Black Sabbath's first manager on Ozzy, The Lost Tapes and getting spurned by the band

Telegraph

6 days ago

In 1968, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward knocked on the door of 14 Lodge Road, in Birmingham, in the hope of finding a singer. The pair were responding to a handwritten advert in the window of a local music shop that read 'Ozzy Zig needs a gig'. But as the door swung back on its hinges, Iommi realised he knew the 20-year-old who lived inside. He told Ward they were wasting their time.
'I'll tell you one thing: his name ain't 'Ozzy Zig',' he said. 'And he ain't no singer, either. His name's Ozzy Osbourne and he's an idiot. C'mon, let's get out of here.' As recounted in Osbourne's memoir I Am Ozzy, Iommi responded to Ward's pleas that the 20-year-old be given a break with the words, 'Give him a break? He was the school clown. I'm not being in a band with that f---ing moron.'
Despite this deeply inauspicious start, the three Brummies did indeed form a band. With the addition of Terry 'Geezer' Butler on bass, in their earliest incarnation, Iommi (guitar), Ward (drums) and Osbourne (vocals) called themselves the Polka Tulk Blues Band. They then changed their name to Earth. Third time lucky, in 1969, they became Black Sabbath.
'An important historical document'
In September, the first ever recordings by this nascent quartet will be released under the name Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes. The title is something of a misnomer; in truth the sessions weren't so much lost as mothballed. Comprising eight songs, the collection includes compositions by Carl Perkins (Blue Suede Shoes), Mitchell Parish and Harry White (Evenin'), and Kokomo Arnold, Pete Johnson and Big Joe Turner (Wee Wee Baby). The remaining tracks – Untitled, Free Man, Song For Jim, Wicked World and Warning – are originals.
As if to ward off accusations of cashing in, the press release announcing the upcoming LP states that 'the release of this album, on CD and on vinyl, has nothing whatsoever to do with the recent Back To The Beginning concert [ Black Sabbath's metal-studded farewell gig in Birmingham earlier this month ] as has been suggested and discussed. In fact, the remastering of those original tapes took place during September 2024, more than four months before the Villa Park event was announced'.
'If you look at the album sleeve there's no mention of the four musicians and there's no mention of the word Sabbath,' Jim Simpson, the group's first manager and the man responsible for the LP, tells me. He adds: '[Earth] quickly moved away from the blues. This recording we've got is, I think, a very valuable document. It shows the emergence of Sabbath from being a blues band.'
He adds that, 'cash was not the motive, for me the music has always taken priority … especially going back to the roots which this release so clearly does. The fact is that Earth were an extremely talented group of young musicians who, from their blues roots steadily and inexorably developed their own extremely distinctive music style. This is an important historical document, charting their early development.'
'I remember Ozzy being very sweet and honest'
Of course, in the wake of the death of Ozzy Osbourne, this week, the release has suddenly attained a timely air. Jim Simpson tells me that although he's fallen out of contact with most of the band, he and Ozzy did reunite, in 2012, when the singer was awarded a star on Birmingham's Walk of Fame, on Broad Street.
'I spent the afternoon with him and his two aunties in the green room at the ICC [International Conference Centre] drinking tea,' he recalls. ''John will you get me another cup of tea, please?' they'd asked him. 'Oh yes auntie.' It wasn't the Ozzy that you imagine.'
He continues: 'I remember him being a very sweet and honest man.'
Jim Simpson tells me about 'the Sabbath bench,' a piece of public furniture bearing the likenesses of Osbourne, Iommi, Butler and Ward. 'It's across the road from [my] office,' he says. Heading into work, two days after Ozzy's death, he noticed that an already sizeable crowd had gathered to pay its respects.
As of this week, in fact, it might even be that Birmingham now has a tourist attraction to rival 'the Beatles crossing' outside Abbey Road Studios.
'As I came to work this morning there must have been 50 or 60 people gathered round it,' he says. 'I was there last night, too, talking to some fans. What really surprised me was the age range. There were people there in the 80s and 90s, and there were kids there who were five, six, seven years of age. One little girl was holding a sign that she'd written, she told me, with the words 'Ozzy we love you' written on it.'
