If the idea of Black Sabbath lasting “a couple of years” now seems ridiculous, imagine what young John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne would have thought of himself owning a house in Los Angeles. He was never going to Los Angeles. He was probably going to prison. Again. He’d already done porridge for burglary (“I got caught because I used fingerless gloves!” he hoots). School had been a washout; as a dyslexic pupil (then not really given credence by educators), Ozzy had found scholastic success tough, and his rebellious streak had seemingly typecast him early on.
“I wouldn’t wear a school uniform, I fucking hated it,” he recalls. “They didn’t like jeans, so I wore jeans with fuckin’ holes in. My mother would pass me in the street and say out the corner of her mouth, ‘You mess!’”
The world of work wasn’t much better. Ozzy’s mother got her beloved “Mess” a job in a factory, tuning car horns. Again, the arrangement didn’t really suit him.
“I could not conform to a nine-to-five job, no way. I lasted about a month then I told them to go fuck themselves and walked out. My mother went fucking insane! I remember one guy was there for 35 years and they gave him a fucking gold watch. Thirty-five years of my fucking life for a watch? Fuck that.”
The one thing Ozzy did have a constructive enthusiasm for was music. A big fan of The Beatles, he decided that he wanted to have a go at singing, if only for something to do more fun than working. Streets away, fellow Beatles fan Geezer Butler was having similar ideas. With “A guitar that cost me 50 pence, with two strings on it”, he had started a band, Rare Breed, when he was at school. When their singer left, Ozzy appeared at Geezer’s house for an audition.
“My brother answered the door and went, ‘There’s something here for you,’” laughs Geezer. “He’d turned up to the house with a chimney brush and no shoes!”
“I used to do the craziest things, I’d do nutty things all the time,” hoots Ozzy at the memory. “I’d basically walk around with a tennis shoe on or some crazy shit. I wanted to make people laugh. And I had no money, so I couldn’t have good clothes anyway.”
Rare Breed started gigging, and thoughts turned to going pro. It was not an ambition shared by the others, however, and the band soon split. Which is where Ozzy Zig’s fateful card comes in. But while Tony had never seen any musical talent from Ozzy before, Geezer was a different story.
“I used to see Geez because my mother and father had a shop in Aston, and Geezer used to walk past the shop because he was dating a girl that lived up the road from us,” he recalls. “Bill and I would go and see Rare Breed, and there he was onstage. When we first saw him we thought he was loony. He was pretty wild in them days, the sort of guy that would climb up the walls. If it was the drugs or what I don’t know, but he was pretty wild for sure.”
With the line-up set, the new band hit the blues clubs of Brum. To set themselves apart, Geezer suggested the start making “scary music”, noting that horror movie screenings were always packed. Thus, they changed the name to Black Sabbath after the Boris Karloff monster feature of the same name, and the bassist – a keen reader of horror authors like Dennis Wheatley and H.P. Lovecraft – began to write dark lyrics whose otherworldly language dealt with real ills of war, drugs and poverty, while Tony’s riffs became increasingly sinister and heavy. The first time they played the song Black Sabbath – with its cautionary, apocalyptic lyrics dealing with an encounter Geezer had with Satan, when the Great Horned One appeared at the end of his bed one night – Sabbs knew they had something.
“We were playing blues clubs where everybody sat on the floor and nodded their head,” recalls Tony. “But when we played Black Sabbath, people were in shock, coming up to us afterwards saying, ‘What was that!?’”
Sabbath soon picked up a name for themselves, gigging heavily around the UK and Europe, and even scoring themselves a residency at The Star Club, the same seedy bar on Hamburg’s infamous Reeperbahn where The Beatles had honed their craft. Indeed, so good did Sabbath become that when it became time to record their debut album, it was simply the work of a few hours on the way to a show in Europe.
“We were over [in Europe] for a month or something, and we were phoning back finding out what was going on – in those days, of course, you had to go to a callbox,” laughs Tony. “We didn't have a lot of money to spend on phone calls, either, so we'd call back very rarely. And then on the way back we were in shock because we heard the album was in the charts. Blimey! We couldn't believe it.”
The album went Top 10 in the UK and hit 23 in the U.S. Billboard chart. In a year they’d sold a million copies. For a working class band from a working class city, this was unbelievable.
“Before the first advance I'd never seen anything more than five quid,” remembers Ozzy. “So when they gave me an advance for £105, I thought I'd won the fucking lottery! The first thing I did was buy myself a pair of shoes because I had no shoes. I'd walk round barefooted all the time. And I'd always like to smell nice so I bought some Brut aftershave. Tacky shit, but it's better than the way I smelled before. In the early days I had one pair of shoes, one pair of socks that I never washed and they stunk, one pair of jeans, no underclothes, a shirt and whatever jacket I could find!”
“I passed my test and immediately went out and bought a Rolls-Royce,” adds Geezer. “I went to pick my dad up form work in the Rolls and he just wouldn't accept it, pretended he didn't know me.”
This was just the beginning, and Sabbath’s star continued to rise at a dizzying rate. Less than a year after their debut, their second album, Paranoid, was released. The title-track was quickly written in the studio to fill up the record, but unexpectedly hit Number One. Sabbath were now bona fide stars in England, and then came the call: you’re going to America. So they went, with stars in their eyes, over the pond. And as they hit New York for the first time they thought… ‘Is this it?’
“The first show was in a place called Angano's Club, which was a real dump,” recalls Tony of the 600-cap venue in which Sabbath made their U.S. debut. “We thought, ‘Blimey, is this America, is this what they’re like for gigs?’”
But this didn’t last long, and soon Sabbath’s darker, grittier antidote to flower-power grooves had struck a chord with folks who realised the hippie dream of peace and love was nice if you lived in San Francisco with good weather, good dope, and good-looking people to shag in the name of free love, but like back home in Birmingham, not so relatable to those on the breadline in New York or Detroit. The venues became huger and huger, despite an initial fear of who these four black-clad long-hairs were, and what they were bringing to town.
“When we first got to America people didn't know anything about us,” says Tony. “We were kept from doing interviews to build up some kind of mystique. And it did – people were frightened of us! So we did get all sorts of people coming to the shows, from witches to any sort of person, really. They just knew our first album and the inverted cross [on the inner sleeve]. It sort of opened a can of worms in a lot of places because we upset some people – you don't know if you're going to get a version of Ku Klux Klan coming out or something. It was mainly religious freaks who used to be outside the gigs quite a lot, parading around with boards saying ‘These are Satanic’ and all this sort of stuff. It was a bit nerve-wracking really because you just don't know what to expect.”
As well as this, the band also started to notice just how different this was to the blues clubs back in Birmingham.
“The audience always had loads of dope; you'd go out and get stoned just off the atmosphere,” remembers Geezer. “And the security back then in America was the police, they didn't have gig security. They didn't really treat kids with long hair that nicely. They used to beat the hell out of the kids if they tried to get near the stage, which was really weird to us. But the crowds were wild back then.”