Planet Caravan

This is another tune that absolutely turned my musical development on end. Summer of 1985, I believe, me scrimping for a few dollars to buy Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Hadn’t heard it, but on the basis of hearing a friend’s album of Master of Reality, I bought a Sabbath music book. (Again, these were the days before “tab” was widespread; basically my book was in piano notation.)

Heard “Planet Caravan” and literally could not get the song out of my mind for days. Simple, sparse, haunting – a narcoleptic jazz-odyssey thing that blatantly defies the label of everything you think when you think of Ozzy Osborne and Black Sabbath. Though, as I’d find out over the next year or so, there’s a “Planet Caravan” on every album (“Laguna Sunrise,” for example).

You’ll either love it and believe it to be the masterpiece I take it for, or fall promptly asleep. Not sure which …