The Tapes Archive

Most Black Sabbath fans consider Sabotage as the last iconic record of the classic-era lineup. Though it contains many of the progressive elements of their prior album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, in terms of arrangements and instrumentation, it is a decidedly heavier affair than its 1973 predecessor. This time around, the band wanted to pare down the arrangements a bit and go in a more direct, heavier approach for what would be their sixth album in exactly as many years. Sabotage would be recorded at Morgan Studios (in Willesden, northwest London) in February and March of 1975 and issued later that year, produced, essentially by guitarist Tony Iommi and engineer Mike Butcher.

Before arriving at Morgan Studio [same studio used for Sabbath Bloody Sabbath], writing and rehearsal took place at Fields Farm, [Bishampton, near Worcester], and lead singer Ozzy Osbourne’s house. [Staffordshire]. Though hampered by legal battles, the band persevered and created arguably one of the best records of their entire career and maybe the first progressive metal album.

Ironically, to tell Sabotage‘s tale, we have to first discuss how the band themselves were sabotaged by management.

[The main characters are]

Jim Simpson: A club promoter in Sabbath’s native Birmingham England and the band’s first real manager. 

Patrick Meehan: Up and coming manager and the son of Patrick Meehan Sr., a more established manager.

Wilf Pine: Local henchman and right-hand man to Don Arden

Don Arden: Heavyweight manager, connected to the Mafia, current employer of Pine and former employer of Meehan’s father.

It’s June 1970. Sabbath’s first album is on the British music charts, and soon they’ll be following it up with their second album, Paranoid. By most indicators, Sabbath was on its way up. But current manager Jim Simpson wasn’t getting them paid for gigs like other similar bands. In particular, a band called Black Widow, managed by Patrick Meehan, Jr. was getting double what Sabbath made for gigs even though Widow was not charting or selling records. Before Sabbath’s debut album had exploded, Simpson had booked concerts at a much lower rate and would not cancel or renegotiate the originally agreed-upon price. 

Iommi said, “It was getting silly. Even the people who ran the clubs we played were going: ‘You should be getting more than this! What are you doing playing here?’”

Knowing of Sabbath’s potential financial success and their unhappiness with the way they were being managed, Don Arden decided to make a play to take them from Simpson. Known as the “Godfather of Rock” and “Mr. Big,” Arden started out doing stand-up comedy and was particularly known for his impressions of mobsters. In the ‘60s, he went on to sign and manage Gene Vincent and later the Small Faces. Around this time, Arden was also known to leverage a group of “well-muscled friends” to intimidate others to see things his way. One example of his license to threaten potential opponents took place back before Led Zeppelin had formed when Jimmy Page and Keith Moon were putting a band together. Page and Moon reached out to Small Faces singer Steve Marriott to see if he might want to join them. The minute Marriott’s manager Don Arden found out, he sent Page a very clear message: “How would you like to play in a band with broken fingers?” Marriott stayed with the Small Faces, and Page went on with his fingers intact.

In 1970, Arden put his plan into motion and sent his right-hand man Wilf Pine to pick up the band and bring them back to his office. During the meeting, Arden painted a great future but came on too strong when he asked them to sign with his label during their first meeting.

Iommi said about the meeting, “We just couldn’t do that. It was all too bombarding. So we came away, thinking, oh God, what are we going to do now? He’ll probably have us killed! He kept getting in touch with us, arranging to take us out to dinner and all that sort of business. He never let go.” Then one day, Wilf got in touch. He said: ‘I’ve got another guy that wants to meet you.’” This other guy was Patrick Meehan, Jr., and after meeting with him, Tony said, “He seemed a lot calmer than Arden and said the things we wanted to hear. He just had the right way about it at the time.” So they ended up signing with Patrick Meehan and Wilf Pine and their company Worldwide Artists. (13 months later Pine would drop out of the partnership with Meehan and move on to other projects.)

