Another Side of Hell: Exploring the Back Half of Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Years
Between 1969 and 1978, Black Sabbath released eight studio albums featuring their original frontman, John “Ozzy” Osbourne. Those first four albums — 1970’s Black Sabbath and Paranoid, 1971’s Master of Reality, and 1972’s Vol. 4 — are roundly considered to be classics. While critics panned these records at the time, Sabbath almost single-handedly laid the groundwork for what would become heavy metal with these records, mixing sinister guitar and bass lines, groovy drumming, and lyrics straight out of an acid-soaked horror film.
Today, these records are appreciated for their macabre genius. But this begs the question: what about the other four records? I partially make my living by appreciating music, and yet I had never heard them, having stopped cold at Vol. 4, my personal favorite of the band’s catalog. So I decided to descend into the void once more and see what joys and horrors the back half of Sabbath’s Ozzy years had to offer.
It should come as no surprise that Vol. 4‘s follow up effort, 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, is by far my favorite of the four records in question. The band made a conscious effort to continue with Vol. 4‘s heavy, drug-addled sound, but found themselves too, well, drug-addled to do so. Cocaine was the group’s intoxicant of choice in those days, and it left them (especially guitarist Tony Iommi) hollowed out and suffering from severe writer’s block following their intense touring schedule in 1972. So while the album is short on memorable guitar lines, with a few notable exceptions (especially the opening one two punch of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” and “A National Acrobat”), this album is possibly the grooviest one the band ever made.
Bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward (the band’s secret weapon) are operating like a single unit here, churning out some surprisingly swinging funk all over the record. Lyrically, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is squarely focused on one question: what happens after we die? Osbourne sounds truly possessed in his vocal delivery, like he’s reporting from beyond the grave. Perhaps this has to do with the fact that the album was primarily written and recorded at Clearwell Castle, an ancient ruin in the woods of Gloustershire, England, that in addition to Led Zeppelin and Mott the Hoople, has also been known to host a number of ghosts. It’s almost entirely too fitting that Black Sabbath would find themselves personally and creatively rejuvenated by a haunted castle, but the proof is in the pudding: Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was a huge commercial success and received a surprising amount of critical acclaim. But as Ozzy would later put it, the album was also “the beginning of the end” for the original lineup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8IVokQED2w
Luckily, from the first few songs on 1975’s Sabotage, you wouldn’t think this to be true. Co-produced by Iommi and Mike Butcher, the album finds the band in full on thunder mode again, all furious riffage and pounding drums. But this renewed anger and urgency in the music was based on the band’s own personal turmoil at the time: Sabotage was written and recorded while the band was involved in a very bitter and litigious breakup with their former manager, Patrick Meehan. It seemed that Meehan had a tendency of overstepping his boundaries; the final straw came when he finagled his way into a producer’s credit on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. The band fired him, and Meehan sued.
All of that frustration comes pouring out in crunchy, hot-blooded headbangers like “Hole In The Sky,” “Symptom of the Universe,” and “Megalomania.” The B-side of the album, however, is where things start to get spotty. The biggest problem, by far, is “Supertzar,” a bloated instrumental given even more bloat by the incantations of a choir. The whole thing sounds like the overture to a Broadway musical, which is decidedly NOT what you want Black Sabbath to sound like. And while the band experimented with synthesizers to agreeable ends on previous records, the final two songs on the record, “Am I Going Insane?” and “The Writ” almost sound like proto-synth pop, and not in a good way. If this was indeed Black Sabbath inventing New Wave, I think they’d rather not be credited with such a distinction. The weird kimonos and leisure suits that the band don on the oft-mocked cover of the album only further cement the impression that the band was starting to lose their way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1dx0rOPJ74
Then comes 1976’s Technical Ecstasy, the album where even the most dyed-in-the-wool Sabbath fans had to say to themselves, “What the hell happened?” How can this possibly be the same band that gave us “N.I.B.” and “War Pigs” and “After Forever” and “Supernaut”? How can a Black Sabbath record sound this bland, this uninspired? For one, it doesn’t help that the album was recorded in Miami, perhaps the least Sabbath-esque place on the planet, in the same studio where the Eagles were concurrently consuming 10 times their body weight in blow and occasionally recording your dad’s favorite record, Hotel California.
This was also the dawn of punk, and cultural watchdogs had moved on from Ozzy and the boys to the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned. The danger of Sabbath’s early music felt somewhat quaint when compared to these new hooligans and their dyed hair and safety pins through their cheeks. Perhaps they felt like they couldn’t compete with punk, but that still doesn’t fully explain why Technical Ecstasy sounds like a collection of Foreigner B-sides. If you played someone the wretched likes of “Back Street Kids,” “It’s Alright,” and (ugh) “Rock ‘n’ Roll Doctor” then told them that these were Black Sabbath songs, they’d probably laugh in your face and call you a liar.
As if band got to the end of the record and said, “Hey, maybe we should put an actual Black Sabbath song on here in addition to all this car commercial butt rock,” we’re treated to the horribly titled yet awesomely menacing “Dirty Women.” This is the single moment on the entire album that sounds like the Black Sabbath we know and love, all galloping drums and snarling guitars, working up to full frenzy over seven minutes and 13 seconds. The inclusion of this one glimmer of hope, this diamond in the rough, only makes Technical Ecstasy that much more perplexing. Clearly they still had the magic in them, so why could they only muster it for a single song tacked on at the end of a mediocre album?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6IUFzFeBkU
Never Say Die!, released in 1978, is one of the most ironic album titles in rock history. This is undoubtedly the sound of a band that had clearly given up. Osbourne had actually given up following Technical Ecstasy; he even briefly quit the band and was replaced for a hot minute by Dave Walker of Savoy Brown. I’m not sure what convinced Ozzy to return, but it sure as hell wasn’t any of the material for this record. A lethal combination of chemically-induced infighting amongst the band, a freezing, sub-par Toronto recording studio, and a tight schedule that meant writing songs in the morning and recording them in the evening spelled doom for the album, and not in the way that you would usually associate with Black Sabbath.
Even more unfortunate was the decision to experiment with that most dreaded of subgenres, jazz fusion. I’d rather shove live prawns into my ears then ever be subjected to the cheesy lounge act piano arpeggios of “Air Dance,” or even worse, the excruciating, unbelievably embarrassing Duke Silver saxophones at the beginning of “Breakout/Swinging The Chain” again. But truth be told, this album is mostly just completely forgettable. At least Technical Ecstasy was kinda mystifying in its awfulness, this album is just… there. Ozzy has since said that he’s “ashamed” of the album, and that he finds it to be “disgusting.” It’s perplexing to me how someone can get that emotional over something so dull. Being angry about Never Say Die! is like being angry about a paper plate. Or a shoelace. In the end, it’s just not worth the effort, which is apparently how the band felt about it too.
And that was it for Black Sabbath’s original lineup. Ozzy Osbourne was fired and went on to a highly successful solo career. Iommi, Butler, and Ward recruited Ronnie James Dio and were reborn with 1980’s heavy metal landmark, Heaven and Hell. The Birmingham lads will occasionally reunite in some permutation or another, usually for some live gigs; they even released a totally not-bad new album (sans Ward, unfortunately) called 13 recently. But as we’ve seen today, the magic of Black Sabbath was lightning in a bottle. It could only last for so long before that spark dissipated. It’s been said that nothing gold can stay, but in this case, nothing dark can stay, either.
