When Rolling Stone ranked the 100 greatest heavy metal albums, Vol. and Number 13 in the U.S., where it was later certified platinum. The album was an immediate hit, reaching Number Eight in the U.K. “You’ve got to remember, coming from the backstreets in Birmingham, now we’ve got a house in Bel-Air with a hit record, people know our music, and we were the kings of the planet,” Osbourne says. The cover art, a picture taken by photographer Keith Macmillan of Ozzy Osbourne with his arms in the air displaying Winston Churchill V’s, said it all: This was victory. Songs like “Supernaut” and “Cornucopia” grooved harder than ever, the ballads “Changes” and “Laguna Sunrise” sounded prettier, the quixotic interlude “FX” was trippier, and heavier fare like “Wheels of Confusion,” with its gut-punch opening guitar notes, and the group’s coke paean “Snowblind,” which they buttressed with Alfred Hitchcock-esque strings, unraveled elaborately to reveal new depths within the Sabbath experience. 4, sounded more sophisticated than the previous three. With loose deadlines and infinite drugs, Black Sabbath ended up breathing fire into a masterpiece - though their label, Warner Bros., refused to allow them to title it Snowblind.
While making this LP, they finally had the luxury to stretch out and develop the songs in the comfort of a California mansion over several weeks. So, by the spring of 1972, they were riding high, literally as much as figuratively, as they set out to craft their fourth volume. Those records allowed them to leave the dark satanic mills of Birmingham, England, and tour the world, experiencing everything it could offer them.
with the follow-up LP Paranoid, and kept up the momentum on their third album, Master of Reality.
In the two years since they had ignited heavy metal’s Big Bang with the gargantuan riffs and horror-movie lyrics of their self-titled debut, they’d scored a Number One album in the U.K. “I got grandchildren now, right? So I’ll stay out of all that.”Īt the time, the four musicians were in their early twenties and reveling in fresh success. “There are some things around then that I can’t talk about, so I can’t go down that road,” drummer Bill Ward demurs.
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