Their short- lived career as a six- piece was curtailed when Philips and ´Acker´ were deemed to be “ totally shit” according ot the rest of the band.
Changing their name to the Earth Blues Company and the simply to Earth, the fledging outfit found their career close to being curtailed whrn Tony was offered a gig with local prog- sters Jethro Tull in earlu ´69. Thakfully, his stint with Tull was short –lived, altought he lasted long enough to participate in the filming of the Rolling Stones ´Great Rock´n´Roll Circus´ movie.
Learning from his experience with Tull but feeling “ it wasn´t quite what I wanted to do, “ Tony returned to reform his old band. “Going with Tull got me the right oath, “ states Tony. “I looked at how they worked, how hard they rehearsed, and I knew that´s what we had to do.”
As the only one who could drive a van, Iommi locked the band into strenous rehearsals, picking up Ozzy, Geezer and Bill at 9:00 am sharp to a chorus of protests, and ferrying them to the youth club where they rehearsed. The first song they wrote together was a 15- minute heavy blues jam titled “Wicked World”. The second track they wrote was to give the band its name. “We rehearsed across the road from this movie theatre wich used to show horor films, “ explains Ozzy. “tony came in one day and said isn´t it weird that people pay money to see horror films and get scared?” Why don´t we make scary music?” based on the ´30s Boris Karlof film of the same name ´Black Sabbath´itself was a chillinf glice of melodrama that was to become the band´s calling card for the next three decades.
The writing of ´Black Sabbath´ also coincided with experiences Geezer Butler would rather forget.” I´d go into alternative spiritual stuff that was going on at the time, “he recalls. “ I´d been raised a Catholic so I totally believed in the Devil. There was a weekly magazine called ´Man, myth and magic ´ that I started reading which was all about Satan and stuff. That and books by Aleister Crowley and Denis Wheatley, especially ´The Devil rides out´which was meant to be a cautionary tale but which read like a handbook on hoe to be a Satanist.
“ I´d moved into this flat that I´d painted black with inverted crosses everywhere. Ozzy gave me this 16th Cenutry book about magic that he´d stolen from somewhere.I put it in the airing cupboard because I wasn´t sure about it. Later that night I woke up and saw this black shadow at the end of the bed. It was a horrible presence that hightened the life out of me! I ran to the airing cupboard to throw the book out, but the book had disappeared. After that I gave all that stuff. It scared me shitless. For Sabbath, it wasn´t the end of the bizarre supernatural events that increased then mystique.