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Fact #109538

When:

Short story:

Black Sabbath release their debut LP, Black Sabbath, on Vertigo Records in the UK.

Full article:

BLACK SABBATH IN THE 70s

This feature by Johnny Black first appeared in Classic Rock magazine

CLASSIC ROCK : BLACK SABBATH FEATURE :V2


The saga of the industrial accident which removed the tips of two of Birmingham sheet-metal worker Tony Iommi’s fingers and obliged him to either give up playing or else create a whole new way of playing guitar, is so well-known that it needs no further elaboration here. Even so, it is sometimes overlooked that Iommi’s innovations as Black Sabbath’s axemeister were so radical, pioneering a previously unimagined blisteringly raw sound, that the music industry of the late 1960s was simply incapable of perceiving the band as an act worth signing. It probably didn’t help that their frontman was a dyslexic former jailbird who had attempted suicide at least twice before joining the band.

Ozzy Osbourne : Two boys used to wait for me to come home after school. Then they would fuck around with me. They didn't fuck me but they messed around with me. They would force me to drop my pants and all that shit They felt me and touched me and... it was terrible. I was afraid to tell my father or mother and it completely fucked me up.

Ozzy Osbourne : I spent three years in a slaughterhouse, killing cows and pigs and all sorts of things. It got pretty bizarre – I was figuring out all these different ways to kill these animals.

Geezer Butler : The first time I met him (Ozzy), he came round my house with a chimney brush over his shoulder, his Dad’s factory gown on, and no shoes. My brother went, There’s something at the door for you.

Tony Iommi : I used to hate the sight of Ozzy. I couldn't stand him, and I used to beat him up whenever I saw him. We just didn't get on at school. He was a little punk.


Their demos were turned down flat by fourteen record labels, until their first manager, Jim Simpson used his clout at EMI, who already had three of his bands, to wangle enough funding to record an album’s worth of material in mid-October at Regent Sound Studios in London with producer Rodger Bain.

Tony Iommi : The idea was to make an album heavier than anything that had ever been heard before. We wanted to make something different. We had only bass, drums, guitar and vocals. We didn’t have keyboards or a rhythm guitarist. The idea was to make the sound as big as we could for what we’d got.

We were relying on Rodger Bain, because we’d never done a record before. It was very different for us to go into a studio with a producer. We knew nothing about recording. All we knew in those days was how to play the songs, like we did at gigs.

Bill Ward (drummer, Black Sabbath) : I was bowled over at the time by the way Roger Bain looked. He wore Converse sneakers and so did I. It was nothing about what he’d done for records or his skills as a producer or anything else. It was literally something like, ’He looks pretty cool. All right.’

Tony Iommi : There was no time to keep going over and over the songs. We had one try and that was it. I remember when we did Warning, it was quite a long track - when we used to do it on stage it was fifteen minutes - but when we recorded it we cocked it up a bit. I said, ‘Can we do it again?’ And Rodger said, ‘Well, okay you can do one more go at it.’ And that was it. We were like, Fucking hell! It was a bit nerve-wracking.
Geezer Butler (bassist, Black Sabbath) : I had a 70-watt Laney guitar amp and a Park 4x12 cabinet with only three speakers in it - and two of them were wrecked! That’s how I got that really distorted sound. I didn’t have any alternative; I couldn’t afford to buy new speakers.

Tony Iommi : From what I can remember about it, it was very simplistic; a mike was stuck in front of the guitar cabinet, and then just the drums got miked up. That was it. I don't remember anything exotic.

Geezer Butler : I’d moved into this flat that I'd painted black with inverted crosses everywhere. Ozzy gave me this 16th Century book about magic that he'd stolen from somewhere. I put it in the airing cupboard because I wasn't sure about it.

Later that night I woke up and saw this black shadow at the end of the bed. It was a horrible presence that frightened the life out of me! I ran to airing cupboard to throw the book out, but the book had disappeared. After that I gave up all that stuff. It scared me shitless. That's what the song's about. (ie title track of the album)

Jim Simpson : I wasn’t aware of Sabbath having any interest in devil worship in the time I managed them. The name just came off an old film poster that Geezer had seen. He just liked the sound of it.

Ozzy Osbourne : We were never really into the occult. It was a hobby, until we started getting invites to black-magic rites in cemeteries. But if you listen to the lyrics, there's nothing that's pro-black magic or pro-satanic worship.

Tony Iommi : I used to like horror films and so did Geezer. I liked the power and the atmosphere in those films, and that had an impression on my writing. When you’re watching a horror film, that tingling sensation when something frightens you – I wanted to try to create that in music. The feeling in that song was something very different to anything I’d heard. It had a certain vibe about it when we played the riff all together. It had this really spooky feeling.

Sabbath’s debut single, Evil Woman, was released on Jan 2, 1970 by Fontana Records. One of just two tracks on the album which had not been written by the band, this heavied-up re-interpretation of a lightweight pop-rock hit by Minneapolis-based blues-rock band Crow made little impact, either at radio or on the charts.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the Regent Sound recordings were rejected by all and sundry until, finally, the recently established Vertigo Records reluctantly took them aboard, but only because an unexpected gap had appeared in their release schedule. Readying themselves for the release of the album, Sabbath dived back into live gigging, making their first appearance of the new decade on January 13, at Henry’s Blues House, Birmingham.
Tony Iommi : We weren’t a part of the London scene, because we couldn’t get gigs in London in the early days. The attitude was: if you weren’t from London you weren’t any good. But you have to turn your back on that and get on with what you do.

Jim Simpson : Vertigo signed Black Sabbath as a makeweight because we had finished masters which could be delivered in a hurry.

Tony Iommi : We got a poxy £400 for signing, and a crap royalty rate, but we really weren’t bothered about the money, because we didn’t have any money anyway, we just wanted a record deal.

Jim Simpson : One thing I noticed early on was that their audience was almost entirely male. It was never fourteen year old girls.

And, instead of hip-shaking, the movement in the audience became more of a vertical thing. They were moving up and down, rather than side to side. The physical reaction to the music became involuntary. Nobody was showing off their fancy steps or trying to do something clever ... it was tribal.

Also, from the beginning, we had kids putting their heads inside the speaker cabinets. There was something heroic about Sabbath. It felt like a cause, and they were winning disciples over to that cause.

The debut LP, Black Sabbath, was released by Vertigo on February 13, 1970. It peaked at No8 on the UK albums chart during a run of 42 weeks, and also reached No23 in Billboard in the USA.
Tony Iommi : We were coming back from Europe when we heard that the album was in the top ten. Bloody hell! We were in shock.

Geezer Butler : The critics hated us from day one.

Tony Iommi : It wasn’t nice to read the reviews. It’s your first album ever, and you get all the music magazines to see what’s been said about it, and then all you read is: ‘What a load of crap.’ I just went, 'Oh my God…'. It was hurtful at first, but you learn to live with it after a while.
Ozzy Osbourne : I never thought we would last. It’s part of the reason why I went for it so hard. I thought: 'One album, that’ll be it, then back to the factory, so make the most of it.'

Tony Iommi : We wanted everyone to share in the band's success equally. Unfortunately, my role began to grow. It just became accepted that I was responsible for booking the studios, producing the record, organizing everybody's life. It got pretty out of control.

Andy Partridge (songwriter, XTC) : I’d previously heard a lot of things described as heavy, such as Steppenwolf, but they paled into insignificance when I heard Black Sabbath. I bought that first album, and I’d never heard anything like it before. It had a demonic atmosphere but was also slightly comic. So I went to see them at McIlroy’s Ballroom in Swindon (May 28, 1970) and I thought they were great. I was in the early stages of learning guitar and I played along with every track on that album until I got them perfect.

Sacrifice by satanic metal band Black Widow entered the UK singles chart in early April, where it peaked at No32 during a run of just two weeks. Unfortunately, lurid tabloid newspaper stories engendered confusion between Black Widow and Black Sabbath.
Jim Simpson : There was another band around at the same time, Black Widow, one of whom got involved with a white witch, Alex Sanders, and they got loads of press, features in the Daily Mail, and people got confused. They thought it was Black Sabbath.
Tony Iommi : I think in one way it helped us. At one point we weren’t doing any interviews, so nobody knew much about us. I heard stories about people being frightened to meet us. The image was good and bad, really. It created this thing and people wanted to come and see what we were like.

When Sabbath played at London’s Marquee Club on May 14, several rock biz bigwigs turned up to check them out. The biggest was Don Arden, the self-styled Al Capone Of Pop, who soon after offered to manage them.
Don Arden : Ozzy looked like a genuine mental case, but he never stopped moving, never stopped communicating with the crowd, getting them going. He may not have been the greatest singer in the world but, as a performer, he walked away with everything. I decided there and then that Black Sabbath would be my next signing.
After pre-production rehearsals at Rockfield Studios, Monmouth, Wales, recording sessions for their second album, Paranoid, began on June 16, 1970, at Regent Sound Studios again, moving later to Island Studios to upgrade the four-track recordings to 8 tracks.
Rodger Bain (producer) : It (Regent Sound) was a good-sounding studio, we always got good results in that room. It was an absolute shit-hole, but it worked!

Tony Iommi : We suddenly had to write a whole album so we got stuck into rehearsals at nine in the morning trying to come up with stuff.