It should be noted that there is an alternate account of why Black Sabbath did not sign to Arden at the time. In the book One of the family: the Englishman and the Mafia [John Pearson, 2003]it states that Black Sabbath was told Arden was making fun and “taking a piss” on Black Sabbath at one of their shows. After the band heard this they did not want anything to do with Arden. According to Pine, it was a misunderstanding and Arden did not make fun of the band. 

Two weeks before their second album was to be released, Jim Simpson received a lawyer’s letter informing him that he no longer represented Black Sabbath, nor was he allowed to contact them directly anymore.

Jim wasn’t the only one put out by this latest development. When Don Arden — still trying to make a backdoor move on the group — found out it was two of his own associates that had plotted behind his back to snatch up Sabbath, he was furious. Issuing threats of retribution, he also offered financial assistance to Simpson, whom he encouraged to sue for damages. (Simpson did and was later awarded £35,000, breaking down to £7,500 from the band and £27,500 from Meehan.)

However, with Meehan at the helm, Black Sabbath became a genuine international success. The three albums that followed Paranoid — Master of Reality in 1971, Vol. 4 in 1972, and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in 1973 — all hit the UK Top 10 and the US Top 20. By 1974, the band had all the trappings of success, the country houses, flashy cars, and unlimited amounts of drugs.

But after four years on a continual cycle of touring and recording, the band was running on empty, and everything came to a head during a gig at the Hollywood Bowl on the Vol. 4 US tour where Iommi collapsed. Ozzy said about the incident, “Tony had been doing coke literally for days — we all had, but Tony had gone over the edge. He walked off the stage and collapsed.” It was not Tony’s day. Earlier that same day during the soundcheck, a crazed man tried to stab Tony with a dagger — the religious zealot was stopped by the crew, and Tony was not harmed — but as bassist Geezer Butler says, “We wanted to take a break after Tony collapsed,” so the rest of the gigs for that year were canceled. 

The following year, 1973, the band embarked on a tour for Sabbath Bloody Sabbath that would take them through February 1974 for the US leg of the tour. Just when they thought that they could take a well-deserved rest before the UK and Australian leg of the tour, management called to tell the band they had been asked to play at one of the largest music festivals at the time, the California Jam attended by 400,000 fans. Geezer said, “We were in England, having just returned from the tour when our management called us all and said we had to go back out to do the California Jam. We said no, but we were eventually forced into doing it.” This was just one of the ways Sabbath was getting manipulated by management. Also during this period and unbeknownst to the band, Patrick Meehan had filtered a large portion of the royalties to himself instead of the band. Even though Black Sabbath played the 1974 California Jam festival and received a generous $250,000 for the performance, the band members were paid only $1,000 each for their efforts. 

Osbourne complained, “Patrick Meehan never gave you a straight answer when you asked him how much dough you were making.” Butler said, more bluntly, “We felt we were being ripped off.”

For Iommi, “the situation with Patrick” had already become “unworkable” even before the band began to question his business dealings. “We could never find him when bills had to be paid,” Iommi recalled. “It was a nightmare, and eventually, I was left with no option  

The band had long suspected things weren’t above board, but they had been too scared and inexperienced to directly question how their affairs were being handled. Despite their aggressive music genre, these masters, in reality, did not like confrontations.

As they learned over the summer of 1974, the reality was that they had no control whatsoever over what happened next. “It was like the more you found out, the less you wanted to know,” said Geezer. “It was horrible.” Sabbath had been snared the same way countless other acts had in the music business of the ‘60s. The band spent a fortune in legal fees only to discover that, in effect, they had no real money of their own. The cars they drove, the houses they lived in, all were owned on paper by Patrick Meehan and their management company. Most excruciating of all and potentially career-damaging, they didn’t even own their music.

“That was why we called the next album Sabotage,” said Geezer. “We were potless, absolutely broke. If the band had finished there, we would have been totally destitute.”

So the band broke it off with Meehan and tried their hand at running things themselves. Drummer Bill Ward stepped up to fill the management void but soon realized he didn’t have the proper skill set — his alcoholism didn’t help either. For a while, there was no manager. Instead, various close friends and coworkers of the band worked together to take care of different duties — Mark Forrester, Spock Wall, Albert Chapman, Norman Perry, and others — but none had everything it took to be the actual manager of the band. 

