![]() ![]() With little else to do, Sabbath went to work on their next album. “I’m pretty lucky to be alive, to be honest.” It was 1972, and that was simply “what you did, what everyone did”. Until then, Ward said, “I thought I was invincible… I didn’t feel so invincible after that.”ĭespite doctors’ warnings, as soon as the jaundice subsided he went straight back into doing what he’d been doing. I was jaundiced for months.” Hepatitis B, as it’s also known, is not an infection that can be contracted from casual acquaintance, but a serious virus that is almost always caused by using infected syringes – ‘dirty needles’ – to inject drugs. “I got serum hepatitis from narcotic abuse. “We were only about twenty-two years old, but we were already pretty much veterans,” Ward told me. When Ward was then diagnosed with serum hepatitis, they knew they were in real trouble. I thought: ‘I’m cracking up here,’ you know?” The others weren’t happy but there was nothing I could do. Until one day I knew I’d had enough – and had to stop. ‘Take these pills, they’ll keep you going.’ It was about keeping going on the road. “It was: ‘Here, have a line of this’ or a smoke of that. “The trouble was in them days it wasn’t: ‘Oh, have a few weeks off until you feel better,’” he said, frowning. “He was very surprised,” Iommi deadpanned. Guitarist Tony Iommi, meanwhile, who had also caught a shark, managed to hurl it through Bill Ward’s hotel room window, where it landed on the hapless drummer’s bed. When he returned several hours later and found the shark dead, he began disemboweling it with a knife, leaving blood and fish entrails all over the walls. Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne took the shark he caught and hauled it into his bathtub, filled it with water, then forgot about it and left for the gig. The Edgewater was also scene of the now infamous Led Zeppelin ‘mud shark’ episode, where a willing groupie reputedly agreed to be tied-up and pleasured with a fish for the amusement of various wasted band members and roadies.Įvery band that stayed there since wanted their own shark adventure. Now they were at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle – famous for being built on stilts by the water’s edge, making it an ideal spot for fishing from your hotel room window. Sorry, bud, but 240 is all you’re going to get here on this (mostly) monolithic metal masterpiece.A hundred shows into an eight-month tour, four nights earlier they had watched Joe Frazier become the first man to beat Muhammed Ali in a boxing ring. “Gimme 500 words on Black Sabbath,” said the fictionalised music journalist based on Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s movie Almost Famous. Under the Sun, Supernaut, Tomorrow’s Dream, Snowblind, and Cornucopia have the kind of monumental riffs (via guitarist Tony Iommi) that could rupture the San Andreas Fault. ![]() Tracks such as Changes (an atypical, forlorn ballad), FX (a time-wasting sequence of echo effects) and Laguna Sunrise (a fragile acoustic instrumental) sit side by side with songs that would become as much touchstones as torchbearers for the genre. The album proved the band could continue sandblasting everyone in its proximity while stretching out creatively, if not always effectively. If their first three albums are cornerstones of heavy metal, birthing the form and several of its virulent strains, then 1972's Vol 4 is the granite covering, which sounds a clanging death knell for the flower power pack ("I don't want no Jesus freak to tell me what it's all about," sings Ozzy Osbourne here). A four-album run in just over two years is, potentially, a creative-sapping disaster for any band, but with their fourth album – delivered here in multiple formats across CD and vinyl – Birmingham’s Black Sabbath ended a pioneering stretch that not one of their peers could match. ![]()
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