This was our first concert at the Atletický Stadion Slávie Praha (the home of the Slávia Praha football team) and we were late. Finding the entrance was the next problem - Debs and I have yet to fathom the intricasies of Czech access and crowd control! The show had been on since 4 p.m. with Pantera, Helloween, Neurosis and Coal Chamber warming up the audience for the main bill - Black Sabbath. To hell with the supporting cast, we were here to see the real thing! What made this Black Sabbath show so special was that it was their "Reunion" tour featuring the ORIGINAL line-up of Tony Iomi, Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward!

For me, no other band has come closer to embodying heavy metal than Black Sabbath. Their loud, methodical guitar-based heavy rock and slow, grinding attack take me immediately back to the mid- 70's! I love the stuff and their 1976 "best of", We Sold Our Soul For Rock 'n' Roll must rate as one of my favourite double vinyls. Nothiing much has changed since then - Iomi's riffs still sound heavier than the rest. The lyrics (penned by basist Geezer Butler) still revel in black magic, fantasy, drugs, mental illness, and the occult (but never sex), and Ozzy Osbourne's singing is still flat - an almost tuneless, banshee wail. As for the drumming, Bill Ward never had any flair for playing around with rhythm, and the beat still plods on and on. Marvellous!!

All Sabbath songs follow a predictable format - one riff, a chorus, another riff, and a guitar solo. So what? That's part of their appeal, together with their bad poetry, primitive musicianship, obsessive fantasy world, crawling tempos and overpowering volume. In one package, everything good and bad about heavy metal.

I still love Black Sabbath - as politically incorrect as that may be. They certainly help me escape from a world dominated by gangster rap, teen boy vocal groups and throw-away pop songs. Critics detested them when they were at the peak of their powers in the early '70s, and they still do. But critical acclaim was never essential to the band's success. Black Sabbath was, in many ways, an underground band -- parents hated them, hippies hated them, self-respecting rockers hated them. Everybody hated them except teenagers. And those were the teenagers that grew up and formed bands, from Metallica to Soundgarden to Henry Rollins. Everybody from the heaviest of metal bands to the sludgiest of grunge bands listened to Black Sabbath when they were teenagers.

Of course, after Black Sabbath hit their peak, they stuck around way too long. Some of their first six albums were great, some of them merely had good tracks, but all of them had something to recommend them. Osbourne hung around for two more records before jumping ship for good. Former Rainbow lead vocalist Ronnie James Dio replaced him in 1979; the new lineup released their first record, Heaven and Hell, in 1980. It was a far cry from their best, but it sounded like Paranoid compared to what they would later release. Throughout the '80s, the band members kept shifting, with Iommi being the only member to remain in all of the lineups. At the end of the decade, he was the only original member left in the band. Not only was Black Sabbath suffering musically, but their credibility was in question by their devoted fans as well. In 1991, Iommi persuaded Butler to rejoin and, for a brief time, Dio. Black Sabbath continues to lurch forward in the '90s (sometimes with Osbourne back in the fold, as on 1998's live Reunion), oblivious of the criticism and declining record sales, but their early records continue to inspire -- as well as infuriate -- whole new generations of listeners.

Sabbath Review: The Head Mix

This isn't to suggest that I align myself with the 8,000 lunatic Brummies who attended the December 5, 1997 concert that Reunion documents.

Black Sabbath, I love to love ya, baby, for it's a love that's unimpeachably mine. That is to say, it's unimpeachably Gen X, pomo, counter-counterculture, whatever. To love Black Sabbath is to love myself and my generation, because it also means to loosen the stranglehold 1960s ideology has on history's throat and the story that still sputters from it.

When the smoke from Altamont cleared, thousands of peace-and-love goodniks scattered to the smug comforts of the Process Church of the Final Judgement (religious sect that espouses an apocalyptic theology involving Jehovah, Satan and Lucifer) and numerology tables where all strains of The Revolution became inaudible. Some of these folks became Sab fans. Even worse, a working class substratum that had nothing to do with the Revolution in the first place also took to Sab. The dream was over, and those who believed in 1967 deep in their hearts found a scapegoat in Black Sabbath.

I'm not here to dispute this experience. In fact, I know it to be a reality if only because a friend of mine felt betrayed by the early 1970s and Black Sabbath, and tells a story of how he and his brother whipped a copy of Master of Reality onto some train tracks just to watch it crush. But I do want to articulate the post-punk challenge to this history. Yes, Sabbath were the heaviest of the heavy (although I hear St. Vitus surpassed them in that category), although it's not so much in heavy qua heavy that their music resonates for a certain legion of music fans born after 1965 or so, but rather in music qua music, and if there's one thing the counterculture had trouble with, it was music qua music.

By this, I mean that from this generational standpoint, I can ignore Sab's ridiculous and contradictory lyrics, and even their proggier tendencies, and dive head-first into the superconscious and cerebral extremities of the music itself -- not just the (God, I hesitate to use this word but) pure explorations into heavy but also the tensions between slow trudge and hardcore rush, between wall of noise and bone-dry atmospherics. The best Sab songs teeter back and forth between these two poles, making it the perfect music for those moments when you need to realign yourself with the primitive verities (good head-clearing music). As such, you don't need to listen to it often. Then again, the same could be said about PJ Harvey's Rid of Me, which functions similarly but gets more respect.

This isn't to suggest that I align myself with the 8,000 lunatic Brummies who attended the December 5, 1997 concert that Reunion documents. For one thing, I bet a large portion of them take the lyrics a lot more seriously than I do and would be appalled to learn that I find the song "Black Sabbath" a milestone of high camp. Also, I'd wager that I have a great deal more rhythmic elan than the average Sab fan, judging by how hideously off-the-beat the audience's shouting is during a break in "Paranoid." But I like to counteract Big Chillology whenever possible, and Black Sabbath helps me do that.

So does Reunion. There are a few minor details I dislike about this two-CD set. Not one cut appears from Sabotage (my favorite and their weirdest album) and they ignored "Supernaut," (my fave Sab track ever) for such dubious choices as "Spiral Architect" and "Orchid." The latter, an instrumental track, points to another problem: there are solos (wouldn't be a heavy-metal concert if there weren't, I suppose). But that's just nitpicking. Really, this is much better than I thought it would be. I saw one of Tommy Iommi's myriad variants on Black Sabbath live once a few years back, and it was a stone-cold bore. This isn't. Apparently, Ozzy was so excited about this performance that immediately afterward he ran to the trailer to make sure that it got preserved on tape. I can't match his enthusiasm, but there's not one moment of uninspired playing. The former John Osbourne's interaction with the crowd is superb, especially when he lets them sing every other line of "War Pigs." His voice has held up much better than Robert Plant's has (except on "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," where he ignores the high notes that are so much a part of the song's power -- in that case, they should've just left it off). And the two new songs suffer from overproduction, but "Psycho Man" has a speedy riff break about three minutes in that gets slowed down by the late entry of Bill Ward's drums and then speeds back up for the coda when Ward decides to compliment the velocity with some of his own. The essence of heavy!

The only serious problem is that I doubt I will ever listen to this record again. It was highly enjoyable, but since the live renditions are faithful to the album versions, there isn't much use for it. If you own the first five Black Sabbath albums, you don't need it. But it's certainly a more coherent introduction than We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll (their 1976 "greatest hits" album) for those who don't.