More than 30 minutes of rare live Black Sabbath film has made its way online. The video was shot on the band’s Technical Ecstacy tour show at the 10,000-capacity Selland Arena in Fresno, CA, USA, on November 9 1976, a night when they were supported by Boston and Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band.
Black Sabbath played 14 songs on the night, and six of those are featured in the clip: Symptom of the Universe, Snowblind, All Moving Parts (Stand Still), War Pigs, Gypsy and Children Of The Grave.
Of those songs, Children Of The Grave has been available on YouTube since 2017 via the account of Reelin’ In The Years, a production company that licences live music and interviews for use in feature films, documentaries, TV commercials, DVDs, CDs, museum exhibitions and concert tours.
The company’s name – and the film timecode – is overlaid on this “new” footage, suggesting that they’re also the original source of this clip (they have 12 songs from the performance listed in their database), and that it may not stay online for long.
“For the Technical Ecstasy tour we didn’t have a very big production, just musical equipment, a snow machine and dry ice,” wrote Tony Iommi, in his book Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath. “Nothing fancy, no coming in through the stage or flying in from the rafters. But Bill had this brilliant brainwave of having a big sea shell built behind his drums.
“It was made out of fibreglass and it was loud, as it projected the sound. And every night he had tons of fresh flowers around his kit as well. He started getting more loony, but the shell was better than his original idea, where he wanted all these tubes around his kit with water going through it, changing colour. He had all these fancy ideas. They were great until you tried to get them to work: impossible.”
Black Sabbath Live in Fresno 1976 – YouTube 