Inside the chaotic recording process of Black Sabbath’s ‘Vol. 4’
Black Sabbath never did anything by half measures, pushing almost everything in their lives to chaotic excess. Whether it was the volume levels of amps or their hedonistic approach to substances, Sabbath didn’t know when to stop, and the making of Vol. 4 was at the height of their recklessness.
To provide some insight into the extent of the level of cocaine abuse during the recording process, if it was up to Black Sabbath, the album would have been called Snowblind rather than Vol. 4. There was an endless supply of cocaine available to the band during the recording process. Sabbath assumed the drugs were a perk of the job, and it wasn’t until they received a $75,000 bill for the white stuff after finishing the album that Sabbath realised it wasn’t free at all.
To go through $75,000 worth of cocaine in a matter of weeks takes some doing, and it’s a miracle Black Sabbath came out of the ordeal alive. Every day, it was utter chaos in the studio. Although Patrick Meehan is credited as a co-producer, the band were left to their own devices for the record.
At one point, drummer Bill Ward felt like his time was up in the band because he was struggling to record ‘Cornucopia’. Eventually, Ward “nailed it”, but he later admitted: “The reaction I got was the cold shoulder from everybody. It was like ‘Well, just go home, you’re not being of any use right now.’ I felt like I’d blown it, I was about to get fired.”
Remarkably, almost getting sacked wasn’t even Ward’s lowest point of the experience. Guitarist Tony Iommi later recalled: “We were staying at John DuPont’s house in Los Angeles, the bloke who owned DuPont paint products. We found all this paint in the garage and were all pissed, so thought it would be fun to paint Bill gold from head to toe”.
He added: “He started having convulsions. The ambulance people gave us a right bollocking: ‘You idiots! You could have killed him.’ They gave him adrenalin and we had to use paint stripper to get it off. He looked like a beetroot by the end.”
Thankfully, Ward survived the dreadful ordeal, but the band continued to regularly play pranks on him and often set him on fire. However, they eventually stopped that cruel activity after the drummer received third-degree burns. Remembering the incident in his autobiography, Ozzy Osbourne wrote: “For me, 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.”
Although their drug use spiralled out of control, Sabbath were on the top of their game musically. Iommi once recalled: “We used to write in the day and jam at night. It was a great atmosphere. We had a fabulous time. In this ballroom there was a grand piano. I’d never played piano before. And I learnt to play and the first thing I wrote on it was ‘Changes’.”
Meanwhile, Osbourne concluded in his autobiography, “In spite of all the arsing around, musically those few weeks in Bel Air were the strongest we’d ever been.”
Somehow, Black Sabbath produced a masterpiece, despite all of the evidence otherwise suggesting it should have been a disaster. Besides Ward’s near-death experience, the band left Bel Air in a stronger position than they arrived, even though they amassed a $65,000 cocaine bill.