Which isn't bad going for a working class boy who began his life in a local blues band.
'An entire new genre of music'
Now 87-years-old, in conversation over Zoom, the white-haired Simpson has good recall and a kindly eye for these events of the past. Understated in a Second City kind of way, he's too modest to mention that no less a personage than the DJ John Peel once described him as the most powerful player in the early-day music scene of Birmingham. In fact, owing to his then-red hair (now white) and imposing physicality, it was Peel who bestowed upon him the nickname 'Red Bear'.
Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes will be released as a stand-alone item (independent of the musicians who appear on it) on Big Bear Records, the label Simpson founded in 1968.
In answer to my question as to whether Simpson is at all worried about being met with an injunction for issuing the long-vaulted sessions, Simpson replies, 'All things are possible. [But] we have the rights to release it … I've got it in writing from the studio owner, who confirms in writing that I booked the session, I produced the session and I paid for the session. There's also copyright law that says that if you record something that's not then released within 50 years, that then goes into the public domain.'
At the time of writing this, copies of Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes have yet to be made available, even to a gentleman of the press. Inevitably, though, a search of YouTube reveals recordings that Jim Simpson claims are mere bootlegs. Of these, the sound is both strangely familiar yet miles removed from that with which its authors would later make their name. If not quite jolly, it is surprisingly upbeat; if not at all bad, it is distinctly formative.
The sessions produced by Jim Simpson were recorded over two days, in January and March 1969, at Zella Studios in Birmingham, at a time when the group's sound was evolving at such a rate that it was deemed unwise to make it available to the public. Certainly, vast changes were afoot. In remarkably short order, Earth went from a promising if rather standard blues band to something much darker. Trading under their new name, the release in 1970 of the eponymous debut album Black Sabbath (which was also recorded over the course of just two days) created an entire new genre of music: heavy metal.
'I hated the name Earth, it sounded soft, but they loved it,' Jim Simpson recalls. 'Eventually, in the columns of the Melody Maker, I found two London-based bands who were also called Earth, which convinced the guys to change.'
He continues: 'It's hard to imagine this but every Wednesday, when they weren't on the road, we had a business meeting with an agenda and business notes that we'd all act on … One day Geezer turned up late for this meeting and said, 'I've got it chaps!' We said, 'Oh what is it now, Geezer?' And he said, 'Black Sabbath'. Then there was a pause and then the four of us, in unison, said, 'Yes!' And that was the start of Black Sabbath.'
'Stealing raw veg in the middle of the night'
With Earth, as with all groups, things were at first tough going. The band were so broke that its members were reduced to eating raw vegetables stolen from allotments in the middle of the night. Other needs were more pressing still. After finding 10 pence on the pavement, the young quartet decided to forego four bags of chips in favour of buying cigarettes and a box of matches.
But they were nothing if not industrious. Even if they were being paid only a few quid, Earth would travel as far as Dumfries or Bournemouth to play a gig. If a popular band were appearing at a large hall in the Midlands, the young Brummies would park their van outside the venue in the hope of deputising should the advertised act somehow fail to turn up. Believe it or not, this madcap idea actually worked – once. In the autumn of 1968, Earth's growing popularity was given a boost when they brought down the house after filling in for an absent Jethro Tull in Stafford.
(Arriving late to his own gig, after watching the end of their set, Tull bandleader Ian Anderson duly offered Tony Iommi a position in his group. Accepting the post, the guitarist returned to Earth after just four days. 'I want to be in my own band,' he said. 'I don't want to be someone else's employee.' He did, though, last long enough to warrant a cameo in the concert film The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus.)
The hustle continued when Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne signed up as opening-night members of Jim Simpson's blues club, Henry's Blueshouse, upstairs at the Crown pub, in Birmingham. Inevitably, after a week or two, the pair had started pestering Simpson for a slot on the stage. Between September 1968 and January 1970, Earth/Black Sabbath appeared at the Crown on numerous occasions.When the group then asked Simpson to manage them, he answered, 'I thought I already did'.
