What was the best-selling Black Sabbath album?
By now, everyone knows that numbers and legacy don’t always add up. The record that the fans, or even the artist themselves, believe to be their best doesn’t always match up with their bestseller. The mission of art doesn’t always align with the populist, but on rare occasions, it does – or, in the case of Black Sabbath, it at least comes close.
Black Sabbath were one of those bands that seemed to work despite all odds. They were outsiders on all levels. First was the geographical fact that they emerged from Birmingham at a time when there wasn’t all that much of a scene there, or at least that scene wasn’t being heard all that loudly. There was also the fact that from the very start, there was chaos. Not long after the band began, they were messed around with Tony Iommi leaving and rejoining, they changed their name over and over again, and it took a long time for any level of settlement or commitment to land.
There’s also the obvious point of the characters in the band. When people think about the ultimate extreme examples of rock and roll carnage, the face of Ozzy Osbourne is never far off. Even during recording, the band’s leader could prove a nightmare, with them sometimes having to lock him away in the second studio, allowing the group to lay down tight instrumentation without him distracting them or singing over the top. As they all descended deeper and deeper into drug-fueled antics, the success and endurance of Black Sabbath is surely some kind of musical miracle.
But miracles came into play over and over again during some of the band’s key moments, including in the making of what would become their best-selling album. Despite the odds, they’d made it through their debut. However, they hadn’t really thought any further ahead. So when it was time to go into the studio for Paranoid, an album that would go on to sell millions of copies, they didn’t have enough songs.
The album was then born out of quick-fire improvisations. “We didn’t have enough songs for the album, and Tony [Iommi] just played the guitar lick and that was it. It took twenty, twenty-five minutes from top to bottom,” drummer Bill Ward recalled about one of those moments that gave birth to the record’s title track. Again, it seemed to be another miracle. What was a rushed-out track became a hit, landing at number four in the charts as the group’s first-ever single release.
By now, Paranoid is the band’s bestselling record. Despite the chaos of the process, the finished product has become a timeless classic that has now sold over 12,000,000 copies. The album outsells their others by a long way, with Masters Of Reality taking second place with 2,280,000 sales.
But what album do Black Sabbath see as their best?
In a tale as old as time, it is not their best seller than the band like best. Instead, Ozzy Osbourne holds really affection for the record that ranks fifth with 1,206,200. In his eyes, it’s 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath that wins in terms of quality, artistic merit and legacy.
While the group would go on to release nineteen albums in total, with their latest coming in 2013, Osbourne said back in 2009 that he saw that 1973 record as their “last truly great album”. In his eyes, it was the best of everything, stating, “With the music we’d managed to strike just the right balance between our old heaviness and our new, ‘experimental’ side.” He saw it as a pinnacle that they never reached again.
