a universally panned marring of a track that didn't need any modernization. In fact, by 1996 it was sheepishly removed and replaced with the original version. Secondly, it misses opportunities for "better" bait tracks. Certainly some of the pre-Space Oddity stuff might have found a seat at the table, or perhaps one of the numerous "non-album" songs. Thankfully, Bowie at the Beeb has helped in those areas immensely, even if they are not the originals. Finally, in an attempt to valiantly put everything on a single disc, some songs were shortened or removed. Therefore, "Heroes", "Let's Dance", "China Girl", and "Modern Love" are all the single versions, and the songs "Starman", "Life on Mars?", and "Sound and Vision" were omitted for the CD, but were part of the cassette and vinyl versions. Nice way to reward obsolete media, huh? Well, if anything positive can be said about removing the songs, it's that the first two messed up the otherwise chronological sequence.

Speaking of chronologies, I've been very slowly working my way through the studio albums in roughly chronological order, so the the so-called Ziggy Stardust barrier of 1972 is still in effect, but I've heard enough from YouTube and the radio of the later albums to know they are worthwhile, at least until we get to around Tonight, the beginning of a number of questionable career moves for Bowie. Of course, as the old saying goes, if you don't like the current Bowie album you're listening to, you will probably love the next one, and it seems that his most recent album has done a lot to repair some of that damage from the 1980's.