BLACK LABEL SOCIETY TRIVIA
Trivia
Black Label Society's debut reached shops in Japan before anywhere else. Sonic Brew was issued there on 28 October 1998 with thirteen tracks and a free Zakk Wylde guitar pick. North America did not see it until 4 May 1999, more than six months later, and that edition carried three bonus tracks — among them a cover of Ozzy Osbourne's 'No More Tears' with Mike Inez of Alice in Chains on bass.
Black Label Society was started in 1998 by Zakk Wylde. The band's own site describes a group that has lasted more than a quarter of a century on music that puts crushing riffs, blues-soaked grooves, soaring guitar leads and unexpectedly unguarded balladry into one place.
The band was very nearly called something else. Zakk Wylde's first choice was Hell's Kitchen, and the drummer Phil Ondich had already worked up a sleeve design under that name — but the name could not be trademarked, so it had to go. What replaced it was Black Label Society, chosen because Wylde liked Johnnie Walker Black Label and because the phrase 'black label' itself stands for the best of something.
The Sonic Brew sleeve in circulation today is not the one the band first printed. Zakk Wylde had picked a whisky bottle off a supermarket shelf, decided its label was the cover, and used it. After release, Johnnie Walker got in touch — Wylde assumed an endorsement was coming, and what arrived was a cease and desist. The artwork was scrapped in a hurry and replaced with a motorcycle-club-style logo of the band's name.
Black Label Society exists because Zakk Wylde briefly had nowhere to go. Ozzy Osbourne stood down after 1995's Ozzmosis, and in that same year Axl Rose rang to invite Wylde to jam with Guns N' Roses. After Ozzy's Black Sabbath reunion in the summer of 1997 came the question of whether Wylde was in or out for a tour, and lawyers and managers turned it into something harder. He did go back for dates in Japan, Australia and New Zealand early in 1998, but he was left off that year's American Ozzfest, and the Guns N' Roses jam never turned into anything. With a pile of riffs and song ideas and no outlet for them, he began work in 1998 on a record of his own.
Ozzy Osbourne's appearance on The Blessed Hellride came about because of Zakk Wylde's wife. Wylde was reluctant to ask — they had come off a tour together only weeks earlier — so she rang Sharon Osbourne, who is also Ozzy's manager, herself. Sharon, by Wylde's account, welcomed it as a chance to get Ozzy out of the house and working. The recording itself took about two takes, and the first thing Ozzy said afterwards was to ask whether there was any beer.
Asked about the title of Mafia, Zakk Wylde explained that what the word means to him is God and family. It is, he said, another way of saying Black Label Society: run into someone wearing a BLS shirt anywhere in the world and you know you have met one of your own, part of the same large family.
'In This River' did not begin as a memorial. Zakk Wylde wrote it for Mafia several months before his friend Darrell 'Dimebag' Abbott was killed. It was after Abbott's death that Wylde read the words back, decided the song could only be Dime's, and let it become one. The video casts the two guitarists as children who ride their bikes to the edge of a river and swim for the far bank; only Wylde reaches it. The river, in his description, stands for life itself.
The live album Unblackened documents a concert that happened exactly once. On 6 March 2013 at Club Nokia in Los Angeles the whole band played sitting down — not unplugged, since electric instruments were in use, with Zakk Wylde moving between electric guitar, acoustic guitar and piano. Two weeks of rehearsal went into it, and the 2,300 people in the room were the only ones who saw it.
'Name in Blood', from Engines of Demolition, is about Zakk Wylde's relationship with his wife Barbaranne. They have been together since the sixth grade, and by his account he had signed his name in blood from that point on — which is where the song comes from. He puts 'Broken and Blind' and 'The Hand of Tomorrow's Grave' in the same category and describes the album, in the end, as being about marriage, love and relationship therapy. The same record carries 'Ozzy's Song', written about Ozzy Osbourne.
Drums are the only instrument on Sonic Brew that Zakk Wylde does not play. He took the guitar as a given, then decided to handle bass, piano and the singing as well, on the reasoning that the more he played the more of the record he controlled. He has explained the singing in particular: after a decade working alongside Ozzy Osbourne he had no appetite for hiring a stand-in vocalist, and he compares the arrangement to Jimmy Page producing Led Zeppelin himself.
Phil Ondich, who played the drums on Sonic Brew, first got in touch by email while Wylde was still in Ozzy Osbourne's band, saying that if a record away from Ozzy ever happened he wanted the job. The two met during Wylde's Book of Shadows tour and later spent time outside a radio station in Roanoke, Virginia. Ondich handed over a tape of his own band, Raging Slab; Wylde played a song he had just written, 'Beneath the Tree', on acoustic guitar while Ondich tapped out the time on his legs. That was enough for Wylde, who invited him down to Miami, Florida.
