What did Ozzy Osbourne call Black Sabbath’s “worst enemy”?
Black Sabbath were never exactly seen as choirboys whenever they put down their instruments. After all, they were known as the antichrist of music by a certain subsection of people who hated their hymns of doom, and having the gall to write songs about the pleasures of getting high wasn’t a shocker to most fans.
But as dark as their career could get, Ozzy Osbourne was aware of those moments when the wheels started falling off for the group halfway through their classic run.
When the band first started, though, they were only trying to have some fun in between playing a bunch of blues covers. The idea of heavy metal wasn’t necessarily a thing yet, so hearing Osbourne sing about witches and the occult only served to terrify people once they heard songs like their namesake track and ‘Iron Man’. They definitely weren’t the most optimistic tunes in the world, but they did at least make you think.
‘War Pigs’ was a seething condemnation of people sending kids off to die in the Vietnam War, and while Master of Reality was forever known as their ‘pothead’ album, ‘Children of the Grave’ is a bold take on the hippy movement, begging for those preaching for peace to take their cause seriously. Once the checks started getting bigger, though, that meant more money for them to keep themselves occupied when the red light wasn’t on.
By the time they reached Vol 4, they were each giving Tony Montana a run for his money in the cocaine department. Osbourne could still hit those high notes as well as any other screecher before him, but from the seething production to having the guts to thank the “American Coke-Cola company” in the liner notes, it’s not like they were trying to hide the fact that they were indulging themselves a little bit.
But in retrospect, ‘The Prince of Darkness’ said it didn’t take long for their drug abuse to turn against them, saying, “We wrote ‘Snowblind’ because it was the most amazing discovery of our lives. We thought that’s what success was, but it turned out to be our worst enemy. We were headfirst into that shit, and it was terrible. Now I think to myself, ‘What the fuck was I thinking to think that was a good night out?’” They could still deliver, but the after-effects wouldn’t be felt until a few years later.
Despite Sabbath Bloody Sabbath being one of the best albums that they ever made, the recording process was also one of the most gruelling. Outside of the fact that they were staying in a castle to get the demos finished, Tony Iommi came up with virtually nothing good enough for a song until he managed to pull out the riff for the title track out of thin air.
It took Osbourne a while to clean up his act, but towards the end of his life, he seemed far more content to have made it to the other side of rock history. He had gone through some of the deepest narcotic lows anyone could get to, and yet he was proud to stand tall and tell everyone that someone could manage to be a musical badass without all of the junk surging through their veins.
He certainly wasn’t the first person to deliver a DARE lecture or anything, but that hardly mattered to him. Osbourne knew his limits after being fired from Sabbath, and if the album 13 is any evidence, he could still make some of the doomiest songs that anyone had ever heard as long as he had Iommi’s thunderous riffs behind him.