Tom Allom (engineer) : We didn’t do much in the way of overdubs.  It was still very much the basic tracks that formed the album. 

Tony Iommi : For the intro (to Iron Man), I wanted something that sounded really horrible.

Bill Ward : We were all going to the same place at the same time, and that was one of the key marks that we had recognizable as Sabbath music, which is actually the opposite of what Led Zeppelin were doing : they use air as a sound.

Tony Iommi : In the early days there was a rivalry between Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, but not a bad kind of rivalry. We weren’t horrible to each other. Deep Purple we really didn’t know, but we were friends with Zeppelin.

Bill Ward : When Tony played those enormous chords in front of War Pigs, I would look and I would go, ’Okay, what am I going to do? How is this going to be presented? So I put the whole thing in waltz time. And Geezer went there, and he fit perfectly with what Tony was doing. So that’s what it is. I think the song would’ve been a train wreck had I played [straight] drums to it. I went into waltz time and I made broad strokes and huge cymbal crashes – that’s what made the whole thing pop.

Tony Iommi : The producer said, ‘We haven’t got enough songs. We need another three minutes.’ So Paranoid was made up there and then. It was just a throwaway thing. While everybody popped out for a bite to eat, I came up with this riff.

Rodger Bain (producer) : I remember pressing the talkback and saying words to the effect of, ‘That's pretty good. What is that?’ and sort of getting disbelief. They said, ‘You're joking’. I said, ‘No, that's really good, that's a really strong riff.’ They said, ‘We're just pissing around. We just made it up.’ I said, ‘Well, that's great - let's do it!’

Bill Ward : I think it was about 1:30 in the afternoon; Tony had the riffs, and by 2:00 we had Paranoid exactly as you hear it on the record. We all looked at each other because we knew something is gonna happen. So, as he rushed to keep behind the microphone, I was fumbling with my drum kit, trying to get into this little booth, you know, put my headphones on, because I knew we are going to roll.

I had one bass drum only when we did Paranoid, and I’m playing six notes across it. We’re kind of almost pumping. Pumping back in drums, and that holds everything steady while Tony’s off playing his melodies.

We automatically grooved with him and Ozzy started singing. We didn't say a word to each other; we just came in the room and started playing.

Tony Iommi : Ozzy used to just sing anything, just make stuff up, until Geezer had written the lyrics for him. So we’d put the track down and Ozzy would just mumble anything that came into his head, and then do the proper vocals afterwards.

Ozzy Osbourne : I remember going home with the tapes and I said to my then-wife, 'I think we've written a single.' She said, 'But you don't write singles.' I said, 'I know, but this has been driving me nuts on the train all the way back.'

Paranoid was released as their second single on July 17, 1970, going on to give them their first UK chart entry, peaking at No4.
Ozzy Osbourne : It’s my anthem. Every time I play it onstage they all love it.

Jim Simpson : Once Sabbath started to become successful they got approaches from several interested parties, including Don Arden (controversial manager known as 'The Al Capone of Pop'). He used a couple of his employees, Wilfred Pine and Patrick Meehan, to approach the band. The band told me they’d had a meeting in a Wimpy Bar. The fact that they told me, made me feel we had a strong bond.

Paranoid, entered the UK albums chart on September 26, 1970, going on to peak at No1 during a twenty-week run. Paranoid, both the album and single, transformed Sabbath into a global sensation.
Tony Iommi : When Paranoid was a hit, we felt like traitors. We weren’t trying to appeal to the young kids who watched Top Of The Pops. That wasn’t our audience. Of course, we did Top Of The Pops, and we felt so out of place, and we looked out of place too. It just wasn’t our scene at all. And at the gigs we started getting a lot of young screaming kids. When they heard our other stuff they probably shit themselves and ran out.
James Hetfield (Metallica) : I discovered Black Sabbath by digging through my older brother's record collection. Their album covers really drew me in. I immediately thought, 'I gotta put this on.' And when I did, I couldn't believe it. It was like, 'Whoa! Heavy as shit.' Sabbath was everything that the Sixties weren't. Their music was so cool because it was completely anti-hippie.
Jim Simpson : Around then, Pine and Meehan split from Don Arden, and their first project was to take over the management of Sabbath. I only found out about what they were up to when I got a letter telling me that Sabbath had now left my management stable, because they didn’t think I was doing the job right, and would I please never contact them again.
We had contracts, of course, which my lawyer insisted were watertight, so I took them to court.

I felt I was badly served by the law. The QC my lawyer employed in 1970 said we should go for £200,000, but then he decided that Sabbath didn’t have any money, so he settled for £35,000, of which £8000 was paid on the day, out of which legal aid got £6,000, the QC got £1,000 and I got £1,000. It took me fourteen years to get the rest.

Sabbath began their first American tour on October 30, with a disappointing show at Esbjornson Gym, Glassboro College, Glassboro, New Jersey, but things had already begun to turn round when they played The Fillmore East in early November.

Geezer Butler : Zeppelin had already been there and kind of opened up the gates for us, but it was like they’d just never seen like us before. They just went mental.

Tony Iommi : [Delete this quote - It was such an experience. We went to New York first.] We took our own PA over but we had no cases for the speakers or anything – so when it got there it was half in bits. It was a disaster from the beginning. One of our roadies plugged the PA in (at Glassboro College) and of course in America the power source is different, so it blew up. [Delete this quote - We ended up in this really small club and we thought, is this what it’s like? It was a bit disappointing.]
Rick Green (promoter) : They blew out not only the power in the gym, but the campus and most of the power in the neighborhood. The street lights were out and there was darkness.

Ozzy Osbourne was only 20 years old at the time. He went into the corner of the gym and started crying. He was shouting, 'I hate America and I want to go home.' 

Tony Iommi : (Then) we did the Fillmore East, and blimey, it was fantastic. We supported The Faces and we went down really well. That was the biggest place we’d ever played.
The women in America seemed a lot more forward to the women back home, a lot more open. We were like kids in a candy shop. We couldn’t believe it. We had women coming up and talking to us - instead of blokes coming and talking to us. When we checked into a hotel there were all these women there, but we didn’t know anything about groupies. We didn’t know how that scene worked. It was certainly an eye-opener, that’s for sure.
With a name like Black Sabbath, we had all sorts of weird people coming to the gigs in America - witches and all sorts. There would be people coming to our hotel with black cloaks on, lighting candles. It was something that grew out of proportion. You never know what people will do. You didn’t know what sort of people would be around. Some of those religious weirdoes were as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan.
Bill Ward : We started to get a little angry with the audience (at the Easttown Theatre, Detroit, November 25) because they were just politely applauding and they weren’t really doing a lot of anything else. I was screaming at them to be more interactive, to get off their ass and just move. At that point, Tony was really hitting his guitar hard and I could feel the emotions running through all of us. At one point, i threw my floor tom tom drum at the audience. It was kind of an audience battle with the band and the outcome of it was the audience stood up and they never sat down again. That moment became a new opening for us with American audiences.
(Tony Iommi quote from this location moved into 1971, Memphis gig, and somewhat edited. I’ve marked it in blue.)
Tony Iommi : The first time I tried coke was backstage LA Forum in 1971. I happened to say to one of the guys in the crew, ‘You know, I really feel tired tonight.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you have a line?’ Of course I’d been around it for a while, but I would never take it. He said, ‘Go on, it’ll really perk you up. And so I did. I only had a little bit. One line. But for me, it felt great.

The success happened so quickly, but we just went along with it. The only thing that messed with our heads was when we got more into the drugs.

With success building on both sides of the Atlantic, their third album, Master Of Reality, was completed at Island Studios, London, in early April 1971. During these sessions, Iommi began tuning his guitar down by three semi-tones, to reduce string tension and make the instrument easier to play with his severed fingers. Happily, this essentially pragmatic step resulted in the heavier sound which made this album the forerunner of doom, stoner and sludge metal.

Tony Iommi : On Master Of Reality we tuned down to get more power. It was an experiment. Tuning down gave it a fatter sound. And with the vocals, you can sing in a lower register - but of course, Ozzy didn’t. He started singing higher. You’d tune down and he’d go, ‘Oh, I can reach that note now.’ Consequently when we got on stage he couldn’t do it.

Ozzy Osbourne : Children Of The Grave was the most kick-ass song we'd ever recorded.

Bill Ward : I was pulling off a lot of new things that I’d been trying to do for three years, such as my double bass work in Children Of The Grave. There’s a lot of different bass drum movement, and I play the timbale with my left hand on that song too.

Tony Iommi : Things like Solitude worked well. Just pushing the envelope a bit. I started playing this thing and it sounded a bit wimpy, but everybody liked it. So we carried on playing it, and it worked. I ended up playing a bit of flute on it as well. It was something different. The idea with a lot of the Sabbath stuff was to have light and shade. Either put a quiet bit into a song or to do a quiet song into the next track - instead of it all being out-and-out pounding, to have a bit of light relief.

We tried recording Into The Void in a couple of different studios because Bill just couldn’t get it right. Whenever that happened, he would start believing that he wasn’t capable of playing the song. He’d say, 'To hell with it - I’m not doing this!'

I do remember writing Sweet Leaf in the studio. I'd just come back from Dublin, and they'd had these cigarettes called Sweet Afton, which you could only get in Ireland. We were going, 'What could we write about?' I took out this cigarette packet, and as you opened it, it's got on the lid, 'The Sweetest Leaf You Can Buy!' I was like, 'Ah, Sweet Leaf!'

