‘Money’: The Pink Floyd song that reminds Ozzy Osbourne of his “LSD days”
While Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne has been sober for many years, he’s never tried to hide away from his substance-filled past. For decades, Osbourne’s life was clouded by his battle with drug addiction, causing him to do many things that he’d later regret, but the legendary rock musician somehow survived and came out the other side.
There’s barely a drug in existence that he’s not experimented with, and as a result, Osbourne has endured many different stints in rehab. Infamously, for many years, cocaine and alcohol were his preferred vices. However, like most artists, he also started using LSD heavily for a period, which was an era of his life soundtracked by Pink Floyd.
While Osbourne found it difficult to get himself clean from alcohol, hence why he had multiple visits to rehab, one unfortunate event brought his escapades with acid to a premature end.
Looking back on the making of Vol. 4 during an interview with Classic Rock, Ozzy revealed: “At that time in America, people were very fond of lacing your drinks with acid. I didn’t care. I used to swallow handfuls of tabs at a time. The end of it came when we got back to England.”
Osbourne continued: “I took ten tabs of acid, then went for a walk in a field. I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour. In the end, the horse turned round and told me to fuck off. That was it for me.”
Before the incident with the horse, Osbourne was obsessed with the Pink Floyd track ‘Money’, which he named one of his favourite songs of all time while in conversation with Rolling Stone. Succinctly explaining the reasoning for his selection, he said: “Reminds me of my LSD days. I’m glad I survived.”
The inventive ‘Money’, which appeared on The Dark Side of the Moon, features an unconventional time signature of 7/8 time, counterbalanced with a traditional 4/4 time, providing the track with a hallucinatory feel.
David Gilmour once said of the track in 2015 to Uncut: “It’s Roger’s riff. Roger came in with the verses and lyrics for ‘Money’ more or less completed. And we just made up middle sections, guitar solos and all that stuff. We also invented some new riffs – we created a 4/4 progression for the guitar solo and made the poor saxophone player play in 7/4. It was my idea to break down and become dry and empty for the second chorus of the solo.”
While Osbourne’s experimentation with LSD was short-lived, his love of Pink Floyd has remained, hence why he named ‘Money’ as one of his all-time favourite tracks. Comical horse incident aside, the Black Sabbath frontman largely left that chapter of his life unscathed and with blissful memories of tripping out to ‘Money’.
Listen to the track below.
