The one song Ozzy Osbourne said he should have never made: “We didn’t want to”
In a perfect world, Ozzy Osbourne probably never would have made it in a band like Black Sabbath.
The cornerstones of rock and roll were all about people trying to have fun, and while everyone was put off by a band that lived to frighten people every single time they played, you could feel that dangerous energy breaking new ground every single time they released a new record. Although ‘The Prince of Darkness’ was more than happy to sing whatever came into his head, there were more than a few times when he felt like the band was being forced to go in certain directions.
After all, there’s no way that anyone would have wanted to hear a bluesy rock band with a knack for occultist imagery at the time. It was bad enough that people were still reeling from the Manson murders happening on the other side of the world, but Sabbath could only play what they felt. Their version of the counterculture was a far cry from San Francisco, so making tunes like ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Children of the Grave’ centred around what was going on around them.
But it’s not like Osbourne could get a word in every single time they made a record. While he considered Sabbath Bloody Sabbath one of the finest records that they had ever made, Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die went way too far in the other direction for him. Tony Iommi seemed to want to channel his inner ELO or Queen, which didn’t exactly fit with a band known for scaring people.
I mean, would anyone have expected the Beatlesque sounds of ‘It’s Alright’ if they had first picked up the band’s debut record? This was a band that was meant to scare the life out of everyone who came in contact with their music, and from the first sounds of rainfall and that dreaded tritone lick that kicked off their career, they were out for blood before their namesake track was even finished.
But depending on which version of the album you got, the rest of the tracks might look a little bit different. There are some fantastic tunes like ‘NIB’ and ‘Behind the Wall of Sleep’ that would go on to be classics from around that time, but whereas a song like ‘Warning’ brought a bluesy flair to everything, hearing ‘Evil Woman’ felt like a sidestep in the band’s discography before they even got going.
The label needed something to sell the record, and while Osbourne did muscle through the take, he felt the cover of the Crow song didn’t fit with Sabbath at all, saying, “We didn’t want to do it – it was a cover by a remote band we’d never even heard of. I don’t even know what happened to them. But the record company said: ‘If you want us to release your album, then you’ve got to do this Evil Woman… thing.’ We were so resentful about doing it, so when it was a flop, we were relieved. Thank fuck for that.”
Then again, Sabbath were never the kind of band that relied on singles. ‘Paranoid’ may have been a heavy metal juggernaut when it was first released, but when looking at the rest of their discography, a lot of it relies on songs with a much more avant-garde structure, whether that’s the strange sections of ‘Iron Man’ or the prog-rock synthesisers that come in halfway through ‘Sabbra Cadabra’.
That’s part of the charm of their sound, so playing a standard blues number was far from the future that they wanted. They already spent their time playing the blues when they first began, and once they hit on the sounds of horrific rock and roll, there was no sense in them retracing their steps.