Bill Ward : That's about meeting marijuana, having a relationship with marijuana ... That was part of our lifestyle at that time.

Tony Iommi : Right at the start of the song, that’s me bloody choking myself. I was in the studio doing this acoustic thing, and Ozzy rolled this big joint and brought it out. I had a couple of puffs and nearly choked myself. They left the tape running, and it turned into the ideal start for Sweet Leaf.

Tom Allom : What (Bill Ward) and Geezer were doing together was incredible, actually.  They were a three-piece band and they were almost a jazz band, really. 

Bill was not playing a straight beat.  The other thing that blows me away, when I think about it, is how young they were.  They were twenty years old.  It is amazing. To have developed that unique style by that tender age is incredible. 

Tony Iommi : I didn’t want to be the boss as such. It was just that they looked to me as a leader. I came up with the ideas, I pushed the band forward, and if anything happened I was the one that they’d come to. It was a big responsibility. And the same in the studio: they’d go home and I’d still be in there. The music, I wanted it to the best it could possibly be, and I was worried to leave it in other people’s hands.

Geezer Butler : Tony was the great leveler of the band. He sort of steered the ship in the right direction. If there were four Ozzys, we never would've gotten anywhere!

Master Of Reality upped the game again, being certified gold on advance orders alone in the USA. On July 2, 1971, the band set off on another US trek, starting at the Public Auditorium, Cleveland, Ohio, supported by Yes.

Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins) : This (Master Of Reality) changed the way I thought when I was eight years old. I'd picked it up from my uncle. The album looked so cool with its dark evil colour and purple writing. I put it on and listened to its stupid Ozzy intro and it sounded so heavy. Okay, the lyrics are pretty hit or miss. Sweet Leaf is their bad ode to pot and never has a man rhymed 'insane' with 'brain' so many times. But the music is amazing.

Rick Wakeman (keyboards, Yes) : Back then, I was a serious drinker, as were all of Sabbath, so we got on like a house on fire, matching each other drink for drink. They had a spare seat on their private plane, so a lot of the time I’d travel with them. You literally couldn’t move for booze on that plane. Ozzy was probably putting away as much as me - which was as much as humanly possible.

Bill Ward : We were getting into coke, big time. Uppers, downers, Quaaludes, whatever you like. It got to the stage where you come up with ideas and forget them, because you were just so out of it.

I think Master of Reality was kind of like the end of an era, the first three albums, and we decided to take our time with the next album.

Ozzy Osbourne : The Satanists never stopped being a pain in the arse. We were playing a gig in Memphis (Sep 20, 1971, Overton Park Shell) and this bloke wearing a black cloak ran on stage.

Tony Iommi : We were playing this open-air show. When we got to the gig, somebody had painted a cross on a door in red. We didn’t think much else of it. But later on we found out this bloke had cut his hand and drawn the cross in his blood. He was some religious freak.
Ozzy Osbourne : Before I knew it, one of our roadies was running on stage with a metal bar raised above his head, and he twatted the guy in the face. The satanic bloke was lying on the stage with his cloak wide open. In his right hand was a dagger.
Tony Iommi : It was only afterwards that I found out this bloke had a dagger and was trying to bump one of us off.
While renting a Bel Air mansion, Sabbath began recording Vol 4 at Record Plant Studios, Los Angeles during May 1972. During these sessions, cocaine begins to exert a serious grip on the band, as a result of which Bill Ward began to fear that he would be thrown out of the band.
Bill Ward : Vol. 4 is a great album, but listening to it now, I can see it as a turning point for me, where the alcohol and drugs stopped being fun.

Tony Iommi : We lived in a beautiful house in Bel Air. It was John Dupont’s house - the guy from Dupont Paints. It had a ballroom and bar leading out to the garden. We rehearsed in the bar area. It was a big room. We had the gear set up there, but we never thought for a minute that all the sound was going out across the valley. It was dead quiet outside. You could hear a pin drop at night. We used to write in the day and jam at night. It was a great atmosphere. We had a fabulous time. And in this ballroom there was a grand piano.
We used to have this coke flown in especially, in sealed containers, sealed with wax. You’d peel the wax off and there are these phials of coke. And bloody hell, it was great the cocaine in those days. We’d sit up all night, gassing.
Ozzy Osbourne : If you come out of having nothing in your pocket, to having bowls of cocaine and pot and champagne, and as many chicks as you can fuck - it was amazing!”
Geezer Butler : Half the budget went on the coke and the other half went to seeing how long we could stay in the studio.

Ozzy Osbourne : Eventually we started to wonder where the fuck all the coke was coming from...I'm telling you: that coke was the whitest, purest, strongest stuff you could ever imagine. One sniff, and you were king of the universe.

Tony Iommi : I went into the ballroom and played the piano for a bit. I’d never played piano before. And I leant to play and the first thing I wrote on it was Changes.
Ozzy Osbourne : Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff. I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill was going through with his wife.
Tony Iommi : We were in the studio one day and I took my guitar off and put it on the stand, and as I put it down it went, BOING! And I can’t think for the life of me why we ended up taking our clothes off, but it was one of those stupid things that you do. That’s how we recorded that track (FX), prancing around, naked, banging the guitar. We were stoned, of course.
Bill Ward : I hated the song (Cornucopia). There were some patterns that were just horrible. I nailed it in the end, but the reaction I got was the cold shoulder from everybody. It was like 'Well, just go home, you're not being of any use right now.' I felt like I'd blown it, I was about to get fired.
Tony Iommi : Vol.4 was such a complete change, we felt we had jumped an album, really. It didn't follow suit, because we had tried to go too far ... we had reached the limit as far as we wanted to go.

Max Bell (reviewer, Let It Rock) : The monotonous riff, the cliched drumming, the heavy bass work and the flat vocal are trade-marks of their style, but where’s the attraction? With this album one can leave the room for ten minutes and not miss anything interesting.

By July of 1972, Sabbath were off on another North American tour with support acts including Blue Oyster Cult, Gentle Giant and The Groundhogs, but when Iommi collapsed during a gig at Hollywood Bowl, the remaining tour dates had to be cancelled. With the band thoroughly distracted, The Hemdale Group, (incl director Patrick Meehan), already Sabbath’s managers, bought the remaining two and a half years of its recording contract from Essex Music Group for a reported $1,8m. It was an acquisition designed to give Meehan greater control over the band.

Tony Iommi : When it came to money, we were always fobbed off. Up to that point, anything we wanted, we’d get it. If I wanted a new Rolls Royce, I’d phone up the office and say, ‘I’ve seen this car.’ ‘Okay, where is it? How much is it?’ And it would arrive the next day or the next week. And that’s how we’d do it. We were kept quiet. Fobbed off. And that’s how it all went. We bought houses the same way. And in the meantime, we were kept working. We knew nothing about the legal side of things.
Alan Lanier (Blue Oyster Cult) : When we started, we copped a lot from Black Sabbath. I don't think our band sounds anything at all like Black Sabbath, though, but we used to like them a lot because Ozzy Osborne used to work in a slaughterhouse and that had a kind of poetic symbolity for us.

Ozzy Osbourne : Tony had been doing coke literally for days - we all had, but Tony had gone over the edge. I mean, that stuff just twists your whole idea of reality. You start seeing things that aren't there. And Tony was gone. Near the end of the (Hollywood Bowl) gig he walked off stage and collapsed.

Geezer Butler : It was really touch-and-go whether he'd survive or not because he was totally depleted. So we had to cancel the rest of the tour and we actually took time off for the first time since the band started. We got away from each other and had a social life.



After an abortive attempt in the summer of 1973 to re-kindle the spirit of Vol 4 by returning to The Record Plant, they began recording Sabbath Bloody Sabbath at Clearwell Castle, a 17th century gothic mansion in The Forest of Dean.
Tony Iommi : What we wanted to do was go somewhere that was out of the way, so we wouldn’t have people turning up. So we went to Clearwell Castle. I thought, we’ll get a bit of atmosphere there. There were dungeons in the basement and that’s where we set up the gear.

As soon as we got down there, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was the first track I came up with, the first riff. The whole vibe in those dungeons made me come up with that riff. And once we’d got the starter song, we could just carry on.

David Tangye (roadie) : My first real close encounter with Sabbath was when I was working with a band called Necromandus. Sabbath were rehearsing for the Sabbath Blood Sabbath album at Clearwell Castle, and we went up there to pick up some spare 4 x 12 speakers we needed from Sabbath’s road manager. 

I remember one glorious sunny day at Clearwell Castle when we went down to the local pub to cool off. Returning back to the castle with flagons of cider, we carried on to the early hours.

Ozzy had banked the fire up in the inglenook hearth in a large living room, as was his penchant. After having crashed out, we were awakened by the smell of burning and discovered that Ozzy's flares were on fire from a burning ember. I, with others, rapidly doused his pants with what remained of the cider!  