'No one else wanted them'
'They asked me if they could play the guest slot,' he recalls. 'I had a guest slot every [week], you see, and I believed very strongly, in fact I still do, in Birmingham bands. I've always featured emerging bands along with established names … So I said 'yes of course', and they were really rather good. So I booked them again. And even in those early days, when they were a straight-ahead blues band, there was a glimmer of something they might evolve into.'
Jim Simpson is the first to admit that he was chosen as the band's manager largely because no one else wanted them. But he's also right to say that by the time the quartet dispensed with his services, in September 1970, Black Sabbath had two albums in the UK top 10, while the song Paranoid stood at number two on the singles chart. Fifty-five years later, despite remaining in contact with Bill Ward, with whom he shared a three-hour breakfast just last year, Simpson didn't attend the Back To The Beginning concert on account of him not being invited.
At the beginning proper, though, he put his charges to work in a manner that turned amateur players into professional musicians. 'That's why they came to me, because I could put dates on the date sheet,' he says. The group were dispatched to the Star Club, in Hamburg, at which they performed as many as eight sets a night.
They suffered their van breaking down in the sub-zero temperatures of rural Denmark. In Lancashire, they were paid 20 quid for playing less than half a song after the manager of the venue shut the concert down upon realising this was a different band from the Earth who played pop tunes and Motown covers.
'These kids worked very hard,' Simpson says. 'Every time they hung out, they'd rehearse. They wrote stuff all the time. They'd get to gigs early so they could turn the soundcheck into a rehearsal. They were very, very, very hard-working. I can't overstate that.'
Later in the interview, he recalls that 'it really was us against the world in those early years. No one wanted them. I took the master tapes of the first Black Sabbath album to 14 major record companies, each of which turned me down. And that album went on to sell millions of copies.'
Spurned by Sabbath
But with the first whiff of success, of course, suddenly, other people did want them. After being treated to first-class rail tickets, a chauffeur-driven limousine, a tour of an office (rented by the day) in Mayfair, and a night out at the Speakeasy club, Black Sabbath had their head turned. At a time when Jim Simpson was working out of the front room of his home in suburban Birmingham, the appeal to the group of the London-based managers Wilf Pine and Patrick Meehan proved irresistible.
'To this day, I feel bad about what happened with Jim Simpson,' Ozzy Osbourne wrote in I Am Ozzy. 'I think he got the wrong end of the stick with us. I suppose it's easy to say what he should or shouldn't have done with hindsight, but if he'd admitted to himself that we were too big for him to handle, he could have sold us off to another management company, or contracted out our day-to-day management to a bigger firm.' Elsewhere in the book, the singer notes that his first manager remains 'one of the most honest people I've ever met in the music business'.
Spurned by Sabbath, Jim Simpson spent much of the seventies devoted to Big Bear Records. Under this banner, he helped revivify the fortunes of the blues players Lightnin' Slim and Doctor Ross, both of whom were working in foundries and factories in Michigan.
In later years, in their magazine Living Blues, the University of Mississippi opined that the most interesting releases of that decade emerged on his label. At the time of our interview, Simpson was in the middle of the 41 st year of The Birmingham Jazz & Blues Festival, a mostly free event featuring 179 performances in venues in the city and its surrounding areas.
For their part, Black Sabbath white-knuckled their way through a roller-coaster ride that seemed extreme even by the standards of modern rock and roll. Along with drugs, sex, fallings out and no end of litigation, come the turn of the century, the group had seen no fewer than 23 different musicians drift through the ranks.
Given that he bowed out before things got hairy, in closing, I ask Simpson if he reflects fondly on his time working with the group?
'I enjoyed my time with them, yes,' is his answer. 'But would I have liked to have continued managing them? Yeah … maybe another two or three years. But I wouldn't have liked to have spent my life fending off the problems that came to surround Sabbath. I don't think I'd have enjoyed that at all.'