Vinylogue
Jenn D’Eugenio
Jenn D’Eugenio is a devoted follower of the church of Black Sabbath. Dive into her obsession ahead of the band’s final show.
Call her obsessive but Jenn D’Eugenio owns 54 different pressings of the same album and she’s still seeking more. The record in question is the third album by the original lineup of Black Sabbath: 1971’s Master Of Reality.
Growing up in the ’90s, D’Eugenio was a ballet-dancing goth kid who discovered Black Sabbath through the massive metal bands they influenced. Metallica, for instance, and Tool. Sabbath’s second album, 1970’s Paranoid, was the first one she heard and it hooked her immediately. “From there, they became a part of my musical DNA,” she says on a video call from her home in Austin, Texas. Needless to say, she sits surrounded by Black Sabbath records. “A lot of the music I love now is inspired by them and so much stoner rock, which is what I love. They’re one of those bands that just becomes part of you and your musical journey.”
I brought the copy home, put it on, and it sounded a little different. That started me on this crazy path of buying every single variant I could possibly find.
Jenn D’Eugenio
Today, D’Eugenio is Vice President of Gold Rush Vinyl, a women-owned pressing plant established in 2018. She is also the founder of the nonprofit organization Women In Vinyl, which does vital work to help create opportunities and training in the vinyl industry. “With vinyl being the number one way people are consuming physical music, we have to start teaching people sooner and that’s what my organization does,” she explains. “We have scholarship programs with Berklee College of Music. We have a podcast where we talk about the technical stuff and the ins and outs of how records are made. We’re getting into colleges, doing different presentations along with the book that I wrote on the art of making vinyl. We’re going into different classrooms and saying here are all these other career paths that you could do.”
While Paranoid was her introduction to Birmingham’s metal pioneers, as it is for many of us given it contains their biggest hit in the form of its rollicking title track, Master Of Reality became D’Eugenio’s all-time favourite. “It’s truly all killer, no filler, from start to finish,” she beams. “You can put that record on and there’s not a single skip. In the documentaries and everything, nobody talks about it enough. I guess, technically, it’s so short it could’ve been an EP but I really think it’s a perfect record. You have songs like ‘Children Of The Grave’ and ‘Sweet Leaf’ but then you have ‘Solitude’ and ‘Orchid.’ ‘Orchid’ is probably one of the most beautiful pieces of music.”
Indeed, Master Of Reality has seismic significance in the story of Sabbath and much heavy music beyond. Guitarist Tony Iommi had already developed a distinctive way of playing, owing partly to the injury sustained on his fingertips when he had an accident working in a sheet metal factory. For Master Of Reality, Iommi downtuned his guitar by three semitones, loosening its strings to make them less painful for him to press. Bassist Geezer Butler adjusted his bass tuning to match. Black Sabbath’s style had already been based around the sheer power of fat-chorded riffs rather than virtuoso licks and it had always been influenced by horror cinema, on the one hand, and on the other the drudgery of postwar life for Birmingham’s working classes.
The music they created on Master Of Reality became even deeper and more thunderous than before. The album is also defined by its sharp contrasts. Those quieter songs D’Eugenio mentions, to which can be added ‘Embryo,’ act almost as interludes and these serve to make the surrounding material sound even bloody heavier.
The first pressing D’Eugenio owned was a US Warner Bros copy. Then, one day, a different version arrived in the record store where her husband works. “I thought it was awesome,” she remembers. “It’s a German Vertigo. It’s beautiful. Anybody who knows Vertigo knows that it’s such an iconic label. I brought the copy home, put it on, and it sounded a little different. That started me on this crazy path of buying every single variant I could possibly find. It fascinates me that it was bootlegged so many times and it was released in so many different ways. Nowadays, it just wouldn’t work like that. There would be too many hands, too many people. So I started the Mistress Of Reality Instagram account and began deep-diving into all of this and, I dunno, maybe it’ll be a book someday.”
One Record, 54 Ways
At eight songs long, and just 34 minutes, Master Of Reality was deemed a little brief in the peak of the LP era. In America, Warner Bros tried to make it look longer by giving the impression it contained more songs than it did in, well, reality. “At the time albums were the thing that made you money and got you tours,” D’Eugenio explains, “so with ‘After Forever’ they added ‘The Elegy’ but it’s actually just the intro of ‘After Forever.’ And then the outro of ‘Children Of The Grave’ is called ‘The Haunting.’ They just thought it would look more marketable with more tracks. They appear on one of the first US pressings of it and it’s only the [center] labels, not on the jacket, which is so strange.”
It’s going to be really emotional. I feel like it’s time. Some bands tour too long and they try to do it too long. I’m a person who feels you should end on a high.
Jenn D’Eugenio
D’Eugenio says her best-sounding copies of the album are all from 1971: the first UK Vertigo pressing, the promo white label on Warner Bros and the Japanese edition. “The promo and the Japanese one are super clean,” she says. “It’s a really good pressing. It was mastered well, whereas a lot of the others I think were ripped audio, in some cases. I feel like the original Vertigo is just how it was intended to sound. It was the initial record, so that’s why that it holds a special warm-sound place in my collection.”
While some of the bootlegs sound considerably worse and have been manufactured flimsily, D’Eugenio loves all their different quirks and the alternate artwork they offer. There’s a Taiwanese edition with a cheaply Xeroxed cover that’s light blue, with the band name in purple and album title in green. The officially sanctioned Mexican pressing on the Rock Power imprint has a textured, leatherette-like gatefold sleeve, with a different picture of the Sabbath inside. One of her favorites is the Brazilian reissue from 1976. It has the band name written in vibrant rainbow colors because the original black-and-dark-purple combo was considered “too drab for the Brazilian market.” It makes you wonder what customers there thought of the doomy and hardly colorful music it contained. D’Eugenio owns a foreign bootleg of Paranoid, incidentally, on the sleeve of which one of Sabbath’s most famous songs is misspelled “Lion Man.”
