Black Sabbath almost ruined America’s most famous classic rock song in 1976
Where would the music world be without the Eagles?
For starters, the music-buying public of the 1970s would have had to find something else to buy en masse, and the record collections of middle-aged men would be far sparser. Still, it is worth remembering that their soft rock sound was once corrupted by the harbingers of rock darkness, Black Sabbath.
Setting aside their shared appetite for self-destruction, there aren’t a whole lot of similarities between the architects of heavy metal and the Eagles. Using the gloomy inspiration and dark satanic mills of industrial Birmingham to fuel their endlessly heavy, abrasive rock sound, Black Sabbath were the princes of rock and roll darkness back in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Eagles represented the marketable sound of America’s mainstream rock airwaves, targeting the kind of mass audiences that Sabbath aimed to shock and outrage.
By some twist of fate, though, the two groups found themselves recording in the very same studio back in 1976. Although Hotel California – Eagles’ defining LP – was fittingly recorded mostly at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, the band also had some sessions at Criteria studios in the sunshine of Miami, where Black Sabbath were recording their new album, Technical Ecstasy.
Although that 1976 album is rarely hailed among Sabbath’s greatest works, and it was marked by well-being but ultimately rather disappointing experiments in their sound, moving away from the straightforward hard rock of their earlier years, it was still markedly heavier than anything the Eagles were attempting.
It was so heavy, in fact, that the sound from the Brum outfit’s recording sessions began to bleed through into the rest of the studio, in spite of its state-of-the-art soundproofing.
“The Eagles were recording next door,” Tony Iommi once recalled, per Classic Rock. “But we were too loud for them. It kept coming through the wall into their sessions.”
It is difficult to imagine the famously volatile line-up of the Eagles taking too kindly to that interference, especially given the perfectionist tendencies of Don Henley when it came to the album’s legendary title track, ‘Hotel California’.
Not only did Black Sabbath represent the antithesis of the Eagles’ mainstream rock sound, but they came very close to actually destroying the group’s biggest hit and defining anthem during those Miami sessions – serves them right for recording a song indebted to California at the other end of the United States, you might argue.
Ultimately, the Eagles were eventually able to complete their recording sessions without the heavy riffs of Tony Iommi and wailing hard rock vocals of Ozzy Osbourne getting in the way. What’s more, if it was a battle of success rather than sheer volume, Henley’s outfit invariably came out on top.
While Technical Ecstasy was hailed, at best, as a forgettable effort from the Birmingham band, Hotel California defined the mainstream rock airwaves of America for the remainder of the decade. Although the two bands weren’t ever really in competition with one another, perhaps if Iommi had turned his amplifier up even more, the world might never have heard ‘Hotel California’, at least not in the same way.
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