Legendary Black Sabbath Hijinks and Pranks

It’s already a given, but Sabbath’s music is timeless and all-encompassing to anyone who is remotely a fan of heavy metal, hard rock and classic rock. But the weird times and “interesting” activities they did aside from the timeless music were something else.

And this doesn’t even include singer Ozzy Osbourne’s insane antics when he went solo.

Here are some choice Black Sabbath stories as told by the band:

on playing pranks on drummer Bill Ward:

Tony Iommi recalls, ‘Bill and I were in the studio rehearsing one day and out of the blue I asked him, “May I set you on fire, Bill?” And he said, “Well, not now, not now.” And then I forgot about it. Later on when the day ended, he said to me, “Well, I’m going home now; you still want to set me on fire or what?” And I said, “Sure.” So I took a small can of lighter fluid and sprayed it on him, lit a match, and whoomph.

He was wearing these polyester pants so they burned really quickly and he was on the floor screaming and crying. I could not help him because I was so busy laughing. It actually turned out to be quite serious. I felt really bad for him.

He was sent to the hospital. Later on, his mother called me on the phone and said, “You barmy bastard, it’s about time you grew up. Our Bill is going to have his leg off.” But things like that always happened to Bill.’

However, some of these pranks went too far, almost killing Ward. Case in point was another infamous prank during the recording of Black Sabbath Vol. 4. Sabbath stayed in a Bel-Air mansion owned by John DuPont of the DuPont chemical company. In there were cans of gold spray paint, and well, you know where this leads next: They got Bill Ward totally drunk, and when he passed out, they proceeded to paint him, all of him, in gold spray paint.

This prank resulted in Bill Ward’s skin pores getting blocked, which caused him to go in a seizure. He was sent to the hospital in an ambulance. Poor old Bill.

Bill Ward Falls Victim to Iommi, Again:

Old habits die hard. Bill Ward is again the unfortunate target of a prank that happened during the recording of the Heaven and Hell album. Tony Iommi sprayed Bill with a very flammable alcohol-based liquid used for cleaning studio tape heads. Iommi ignited Ward, which caused him to go in flames yet again. Poor old Bill suffered some 3rd degree burns, aside from burning horrifically at his expense. Iommi and the band surely were ROFLing stoned during the stunt.



During the making of their album Paranoid:

Geezer Butler recounts a weird encounter with the unknown during the recording sessions for Paranoid: “I’d been raised a Catholic so I totally believed in the Devil. There was a weekly magazine called Man, Myth and Magic that I started reading which was all about Satan and stuff. That and books by Aleister Crowley and Denis Wheatley, especially The Devil Rides Out…I’d moved into this flat I’d painted black with inverted crosses everywhere.

Ozzy gave me this 16th Century book about magic that he’d stolen from somewhere. I put it in the airing cupboard because I wasn’t sure about it. Later that night I woke up and saw this black shadow at the end of the bed. It was a horrible presence that frightened the life out of me! I ran to the airing cupboard to throw the book out, but the book had disappeared. After that I gave up all that stuff. It scared me shitless.”

On their album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath:

Sabbath for a change, recorded Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in an old haunted castle. They didn’t know it was haunted. According to Iommi, “We rehearsed in the armoury there and one night I was walking down the corridor with Ozzy and we saw this figure in a black cloak… We followed this figure back into the armoury and there was absolutely no one there. Whoever it was had disappeared into thin air! The people that owned the castle knew all about this ghost and they said, ‘Oh yes, that’s the ghost of so and so. We were like ‘What!?’”

Geezer Butler also added, “We rehearsed in the dungeons and it was really creepy but it had some atmosphere, it conjured up things, and stuff started coming out again”. The creepy medieval castle inspired Iommi instantly, and soon enough, “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” was born in the jam room, dictating the DOOM for the rest of the album.

As for Ozzy, going to sleep dead drunk one night almost burned down the castle after he left one of his boots in the fire. But the Bill Ward pranking also got heavier. By that time, Bill armed himself with a dagger every night to sleep to thwart any possible evil pranks on him.



Recording at the same studio with the Eagles:

During the recording sessions for Technical Ecstasy, The Eagles were also at the same studio building, recording what would be their landmark album, Hotel California, in well, Miami, Florida. Geezer Butler recalls in an Uncut Magazine interview: “Before we could start recording we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board. I think they’d left about a pound of cocaine in the board.” Sabbath’s loud sessions forced the country rock n’ rollers to stop at certain points due to the sheer volume. Black Sabbath was just simply too LOUD and HEAVY.



