A Recommendation A Day (A-RAD) #1
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture
Frank Zappa
Let’s play a Jungian word association game. What comes to your mind first when you hear the following words – Oz Osbourne, occult and Satanic rock music, and “Black Sabbath”? Most of you will immediately say “the Birmingham metal band Black Sabbath, duh!” Right? Wrong! The first time those words could be associated with each other was when a teenaged girl in Chicago gifted with a divine singing voice, Jinx Dawson, teamed up with bassist Greg “Oz” Osbourne, and drummer Steve Ross, and dropped a stunning debut album in 1969 on an unsuspecting musical world, opening with the track Black Sabbath, a year before the band Black Sabbath even began to make music.
Steeped in a family with a long history of involvement in occult traditions of the Left Hand Path & various secret societies, Jinx was already well-versed in, and committed to, those “Satanic” ideals by the time she was a teenager. In her own words, when asked what Satanism means to her, “In my experience, one would have to have been a Christian at one time to be a theistic Satanist in its modern day definition. My ancestors were never into religion. They were Left Hand Path, which is vehemently against all religions. Thus why the presenting the Lord’s Prayer backwards, wearing upside down crosses, or the rewording religious rituals. The Satanic imagery is used to mock the church as being an unenlightened path, not to believe in any literal being. I see so-called ‘Occult’ bands wearing Christian crosses. It makes no sense to me. And they give the Sign of the Horns on stage while wearing a Christian cross. This has confused the true meanings of the practice.”
Opening with a strong number, Black Sabbath, conceptually something people have now come to expect out of, say, Iron Maiden à la Dance of Death, Jinx stands out with her incredible vocal dynamics soaring over bluesy rock music, which rightly earned them the moniker “Satanic Jefferson Airplane”. It’s a shame, hence, that Jinx is hardly mentioned in the same breath as her much storied contemporaries, Janis Joplin and Grace Slick. Further in the album, there are more creepy tales sung in haunting songs White Witch of Rose Hall, Coven in Charring Cross, and Pact with Lucifer, each of them accompanied by wonderful guitar harmonies and sometimes with an organ that provides a very suitable sepulchral undertone. The album ends with a controversial, theatrical, 13-min Satanic (Black) Mass that could very well have been taken out of Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible.
Over the next couple of decades, as more bands explored occult themes, and heavy music became inextricably linked with Satanism – with many bands like Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Venom, Mercyful Fate overtly embracing it with varying degrees of sincerity – a female-fronted Coven faded out of, and eventually largely forgotten by, a scene that was increasingly becoming associated with hypermasculinity and machoism. Nonetheless, there’s no denying Witchcraft‘s deep impact and influence on the musical world, and Coven most probably warmed Lucifer’s own black heart in their brief existence.