The cover art, a picture taken by photographer Keith Macmillan of Ozzy Osbourne with his arms in the air displaying Winston Churchill V’s, said it all: This was victory. Songs like “Supernaut” and “Cornucopia” grooved harder than ever, the ballads “Changes” and “Laguna Sunrise” sounded prettier, the quixotic interlude “FX” was trippier, and heavier fare like “Wheels of Confusion,” with its gut-punch opening guitar notes, and the group’s coke paean “Snowblind,” which they buttressed with Alfred Hitchcock-esque strings, unraveled elaborately to reveal new depths within the Sabbath experience. 4, sounded more sophisticated than the previous three. With loose deadlines and infinite drugs, Black Sabbath ended up breathing fire into a masterpiece - though their label, Warner Bros., refused to allow them to title it Snowblind. While making this LP, they finally had the luxury to stretch out and develop the songs in the comfort of a California mansion over several weeks. So, by the spring of 1972, they were riding high, literally as much as figuratively, as they set out to craft their fourth volume. Those records allowed them to leave the dark satanic mills of Birmingham, England, and tour the world, experiencing everything it could offer them. with the follow-up LP Paranoid, and kept up the momentum on their third album, Master of Reality.

In the two years since they had ignited heavy metal’s Big Bang with the gargantuan riffs and horror-movie lyrics of their self-titled debut, they’d scored a Number One album in the U.K. “I got grandchildren now, right? So I’ll stay out of all that.”Īt the time, the four musicians were in their early twenties and reveling in fresh success. “There are some things around then that I can’t talk about, so I can’t go down that road,” drummer Bill Ward demurs. “We had a lot of late nights,” says frontman Ozzy Osbourne, who now regrets his coke indulgences. Hear Black Sabbath's Rare 'Heaven and Hell' Early Rehearsal Demoįlashback: Black Sabbath Play 'Heaven and Hell' With Replacement Singer Tony Martin See Ozzy Osbourne and Post Malone Dodge the Cops in Cartoon 'It's a Raid' Video We were all bloody smugglers if you think about it.” “That’s why we used to have all the musicians turning up at our house at the time, pretending they’re coming to visit us. “At that time, was good stuff, and we used to have it flown in on a private plane,” guitarist Tony Iommi recalls, sounding lighthearted. “Whether you can believe him or not, the record cost, I think, $65,000,” bassist Geezer Butler says drolly, “and the cocaine bill was $75,000.”

All they have to go on is the bill their manager presented to them when they were done with it. There’s no way to precisely quantify the colossal amount of drugs Black Sabbath inhaled in 1972 while making their fourth album, which they’d hoped to title Snowblind, in tribute to their favorite powdered narcotic.

Black sabbath vol. 4