The 1971 album Ozzy Osbourne wished never came out: “I was disappointed”
Ozzy Osbourne didn’t want to go through life with too many regrets when he left Black Sabbath.
He knew that the best way for him to move on was to try and write the best songs that he could, and with the help of Randy Rhoads, he carved out a place for himself that very few people in the metal world have been able to achieve. He put up one of the greatest track records that any hard rock act was able to work with, but he never had the same kind of love for his classics as the rest of his fans did.
At the same time, it’s not like ‘The Prince of Darkness’ wasn’t proud of where he came from. He knew that he wouldn’t have been able to support himself without working on a song like ‘Paranoid’, and up until the day he died, he thanked the Lord for giving him someone like Rhoads to help him flesh out his songs. But the reason why Rhoads was a breath of fresh air was that it didn’t interfere with what Sabbath had been doing.
Tony Iommi’s guitar tone was far darker than anything Rhoads was doing, and while Osbourne still loved what Iommi did, he had had enough of him trying to sound like other people. The past few albums had shown Iommi to be a copycat, and Osbourne was interested in getting heavier all the time rather than trying to sound like the new version of ELO or Foreigner whenever they went into the studio.
In fact, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was probably the last time all of them were on the same page. Osbourne knew they had created something spectacular, but when you look at Sabotage or Technical Ecstasy, nobody was really having any fun behind the scenes. But when you’ve been thrown onto the road and told that you need to come up with as many albums as you can in a short amount of time, it’s easy to imagine why Osbourne wasn’t in love with working on some of their records.
And that even applied to Master of Reality. Despite being one of the darkest albums the band ever made, Osbourne felt that the lion’s share of the record was rushed and needed to be worked on a little more before it was put out, saying, “Paranoid was another thing we were into, and Master of Reality was just, personally, I was a bit disappointed with it. It was a rush job. We had to write as quickly as we could and record it even faster. Luckily, it isn’t as bad as it could’ve been. Compared to the standard, the new one isn’t quite that good, though.”
Considering what the band had been going through, though, this album is one of the best things that they’ve ever done. A lot of their more celebrated material is there for a reason, but aside from ‘Sweet Leaf’, some of the songs on Master are some of the heaviest tunes ever made, especially ‘Children of the Grave’ with that detuned guitar riff that sounds like a soldier’s march coming straight from hell.
Osbourne has said that he prefers records like Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, but there are a few times when those records can get buried underneath their own production at times. Some of the songs on there sound a bit too slick, and while Master is a bit messy by comparison, that’s what makes it such an iconic record for those into the heavier side of rock and roll.
‘The Ozzman’ always considered himself part of a heavy rock band, but if Paranoid set the stage for heavy metal, Master of Reality was what happens when the heavier subgenres of metal start creeping in. There are far cleaner Sabbath records out there, but everything from thrash metal to stoner rock has this record to thank for paving the way for them.
