Well, afaik, that assertion isn't musical. Unless he's even more confused than I've read. I believe his "theory" is that Sabbath lifted the idea for doing the "horror" thing from them. To me, he fails to understand that while that aspect of Sabbath was revved up by Vertigo at first, they quickly evolved into a somewhat different image. And I'd argue that Sabbath was never so black and white from the beginning. Some of the very earliest publicity photos might have been ideas Vertigo got from that Coven record and so on ... but musically I highly doubt they even heard that Coven album.
I think most people realize that Sabbath sort of pulled away from where Vertigo wanted to go pretty quick. They retained a dark image but it really became more about the state of the world as they viewed it as opposed to devilish rituals or whatever Coven were into. My guess is that they came up with the idea for writing dark music and their label came up with ideas on how to promote that from there. I don't doubt for a second that Vertigo looked around for who was onto this idea and got ideas for imagery or what not, but where they differed was musically. Nobody had quite come up with the music to match that imagery. Once they ascended they took more control of their brand and one could argue that by the time of Paranoid hit in September, 1970, they had a much clearer vision of how to combine their unique musical vision with unique imagery.
I also think Dawson apparently never heard of Arthur Brown, who was doing the horror shtick well before Coven.
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