Black Sabbath album ‘Vol. 4’ turns 50
Birmingham’s finest, Black Sabbath, brought on a new era for rock music as society ventured into the 1970s. Where the 1960s had been an era of sociopolitical transition and the popularisation of rock music across the western world, the ’70s would prove to be the era for dynamic genre propagation. Ozzy Osbourne’s four-piece took the heavy rock music sound of The Who, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles’ ‘Helter Skelter’ and malleated it into a beast of their own: this beast was heavy metal.
Setting out with their eponymous debut album in 1970, Sabbath set the bar high for themselves and their heavy metal competition, which at the time, consisted of Deep Purple and, at a push, Led Zeppelin, who were more associated with prog-rock. Had Osbourne and his bandmates called it quits after this seminal beauty, they would still be a household name with classics like ‘N.I.B.’ and ‘The Wizard’ on the score sheet.
Alas, Sabbath soldiered through the early 1970s to release three more metal essentials that are nothing short of iconic. For me, Paranoid, the marijuana-induced fantasy of darkness released just seven months after the debut, marked the pinnacle of the group’s most impactful era, with its eight energetic, well-balanced tracks that saw Black Sabbath’s only chart-topper until 2013’s 13.
Maintaining this momentum, Sabbath recorded Master of Reality for release in the summer of 1971. The album saw the Birmingham boys at the height of their influence, on a plateau of creative strength extending towards 1972’s Vol. 4, which was released 50 years ago to the day.
Vol. 4 marked a change in tempo from the previous three albums, which was thought to be governed by a change in chemistry. Those who know their stuff about Sabbath will know that I mean “chemistry” in the most literal of senses. While the first three albums were fuelled by the notoriously hedonistic gang’s collective alcohol and marijuana habit, Vol. 4 documented the rise of cocaine.
With a song like ‘Snowblind’ on the album, this influence is far from a secret. In the liner notes for the album, the band thanked “the great COKE-cola”, and in his 2009 autobiography, Osbourne noted: “‘Snowblind’ was one of Black Sabbath’s best-ever albums – although the record company wouldn’t let us keep the title, ‘cos in those days cocaine was a big deal, and they didn’t want the hassle of a controversy. We didn’t argue.”
This fourth album resembled freedom for Sabbath; they felt comfortable producing the material themselves for the first time. While retaining their thunderous trademark style, they used this opportunity for experimentation.
‘Changes’, a track written primarily by guitarist Tony Iommi, saw the band’s first use of the mellotron and was notably lighter than the material Sabbath fans had grown accustomed to. When recording the album, the band resided in a rented mansion in Bel-Air. After finding a piano in the mansion’s ballroom, Iommi decided to teach himself to play, and ‘Changes’ was the first fruit of his ivory odyssey.
“Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff,” Osbourne writes in his memoir. “I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer [Butler] wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill [Ward] was going through with his wife. I thought that was brilliant from the moment we recorded it.”
Another moment of novel innovation came in the form of ‘FX’. While the band were getting stoned and jamming in the studio, Iommi’s crucifix necklace charm accidentally railed against his strings, creating a peculiar sound. Transfixed by this sound, the band added an echo effect and proceeded to abuse Iommi’s strings with an assortment of objects. The short instrumental track has been praised as an experimental gem, but Iommi dismissed it as “a total joke” in his 2011 autobiography.
“In spite of all the arsing around, musically, those few weeks in Bel Air were the strongest we’d ever been,” Osbourne recalled in I Am Ozzy. “Eventually, we started to wonder where the fuck all the coke was coming from … that coke was the whitest, purest, strongest stuff you could ever imagine. One sniff and you were king of the universe.” The worsening cocaine habit that seemed to bookmark this period for Sabbath also came with its downsides, as drug binges often will.
Following the release of Vol. 4, things took a turn for the worse during a show in support of the album at the Hollywood Bowl. “Tony had been doing coke literally for days. We all had, but Tony had gone over the edge. He walked off the stage and collapsed,” Osbourne remembered.
In a 2013 interview with Mojo, Butler recalled that heroin had also entered the equation at this time. “We sniffed it; we never shot up,” he remembered. “I didn’t realise how nuts things had gotten until I went home, and the girl I was with didn’t recognise me.”
Vol. 4, alongside David Bowie’s Station to Station, marks one of the apparently rare occasions where a cocaine burnout produced some undeniably sensational art, whether it was thanks to or in spite of the substance. Where Bowie felt a new chapter in Berlin with Iggy Pop was necessary, Black Sabbath stormed forth against the odds of their unbridled hedonism but never quite managed to top the timeless magic of those first four albums.
Stream Black Sabbath’s 50-year-old album below.
