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There Has to be Someone Around Here Who Saw Black Sabbath’s First American Gig (Allegedly) at Glassboro State College in South Jersey
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This story probably should have been written two weeks ago, when Black Sabbath was gearing up to play their final show as part of the “Back to the Beginning” mega-event at Villa Park in Birmingham, England. It was a star-studded tribute featuring bands like Guns N Roses and Metallica serving as openers for a solo Ozzy Osbourne + Sabbath headlining combination. What’s most amazing, perhaps, is that Tool was able to fit three songs into a 20-minute window. Incredible!
Interestingly enough, there’s a uniquely-local piece of Sabbath trivia. Did you know that Sabbath’s first American show took place in South Jersey? That’s how the story goes, according to most people, but not everyone.
Dave Swanson at Ultimate Classic Rock wrote the following back in 2015:
Black Sabbath made their U.S. debut on the day before Halloween 1970. Though the timing was quite appropriate, the venue was curious, indeed.
The band were featured inside the Esby Auditorium at the usually sedate Glassboro State College (now Rowan University) in Glassboro, N.J. – a school known for hosting guests like poet Robert Frost and the Boston Pops. They’d never seen anything like Black Sabbath before.
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Their set was short, but it was made up of classics from the band’s two albums, including “N.I.B.,” “War Pigs,” “Black Sabbath” and “Paranoid.” That first U.S. tour consisted of about 15 dates, ending in late-November, with the majority of shows taking place on the west coast.
During that time, the band opened for the James Gang, Three Dog Night, Jethro Tull and Alice Cooper. The shows were a huge success – so huge, in fact, that Sabbath made a quick return to the U.S. early the next year, sealing their spot in rock history.
Pretty cool, you may think, but, there’s a bit of discrepancy. Others say that the first U.S. show was actually at a Manhattan club called “Ungano’s,” with a corresponding story about blown electrical fuses when Sabbath plugged European equipment into American sockets.
A site named Dangerous Minds touched on this in a 2014 story, citing two of the members themselves:
Riding high (quite literally) on the huge successes of their first two albums, Black Sabbath (released on February 18th, 1970) and Paranoid (released on September 18th, 1970), both Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi and vocalist Ozzy Osbourne historically credit the location of their first U.S. show in their respective autobiographies as legendary Manhattan club, Ungano’s. In his 2012 autobiography, Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, Iommi recalls showing up to Ungano’s and was horrified at what a “shithole” the club was. Their roadie plugged their Euro gear into Ungano’s U.S.-only sockets and subsequently blew the club’s fuses. After a short unplanned pre-show intermission, the power went back on and Black Sabbath’s first gig was history. Or was it?
Other sources claim that the band’s first gig took place at Glassboro State College (now known as Rowan University) in New Jersey. And the story is quite similar to Iommi’s. Claims made by rock promoter Rick Green, the brother of Stu Green who with his brother ran Midnight Sun an influential music promotion company that started out in Pennsylvania in early 70’s, has been quoted as calling himself the “promoter” of Black Sabbath’s “first U.S. gig” at Glassboro. On the surface, it’s not hard to believe. The Greens booked everyone from Lou Reed and Alice Cooper to the Patti Smith Group at the historic Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, not far from Glassboro State.
In an interview that Rick did in 1992 with The Philadelphia Daily News, he spoke about the gig in strangely similar detail to Iommi’s recalling that Sabbath blew out the power after plugging in their amps into incompatible sockets. This caused the gig to be rescheduled until the end of Sabbath’s inaugural tour. Hmmm. So what about Glassboro? Was it real, or was it just a bad memory? Here’s another version of the Glassboro story, according to an article from The Seth Man, a journalist who writes over at Julian Cope Presents Head Heritage. The post also cites Rick Green’s Daily News interview as a source, but includes more detail:
‘The band’s (Black Sabbath’s) passage through customs at Kennedy Airport in New York proved to be “a day-long trauma that left the group tired and humiliated,” causing them to be three and a half hours late for the gig. Finally appearing onstage at 1:00 in the morning, the power to their sound system cut out during the first song. It was fixed within a few minutes, but once they recommenced they caused a second power outage that not only knocked out their sound system but the power to the gymnasium, the campus and “…most of the power in the neighborhood. The street lights were out and there was darkness.” Appropriately enough, the date was Mischief Night: exactly half a year away from Walpurgisnacht on October 30th.’
When you do some research on this, the Glassboro thing pops up everywhere. There’s much less about this reported show in Manhattan. But surely we have a Crossing Broad reader who can corroborate. If you were at Rowan back in 1970 and saw Black Sabbath at this mysterious event, you would be in your early 70s now, so there are definitely people still alive who saw this gig. We need to get one of them on the record here. We will rest easier knowing that the first Sabbath gig was in the Delaware Valley, where it belonged.
Play the song Choonis! –
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com