Tony Iommi : One night Geezer and me were walking along this hallway and there was an armoury at the end of this hallway, with all these weapons on the wall. We saw someone going into the armoury. We said, ‘Who the fuck’s that?’ There was nobody else there - we’d rented the whole castle. There was just the one entrance to the armoury - no other doors. And when we went in we couldn’t find anybody.
The next day, we spoke to the woman who owned the castle. We said, ‘You’re going to think we’re a bit mad, but we saw somebody walking around last night and go in the armoury and they just disappeared in there.’ And the woman said, ‘Oh, that’s the castle ghost.’
Ozzy Osbourne : We weren't so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep. You'd just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second to shove a dagger up your arse.

Tony Iommi : I’ve got to be honest, we frightened the life out of each other. We used to leave, drive all the way home and drive back the next day. It was really silly.

Geezer Butler : A National Acrobat was just me thinking about who selects what sperm gets through to the egg; Spiral Architect was about life's experiences being added to a person's DNA to create a unique individual. I used to get very contemplative on certain substances.

Recording of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was completed at Morgan Studios in Willesden, North London. Keyboardist Rick Wakeman of Yes (who were recording Tales from Topographic Oceans in the next studio) was brought in as a session player, adding harpsichord to Sabbra Cadabra.

Rick Wakeman : Was Ozzy going off the rails when I worked on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath? I don’t think he was ever on the rails, was he? Actually, I think Ozzy is very clever, because he’s got this knack of appearing to be out of control, while actually being perfectly in control. I never saw him too wasted to perform.

Released in December, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath peaked at No4 in the UK, but stalled at No11 in the USA.
Ozzy Osbourne : Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was really the album after which I should have said goodbye because, after that, I really started unravelling. Then we ended up falling out of favour with each other.

Slash (guitarist, Guns N' Roses) : The outro to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the heaviest shit I have ever heard in my life. To this day, I haven't heard anything as heavy that has as much soul.

Early in 1974, Bill Ward moved into Somerville House, Malvern, Worcestershire, and, around the same time, Richard Ogden of Heavy Publicity was hired by Sabbath’s accountant to work on their upcoming UK tour.
David Tangye (Ozzy’s PA) : At Ozzy's house one day, I got a phone call from Bill enquiring if I knew where he could get some wrought iron gates made for the courtyard of his house.

I was a Blacksmith by trade, so I offered my services and then I  spent two weeks at Somerville House fashioning these gates whose centre featured five wrought iron bars with a G-Clef and the opening notes to Paranoid.

Richard Ogden : When I started looking after Sabbath they were still huge in America, but nobody in the UK took them seriously any more.

Also, they’d found out that they didn’t really have any money. They had big houses all over the UK, and flashy cars but they didn’t actually own any of them. So they’d got rid of Meehan.

Ozzy Osbourne : Patrick Meehan never gave you a straight answer when you asked him how much dough you were making.

Geezer Butler : We felt we were being ripped off.

Richard Ogden : So they didn’t have a manager. All they had was a guy called Mark Foster, their accountant, based in Chicago, but Bill Ward seemed to be making most of the business decisions.

After about nine months, Bill asked me if I’d be interested in managing them, which didn’t appeal to me at all, because they seemed to be surrounded by gangsters and drugs.

They didn’t pay me anything like as much as other bands, like Aerosmith, at that time. I think the money was still coming in, especially from America, but it had been going straight into the pockets of their manager.

During another extensive US tour, Sabbath performed to an audience estimated at 400,000 at The California Jam Festival in Ontario, California (April 6, 1974). Also on the bill were ELP, Deep Purple and The Eagles.

Geezer Butler : We wanted to take a break after Tony collapsed with exhaustion on the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tour. We were in England, having just returned from the tour, when our management called us all and said we had to go back out to do the California Jam. We said no, but we were eventually forced into doing it.

Glenn Hughes (vocalist Deep Purple) : The day before, I spent with Tony Iommi and Ozzy doing lines and drinking beer. We were up all night and Sabbath played before us at Cal Jam. I remember flying in on the helicopter with Coverdale, looking down at the audience, and Sabbath were on stage.

Tony Iommi : We went on stage extremely cold. We hadn’t played for a few months, which was a long time for us. But it was great, really great. One of the best shows we ever did.

Don Branker (promoter, California Jam) : When I watched Sabbath go out and play they had no lights, they had no tricks, they had no pyro, they had no anything, and I probably watched the greatest show I’ve ever seen in my life. Ozzy just took the quarter million people and took them on a trip.

Richard Ogden : I drove up to Ozzy’s house in 1974 in my Lancia with Brian Harrigan from Music Week and, when we got there, it was this kind of bungalow, like a smallholding, where he had all these chickens. At one point, the chickens were making a lot of noise so Ozzy disappeared out of the room, came back with a shotgun and fired it at them out of the window.

In February 1975 the band entered Morgan Studios in London, working on what would become their 6th album, Sabotage. Perhaps because of the infuriating legal turmoil surrounding them, the album emerged as a much more energised and raging beast than its predecessor.

Geezer Butler : It's called Sabotage because we felt that the whole process was just being totally sabotaged by all these people ripping us off.

Tony Iommi : We had lawyers coming down to the studio with writs (from Meehan). Then we had to go to court. So we’d be in court in the morning and in the studio in the afternoon. It was bloody awful, a terrible time for us.

Ozzy Osbourne : In the end, I felt like calling it Crossroads and having (soap opera actress) Meg Richardson star on it. Every time there was a session we used to call it chapter 99 – 'Will Black Sabbath complete the album this time?'

Geezer Butler : Ozzy was asleep in the bar most of the time. And that’s how he carried on.

Tony Iommi : We could've continued and gone on and on, getting more technical, using orchestras and everything else which we didn't particularly want to. We took a look at ourselves, and we wanted to do a rock album.

The signature song from this album is Symptom Of The Universe, reckoned to be one of the earliest examples of thrash metal, written by Iommi and Geezer. Apart from its thrash metal claim to fame, it’s also considered to have been the first example of a progressive metal track, because of the contrasting musical styles it encompasses, notably an acoustic intro and an improvised closing section.

Tony Iommi : It starts with an acoustic bit. Then it goes into the up-tempo stuff to give it that dynamic, and it does have a lot of changes to it, including the jam at the end.

Ozzy Osbourne : I wrote most of the lyrics (for The Writ) myself, which felt a bit like seeing a shrink. All the anger I felt towards Meehan came pouring out.

David Tangye : Graham Wright designed the album cover and it was a good idea to have a reverse image of the band in a huge mirror. It was supposed to be in a big castle, with all of them dressed in black, but it didn’t work out. They did it in a studio in Soho, I think. Bill had his wife’s tights on, and Ozzy got nicknamed The Homo In The Kimono.

Keyboardist Jezz Woodroffe was taken on in May 1975, and he gradually became involved with co-writing and arranging in partnership with Iommi. At first, however, his role was simply to replicate parts Wakeman and Iommi had created, during their imminent American tour.

Jezz Woodroffe : My first gig with them was July 14, 1975, at the Sports Auditorium, Toledo, Ohio. When I was with Sabbath, a lot of the time they were relying on their support acts to draw the crowds. For example, when we toured with Kiss (Aug, 1975), they put on a fantastic show and pretty much outshone us. The audiences much preferred Kiss to Sabbath.

During the next UK tour, in October 1975, Ozzy promoted roadie David Tangye to become his driver and personal assistant.
David Tangye (roadie) : He offered me the job after the gig in Colston Hall, Bristol, and half an hour later I was sitting at the wheel of a beautiful new metallic green Mercedes Benz on my way to Bulrush Cottage, Ranton, Staffordshire, Ozzy’s beautiful farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
Ozzy lived there with his wife Thelma and three children. The house itself was kind of split in two, the main farmhouse and, on the other side, this massive studio - or Ozzy's playroom as we came to know it. 

Normally, all was just like any other household, the kids went to school and so on. John Michael Osbourne family man, and Ozzy Osbourne Rock Star, were two different entities totally! Ozzy was a loving, caring parent to his kids. I remember him taking them to Blackpool for a holiday. You don’t get much more family man than that.

This was where I spent most of my time while I was working for the "Prince of Darkness". 

Jezz Woodroffe : A lot of daft stuff went on during that tour, but it wasn’t just aimed at me, it was aimed at everybody. I had gone to bed early the night before the gig in Newcastle (October 18, 1975), so when I got up in the morning, they were still all asleep. When it came time for rehearsals, somebody arrived with 48 bottles of Lowenbrau and they all got pissed and went back to bed.

That night, the crew turned the smoke machines round to blow straight at my keyboard. There was always lunacy wherever they went and, as an innocent 24 year old bloke, I’d never seen anything like it.

At Hammersmith Odeon, Patrick Meehan turned up with all these heavies, extremely scary guys, there were shooters and stuff around.

David Tangye : Werner, the local promoter, took us out to The Why Not? Club in Dusseldorf. Roger Chapman’s Streetwalkers were the support band (Nov 2, 1975), and their drummer Nicko McBrain got involved in a punch up in the club. There was a few having a go at him, so I got up to try and pull him out of there, and then Albert, a big lad who had been a boxer, followed me over.

We managed to pull Nicko out but after that you could feel a heavy presence. I remember there was two lesbians kissin’ and cuddlin’ and Ozzy went over and mooned at them, then he set off up the stairs to the toilet. Halfway up, he took a swing at this fella who had been in the fight but missed him by a country mile. So another bloke waded in and I knocked him down like a bag of shit, and then it all erupted.