Meeting Bob Marley:

Never Say Die was Ozzy’s last album with Black Sabbath. While their working relationship was already troubled, they forged on after he came back. The recording sessions were problematic, as Ozzy quit, Sabbath hired Fleetwood Mac/Savoy Brown singer Dave Walker, and then Ozzy wanted to come back. He refused to sing on the new tunes, and the band was forced to start over.

After finishing the album, the strength of the title track single was enough to get Sabbath on the popular TV show Top of the Pops for the second time. It was another highlight of their career and a chance meeting with a stoner who smokes more heavily than them.

Ozzy remembers it well “‘cos we got to meet Bob Marley. I’ll always remember the moment he came out of his dressing room – it was next to ours – and you literally couldn’t see his head through the cloud of dope smoke. He was smoking the biggest, fattest joint I’d ever seen – and believe me, I’d seen a few. I kept thinking, He’s gonna have to lip-synch, no one can do a live show when they’re that high. But no – he did it live. Flawlessly, too.”

Making things weird was well, Bill Ward’s hair, which was in braids, and Iommi recalls that “everybody thought he was taking the mickey out of Bob. It wasn’t like that at all; it was just the way he happened to have his hair in those days.”

Some hijinks during the recording of Born Again:

Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan was Tony Iommi’s final choice to replace Dio for their next album, after having considered David Coverdale, Robert Plant, and even Michael Bolton (he was in a hard rock band called Blackjack in the late 70s). It would have all gone south if Sabbath did go with Bolton, or not. Ironically, they switched management to Don Arden, Sharon Osbourne’s Dad.

Iommi’s choice proved to be pivotal for Sabbath, which resulted in the excellent, but initially ridiculed album, Born Again. “His shriek is legendary,” he adds. Arden persuaded Gillan to hang out with Geezer and Tony at a pub, the duo got him wasted, and by the end of the night after serious boozing, Gillan accepted the offer.

When they commenced recording in the studio, some weird stuff was about to get down, starting with Gillan’s weird commitment to camp out of the studio to get some down and dirty feels. Iommi recalled, “I thought he was joking, but when I arrived at the Manor I saw this marquee outside and I thought, fucking hell, he’s serious. Ian had put up this big, huge tent. It had a cooking area and a bedroom and whatever else.”

Ian Gillan returned from a local pub one evening, took a car belonging to drummer Ward, and commenced racing around a go-cart track on the Manor Studio property. He crashed the car, which burst into flames after he escaped uninjured. He wrote the Born Again album’s opening “Trashed” about the experience. There is a picture of it on the Born Again tour program, to add insult to injury for the prank-weary Ward.

During the recording sessions, Gillan accidentally blew up the speakers in the listening room after listening to the mix too loud, which affected the final mixdown. Iommi recalls “We just thought it was a bit of a funny sound, but it went very wrong somewhere between the mix and the mastering and the pressing of that album…the sound was really dull and muffly. I didn’t know about it, because we were already out on tour in Europe. By the time we heard the album, it was out and in the charts, but the sound was awful.”

Tony Iommi commissioned artist Steve “Krusher” Joule to create the wicked and outrageous cover art for Born Again, which featured an altered image of a new born baby with fangs and claws and a unsightly purple, yellow, and hot red color palette. Upon seeing the final artwork, Ian Gillan threw up, and Iommi approved the final artwork, considered one of the worst album covers of all time.

That’s not all: When the tour finally started, Iommi and crew commissioned an evil Stonehenge stage design based on Geezer Butler’s ideas. However, miscommunication and the difference between US and British measurement standards resulted in the laughable mistake that was to come when they finally saw the final stage set. It was simply too huge for the stage.

Iommi recounts “We were in shock. This stuff was coming in and in and in. It had all these huge columns in the back that were as wide as your average bedroom, the columns in front were about 13 feet high, and we had all the monitors and the side fills as well as all this rock. It was made of fiberglass and wood, and bloody heavy.”

Also, manager Don Arden thought it would be cool to play a tape of a baby crying for the intro, and hired an evil dwarf mascot to walk around the top of this set after the intro and fall from the top of the massive set. Despite all the weird stuff that went down, the tour was a hit.

We’ll leave you with the ridiculous and weird music video for heavy groover “Zero the Hero” which well, we’ll let you see for your self if you haven’t yet: