1- They didn’t know they were icons
“Management we had never let us realize how big we were. We always used to think we were lower than Zeppelin,” Osbourne said in an interview with Hard ‘N’ Heavy during his solo years. “When we toured with Metallica, I used to think they were taking the piss.”
Not the case: Metallica thought they were gods.
“Every hard rock band in the last 40 years, including mine, traces its lineage directly back to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple,” drummer Lars Ulrich said in 2016, in his induction of Deep Purple into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
But Osbourne probably figured it out by the time he launched Ozzfest in 1996, leading an annual tour of bands made possible by Sabbath’s music—or in 2006, when the group was inducted into the Rock Hall itself.
2- “Seventh Star” was supposed to be an Iommi solo album
With the band’s original members all gone except for Iommi in the mid-80s, he set out to make a solo release under his own name. But the band owed Warner Bros. another album under their contract, Iommi said in his “Inside Black Sabbath” interview, and so the 1986 release entered the Sabbath catalog.
“Which did upset the cart a bit,” Iommi said. “It became a Black Sabbath album without my involvement.”
3-Even Ozzy had limits
Osbourne’s musical mayhem was often criticized in standard rock ‘n’ roll fashion for being a bad influence: he was even sued over the solo song “Suicide Solution”by the parents of John McCollum, a 19-year-old fan who killed himself in 1984. The suit was dismissed two years later, but in a 1991 appearance with his three children on “The Joan Rivers Show,” Osbourne explained he didn’t let just any entertainment into his house.
“If I think something’s too unhealthy for my children, I stop it,” he said, seated next Aimee, Kelly and Jack, all then under 10. “I wouldn’t let my kids stay up and watch ‘Friday the 13th’ or ‘Nightmare on Elm Street.'”
Then again, he added, “They’ve already seen it anyway, you know.”
4- Osbourne was passing the Courvoisier before Busta Rhymes
Before the cognac was an essential hip-hop beverage, it was fueling an infamous Osbourne moment: he said he drank about a bottle and a half before killing a live dove in front of record executives in Los Angeles in 1981. “Bit the head off, which horrified everybody,” he explained in a Hard ‘N’ Heavy interview.
5- When Ozzy himself was axed in 1979, the then-Sharon Arden (who went on to marry Ozzy) suggested Ronnie James Dio as his replacement. As well as giving his voice to Sabbath albums Heaven and Hell, Mob Rules and Dehumanizer, Dio is also said to have popularised the infamous “devil horns” hand-gesture in the metal world. After releasingThe Devil You Know with Butler, Iommi and Ward as Heaven & Hell in 2009, Dio died in May of the following year.
6- In their early days, the band were asked by a group of Satanists to play their ‘Night of Satan’ celebrations at Stonehenge. They refused, and the band were told that they had been placed under a hex. Ozzy asked his dad to make the group some aluminium crosses, which the group got blessed and wore round-the-clock for protection.
7- Iommi lost the tips of his middle and ring fingers on his right hand at the age of 17 when working in a sheet metal factory. (Ew!) A left-hander, he failed to relearn the guitar by changing his fretting hand and instead switched to lighter strings and made special thimbles for his fingers. The accident is also said to be behind the band’s downtuning their guitars from E to C# from third album Master of Reality onwards.
8- “Paranoid” wasn’t meant to be a single
Iommi wrote the “Paranoid” riff at lunch while the rest of the band was out, not expecting it to become a Black Sabbath signature. The entire album of the same name was recorded in under a week, and was expected to be called “War Pigs,” explaining the cover art, but in “Inside Black Sabbath,” the guitarist said the title was banned.
9-Critics hated them
Before the band became perhaps the most seminal act in metal, writers didn’t know what to make of them. Lester Bangs himself, catching their blues influence, called Sabbath’s debut “just like Cream! But worse,” in his 1970 Rolling Stone review.
10- Their first song used the “chord of evil”
“Black Sabbath,” the first song on the band’s first album, includes what’s been called the Devil’s Tritone, a musical interval once considered “diabolus in musica” by medieval composers. As the band moved away from its blues origins, it was the perfect evil detour. (The three-note combination also appears more happily in the opening notes to “The Simpsons” theme song.)
11- Guitarist Tony Iommi got heavy by accident
As a 17-year-old musician, he lost the ends of two fingers in an accident in a sheet metal shop—his last day on the job. “I thought that was it… I’d never play again,” he said in the “inside Black Sabbath with Tony Iommi” documentary. After building himself protective fingertip covers, he started playing again, but he needed to make the instrument easier. So he loosened the strings—tuning the notes down for a deeper, darker sound—and turned to two-finger power chords.
12- He followed that up a year later by biting the head off a bat thrown on stage at a gig in Iowa. He apparently thought the bat was rubber. He was wrong. The bat-thrower claimed it was dead. Ozzy says it was alive and bit him first. “I got rabies shots for biting the head off a bat but that’s okay,” he is reported to have said. “The bat had to get Ozzy shots.” Iommi later claimed that Ozzy once chucked the body of a shark through a window, dismembering it and covering the room with blood.
13- Ozzy bit the head off a dove after signing a solo record deal in 1981. “Sharon gave me these two doves, told me to go into the conference room and throw them up in the air,” he explained later. “I did that, but one of them didn’t fly…so I picked it up, bit its head off and threw the body towards all the suits around the table… hoping they would, you know, see the funny side.”
ads
[wp_ad_camp_2]
Sources : https://www.digitalspy.com/showbiz/10-things-about/news/a350793/ten-things-about-black-sabbath/
,
https://www.oregonlive.com/music/index.ssf/2016/09/8_black_sabbath_facts_final_tour.html