It became a huge ruck with me, Albert, Tony, Geoff Lucas who was a big 6 foot 5, and there were iron bars and everything, and next thing I heard this bang which was some guy shooting Albert in the mouth. Knocked his teeth out. If it had been any higher it would have killed him.

So we had to fight our way out of the club, and we ran out into this courtyard where Tony and I jumped in the back of a taxi, but the driver turned round, stuck a gun in our faces, and told us to get out.

Then the police came and arrested us. Werner came down and explained what had happened, so we were allowed to go back to the hotel. We took some extra security on after that.

We ended up abandoning most of the British leg of that tour because Ozzy fell off a child’s motorised bike and he pulled some muscles, did some damage to his back. He had loads of motorbikes and he was always tearing about on them at Bulrush Cottage.

They returned to active service in December, opening a brief North American tour at Madison Square Garden, New York City, with Aerosmith in support.
David Tangye : After Aerosmith had been on, I was setting the stage up, putting the drinks and towels and other bits for the band on. Then I suddenly saw this black shape hitting the edge of the stage. It was this guy who had jumped off the balcony, trying to jump onto the stage and he missed. He had to be carried away on a stretcher and I think he died.

Musically, though, the band was fantastic that night. It was such a big thing for them to play there that they were really buzzing.

With it being Ozzy’s birthday, the promoter Howard Stein threw a party for him with a scantily-clad woman who jumped out of a massive big birthday cake with black candles round it, but she burnt her bum on the candles which completely cracked Ozzy up.

With punk becoming the dominant force in 1976, and younger metal-oriented bands offering more dynamic music, Sabbath entered a period of decline which would continue to the end of the decade. Drugs, drink and business problems continued to plague them but, even so, their sense of humour never quite deserted them.

Richard Ogden : They were always playing practical jokes. Bill wore plimsolls onstage when he was drumming, but when he came off at the end of the show he’d put on a dressing gown and slippers. I remember at The Kursaal in Southend (January 10, 1976) they put bananas in his slippers. It had obviously happened before, because I remember him going, "Bloody 'ell, not again." And the rest of them laughing their heads off.

The summer of 1976 found them recording their seventh album, Technical Ecstasy, at Criteria Studios, Miami, Florida.
Tony Iommi : We’d gone to Ridge Farm (in Surrey) to write the album and rehearse. It was good for me, because I could rehearse with Gerald (Jezz). The other lads used to stay in bed quite late, so you didn’t want to make too much noise. But I’d sit down with Gerald and we’d write all this stuff. So that album was different from the others, but I did like it.
Jezz Woodroffe : As time had gone on I’d got more involved in writing with Tony, and arranging and everything. I wrote most of the Technical Ecstasy album, which I’ve still never had any royalties for.
Tony Iommi : We went to Miami to record Technical Ecstasy at Criteria Studios. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. We all stayed in a place right on the beach, and I’d go down to the studio and nobody would be there. The Bee Gees were recording there too, and I spent a lot of time hanging out and doing coke with Barry Gibb. And the Eagles were there, too, in the room next to us. The Eagles had to pack up because we were too loud.
Geezer Butler : Before we could start recording we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board. I think they'd left about a pound of cocaine in the board.
Jezz Woodroffe : Ozzy had very little to do with the writing of the songs. Tony did the riffs, Geezer wrote most of the lyrics and the last thing that was done during recording sessions in the studio would be Ozzy putting some vocals over the top.
Ozzy Osbourne : In the studio, Tony was always saying, 'We've gotta sound like Foreigner', or 'We've gotta sound like Queen'. But I thought it was strange that the bands we'd once influenced were now influencing us.

Geezer Butler : We didn't know what we were doing. And obviously, the music was suffering; you could just feel the whole thing falling apart.

Jesse Woodroffe : Geezer wanted me to become a full member of the band and the others were happy with that, except Ozzy. I remember having a big meeting about it with the lawyers in Los Angeles, but Ozzy never turned up, because he didn’t want to agree to me being a member. He hated Technical Ecstasy.

After completing Technical Ecstasy, an increasingly frazzled Ozzy returned to England and checked himself into Stafford County Asylum.
Ozzy Osbourne : I checked myself into a loony bin called St George’s when I got back home. Its real name was Stafford County Asylum, but they changed it to make people feel better about being insane. It was a big old Victorian place. Dark and dingy, like the set of a science-fiction movie.

The first thing the doctor said to me when I went in there was, ‘Do you masturbate, Mr Osbourne?’ I told him, ‘I’m in here for my head, not my dick.’

I didn’t last long in that place. I’m telling you, the docs in those funny farms are more bonkers than the patients.

Jezz Woodroffe : That summer, Bill invited me to Somerville House several times. He would invite me over to stay but I’d get there and find him in bed, and all he wanted me to do was sit downstairs and play the grand piano in his front room. He wouldn’t get up. He’d spend the day in bed organising tours, talking business to people in Los Angeles on the phone.

Bill’s problems seemed to be coming to a head when Sabbath began a tour of the USA in October, with Boston as support.
Jezz Woodroffe : I was picked up in the Merc to go to Heathrow airport, and then Geezer, but when we got to Bill’s, he was wearing red tights, a t-shirt and a leather jacket.

When the crew asked where his luggage was, he said, "This is it." One plastic bag full of tights and about three t-shirts. That’s what he was planning to go around America with. It was obvious to me that there was something not quite right.

When we got to America, it was about minus 10 degrees outside but Bill was still wearing tights and a t-shirt. The porter at the hotel pointed to Bill and asked, "That gentleman behind you, is he with the band?" We looked back and said, "No, never seen him before." We went in but they wouldn’t let him through the door.

1977

By the time the US tour ended in February 1977, not only was Ozzy’s mental health ever more fragile, but his commitment to the band was increasingly in question. Nevertheless, another European tour was set to start in March.
Jezz Woodroffe : Ozzy had got to the point where he really didn’t want to do it any more. I remember, on the last tour I did with them, seeing him being pushed from behind the PA columns onto the stage by a roadie.

David Tangye : Ozzy had a big field out the back of Bulrush Cottage, and another one down the road which Ranton Rovers football team used to use as their pitch. One time, about 1977 I think it was, Ozzy asked them to take down their goalposts and they didn’t do it, so he went down and shot the posts down with his pump-action shotgun. Blasted them to bits.

Ozzy had quite an arsenal of guns. It was like the Bermuda Triangle for birds. Anything that flew over was lucky to get past. That’s why it got nicknamed Atrocity Cottage.

In November, amid rehearsals for their next album, Ozzy quit Sabbath because of his drink and drug problems, and was briefly replaced by former Savoy Brown vocalist Dave Walker.
Ozzy Osbourne : We had a few internal problems. My father was dying, so that put us out for over three months with the funeral and everything.

Tony Iommi : I think Ozzy just went through a bad patch and he was unhappy. It wasn’t working for him, so he just left.

David Tangye : Ozzy hadn't gone back down to rehearsals at Rockfield. Tony continued workin' on riffs, but he was getting more and more frustrated with not having a singer around, so Dave Walker, an old friend of Bill and Tony’s, was brought in, but he wasn’t Sabbath material. For one thing, his wife liked him to be in bed early.

I think there was an element of hiring Dave Walker just to shock Ozzy to come back, which he did, announcing his arrival with a few blasts of his shotgun outside Bill Ward’s window.


Dave Walker : When Ozzy decided he was going to leave, I was playing in California with this band called Mistress. And this call comes, "Hey Dave, come on over to England, 'cos Ozzy’s leaving." And they’re real nice guys.

We were in this real nice little town, pretty little place. I did a lot of writing with them while I was there, a shitload of lyrics, none of them ever got used. I didn’t know Geezer was supposed to be the main lyricist. I was the only one writing lyrics, as I recall.

Tony Iommi : It didn’t feel right with Dave Walker. It really didn’t. We were such a band unit before, and when somebody new comes in it was really uncomfortable.
Dave Walker : And then Ozzy came out - Ozzy’s a real nice dude - and I felt really sorry for him because he was going through some awful crap at the time. I felt, like, "You know what? Ozzy’s really not sure about what he’s doing, if he did the right thing, quitting Black Sabbath.’

In the first days of 1978, Ozzy decided to re-join Black Sabbath just as they were about to begin recording their eighth album, Never Say Die, in Toronto.
Dave Walker : I showed up for rehearsal. As I walked in, the band announced that they were going to the local pub for a meeting and that I was to wait until they got back. When they did, Bill Ward spoke for the band and said, and I quote, “We’re still here, and you’re not”. That was it.

Tony Iommi : We were glad when Ozzy came back. But we were due to go to Toronto to record an album, and we had no songs, really, because Ozzy didn’t want to sing the songs that we’d written with Dave Walker.

I don’t know how we got that album done. I booked the studio out in Toronto, never having seen it in my life. I booked it because the Stones had used it. But when we got there, it was just too plush, it wasn’t right for us. I had all the carpet ripped up because it just sounded dead in there. We had to rehearse in the morning at this cinema, and it was fucking freezing cold. And then at night we’d go into the studio to record. You wanted to live with the songs for a little bit. So it was very hard to put that album together, very frustrating for us all.

