Big difference from the other recent bios… this one is full color throughout, stuffed with pictures, but also lots and lots of text – 355 pages, way bigger than the Rush. Long-friggin’-awaited… I’ve had it finished for nine months. It just goes through a lot of hands with ECW, which is a good thing.

Long story, but the prices below have been raised from the original estimate. This bloody thing weighs exactly one kilogram, so with packaging material it goes over and costs much more to ship. Sorry – nothing I can do; I gotta deal with Canada Post.

Essentially, it’s like my Rush book (also published by ECW) – same high quality look, with 373 graphics, consisting of 127 band photos and 246 memorabilia and record sleeve shots.

OK, first, here’s the publisher’s hype… (from which you’ll gather, it’s very much along my usual format – every damn song discussed in one way or another, and ALL of Sabbath’s eras):

Containing rare and previously unpublished material culled from Popoff’s interviews over the last decade with all the principal members of the band, Black Sabbath: Doom Let Loose is an exhaustive song-by-song, album-by-album trek through the Sabs’ 37-year history. Numerous one-on-one conversations with Ozzy, Tony, Geezer, and Bill, as well as ten interviews with Ronnie James Dio, and additional interviews with supporting musicians such as Tony Martin, Ian Gillan, Glenn Hughes, Vinny Appice, Bob Daisley, Bobby Rondinelli and Neil Murray, make this full-colour retrospective a must for any fan.

The drugs, drink, depression, and doom surrounding this band have imbued songs like “The Wizard,” “Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” “Children of the Grave,” and “Heaven and Hell” with an almost supernatural importance among lovers of dark music. In the wider realm, full albums such as Master of Reality, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Sabotage, and Heaven and Hell show up with regularity on lists of greatest records of all time. Doom Let Loose explains how such classics came to be. It also deals with their tour history, documenting the places rocked, the supporting bands, and most notably, the band’s trials and tribulations as they tried to hold it together in the Satan-obsessed, drug-addicted America of the Nixon era. Look for all manner of Sabbath photos and artifacts that make this examination of heavy metal’s fearsome foursome a feast for the eyes as well as the enquiring mind.

SOLD OUT !