Black Sabbath bootleg cassette
On Friday the 13th of February 1970, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler and Ozzy Osbourne released their first album, the self-titled record Black Sabbath. Just seven quick months later, the band put out their second full-length release, Paranoid in September of the same year. Between these two albums, Black Sabbath had several of their greatest hits of all time, including songs like “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” “The Wizard,” and “Paranoid” and helped pave the way for the creation of genres like heavy metal, doom metal, stoner rock, and goth.
2020 is a lot of things, but it also celebrates 50 years of Black Sabbath and Paranoid. Here is a bootleg cassette containing both albums in full on their respective side, all dubbed on one 90 minute cassette. Original j-card design from Chaotic No Good, two-color risograph printed by Martian Press.
As mentioned in a previous post on Fonts in Use, in 1972 and '73 the typeface Marvin was used on tour flyers promoting Sabbath’s shows in Germany. Although it may now seem strange to view the band’s name in this flair-filed hippie-invoking font, I’d like to pose this as an accurate depiction of the young band’s psychedelic-induced horror and the distorted blues riffs of their earliest years. Black Sabbath is hippie.
The secondary typeface in this design is a modified version of Bookman Old Style. Since there is no digital version of Marvin available, letters on this design were hand placed and kerned from a photo of the font’s type-specimen.
