The Black Sabbath album written about hating their manager
It tends to be a dog-eat-dog world for anyone in the music industry. Even if you claim to trust the people you work with, they are always just a few steps away from throwing you to the wolves if it means they will save their own skin. Black Sabbath may have looked like the wrong people to mess with throughout their time together, but trouble with their management led to them lashing out in anger on the album Sabotage.
For the first few years of their development, the idea of anyone listening to Sabbath’s music felt like a pipe dream. Out of all the great blues rock outfits making the rounds on the English music scene, like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, Sabbath was practically the bastard son of the blues, with Tony Iommi penning riffs that left fans with their mouths on the floor.
Even though songs like ‘Black Sabbath’ and ‘NIB’ were classics of their time, it’s easy to see why people didn’t exactly see the merit in them at first. The idea of a song about being in love with Satan may have been strange in its time, but that didn’t stop the metal fans out there, leading to both their debut album and Paranoid landing near the top of the charts.
Now, Sabbath were a business… and the world got introduced to some of the last people one would consider to be rock stars. After doubling down on their heaviness on albums like Master of Reality, Vol 4 was where things began going off the track, with the band crediting cocaine on the back sleeve for how much they indulged during their time in the studio.
After getting back on track on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the band hit a wall when they went back to the studio and realised that their financial situation was in shambles. When doing some digging behind the scenes, the band were getting ripped off by their record company, who had been taking them for everything they were worth when they were on the road.
Instead of settling their differences with violence, the band channelled every one of their problems into the songs. Compared to every other album they ever made, Sabbath never sounded more pissed off than they had on Sabotage, with Osbourne going for the highest notes of his career on songs like ‘Hole in the Sky’ and Iommi paving the way for future metal genres like thrash with songs like ‘Symptom of the Universe’.
Then again, you would probably be pissed too if the lawyers were actually on the other side of the glass, too, as Geezer Butler explained to Guitar World, “Around the time of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, we’d found out that we were being ripped off by our management and our record company. We were literally in the studio, trying to record, and we’d be signing all these affidavits and everything. That’s why we called it Sabotage — because we felt that the whole process was just being totally sabotaged by all these people ripping us off”.
Granted, if everyone was asking you to sign away the rights of something you just played, you’d probably be in a foul mood yourself. No band should have had to go through the slog Sabbath did, but getting a few angry songs out of the deal suited most fans just fine.
