Changes by Sabbath. It's a cover.

It was Ozzy’s funeral a couple days ago. I am not known for being an expert on hard rock or metal but I’ve always held that the holy triumvirate is Zeppelin, AC/DC and Ozzy’s Sabbath. Sabbath was not a presence in my life growing up and when I saw pictures of them I thought they were terrifying. Raised going to church, I knew what Sabbath was. It was Sunday. They were basically called Evil Sunday. I could only guess at their evil ways with the limited brain power of a child. Later I realized that they were closer to kid’s music than they were to evil black metal. Iron Man is a kid’s song, with much less gravitas than Ring Around The Rosie. What were heavy boots of lead compared to the Black Death? War Pigs was not on the side of the War Pigs. Ozzy’s later solo hit Crazy Train was not on the side of the crazy train. He wanted a more peaceful train, like the one Cat Stevens had. Then there was the song I’ve covered here: Changes. It was a piano ballad. A piano and a mellotron woozily creaking along just behind the beat. They weren’t so scary, Black Sabbath. They seemed like good guys.

This song also makes me think of my band Zumpano. We named our 2nd album on Sub Pop ‘Goin’ Through Changes’. It wasn’t an ironic dig at Sabbath, though it was the ironic 90s, but it also wasn’t a straight tribute. We must have thought it was funny. I know we loved the song. We decided that we’d put our drummer Jason Zumpano on the cover. He wasn’t the singer or the songwriter, I think it was an elaborate and subtle troll to put him out front as the face of the band. He WAS the cutest one. Kind of a Dennis Wilson thing. When we played in NYC on that tour, at Brownie’s (the biggest show of the tour! 75 people there!), Chris Collingwood from Fountains Of Wayne came up to me to ask why we put Jason on the cover, when I was the singer. I had no answer, except that maybe there was something wrong with us.

Ozzy isn’t the only loss that I think of today. When I think of that album we made, I also think of my Zumpano bandmate Mike Ledwidge. We lost him a while back. We had some struggles as a band, little success despite our cool record label, but it was a great creative and learning relationship. Mike was the best musician, it seemed effortless to him. Sometimes I would ask him to play, improvise whatever, and I’d stop him when I heard something I liked. If I didn’t do that, it would be lost forever. He’d go on to the next thing. There are certain deaths that no one wants to talk about. We reference them by telling people to watch out for each other, by telling people that you don’t know what a person is going through, that many people keep things hidden. It was one of those. When a person that is not in your life anymore has died, you can sometimes do some magical thinking and imagine that they are still out there living their life like you. I suppose we all have our different ways of talking to the dead. He was funny, kind, talented, intelligent, it is always upsetting when people cannot see how much they are worth.

This song seemed like a good choice for me. I wasn’t going to attempt Paranoid or Wheels Of Confusion, it was the rare Sabbath song that I could actually make MORE rocking. Even faster. I tried singing it with the original melody in Ozzy’s key. No, too strained. An octave down was OK. I ended up singing a harmony with the octave down. That felt better. Not a better melody, but a good melody. Felt good for my voice. Then I sang a harmony to that, which became the lead vocal I used. The 2 harmonies became the chorus. It went through changes, you see. Just like the person in the song.

The song has a very specific shape and vibe, like all the best songs, which makes it easy to change the melody and not feel like you’ve changed the song too much. You keep the chords, the lyrics, the phrasing, you just move some notes around. Not trying to improve it. Like always, just trying to find a reason for my version to exist. Even if it is all just for me.

I’ve been getting pretty good at navigating the internet. Avoiding the garbage, trying to find the interesting and intelligent things. If you are in ANY comment section, you have made a wrong turn. I don’t care if you’re all discussing Maya Angelou, run. Nothing good happens in the comment section. I followed a hyperlink or 2 and found this article here:

I hope the link worked. It is a great article by a writer named Henry Farrell called ‘Brian Eno’s Theory of Democracy’. It juxtaposes Eno’s approach to music with systems of democracy. Eno doesn’t actually have a theory of democracy. I won’t clumsily repeat his main points, I’m not sure that I understand much of it, but I loved the sections where he writes about Eno’s essay “Organizing And Generating Variety In The Arts”:

“Eno writes about music, drawing out the distinction between classical composition, and the forms of composition that interest him. As I interpret him,*** the differences have to do with how to interpret the score. In classical music, the score flattens out variety. Musicians perform the score as it is written - virtuosity consists of interpreting a score that is fixed in advance in compelling ways within a prescribed and narrow band of variations. The kinds of music that Eno wants to talk about treat the score in very different ways: as a set of simple instructions for generating variety rather than constraining it.”

I highly recommend reading it. I liked the idea of music as a set of simple instructions that you can work inside of. So taking that idea, I decided the instructions I’d use from ‘Changes’ were the lyrics, the chords, and the phrasing (90% of the phrasing). The tempo, key or melody could change, the rhythm could change, sections could be shortened or lengthened.

I would never for a moment compare myself to Eno but he is a great model for the artistic life. Ozzy was at the other end of things, and another fascinating model for an artist. A genius in his direct approach to art. An appreciation of chaos that is a 2nd cousin of Eno’s appreciation of chaos. Two different approaches to finding something cool and new. Is that what anarchy is? Am I just describing the concept of anarchy?

Here is the song: