I discovered Sabbath during my own teen-age period of self-indulgent pessimism, which was spent in another bombed-out city, Belfast. My years there coincided with the so-called New Wave of British Heavy Metal, a second-generation blossoming of loud music that came after Sabbath and Zeppelin and Deep Purple. The noise and spectacle of heavy metal and its close cousin punk rock were well suited to the fractious Northern Irish capital in the early nineteen-eighties. Befitting their image, hard-rock and punk bands also seemed more willing to play gigs in the province than Top Forty acts were. Judas Priest, Def Leppard, The Damned, Thin Lizzy, Motörhead, and Saxon all performed in Belfast during those years. Every show was sold out and every show was an event. The one band that did not come was Black Sabbath. Even without Ozzy, they had stayed in top form, releasing two potent albums, “Heaven and Hell” and “Mob Rules,” featuring Ronnie James Dio on vocals. When I left Belfast, in 1986, I left my passion for metal behind. I still listened to the albums in my collection, but did not keep up with the new developments in the genre: thrash, hardcore, black metal, death metal, and nu metal, all of which are thoroughly chronicled in “Louder than Hell.”

Decades passed. The original Black Sabbath reunited and put out a decent album, “13.” They announced a tour. Given the opportunity to take care of unfinished business, I bought tickets for a show at an outdoor arena not far from my home, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. I went with a high-school friend who still plays in a band. Traffic was bottlenecked on the highway to the venue, so we took the back roads, cutting through the Manassas battlefield, which is rapidly being surrounded by the sprawl of Northern Virginia. That contrast—strip malls and Civil War dead—felt appropriate for the occasion, and Sabbath didn’t disappoint, opening their show, as they often have over the years, with the air-raid siren that leads into “War Pigs.”

Inevitably, it was an uneven performance. Ozzy, who sang like an old man even when he was young, was frequently off-key. His voice is still otherworldly, but it can no longer reach the heights of a song like “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” which was, mercifully, not on the set list. Bill Ward had opted out of the tour over a contract dispute and was replaced by Tommy Clufetos. His drumming was forceful, but I missed the depth of Ward’s jazz-influenced style. The bassist Geezer Butler has now lived long enough to justify his nickname, but there was nothing geezerish about his nimble playing. And Iommi, in a black leather jacket and spectacles, looked like a movie villain and played, prosthetic fingertips and all, like the guitar god he is. There were plenty of songs in which the quartet blasted the audience with the kind of fearsome power that we had paid to hear. “Black Sabbath,” “N.I.B.,” “Snowblind,” “God is Dead?,” and “Dirty Women” all stand out in my memory.

For the most part, the audience was what you might expect: a horde of extras from the “Sons of Anarchy” set with a sprinkling of middle-aged suburbanites still in their collared work shirts. (The timeless melancholy that Willis identified appears to have carried well into middle age.) What was striking however, was the number of people who brought young children—children who were, by my best estimate, under the age of ten. Perhaps they couldn’t find babysitting, or perhaps the kitschification of the occult had become so pervasive that they didn’t think twice about it. As the father of two sons in that age group, I found it mystifying. The sheer volume of the Sabbath sound system would have sent my boys howling into the night crying for their mother. Onstage was a trio of screens where video of the band was intercut with footage from horror movies and other grisly sources. About two-thirds of the way through the show, as “Children of the Grave” was being played, I saw a woman carrying her daughter up the stairs of the amphitheater, shielding the child’s eyes with her hands. They didn’t come back. It was good to see that the demon retained some of its bite.

Top: Black Sabbath at the Gaumont Theatre, in Southampton, on June 25, 1980.

Above: The author in Belfast, in 1983.