Caught red-handed: The moment Ozzy Osbourne called the police on himself
Many people who make music say that the debut album is always the best because you’re experiencing things for the first time. What is writing music if not capturing a specific moment? And when is a specific moment fresher in your head other than right after it just happened? It could be argued that this is why Black Sabbath’s debut album is one of their very best.
In order to really appreciate that first Sabbath album, you really need to take a moment and appreciate what their life was like when they were making it. They were growing up in a post-war Birmingham where people worked dead-end jobs in factories and tried to find a place in a country that was still rebuilding. Their debut album, exposing the world to metal, also exposed them to the feeling of hopelessness and anger that a lot of their community was feeling.
I’m not saying that Black Sabbath’s following albums weren’t also excellent. Paranoid is one of the greatest pieces of music ever put together, Technical Ecstasy is an underrated gem filled with great guitar lines, and their album Vol 4 is a great listen, even though there were periods when it was looking like it might not be made. While all those records are great, they don’t contain the same heart that the first Sabbath record does.
Take that last record, Vol 4, for example. The band was transported much farther away from steel factories in Birmingham when they were making this record. The majority of the album was done in California, where the band separated their time between the studio, the sun, and a face deep in a pile of cocaine.
The album process was flying as the band were writing songs quicker than they ever had done before; however, as Tony Iommi noted in his book, there may have been a good reason for that. “We were still fucking about and doing stupid jokes, but ideas and the songs were coming out quickly,” he wrote, “Perhaps having loads of cocaine helped speed things up as well. And we had a lot of it.”
Iommi and the rest of the band spent hours every day doing drugs and recording music. As Oasis learnt the hard way on their first tour of America, American cocaine is a lot stronger than that available in the UK, and Sabbath were taking advantage of the high-quality stuff that was being supplied to them.
While the coke was helping the band finish the album in record time, it did almost stop proceedings, as one day, while (presumably) high, Ozzy Osbourne managed to accidentally call the police on himself. While baking in the California sun, he pressed a button that he thought turned on the air conditioning, but instead sent an alarm to local authorities that told them to come to their house as soon as possible.
It wasn’t before, as Osbourne put it, “Six cops come screaming down the fucking [road].” He picked up the cocaine and ran to flush it down the toilet, but upon seeing it, he remembered how good the quality was and physically couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it.
“This is good coke,” he remembered, “I managed to call Frank [Tony Iommi] and go, ‘Frank, get your fucking spoon out’. And we’re fucking banging here, you know. We’re all gagged up to the gills.”
While the new life of luxury might have prevented Black Sabbath from recreating the energy of their debut album, it did give readers some excellent stories to enjoy.