“The alternate covers are really fascinating to me,” she says. “It’s really cool to see that and how people felt it needed to be marketed. I have most of the alternate covers. Because a lot of them are just Xeroxed, it could get really crazy and expensive because there are different variations of the Taiwanese one, for example, just with a lighter background.”
One of the fun aspects to her quest is that there will be more bootlegs out there that she doesn’t even know exist yet. “I’m trying to decide how deep I want to keep going with it because I could buy the [official] French version and the German version, even though they’re probably very similar. There are two different pressing plants for the US Warner release so they’re known as two separate pressings of the same record. I could get really into the nitty-gritty with it. Funds [allowed], I’m sure I will.”
As someone who works in the record-pressing industry, D’Eugenio does not condone bootlegging. “Artists should make their money,” she emphasizes. “But I do think it’s part of this archiving that I’m doing, so I think in this case I would be missing something if I didn’t buy them and learn about them. I wouldn’t have found these fun typos or learned about these pressing plants that were bootlegging them and typewriting on the labels. To me, that is a fascinating piece of vinyl pressing history.”
Besides, collecting old and unofficial copies of Master Of Reality, in the year 2025, isn’t going to do much harm to Black Sabbath’s bank accounts. “I paid them enough for the tickets,” D’Eugenio laughs.
The End of Sabbath
This brings us to Sabbath’s final show which D’Eugenio will be flying over to attend, having never seen her heroes in concert before. It’s unclear what exactly to expect from this event. It will take place at Aston Villa’s football stadium on July 5 and its lineup reads like a who’s who of major rock and metal artists, from Guns ‘N Roses to Gojira. Its host will be Aquaman himself, Jason Momoa, and it is going to mark the end of Black Sabbath as well as their singer Ozzy Osbourne’s retirement from public performances.
“For me, I love all of Black Sabbath,” says D’Eugenio. “Obviously, Ozzy has a special place. I don’t believe that after Ozzy it’s still Black Sabbath. That’s just my opinion!” The original Osbourne era ended with 1978’s Never Say Die after which the singer went solo. Sabbath’s next two albums, 1980’s Heaven And Hell and the following year’s Mob Rules, were fronted by Rainbow’s Ronnie James Dio. Thereafter, the situation (and quality control) became much more erratic as Iommi tried his best to steer the ship through choppy waters with an ever-changing crew.
“To me, they created subgenres,” D’Eugenio says of the original lineup’s run of albums in the first half of the 1970s. “They created a genre. They were what this is. I find it hard to replace an integral part of that and still call it the same thing. Black Sabbath with Dio is awesome. Dio as Dio is awesome. I just don’t think it’s Black Sabbath. That’s just my two cents on it.”
Whatever surprises the final extravaganza has in store, inevitably it will be a bittersweet experience. Osbourne has Parkinson’s disease and has suffered further debilitating health problems of late.
“I read his book and I know that he has a hard time sitting still and I think everything he’s going through is just sad, honestly, for him, that he physically can’t or won’t really be able to do it anymore,” says D’Eugenio. “It’s going to be really emotional. I feel like it’s time. Some bands tour too long and they try to do it too long. I’m a person who feels you should end on a high. At this point, it’s like a send-off, in a way. I hope he finds something that keeps him going afterwards. When you read Ozzy’s book, he talks about how he’s tried to quit before, and he’s an anxious person, which I can relate to, and he needs to keep busy. I hope he finds something. The other guys, I think, will still make music.”
Heavy Music Will Never Die
It’s no surprise to learn that the newer and contemporary bands D’Eugenio admires all owe their stylistic debts to the blueprint set by Black Sabbath back in the day. There’s Cambridge’s Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats, for instance: “I love that their albums are themed without it being obvious. I love a band that just comes out there and doesn’t say anything. They’re just so heavy and they just crush it every single time.”
She’s a fan of Sleep, too, the Californian trio who basically distilled the sound of Sabbath down to one of its relentlessly monolithic conclusions. Their album Jerusalem (also known as Dopesmoker) was recorded in 1996, released first in 1999 and in other forms since, and it contains one mammoth song about marijuana which rides on one titanic riff after another. It’s as if Master Of Reality’s “Sweet Leaf” was stretched out to fill a CD and wildly disfigured in the process. The result is a contender for the heaviest album ever recorded. Sleep are another band whose different variants of the same records are collected by D’Eugenio.
“I love the label RidingEasy and pretty much everything that Dan [Hall] puts out. I have a ton of that stuff,” she adds. “Another band I really love right now is Elder [from Massachusetts]. Again, anything that Nick [DiSalvo] puts out, even the solo work he does, I think is amazing. A lot of people were not happy with the new sound they went into with [2019’s] The Gold & Silver Sessions. That one changed their sound a little bit but I still thought that was really cool and I love them. A lot of that space rock or stoner rock stuff is what I’m into. [London’s] Green Lung, as well.”
Although this is the end of an era, Black Sabbath’s significance is set firmly in stone. Younger bands across the globe will continue to carry the torch lit back in the ’70s by their Brummie forbearers. Their riffs and their words will continue to resonate down the ages and generations. “I feel like, even now, they’re still going up,” says D’Eugenio. “People are still discovering them and falling in love with them. That’s really cool. They’re never going to go away.”
Interested in reading more about the most influential players in vinyl culture? Check out our features with The Black Keys, Colleen Murphy, Peanut Butter Wolf, Thurston Moore, Cut Chemist, My Analog Journal, DJ Marky, Steve Aoki, SRZ, Vinyl Souk, Sara Mautone, and DJ Rashida.
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