The Beatles have always been the world’s greatest rock band, almost by default. No other group was willing to push the boundaries like them throughout history, and when you look at the massive techniques they pioneered, there are many things that we take for granted today that they ended up doing first. Dave Navarro of Jane’s Addiction appreciated the Fab Four just like everyone else, but he was always drawn to something heavier, and Black Sabbath was exactly what he was looking for.
That’s not to say that The Beatles didn’t have their heavy moments as well. Going through their back catalogue, songs like ‘Helter Skelter’ were insanely heavy for their time, and tracks like ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ could be considered the progenitors of metal due to how ferocious the riffs sound.
Ozzy Osbourne was no different than any other rocker who wanted to be a Beatle, but Tony Iommi had something different in mind when putting together the group’s first riffs. There had been more than a few bluesy bands on the scene at the time, but the minute that Iommi traded in standard blues licks for riffs that could scare you half to death, they realised they had something no one had heard.
Whereas the heaviest acts before that were probably Cream and Jimi Hendrix, Sabbath represented the exact opposite of Flower Power. The Woodstock generation carried on as if there was nothing to worry about, but Sabbath held a mirror up to the horrors of society in their songs, either talking about the tragedy of war on ‘War Pigs’ or condemning the huppie generation on ‘Children of the Grave’.
Although Navarro had a funky slant to his playing in Jane’s Addiction, Sabbath was the pinnacle for his taste, telling Rolling Stone, “Black Sabbath are the Beatles of heavy metal. Anybody who’s serious about metal will tell you it all comes down to Sabbath. Any hard-rock band that ever tried to write a crazy twelve-minute operetta owes them a debt. There’s a direct line you can draw back from today’s metal, through Eighties bands like Iron Maiden, back to Sabbath”.
Jane’s Addiction isn’t necessarily walking in Sabbath’s footsteps by any means, but if you listen to just Navarro, you can see that he has studied Iommi’s leads for years. Outside of the odd guitar freakout in Jane’s Addiction, his performance as the replacement guitarist in Red Hot Chili Peppers saw him flex his chops, turning in heavier lines in songs like ‘Warped’ and ‘Transcending’.
Even when going back to listen to old Jane’s Addiction records, there’s still the occasional moment where they trail back into classic rock. ‘Been Caught Stealing’ had all the hallmarks of a classic James Brown song, but ‘Mountain Song’ practically sounds like a Sabbath song with a swing rhythm.
It’s not like Navarro is wrong about their influence, either, with acts like Ghost taking up the mantle that Sabbath had all those years ago and putting more theatrical elements around them. Metal has broadened out considerably since Sabbath, but anyone who has ever dreamed of tuning their guitar down low and making something ferocious is walking in Iommi’s footsteps.