Geezer Butler : It was horrendous. We were in Toronto, broke and miserable and freezing to death. It was minus 18 or something, and I got this cold in my ear and went totally deaf, so everything that I was playing sounded like it was underwater.
Tony Iommi : We were all into silly games...and we were getting really drugged out...We'd go down to the sessions and have to pack up because we were too stoned. Nobody could get anything right. We were all over the place. Everybody was playing a different thing.

Geezer Butler : He’d gone nuts, Bill. He was dressing up as Hitler in the studio. And one day he passed out in the studio, so Tony put all of this black gaffer tape on his head, as if it were a Hitler haircut. When Bill came round from whatever he was on, he realized that his whole head was stuck down with tape.
Ozzy Osbourne : I'd go down to the studio and I heard what sounded like a jazz band playing. Is this really Black Sabbath? I'd just fuck off.

Bill Ward : In the circumstances, I thought we did the best we could. We were taking care of business ourselves, we didn't have millions from the record company and, despite the booze and Ozzy's departure, we tried to experiment with jazz and stuff the way we had in the early days. Songs like Johnny Blade and Air Dance I still like.

Geezer Butler : I like Air Dance. It was a great track, and totally different to what we’d normally do. But even if they were the best songs we’d ever done, I’d still get a bad feeling from listening to that album.
Ozzy Osbourne : The last album I did with Sabbath was Never Say Die! and it was the worst piece of work that I've ever had anything to do with. I'm ashamed of that album. I think it's disgusting

On May 16, Sabbath began the Never Say Die! tour at the City Hall, Newcastle on Tyne, with Van Halen as their support act.
Tony Iommi : Van Halen were really hot to trot, whereas we were established, but burning out. And there’s these guys all ready to go, and they were really good. They were great musicians, energetic onstage. We were good friends with Van Halen. We had them on tour with us for eight months. Eddie Van Halen became one of my best friends. Eddie was the first guitarist I’d heard come up with the tapping method. And he was a great player. But that tour was difficult. We hit a wall.

Geezer Butler : Ozzy thought that David Lee Roth was ripping him off every night, which he was. The thing is, Van Halen were getting all these young girls at the shows, and we’d never had that. We were going, ‘What are all these women doing at our shows?’

Our record company, Warner Brothers, had put everything into Van Halen. They really wanted to build them up. And we were sort of old hat to them. Van Halen were getting limos everywhere, and we hardly had any money back then. We’d just got rid of our management, paying horrendous lawyers bills and everything. The record company didn’t really believe in us anymore. And by the end of that tour, Ozzy was in pieces.

The last year of the decade brought no tour and no new album. At the end of April, having finally accepted that Ozzy’s behaviour had made him impossible to work with, they sacked him.

Ozzy Osbourne : We were doing some rehearsals in L.A., and I was loaded, but then I was loaded all the time. It was obvious that Bill had been sent by the others, because he wasn’t exactly the firing type. I can’t remember exactly what he said to me… but the gist was that Tony thought I was a pissed, coked-up loser and a waste of time for everyone concerned.

Tony Iommi : Ozzy seems to think it was me who pushed it, but I was only speaking on behalf of the band and trying to get the thing going.

Geezer Butler : Ozzy was incapable of working. He was 100% out of his brains all the time.
Ozzy Osbourne : It got to the point where no one would be in my company because I was being unreliable, unpredictable. And it was never a good idea to go, "I know, I'll go and get two eight-balls of coke and a pipe and smoke this crack. And now we'll create this." All that ever came from crack was misery, broken hearts, and fuckin' broken minds.
Tony Iommi : I got in touch with Ronnie (James Dio). Through Sharon (Sharon Arden, later to become Sharon Osbourne), I might add.

As soon as we heard Ronnie sing with us, we knew he was the right man.

Ozzy Osbourne : I should be dead. I don’t know why I’m not. Most of the people I used to get off my head with are dead. I’ve fallen down stairs, over stairs, over balconies. I once jumped out of a hotel window thinking it was the ground floor, but I was two floors up … someone must be looking after me.

Geezer Butler : That’s probably the thing which amazes me most - with all the things we got up to back then, how am I still alive?

Bill Ward : Quite honestly, I thought I would be dead by 25.

Tony Iommi : It’s nice that what we were doing turned out to be right. Especially after everyone said, 'Oh, they'll never make it!'

Tony Iommi : It was so hard for him to walk into a band as established as we were, and he wasn’t a big chap, just a little guy. (Sabbath manager) Don Arden’s words were, ‘You can’t have a midget singing for Black Sabbath.’ I just looked at the size of the talent. He sang so well. It was different to what we’d done, but there wasn’t much else we could do.

Ozzy Osbourne : I couldn’t imagine someone singing for that band that wasn’t me. It takes a long time to get that into your head.
Tony Iommi : It was like we were starting over again. But it made us fight again. We’d lost that – you get too comfortable. It made us have to work again, it kicked us up the arse, and that was good for the band.
Geezer Butler : One of the reasons I loved Ronnie was that he would write his own lyrics. I’d had enough of that after Never Say Die! For me, writing lyrics had become like torture. And Ronnie’s lyrics were totally different to what I’d do. When Ronnie came in, he took the band in another direction. It was really good.

After the breakup with Sabbath, Ozzy spent several months, from May to September 1979, in a Los Angeles hotel room (Le Parc) getting high and drunk non-stop. Sharon Arden (Don Arden's daughter) came to collect an old debt from Ozzy, saw the sad state he was in and resolved to help Ozzy get back on his feet.

Ozzy Osbourne : I just stayed in that room and got fucked up. I thought, Black Sabbath was a big thing that happened to me, but it’s over. So I’ll have my last blast with the booze and dope, and fuck as many tarts as I can, and then go home. But I didn’t fuck the tarts because I was too pissed. And then, one day, Sharon came round…

Sharon Osbourne : He looked awful. He hadn’t shaved in weeks. His clothes were covered in food and he smelt terrible. It was heartbreaking to see somebody in such a state of hopelessness.

It started with cleaning himself up. Then trying to cut back on the booze and the drugs. And then you start to take him out and people recognize him and tell him he looks good. And when people asked him what he’s doing, he’d start saying, ‘I’m auditioning musicians.’ It’s not just like, ‘I’m not doing anything.’ It’s, ‘I’m here, I’m putting a band together. And it makes you feel like, ‘Hey, yeah, I’m doing something.’

Ozzy Osbourne : After I got fired from Sabbath, I was very fortunate in meeting (Quiet Riot guitarist) Randy Rhoads, God rest his soul. He was great with me, and I felt like I did have something that was worth it.

Of course there was bad blood. I didn’t want them (Sabbath) to beat me and they didn’t want me to beat them. It spurred us on. They made a couple of great albums without me. I was pissed off. I was vengeful. But there came a point when I went, I’m free.
During the closing months of 1979, Ozzy set about completing the line-up for his first solo project and Sabbath entered Criteria Studios to record their first album with Dio, Heaven And Hell.

David Tangye (Ozzy’s PA) : I started working with him again when he went solo. It was like a new day for Ozzy with plenty of interest from others to get him back out on the road and doing what he should be doing! He had no record deal as such back then, so had no budget to play with.

Tony Iommi : I had an excitement about the band again. I had to keep this band going. I’ve never been one to give up. I had to fight and to try and make it work. It would have been so easy to have turned my back on it and just said, ‘That’s it.’ But I couldn’t do that. I had to go with it and make it work. And it did. Heaven And Hell turned out to be great album. Black Sabbath hadn’t died. We were back out there with Ronnie and the band was great again.
Against all the odds, the 1980s saw both Sabbath and Ozzy re-establish themselves as viable, multi-platinum entities. Under Sharon’s astute management, despite his tendency to bite the heads off bats and doves, Ozzy has since notched up over 30m album sales in his own right, and established his hugely successful Ozzfest. Sabbath have also continued from strength to strength, finally re-uniting with Ozzy to secure their first No1 US album in June 2013 with 13. As of this writing, the re-union appears to be holding fast with their joint 20th album underway in the capable hands of Rick Rubin, and a 'final’ tour in the offing, despite the uncertainties caused by Iommi’s ongoing cancer.

SOURCES : Interviews conducted by Johnny Black and Paul Elliott, plus pre-existing quotes from :
Classic Rock
Jeb Wright interview at Classic Rock Revisited website
Ultimate Guitar, 13 Feb 2010
Guitar World, 1992, 2001, 2008 and 2011
Mojo 2013
Uncut 2014
After Hours 1981
Sounds 1978
Melody Maker, Harry Doherty interview 11 Oct 1975; Chris Charlesworth interview 24 July 1976.
The Telegraph, interview by Andrew Perry, Jun 20, 2013.
Daily Mail : Louise Gannon, Jun 7, 2014
Oui magazine, March 1982
Daily Mirror interview, Nov 2003
Metal Hammer interview by Malcolm Dome, May 2014
New York Daily News interview, May 27, 2010
Philadelphia Daily News, interview by Mark de la Vina, Aug 31, 1992
Esquire, interview by Mick Stingley, Oct 2014
Spin magazine interview with Kory Grow.
Drum Magazine interview by Andrew Lentz, Sep 2010
Sleeve notes to the CD re-issue of Paranoid
Sleeve notes to 1998 LP Reunion.


