RECORD STORE TALES #1165: Zero the Hero
The True Story of My Favourite Album of All Time
1984.
It wasn’t I that owned Born Again by Black Sabbath. That would have been Bob Schipper, who had all manners of metal in his cassette collection. I knew very little about Black Sabbath when I first discovered music at the end of 1984. Though Ian Gillan was not the lead singer by the time I became interested in bands like Black Sabbath, he was for all intents and purposes the lead singer to me. Magazine coverage of Black Sabbath goings-on were beyond my reach, and this would be the last Sabbath album for a few years anyway. To me, Black Sabbath were: the two guys with the moustaches, the guy with the long black hair, and the drummer…who looked completely different in the music video for “Zero The Hero” than he did on the Born Again cassette cover. How was I to know that original Sabbath drummer Bill Ward had been replaced by a guy named Bev Bevan? I was just starting out on my rock journey. I had the puzzle pieces in my hands, but no picture to guide the assembly.
It all started when Bob came over one day raving about this song called “Zero the Hero”. “You gotta hear it! It goes, ‘Whatcha gonna be, whatcha gonna be, Zero the Hero!'” Bob was right that the chorus was pretty cool and memorable. The effects on Gillan’s voice on the chorus lent it a metallic sheen. He let me borrow the tape a bit to listen. I enjoyed it. Master of Reality was another one we listened to together. He liked a song called “Children of the Grave”, especially the spooky outro. Born Again had some spooky stuff on it too. This would come in handy a little later on.
As I discovered bands, I tended to hear the stuff that most popular in my own neighborhood. W.A.S.P., Iron Maiden, Kiss, Judas Priest, Van Halen, ZZ Top. I heard some of The Police as well, but my closest friends were rockers. Metal heads. There was a serious division in music back then: Heavy Metal vs. New Wave. You couldn’t like both. To us, everything that wasn’t metal was “New Wave”. If you liked Corey Hart, you were a “Waver”. If you liked Tears For Fears, you were a “Waver”. In our neighborhood, you didn’t want to be a Waver. Basically a Waver would be a slur along the lines of “gay” or whatever the kids were saying back then. I remember “hurtin’ eunuch” was a phrase that kids like Jeff Brooks would throw around at kids like me.
Anyway, I threw myself into metal full-time and counted Black Sabbath as one of the bands I liked. I didn’t own any Black Sabbath, but I could name two songs that I liked. I think Ozzy Osbourne had something to do with the band, and that singer with the black hair was also in Deep Purple. I was learning. I didn’t know his name, and I didn’t realize that Ronnie James Dio was also in Black Sabbath (mind blown there) but I was piecing that puzzle together. I had a few of the edges together, and now I would work on the body: collecting the music.
In the mid-80s, Bob and I were too old for going trick or treating at Halloween time. Instead we gave out candy at Bob’s house. We wanted to go all out and really make a cool “haunted house”, and for that you needed sound effects. Instead of spending valuable allowance money on one of those corny Halloween tapes, we made our own. We did this by looping the scary bits of Black Sabbath songs. Bob especially liked that haunting whisper at the end of “Children of the Grave”. We made loops, maybe 10 of them, adding in our own bits via an external microphone. Then we would loop “The Dark” a few times, until the side was full. Bob would go home and eat lunch, and come back later that afternoon to work on more Halloween stuff. We were very resourceful and creative. To this day I have never used pre-made Halloween sounds. I always made my own by looping bits of songs. It worked. Kids would either go straight to our house for candy like a bee to honey…or they would run past terrified!
[Bob and I learned from this experience when a young girl cried at our house. If we saw anyone really really little approaching, we would kill the sounds and turn on the lights. It wasn’t our goal to make kids cry.]
I managed to record the music video from the Pepsi Power Hour one afternoon. I called Bob over to watch it with me. It was (and remains) one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life. A Frankenstein looking guy and a Franken-Hitler guy appear to be resurrecting a dead body as…a nerd? They force fed him eggs with ketchup, while he grinned the whole way through. Then, a horse walked backwards down a flight of stairs in a mansion. Meanwhile, scenes of the band playing live were cut in, and you could hardly see Gillan’s face. It was weird…and heavy. We hated it. But I loved it.
Finally one day in highschool I said to myself, “Why the heck haven’t I taped Born Again off Bob Schipper yet?” I wanted that song “Zero the Hero”. I popped over one afternoon and borrowed it. I put it in deck “A” of my Sanyo dual deck ghetto blaster, with a Maxell blank 60 in “B”. I hit “dub” and began recording. For whatever reason (and I tried a couple times), I could not get a good copy of that tape. It wasn’t the best blaster in the world that I was using, but there was so much warble in the copies I made, I got fed up. I called Bob and asked if I could just buy the tape from him. I knew it wasn’t in regular rotation at his house. He said “OK” and I gave him $2 or $3 for it.
I was finally able to listen to Born Again properly. I liked a few songs such as “Trashed”, “Disturbing the Priest”, “Born Again” and “Keep It Warm”. It played better on my Walkman, so that’s where most of my listening happened. That meant it was often on the way to the cottage, or at the cottage, where I used my Walkman most.
I don’t know when Born Again became my favourite album of all time. I really don’t. The tape grew on me through the years, but the poor quality of that old WEA cassette made listening hard. It probably elevated to “among my favourites” when T-Rev found me a vinyl copy in 1995, a full decade since I first became acquainted with it. A decent CD reissue followed a few years later, and then it hit serious heavy rotation.
Keep it warm, rat: I love this album for all its flaws and overreaching. It brings me back to that bedroom, dubbing scary music with Bob. It brings me back to listening on my Walkman at the cottage at night. It brings me back to that place where I escaped all the bullies and teachers, and was alone with my own imagination.
Yes, Born Again is my favourite album of all time. I play it more often than I should, sometimes twice in a row. No remix or reissue could make me love this album more. I am Born Again!
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