Ozzy Osbourne is in high spirits as he calls from Los Angeles. “I’m having the time of my life,” he says, revelling in the success that has greeted the reformation of the classic Black Sabbath lineup for a new album and tour. “We’re having a fucking blast,” he adds. “We played the Holl...
VOLUME 4
Vertigo, 1972
The band set up shop in America. Contains the mighty “Supernaut” and scenes of drug use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUfYNQsr3h8
TONY: We’d moved out to California. We had all the gear set up in the bar and we just had a great time playing and doing lots of coke. It was very much influenced by the coke.
GEEZER: It was a bit nuts at the house. We had all these mad fights with hoses and stuff. It was the first time we’d all lived together, and the first time we’d got into cocaine.
OZZY: Drugs became a part of Sabbath. We had the Egon Ronay map of cocaine dealers.
GEEZER: It was all the top dealers we were getting, so they’d come with bodyguards, armed with machine guns. They’d come up with these soap powder boxes filled with cocaine.
OZZY: We were originally going to call that album ‘Snowblind’ – if you look in the sleeve you can see we thank the “COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles”. People think it was a spelling mistake. I look back on it, and say, “Why am I still alive?” When you write on cocaine, you think everything you write is magic, but there was so much of that shit we never used.