Sunday Music – Laguna Sunrise

Today’s music video is ‘Laguna Sunrise’ from the band Black Sabbath.

When you think of Black Sabbath, you think of Heavy Metal, and a band that was exceedingly good at what they did, but they were renowned as a band that had ’substance’ issues. You think of Ozzy Osbourne, and when you see him now, it offers a startling insight into how hard living with immense amounts of money might not be all it’s made out to be. That is the surprising thing about this song, an instrumental that even the most diehard fan of the band would probably not recognise as one of their songs.

The band formed in the U.K. in the late 60’s, a time of great musical change. As a new band, they didn’t get much studio time, but all that soon changed. Their first, second and third albums were big, and the band was now established. Truck loads of money followed, money that they could indulge on their profligate lifestyle.

Over time, this band has had many different line ups, and 22 people have passed through the band as members. This song, ‘Laguna Sunrise’ is taken from that fourth album, which was laid down in 1972, and still includes the four original band members. The album was originally supposed to be titled ‘Snowblind’, also the title of one of the songs on the album. The record Company thought that this title would cause problems for release in the U.S. and they retitled the album ‘Vol 4′, which the band detested as a name. The album still went gold within a month, due to the bands huge following.

This Instrumental was a departure from their style, and for this album, now they could name what they wanted, they experimented with layered sound, orchestration, and different instruments.

This song features guitarist Tony Iommi playing acoustic guitar and backed by an orchestra. This was long before the advent of the music video, so there are no clips of the band performing this song, just one track on an album, in a time when bands rarely even made clips of them performing even their biggest hits.

This video includes some fine matching of images to the intent of the song, and was posted to YouTube by videomix22.