“Every day the guy with the drugs would show up” Tony Iommi claims this was why a Black Sabbath album “sounded so weird”
Billy Corgan once asked his hero Tony Iommi why Black Sabbath‘s Vol. 4 “sounded so weird” – and apparently, and perhaps unsurprisingly, the metal pioneer believed it was all down to the liberal availability of drugs.
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The recording of Sabbath’s 1972 album took place when the band members’ substance abuse was at its height. Famously, the Brummie metal legends had speaker boxes filled with cocaine delivered to the studio.
“I did ask Tony once — I’m bragging, but I got to work with Tony on his solo record [2000’s Iommi] — and I said to Tony, ‘Why does ‘Vol. 4’ sound so weird?’” Corgan says in a recent interview with Wall Of Sound. “And he goes, ‘Well, we were living up in the hills in L.A. And every day the guy with the drugs would show up.’ And he said, ‘We were just so high. And we were working in a house.’ He said, ‘I think it’s just the way we were living.’ ‘Cause it is a very unique, strange-sounding record. It doesn’t sound, really, like any other Sabbath record.
He continues: “The great thing about, obviously, one of the best bands ever — my favorite band ever — is every album is different. And even when it starts to get weird that at the end with Ozzy [Osbourne] and things start to kind of fall apart, they’re still trying to kind of be a little punk and a little bit — I don’t know what they were going for. There’s some good stuff in there.”
However, if Corgan could take only one Black Sabbath album with him on a spaceship, it would be Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
“Tony was such a pioneering guitarist and a visionary musically, and what makes him so interesting is he pioneered the idea of a riff becoming part of the song in a way that was almost atmospheric and cinematic,” he explains. “And I think we really all understand that now, especially those of us who love metal.
“But then in about ’74, ’75, Tony starts to take this kind of artistic turn. It’s almost alternative Sabbath. if you really look at it. And I think that’s why Sabbath has so much street cred with alternative musicians and even rappers and stuff like that. There’s this other Sabbath. Cause early Sabbbath is more bluesy, heavy, doomy, but somewhere in there, it starts to get really out there, and that’s the Sabbath I love the most.”
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