Website : http://davewalkerband.com/black-sabbath-dave/)
Website : http://dmme.net/interviews/dwalker.html)
Website : Jason Saulnier at http://musiclegends.ca/interviews/dave-walker-interview-black-sabbath/)
Website : Interview by Shawn Perry at http://www.vintagerock.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46:glenn-hughes&catid=35:glenn-hughes&Itemid=3
Website metalshrine.se

Promoter Don Branker quotes at : Black Sabbath FAQ
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEXhxPrdWS4C&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=%22Mark+Foster%22,+%22Black+Sabbath%22&source=bl&ots=n4TqbVo8w7&sig=e12zMWs_20_DnLUAp1EqS3kQQ_0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=kwetVPg8x9lqjMyBeA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22Mark%20Foster%22%2C%20%22Black%20Sabbath%22&f=false

Symptom Of The Universe by Mick Wall (book)
I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne
Iron Man by Tony Iommi
How Black Was Our Sabbath by David Tangye and Graham Wright.

DVD documentary Black Sabbath, Volume 1: 1970 - 1978


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NONE MORE BLACK by Johnny Black (feature originally appeared in Music Week, 2009)

“It’s been described as the heavy metal Holy Grail,” says Steve Hammonds, Catalogue Consultant for Universal Music, “and it’s been a labour of love to get it to the point where it could be released.”

It started in 2004 when archivist Rob Caiger discovered a cache of long lost tape boxes in the vaults of publisher Bucks Music in West London. “It turned out to be the original multi-tracks for the first three Black Sabbath albums,” continues Hammonds, “plus a treasure trove of unreleased and different versions.”

Finally, after years of negotiation, that Holy Grail will realize its potential via a major Universal Music Catalogue Marketing campaign that kicks off on March 30 with a 3CD Deluxe Edition of Sabbath’s ground-breaking 1970 album Paranoid, in the vanguard of a release schedule that also sees the band’s classic albums finally made available in the digital domain.

And none of it would have been possible if not for a freak industrial accident.

“I did sheet metal work in a factory,” remembers Sabbath’s founding guitarist Tony Iommi, “and this cutter came down on my fingers, took the ends of my middle and ring finger off.”

Every doctor Iommi consulted confirmed he would never play guitar again. “I was in deep despair until my factory foreman brought a record to my house and asked me to listen.” The last thing Iommi wanted to hear was music but his foreman insisted. “It was guitar music, and I had to admit it was fantastic but it was almost like he was rubbing it in. Then he told me it was Django Rheinhardt, the fabulous jazz guitarist, who had two fingers badly damaged in a fire and played all his incredible solos using just the other two fingers. That’s what inspired me to carry on and develop my own way of playing.”

Amazingly, because playing was agony, Iommi manufactured his own plastic finger-guards so he could press down the strings. “Before the accident I could play in the normal way, using full chords and everything,” he recalls, “but, after the accident I had to play differently. I came up with fatter chords that I could play with less fingers.”

The unintentional result was a whole new style hailed by many as the basis of heavy metal guitar playing. “What an act of God that was,” reckons Chris Ingham, publisher of Classic Rock and noted Sabbath scholar. “He couldn’t feel the strings on his guitar, so he tuned it down and developed that slightly mechanical phrasing style which resulted in the Sabbath sound from which sprang heavy metal.”

Heavy rock was then in its infancy, so the band’s new sound wasn’t immediately understood. “It was very difficult doing what we did, because it was all soul clubs and blues clubs,” points out Iommi. “We started playing blues, but the first time we threw in a couple of our own songs, Black Sabbath and Wicked World, people came up and said, ‘We really loved those two songs.’ We were well pleased.”

Along with Iommi’s distinctive axemanship, the band had another ace up its sleeve in time-served ex-burglar Ozzy Osbourne, a frontman who would prove to have an uncanny knack for self-promotion. Innovative bassist Geezer Butler was also a strong lyricist whose songs cleverly mirrored the band’s occult-sounding name, while thunder-fisted drummer Bill Ward not only propelled the music but was a showman in his own right. (On their first American tour, Ward energized one lethargic audience by throwing his bass drum at them.)

It was London-based record plugger Tony Hall who, in the wake of a fairly successful Fontana Records debut single, Evil Woman, secured an album deal with Philips’ prog-rock subsidiary Vertigo Records. “We just went in the studio and done it in a day,” says Iommi. “We played our live set and that was it. We actually thought a whole day was quite a long time, then off we went the next day to play for £20 in Switzerland.”

The album achieved a respectable No8 slot in the UK and also made a good showing across the Atlantic, reaching No23 in Billboard. Sabbath had arrived and a second album was required. “We suddenly had to write a whole album,” laughs Iommi, “so we got stuck in to rehearsals at nine in the morning.”

While the rest of the band was out getting lunch, Iommi had the moment of inspiration that would establish them among the rock greats. “I came up with the riff for Paranoid and when they got back and I couldn’t wait to play it for them. We recorded it there and then, in as long as it took to play it through.”

The upcoming 3CD re-release includes a version of Paranoid with unfamiliar lyrics, and Iommi well-remembers how it came about. “Geezer hadn’t written lyrics yet, so we put the track down and Ozzy just mumbled anything that came into his head, and then did the proper vocals afterwards.”

Paranoid, both the album and single, transformed Sabbath into a global sensation, and the band knew exactly how to play the superstar role to the hilt. Keith Altham, who later became their publicist, remembers how, even during his first encounter with the band, at Brighton Dome in 1972, their flair for self-promotion was unmistakable. “Geezer Butler came off stage in a white chamois leather suit with a zip down the front. It was drenched in sweat, so in the dressing room, he opened up a trunk, pulled out another absolutely identical suit and put it on. Ozzy saw me watching this and said, ‘E loiks to be recognoized when ‘e leaves the stage door.’”

Deprived of their charismatic frontman when Ozzy and the band parted company in 1978, Black Sabbath never faltered and, under Iommi’s leadership, began a new era with Ronnie James Dio upfront and centre. Meanwhile Ozzy went from strength to strength on Epic Records under the guidance of his new manager, Sharon Osbourne.

Another happy accident kept Ozzy in the spotlight when audience member Mark Neal tossed an unconscious bat onto the stage during a concert in Veterans’ Auditorium, Des Moines, Iowa. “I thought it was one of those rubber toy things,” explained Ozzy, “but as soon as I crunched its head I realized, 'Oh my god, what have I done?’.”

Keith Altham, now a successful PR man, looked after Ozzy’s 1983 album Bark At The Moon. “Sharon was obviously the person to deal with. Right from the start she was the boss of what was going on. Ozzy was just having fun, but I could see he was a superstar in the making.”

By 1986, Roland Hyams of Work Hard PR was working with Ozzy and found him as irrepressible as ever. “I turned up at their place in the South of France and, of course, there’s a swimming pool. I asked, ‘How deep is it?’ Big mistake. Bang! He pushes me straight in. Everything – my passport, my wallet – it was all sodden, and that set the tone for the rest of the visit.”

Sabbath, meanwhile, were proving they too remained a force to be reckoned with, and 1992’s Dehumanizer is widely seen as one of their heaviest albums ever. “One thing people miss about them is their humour,” says Chris Ingham who attended the Dehumanizer sessions. “Tony and Geezer once burnt Bill’s beard off while he was sleeping in the studio.”

Ozzy founded the Ozzfest in 1996, and the original quartet reformed in 1997 to record the live album Reunion for Epic. “Sharon was the driving force behind getting Sabbath back together,” recalls Neil Martin, Sony’s Senior Marketing Manager, Catalogue. “I’ll never forget seeing them headline Donington. As Sabbath came on, the sun went down, so you had this fantastic sunset as they went into War Pigs in front of 90,000 people and I’m right there onstage beside them. I still curse myself for not having my camera.”

The new Millennium brought a veritable blizzard of Ozzness with the single Iron Man winning Sabbath their first Grammy in 2000, The Osbournes MTV series debuting in 2002, Ozzy and Kelly’s No1 duet with the Sabbath classic Changes in 2003 and Tony Iommi’s formation of Heaven & Hell in 2005.

Tony Cooke of Scream Promotions worked on Changes and recalls, “Ozzy was a complete diamond to work with. When Chris Moyles moved to Radio 1’s breakfast show he said the one artist he really wanted to interview was Ozzy. So Ozzy bought him a clock to make sure he’d wake up in the morning and Chris still mentions that on air.”

Hugh Gilmour, long-time sleeve designer for Black Sabbath, has been closely involved in the process of cataloguing the material on the rediscovered tapes. “It was a revelation to hear familiar songs, such as Children Of The Grave, Paranoid and Planet Caravan, sung with completely different lyrics,” he says. Gilmour goes on to single out the discovery of their debut single Evil Woman with an added horn section and flute accompaniment and Lord Of This World Master Of Reality with previously unheard piano and slide guitar parts.

“We’re delighted to be able to reactivate the Black Sabbath catalogue in such a positive way,” says Silvia Montello, Marketing Director of Universal Music Catalogue Marketing. “The previously unreleased rarities, access to the original tapes for re-mastering and the long-awaited digital availability of all those classic albums through iTunes, Amazon, Nokia and elsewhere makes this a very special project.”

Aside from the schedule of DeLuxe versions, plans also include box sets, one of which will be a complete 70s replica CD edition.

With a new Heaven and Hell album due in April, and Universal’s Black Sabbath campaign moving into high gear, 2009 looks set to be the new Millennium’s mightiest metal year to date.

