BLACK SABBATH - VOL. 4 @ 50

 

Celebrating half a century on the shelves today is the fourth studio album from Black Sabbath, Vol. 4, which was released on September 25th, 1972. It’s an album created in a blizzard of cocaine and somewhat miraculous in the fact that it managed to manifest and turn out as coherent and powerful as it is.

The album was recorded in LA when the band were at the peak of their dalliance with the “snow white”. They were literally having speaker boxes shipped into the studio filled with what they described as the purest, whitest, most potent blow they’d ever seen. No one had any idea where it was coming from, but it’s best not to ask too many questions about things like this. The drug and booze consumption during the sessions meant that the recording process was fraught with difficulties as the band teetered on the brink of oblivion. Drummer, Bill Ward, recalls feeling like he was on the verge of being sacked from the band as he struggled to nail one particular drum part for Cornucopia. He hated the song and spent a great deal of time in the middle of the room, just doing drugs. He eventually managed to nail the parts, but felt the cold shoulder from the band and was expecting to get the boot after that. But being fired might have been the least of his woes as Ward nearly met his maker when the band found him passed out naked in the mansion they were staying at and through it would be a laugh to cover him in gold spray paint. The drug situation became a point of paranoia after the group attended a screening of The French Connection, a film about an undercover heroine operation, which left Ozzy hyperventilating by the end of the movie, freaked out at the prospect of the band being busted.

Despite the chaos and substance abuse, the stars were still aligned enough for the band to craft another solid slab of metal mayhem. This was the first LP the band produced themselves. In reality it was mostly down to Tony Iommi for all practical purposes, though the band’s manager, Patrick Meehan, insisted on a co-producer credit. The band recount him having negligible involvement in the actual process, however. Musically, they were starting to try out some new tricks with their style. They still maintained their heaviness, but were able to showcase a more emotionally subtle range with tracks like Changes, which has since become an iconic example of their softer side. The song was written by Iommi with lyrics by Butler and was performed on piano and mellotron. Tony had taught himself how to play piano while killing time at the mansion they were based at. Ozzy recalls that Iommi just sat down at the piano one day and out popped this gorgeous melody for the song. Ozzy started to hum a vocal counter-melody while Butler wrote a heartbreaking lyric based on Bill’s breakup with his wife. Snowblind, on the other hand, delves into the band’s cocaine indulgence and was intended to be the title track for the album, but the band’s record label balked at the thought of such a blatant drug reference for an LP title and they were forced to settled with the rather more innocuous “Vol. 4” instead.

At the time of its release, the critics were in the habit of treating the band with little respect and had a tendency to dismiss, disparage and ridicule their output, though Lester Bangs would be one of the few who was able to appreciate their achievements on this album. While he’d been harsh on their previous albums, his review in CREEM stated: “We have seen the Stooges take on the night ferociously and go tumbling into the maw, and Alice Cooper is currently exploiting it for all it's worth, turning it into a circus. But there's only one band that's dealt with it honestly on terms meaningful to vast portions of the audience, not only grappling with it in a mythic structure that's both personal and powerful but actually managing to prosper as well. And that band is Black Sabbath." He went on to compare their lyrics to the work of Dylan and Burroughs. As the decades have passed and critics have moved beyond the trendy temptation to bash the band, albums like this now find themselves frequently populating top 100 lists of all-time best rock & metal albums. Negativity from the critics didn’t dent the band’s popularity with their fans and the album became a platinum seller with easy.