At the beginning of Black Sabbath’s career, the Brummie metal pioneers’ drug of choice was marijuana.
Forged during the dying days of the 1960s’ counterculture, some of the hippy residue still in the air had shaped the four working-class English Midlanders; long hair, groovy dress, and a semi-dropped-out lifestyle all played a hand in cultivating the band back when they were known as Earth.
Yet, charged with a restless belligerence, Black Sabbath intuitively spotted the hippy idyll’s wane long before many, coating their hard blues with a downtuned heaviness that would pull their rock attack toward a darker and smoggier realm. Birmingham’s industrial heritage would hover over its early records, too. Alongside an interest in the occult and horror themes, their Aston home’s terraced streets wrought a claustrophobia to their sound, and the weight of the city’s manufacturing might instilled a perennial heft across their early records.
A penchant for grass had been happily passed over across their doom-laden early LPs. After flying high with their first two records, Black Sabbath followed the UK chart-topping Paranoid with 1971’s Master of Reality, a thicker and dirgier plume of metal skulk that dreamed up the immortal ‘Sweet Leaf’, a sludgy ode to their favourite plant that even captures guitarist Tony Iommi’s coughing on a massive joint in its warped intro.
The 1970s were swiftly changing, however. Money began pouring into the music industry on an unseen level, peace and love gave way to political pessimism, and the drugs shifted from weed and LSD’s mind-expanding epiphanies to the glamour-chasing glitz blitz of the cocaine boom. Buoyed by recent chart successes and now finding themselves recording in Los Angeles, four young lads from Aston found the terrain of unrestrained chemical hedonism difficult to turn down.
Coke became a daily feature in the Black Sabbath camp, snorting daily while jamming songs in a hired Bel-Air mansion and eventually cutting their fourth record in LA’s famed Record Plant. The temporary Sabbath HQ on Stradella Road would draw dealers flown in by management on private jets to deliver the finest Devil’s dandruff, and the likes of Deep Purple and Pete Townsend would ‘show their faces’, eager to hang out/indulge in their imports. Such devotion to the Charlie inspired one of their most-loved numbers.
“We wrote ‘Snowblind’ because it was the most amazing discovery of our lives,” frontman Ozzy Osbourne confessed to Rolling Stone in 2021. “We thought that’s what success was, but it turned out to be our worst enemy. We were headfirst into that shit, and it was terrible. Now I think to myself, ‘What the fuck was I thinking to think that was a good night out?’ The night never ended. You’d still be going to the next morning”.
Such excesses came with an almighty bill. Reportedly, 1972’s Vol 4 cost $65,000 to produce with an ‘extras’ attached to the tune of $75,000 by their manager, well over half a million dollars today. Capturing a theme, Black Sabbath wanted to title their fourth LP after their ‘Snowblind’ love letter, but the Warner Bros label shot down any such idea. The band made sure their beloved blow was afforded the recognition for the role it’d played in all their lives in Vol 4’s liner notes, however: “We wish to thank the great COKE-Cola Company of Los Angeles”.