The Sonic Brew sessions began in Miami, Florida, in May 1998, with Ron and Howard Albert as co-producers. Wylde and Phil Ondich settled into a routine of jamming through the day and heading, in the evening, for an Irish pub around the corner from the studio. What Wylde remembers about the place is its jukebox, stocked with Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Bad Company.
Zakk Wylde goes into a studio with nothing prepared. Speaking in Japan in 2003, he said that what he brings is a great deal of beer and that everything starts from jam sessions; put himself somewhere between Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, he reckons, and the ideas arrive. A Black Label Society album, he added, takes at most about fifty days. For 2005's Mafia he wrote twenty-three songs in the first eight days of the sessions.
'F.U.N.', which closes the Japanese edition of The Blessed Hellride, was included in full knowledge of how bad it is. Zakk Wylde has said it may be the worst recording in the history of music, and that being the worst was exactly why he wanted it on the album — the more people told him he surely would not really include it, the more he wanted to. Putting the worst song at the end of a record, as he put it, is like the surprise at the bottom of a box of caramel popcorn.
Every song on Mafia was written on bass. Zakk Wylde compares writing to building a house, and the foundation, in his account, is the drums: once the drummer Craig Nunenmacher has played something that holds up, the rest goes on top of it. He named the Minimoog and the talk box as things he used for the first time on this record, and put it down to always wanting a sound he has not made before.
'I Never Dreamed', which closes Mafia, is a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover. Zakk Wylde has said that in his Ozzy Osbourne years the music on stage was heavy but the music on the tour bus was mellow, and that Lynyrd Skynyrd is what he played there. He holds their singer Ronnie Van Zant in particular regard, and rates this song — far less famous than 'Free Bird' — as one of their best.
The first stage Zakk Wylde stood on with Ozzy Osbourne's band was inside a prison, in July 1987. He was still on trial for the job at the time, and has said that had he failed the audition he would simply have been left there. The connection did not end: a visit he made to a British prison in July 2010, playing a short set and talking to the inmates, was included as bonus footage on the DVD of 2013's Unblackened.
Nick Catanese had been at Zakk Wylde's side since 1997 and was, within Black Label Society, his partner on guitar. Ahead of 2014's Catacombs of the Black Vatican the band parted with him amicably and brought in Dario Lorina of Lizzy Borden. Lorina stayed: the line-up the band's own site lists today is Zakk Wylde, John DeServio, Jeff Fabb and Dario Lorina.
Catacombs of the Black Vatican sold around 26,000 copies in the United States in its first week and entered the Billboard 200 at number five. Mascot Label Group released it in Europe on 7 April 2014, and eOne Music brought it out in North America the following day.
Grimmest Hits, the tenth album, was made in the gaps of 2017 — the year Zakk Wylde rejoined Ozzy Osbourne's solo band — at Wylde's home studio, the Black Vatican. eOne released it on 19 January 2018. The video for 'Room of Nightmares', which went out ahead of the album, was directed by Justin Reich, a longtime collaborator of the band's.
In 2019 eOne took on Black Label Society's earlier catalogue. On top of the three most recent albums, which the company already had, it licensed Sonic Brew, Stronger Than Death, 1919 Eternal, The Blessed Hellride, Hangover Music Vol. VI, Mafia and Shot to Hell — which put the band's records in one place for the first time.
The 2019 '20 Years Of Sonic Brewtality' tour, marking two decades since the debut, played each city twice: Sonic Brew straight through on the first night, a set of the better-known songs on the second. It opened on 24 April at the Oriental Theater in Denver and closed on 23 May with the second of two nights at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles. Alongside it came a reworked Sonic Brew - 20th Anniversary Blend 5.99 - 5.19, released on 17 May, which added a full-band-and-piano version of 'Spoke in the Wheel' and an acoustic 'Black Pearl'.
Doom Crew Inc., the eleventh album, is dedicated to the touring crew who have kept the band on the road since it formed in 1998, and to its audience worldwide. It came out on 26 November 2021, and all twelve songs on it were recorded at Zakk Wylde's home studio, the Black Vatican. 'Set You Free' went out ahead of it as a single.
Engines of Demolition, the twelfth album, was made in a way Black Label Society had not worked before. Wylde's account is that a record normally arrives in one burst of writing and recording and is finished when the smoke clears; this one went on, then off, then on again. A year of the Pantera celebration tour fell in the middle of it, then another year on the road, then a year and a half more, and the finished album mixes songs written in 2022 with newer ones. He also says he does not demo: a song is finished when it is written.
Craig Nunenmacher played drums in Black Label Society for close to ten years before leaving early in 2010. Zakk Wylde described the parting as an amicable one: Nunenmacher wanted to try other music, and Wylde had told him he would be welcome back whenever he liked. The drummer who replaced him, Will Hunt of Evanescence and Static-X, was recommended by Jerry Cantrell of Alice in Chains.
Shot to Hell sold just under 32,000 copies in the United States in its first week and reached number twenty-one on the Billboard 200. That was short of the 45,000 its predecessor Mafia had managed in March 2005.