CROSS PURPOSES is Better Than You Remember It
Fresh off of Black Sabbath’s colossal “Back to the Beginning” farewell sendoff, it’s hard to imagine a time when Sabbath wasn’t the biggest Metal band in the universe.
If we rewind back to the mid/late 80’s, Black Sabbath was a mere footnote in the juggernaut solo career of Ozzy Osbourne at the time. Sure, the band was technically still “active”, but Ozzy was at the peak of his fame as a solo artist. At the time I knew that Black Sabbath had been a thing, but I knew songs like “Paranoid” and “Iron Main” mostly from the Randy Rhoades live album, Tribute. I’d recently purchased a copy of Ozzy’s No Rest for the Wicked cassette from my local K-Mart, and songs like “Miracle Man” and “Breaking All the Rules” were infinitely more interesting to me than anything some old British farts had recorded back in the 70’s.
That all changed on a random Saturday night while watching MTV’s Headbanger’s Ball. While flipping channels, I missed the band intro for a song called “Headless Cross”. The 4 dapper British gents in the band were clearly older than most of the bands was listening to at the time, but there was a mature confidence in the tune that just exuded cool...These guys were all decked out in black leather singing about druids or something in the middle of the night, it was everything Heavy Metal was supposed to be about. The guitar player was a leftie and sported an epic mustache, and the lead singer had an amazingly powerful and polished vocal delivery. When the band credits faded in towards the end of the song, color me surprised to find out that this was the one and only Black Sabbath.
That, my friends, was when I fell in love with all things Black Sabbath. And I unapologetically love all of the records from the Tony Martin era(s).
My first time seeing Black Sabbath live was on the Cross Purposes tour. By that time, they’d released 3 albums with Tony Martin, reunited with Dio, split up with Dio, and reunited with Tony Martin again. But this time Geezer Butler was still in the band, so Cross Purposes felt more legit than past offerings from the post Ozzy/Dio years. I can remember seeing the concert ad in a corner page of Jam Magazine (a free local newsprint zine for musicians, by musicians) announcing the band’s only Florida date of the tour at the Edge in Jacksonville. Seeing Sabbath in a club venue was one thing. Seeing Motorhead and Morbid Angel open for them? I had to be at that show.
By now I was fervently worshipping at the Church of Iommi and somehow convinced my mom to make an overnight trip to Jax so I could go to this concert. I remember being dropped off at the venue before doors opened and killing time at the comic book store that was next door. Who else was killing time in that comic book store? Tony Martin and Geezer Butler, thumbing through copies of whatever had grabbed their attention. It was like seeing a pair of unicorns in the wild; as much as I wanted to rush over and profess my undying devotion to the Sabbath cause, I didn’t want to ruin the moment. So I just stood there with a growing crowd of other long hairs, gawking at our (Eternal) Idols.
The concert was amazing, one of the best I’ve ever seen. It didn’t matter that the venue size was a fraction of what they’d draw overseas, they played as loud and triumphantly as if they were headlining Donnington. Morbid Angel opened the show and were starting to break big thanks to the “Rapture” video getting regular airplay. I’d seen their headlining run not to long before this (that’s a whole other story to tell), but they definitely knew where their place was on this bill. Motorhead opened their set with “Ace of Spades” and Lemmy watched all of the Sabbath set from the side of the stage, so I watched Lemmy watching Sabbath for most of the Sabbath set. And Sabbath was of course phenomenal. Geezer Butler was the star attraction for most of us in the audience, but I was firmly planted up front against the barricade, stage right in front of Mr. Iommi himself. I can still remember watching the total control in his hands as he laid waste to songs like “Children of the Grave” and “The Wizard”, how effortlessly he made it all look. I caught a guitar pick that he tossed into the crowd mid-set, it felt like I’d won the lottery. I’ve since lost that guitar pick. And Tony Martin owned the crowd that night. Say what you will about his place in the Sabbath pantheon, but the guy is a consummate frontman.
Everybody that had packed into the Edge that night knew which version of Sabbath we were getting. And we were all happy to spend one sweaty night together in a tuna can of a nightclub watching the most important band of our lives play our favorite songs.
As for Cross Purposes the album itself? It’s pretty good. It’s not the best album of the Tony Martin-era, I think that award has to go to TYR. Headless Cross and TYR are like Heaven & Hell and Mob Rules for the Dio-era fans. The former albums get all of the glory, but the latter are arguably the better records. “Cross of Thorns” and “Hand That Rocks the Cradle” are some of the best tunes from the post-Ozzy canon, and “I Witness” is a banger of an opening track. The rest of the album is a mix of generally serviceable tunes that really depend on your frame of mind at the time while you’re listening. According to Geezer Butler’s autobiography, he stuck around for this record after the Dehumanizer lineup fallen apart because it wasn’t supposed to be a Sabbath record but a new venture between him and Tony. History has shown us how that’s worked out before, but that could also explain why Cross Purpose sounds the way that it does.
There was also a CD/VHS live album released to commemorate the tour, the aptly title Cross Purposes Live. I still have a copy of that somewhere, and I’ll go on record to say that the live versions of those tunes translate better than their studio counterparts. You can watch the full thing on YouTube; I’ll still revisit it once a year.
So those are my thoughts on Cross Purposes. Even though it’s not their best work, or even Tony Martin’s best work, it's an important record in my long and complex relationship with Black Sabbath. Thanks for the memories, guys.
