Sweet Leaf

Yes, more s**t about stoner rock and Black Sabbath.  Here, though, I have to be critical.

By the way, a bit on why Black Sabbath serve as the inspiration for stoner rock.  Let’s look at the band’s top two competitors in the 1970s:  Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin.

Deep Purple were hardly even a drinking band, and with the obvious 800 lb gorilla exception of Tommy Bolin, who OD’d on heroin a few months after Mark IV crashed and burned on their Asian tour of Come Taste the Band, wasn’t into drugs.  They don’t sing about getting drunk, high, or otherwise screwed up.

Led Zeppelin were into alcohol (Bonzo) and heroin (Page), but Plant was writing the lyrics and preferred to be pretentious and up in the clouds.  Singing about drugs was beneath his dignity.

That leaves Sabbath:  the #1 song is, of course, “Sweet Leaf”, an obvious tribute to cannabis.  “Hand of Doom” is a caution against heroin – which even Ozzy knew to avoid – whereas “Fairies Wear Boots” (also from Paranoid) refers to “tripping”, i.e. LSD use.  And they had to praise cocaine with “Snowblind”.  Add this to the doom and riffing, plus the otherworldly change-ups best seen on Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage, and you’ve got a strong recipe for a band inducing its fans to fire up a bong.   

Back to this dirtweed idiocy claiming to be a stoner rock Sabbath tribute album….

Track Listing: Into the Void (Cancer Bats); Dirty Women (Mos Generator); Changes (Bloody Hammers); The Warning (Wo Fat); The Writ (Stoned Jesus); Hole in the Sky (Scorpion Child); Hand of Doom (Death Hawks); Lady Evil (House of Broken Promises); Planet Caravan (Machuca); Sleeping Village (Witch Mountain); Electric Funeral (Solace); Solitude (Ulver); “After Forever” – in fact, Tomorrow’s Dream, you morons (Pentagram); Sweet Leaf (Weedpecker); Paranoid (Golden Void); Iron Man (William Shatner).

I got this because two bands I really like, Wo Fat and Weedpecker (do they toke?  Need you ask?  I have to wonder what Polish weed is like) are on this.   They do a decent job of it.

With one exception, they’re all Ozzy songs:  House of Broken Promises (who?) cover “Lady Evil”, hardly the best song on Heaven & Hell.  I’d have gone with “Lonely Is the Word”. 

The Death Hawks (who???) butcher “Hand of Doom” by making it into a half-assed acoustic song.  Black Sabbath have several acoustic songs.  Why ruin this one? FAIL.

I don’t know if was the producer of this album or the ever-f**ked Bobby Liebling who was responsible, but if you can’t tell “After Forever” from “Tomorrow’s Dream”, Tony Iommi should come to your house and kick you in the nuts.  Free of charge.  Having said that, the cover itself is not bad. 

I’m puzzled as to why “Sleeping Village” was put on disc two, well after “The Warning”, which it runs into on the first album.  I’m also puzzled that Witch Mountain bothered to cover it at all.  8 albums – more, if you include 13 or any of the non-Ozzy albums - and that’s the song you chose?  SMH.

Is William Shatner a stoner rock band? Lest we think that some group of non-Montreal Star Trek actors thought it would be clever to name themselves after Captain Kirk himself (or Denny Crane) it turns out that this is, in fact, Shatner himself.  He makes a decent attempt to actually SING the song, a more heroic attempt than his “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” effort, and Zakk Wylde brings the artificial harmonics we recognize from his work with the Ozzman.  Someone was probably a bit too stoned when they put this on the list.   From the rest of the mistakes I guess whoever did this doesn’t know any better.  Maybe it was a joke, but given the consistent incompetence on display here, the ignorance explanation is more plausible.

What’s funny is that by now I’ve been into stoner rock for years and bought lots of stuff from All That’s Heavy.  Yet I only recognized a few of these bands.  Moreover, stoner rock stalwarts like Fu Manchu, Nebula, Kyuss, Monster Magnet, etc. are absent.  So who put this thing together?

Then there’s the idea of a tribute album at all.  With any given song you can…

1.         Screw it up.  Why bother?  In particular, making an electric song acoustic is the easiest way to do this.  Let the band itself make this mistake.

2.         Play it verbatim.  In that case, there’s little point in doing it at all.  Then again, doing so is a way of saying the original version is the best.  

3.         Play it a little differently.  How?  Here’s your chance to either shine or crash & burn.  Choose wisely, but there is not to TRY but only to DO.  Where have we heard that before?

Before this, we had these two more mainstream (and much better) tribute albums to Black Sabbath:

Nativity in Black.  A better, A-List group.  After Forever, the actual song (Biohazard); Children of the Grave (White Zombie); Paranoid (Megadeth); Supernaut (1,000 Homo DJs); Iron Man (Ozzy w/Therapy); Lord of this World (Corrosion of Conformity); Symptom of the Universe (Sepultura); The Wizard (Bullring Brummies): Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath (Bruce Dickinson with Godspeed); N.I.B. (Ugly Kid Joe); War Pigs (Live) (Faith No More); Black Sabbath (Type O Negative).

Nativity in Black II.  A sequel, with some bands reappearing.  Sweet Leaf (Godsmack); Hole in the Sky (Machine Head); Behind the Wall of Sleep (Static X); Never Say Die (Megadeth); Snowblind (System of a Down); Electric Funeral (Pantera); N.I.B. (Primus with Ozzy Osbourne); Hand of Doom (Slayer); Under the Sun (Soulfly): Sabbra Cadabra (hed(PE)); Into the Void (Monster Magnet); Iron Man (Busta Rhymes).

Even these had some good tracks and some absolute stinkers.  The first one was mostly faithful versions with no misses.  But NIB II had some horrendous ones:  Machine Head, Static X, System of a Down, and Busta Rhymes were absolute s**t.  Dave Wyndorf screwed up "Into the Void" with a confusing ad lib about "dinosaurs in Vietnam".  I'm ambivalent about hed(PE)'s version.  The rest on that album were fine.