The 1960s songwriter Ozzy Osbourne “wanted to strangle”
The mentality behind the psychedelic movement always seemed to be good enough to last. Although there may have been a feeling in the air that people could actually create a utopia in the middle of a field at Woodstock, it would take years before they started to realise that form of idealism was going to burn itself out fairly quickly. While Ozzy Osbourne may have helped us see the dark side of life in Black Sabbath, he remembered not sparing any expense when it came to the giants of the hippie movement.
Granted, Osbourne did have a fondness in his heart for some parts of the psychedelic movement. He always described himself as a massive Beatles fan, and it’s not like John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t indulge in their fair share of psych-rock tracks in their day. But if the Fab Four showed us the way forward, it took many other artists to turn it into a parody of itself.
After all, whenever there’s a movement, there’s always money to be made from it, and the biggest names in the industry were more than happy to go after anyone who they thought wouldn’t be the wiser when profiting off of their dreams. So that means things like the 1910 Fruitgum Company playing the kind of tunes that would even make the Disney Channel cringe today.
If there was ever a place where everything congregated, though, it was San Francisco. The thought of California may have been people like The Beach Boys and Brian Wilson writing his own miniature symphonies, but as soon as people got a look at the Haight/Ashbury, they were willing to fork over whatever they had if it meant getting a few good hits of acid and finding their own state of nirvana.
They even had a song for it, ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)’, written by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas. That’s all well and good if someone is living in that reality, but for someone who came from the hard streets of Birmingham like Osbourne did, it was far from reality. That was a pipe dream, and he knew that he wasn’t about to put a flower in his hair at the time.
When talking about his first bands, Osbourne made it a point to avoid that kind of hippy idealism at all costs, saying, “I was hungry. I had my ass hanging out of my pants. I hated the fucking world. When I heard the silly fucking words, ‘If you go to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair,’ I wanted to fucking strangle John Phillips. I was in the industrial town of Birmingham. My father was dying from asbestos, and I was an angry young punk.”
That didn’t mean that Black Sabbath didn’t eventually find time to dwell on the dangers of the hippy movement as well. ‘Children of the Grave’ had that same sense of idealism on Master of Reality, but that was far more practical than fake posturing, with Osbourne pleading with the rest of the movement to take everything seriously if they had any hope of surviving in the next generation.
So, while Sabbath is rightfully considered one of the bands that stomped out the hippy movement, it wasn’t out of spite for people who were living life to the fullest. This was them giving a mirror to the society they were seeing, and it was up to the rest of the world whether they wanted to live on in ignorance or start actually changing things.
