The Record That Changed My Life: Krist Novoselic on Black Sabbath – Sabotage (1975)

I was just recently talking about Sabotage by Black Sabbath again. I always wonder if there had been Nirvana without this album. Probably not. It’s everywhere in Nirvana’s music. This is the music that I loved when I was 15 or 16 years old. I had the album on cassette, and I listened to it every day. I think it was the riffs that attracted me, maybe also the album’s occult touch. “Symptom Of The Universe” is a monster of a song. The acoustic guitar, then this riff.
It is simply what it is. It is an untouchable album.

I already knew Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules because they were just being released at the time. I discovered Sabotage with an according delay. It was claimed that Nirvana had done away with a lot of metal, but that never applied to Black Sabbath. Sure, we were snotty punks who wanted to get rid of all that 80s rock, but I’m older and wiser now. You cannot do away with Black Sabbath anyway, because this band is for eternity. Black Sabbath is immortal, nobody can do any harm to them. And if you look at the rock music timeline, they are simply above Nirvana. They are part of us because we descended from Black Sabbath, just as Black Sabbath descended from the Beatles. The Beatles opened the gate for all of us, nobody can do anything about this truth. And when I played with Paul McCartney years ago, it was like coming full circle.

by Krist Novoselic