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Four Key Black Sabbath Albums

Paranoid
The Sabbs second album took them to No1 and has since achieved quadruple platinum status in the USA. Sanctuary’s DeLuxe triple disc re-issue on March 30 includes the original album remastered plus the 1974 Quadraphonic mix along with a veritable feast of rare out-takes, demos and instrumental versions including an early attempt at the title track with different lyrics. The digipak gatefold packaging features expanded booklets containing rare and previously unseen photographs and in-depth sleeve notes. An extensive marketing campaign includes pages in Kerrang, Classic Rock, Terrorizer and Metal Hammer, plus online activity across a wide range of outlets including Sonic Nation, Kerrang!, MySpace, Metal Hammer, Classic Rock and The Gauntlet. A national and local tv/radio campaign is underway aiming at prime time tv talk shows, breakfast slots and across the board radio coverage. The re-issue is also available in a double LP format, and is synchronised with the digital relaunch of the remaining Black Sabbath catalogue in their existing format.

Black Sabbath
The February 1970 album that started it all off, gave them an immediate UK Top Ten placing, peaking at No8 and logging up 42 weeks on the chart. This auspicious debut has long since gone platinum in the USA. Along with Master Of Reality, this forms the second wave in the relaunch campaign, due in June. The re-issue will be made available as a DeLuxe double CD and LP set featuring expanded booklets containing rare and previously unseen photographs, and extensive sleeve notes.

Master Of Reality
Their third UK Top Ten album, 1971’s Master Of Reality peaked at No5. In the USA, it achieved a higher chart placement than Paranoid, peaking at No8, and eventually going double-platinum. The re-issue, set for June release, will be made available as a DeLuxe double CD and LP set featuring expanded booklets containing rare and previously unseen photographs, memorabilia images, and extensive sleeve notes.

We Sold Our Soul For Rock’n’Roll
Despite a relatively weak initial showing in the UK, and no chart entry at all in America, this December 1975 release – a double album compilation - has proved to be a slow-burner. It was certified silver in the UK on October 1, 1976, and ultimately notched up double-platinum status in the USA. This singles it out as a particularly intriguing component of the March 30 digital catalogue relaunch, alongside original albums including Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Volume 4, Sabotage.


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BLACK SABBATH INTERVIEWS

Geezer Butler (bassist, Black Sabbath) : I'd moved into this flat that I'd painted black with inverted crosses everywhere. Ozzy gave me this 16th Century book about magic that he'd stolen from somewhere. I put it in the airing cupboard because I wasn't sure about it.

Later that night I woke up and saw this black shadow at the end of the bed. It was a horrible presence that frightened the life out of me! I ran to airing cupboard to throw the book out, but the book had disappeared. After that I gave up all that stuff. It scared me shitless. That's what the song's about. (ie title track of the album)

When we were invited to play Stonehenge on the Witches Sabbath on Walpurgis Night. We said 'No,' so the head bloody warlock cursed us and we had to go to this white witch and have the curse counter-acted. He said 'You have to start wearing crosses to keep the curse away' so Ozzy's dad made us these crosses and that was why we started wearing them in all the early photos.

Tony Iommi : Rodger Bain was picked by the record company. I think it was his first project as well, that he was the new boy, and they wanted to give him us. We got on.

I suppose he had more knowledge of what was going on than we did because we didn't know anything about the studio in them days. We had never been in a studio as far as... We'd been in demo studios, but we'd never actually been in a proper studio to record an album, so he obviously had more knowledge than us, and he knew things that we didn't. He was helpful, he was alright. He was good at the time.

From what I can remember about it, it was very simplistic; a mike was stuck in front of the guitar cabinet, and then just the drums got miked up. That was it. I don't remember anything exotic.

We used a couple of effects on the album, but again, the guy that we had engineering at the time was Tom Allom. He was very good, so he helped a lot as well. He knew how to mike everything.

With the actual sound of the track, it seemed like it'd be good to have that (rain effect) on the beginning of it, so Rodger and Tom Allom did that.

I think they must've found some tape in the library, and used that. I don't think we were there when they actually did that.
(Source : Ultimate Guitar interview, 13 Feb 2010)

Geezer Butler (bassist, Black Sabbath) : Every producer we played to said, ‘You can’t have that sound - it’s a bass, not a bloody guitar!’ Roger Bain, the one producer who went, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good sound,’ was the one who got the job.

When we recorded Black Sabbath, I had a 70-watt Laney guitar amp and a Park 4x12 cabinet with only three speakers in it - and two of them were wrecked! That’s how I got that really distorted sound. Actually, I hated the tone of that record at the time, but I’ve gotten used to it now. It’s nostalgic. I didn’t have any alternative; I couldn’t afford to buy new speakers.

We had only two days to record, so we just plugged in and performed our live set in the studio. We were allowed one take for each song and stopped only if someone made a horrible mistake. It was out of our hands. No time to dial in the perfect bass tone.

Tom Allom (engineer) : I got a job as a recording engineer in a little recording studio in London.  The other engineer there knew me from a time where I did a holiday job at a studio that he had started out at.  He knew me and he knew that I was interested in tape recording and he said, “Do you want to have a crack at it?”  I said, “I’ll have a go at it.” 
It was a console that had 12 ins and four outs.  We had to persuade the boss to get a second four-track machine.  It was soon after that when we did the first Black Sabbath album. 
We did that with them using two four-tracks.  They were not in synch; we were bouncing from one to the other.  It wasn’t anywhere near as difficult to learn the ropes as it would be today in a full-fledged studio. 

At the same time, you had to learn to work with what you had.  You had to do an awful lot outside of what you had on the console.  We really didn’t have any outboard equipment.  It was really quite elementary. 

Jeb:  You had to use other means to get the sound you were trying to achieve.

Tom: Microphone placements were very important in those days.   You couldn’t use a lot of heavy EQ, as we didn’t have it.  You had to get the blend right. 

I was watching Iron Man on network TV a couple of nights ago; the movie.  At the end, the song “Iron Man” plays.  It still sounds pretty cool.  The guitar sound is not quite what I would want to do now, as it is quite thin, but it does have a real energy to it. The drums are almost dry as a bone.  I remember we only had four mic’s for the drums.  Bill Ward played in this little drum booth in the corner of the studio.  They sound so real.  They were a fantastically good band; they were so tight. 

Jeb: So you were pretty new to the job when you recorded Black Sabbath. 

Tom: I was.  I started in the fall of 1968, so I had only been there for a year, if that.  It was baptism by fire.  I had no idea who Black Sabbath was when they came in.  On the second album, we did the tracks in the same studio and then we took the tapes to Island Studios and transferred them all up to eight-track, which was Paranoid.  I suppose that was the album with “Iron Man” on it. 

When I got confronted with the original four-track tapes for the Classic Album Series I was interviewed for a couple of years ago; when I heard what was on the four-tracks compared to the final mixes, we didn’t do much in the way of overdubs.  It was still very much the basic tracks that formed the album. 

Jeb:  When you heard Black Sabbath for the first time, what was your impression? 

Tom: We captured a new sound and Rodger Bain, who was the producer, has to take credit for that.  He really did understand the way it should sound.  I had never seen the band live.  Rodger was a very intuitive producer and he never got anywhere enough credit for what he did.  There was just something about it.  I can’t say that we did this, or we did that, it just happened.  

Jeb:  How long did it take to record the first Black Sabbath album?

Tom: The first album was done in four days.  It was two sessions, from 10:00AM to 10:00PM.  Can you imagine getting Black Sabbath up at 10:00am?  Those two sessions were for the recording.  Then, there were two sessions from 10:00am to 6:00pm for the mixing.  After those four sessions, it was done, finished and in the can.  I think the whole record cost 500 pounds, including the photo of that lady in front of the mill.  They did quite a good return on that 500 pounds. 

Jeb:  How much longer did Paranoid take?

Tom: Paranoid didn’t take much longer, as we did the tracks the same sort of way.  I would not think the whole thing took more than ten days.  Master of Reality was the third one that I did.  They wrote that in the studio and that kind of dragged on and took a massive month [laughter].  That one was a test, as they were not really prepared like they were for the first album.  They recorded, essentially, all of the tracks on the first album beforehand.  I had done the demos when they were Earth; that was before they became Black Sabbath. 

I did the demos and then they came back about six months later.  When I did the demos, I was really new to the job.  Rodger Bain and I got along well. 

Jeb:  Looking back, can you believe how important those sessions were to rock music?

Tom: It is neat to be involved in something that so many people think was such an important part of music.  It really gives you a good feeling. 

Jeb:  Was it difficult to record Bill Ward?  I love his drumming on those albums, but I don’t know if Bill has ever kept a straight beat.  He does some crazy stuff on those records. 

Tom: What he and Geezer were doing together was incredible, actually.  They were a three-piece band and they were almost a jazz band, really. 

Bill was not playing a straight beat.  The other thing that blows me away, when I think about it, is how young they were.  They were twenty years old.  It is amazing.  I was only 21, or 22.  To have developed that unique style by that tender ago is incredible.  It didn’t seem that way to me then.  It did take me by surprise because I had never heard music like that because, then, nobody had.  I find it more impressive now than I did then. 
(Source : interview by Jeb Wright at Classic Rock Revisited website)