Ironically a couple of years later, their would-be savior turned out to be one of the most infamous gangster managers in the music biz: Don Arden, the guy who’d tried to pressure them into signing with him in 1970 — spoiler, Arden would eventually become Ozzy’s future father-in-law. In the years that followed the band’s split with Simpson, Tony had remained friendly with Arden, which was unusual. Arden, for his part, did not take kindly to being turned down by anyone. But he made an exception for Sabbath. For one thing, they were still one of the biggest-selling rock bands in the world, something Arden would personally profit from. But there was also the satisfaction he’d derive from, as he put it, “taking back what was rightfully mine,” from Patrick Meehan, whom he loathed. 

Even with the formidable figure of Don Arden behind them, the fallout with Meehan would continue to cast a deep shadow over Sabbath throughout the ‘70s and up into the ‘90s. For instance, Meehan and company not only mismanaged their back catalog, but they continued to profit from a string of compilation albums of Sabbath’s most recognizable material.

After years of litigation between the two camps, the band was eventually forced to seek an out-of-court settlement. They agreed to pay an undisclosed amount for breaking their contracts with Meehan, but more costly, Sabbath also agreed to give up their rights to the music released while Patrick was their manager — most of the best work they would ever produce.

Meanwhile, due to personality conflicts and health issues, the band was beginning to fracture. Already deep into alcoholism and drug addiction, Bill Ward suffered multiple health problems (a case of hepatitis and a mild heart attack, to name two). At the same time, Ozzy Osbourne became increasingly distant from the band due to musical differences and family issues. As always, guitarist Tony Iommi took the lead in writing the bulk of the material.

[Facts about the songs]

“Hole in the Sky” begins with the hum of amplifiers set at maximum volume and someone screaming “Attack!” (Some people believed the word was “Chicken!”) This scream was an in-joke, delivered by producer Mike Butcher. “Sabbath had a supporting act who had a manager who would stand behind them on stage shouting, ‘Attack! Attack!’” said Butcher. “So that’s what I shouted from the control room.” 

“Hole in the Sky.” is a dense, purposeful doom classic where you can hear how Tony’s guitar tone, had gotten even larger than on previous albums, as it loomed over the surging swing of Geezer and Bill, while Ozzy was forced into another high and dramatic vocal. It begins to become clear that Sabotage would mark the finest vocal performance of Ozzy’s career. The sheer anger of the music is emphasized by its abrupt, look-twice ending, segueing instantly into what appears at first to be one of Tony’s sultry acoustic rambles.

The 49-second acoustic respite is titled “Don’t Start (Too Late)” and was inspired by tape operator David Harris’ exasperation with the band plowing into their takes before he’d gotten himself prepared. So that’s David saying “don’t start” and the band chuckling “too late.” The piece is essentially melodically complex, modern classical, but it’s a good example of how Sabbath liked a little light and airy interlude before the hulking monster comes to wreck the village.

[Maybe on the screen] “Iommi’s invocation of the flat fifth on this song would have got him burned at the stake a couple of hundred years ago.”  — Yngwie Malmsteen

“That has been described as the first progressive metal song, and I won’t disagree with that. ”

 — Tony Iommi 

Wrecking the village is the supercharged “Symptom of the Universe.” From Iommi’s staccato riff driving the monster forward to Ward’s crazed drum fills, the entire band is on the attack. Not until Judas Priest’s Sin After Sin two years later would heavy metal sound this intense and overdriven, and in retrospect, you can practically envision the entire New Wave of British Heavy Metal coming to life. Metalica, Selputura, The Melvins, and Helmet, who did their version for the Jerky Boys movie, have all paid their respects by covering this metal classic. 

Closing out Side One is the 9-minute 46-second (the longest self-penned Sabbath tune ever), “Megalomania,” which is a much more involved piece, structurally, than anything else before it. Highlights include Iommi’s snarling trilling riffs, Ozzy’s growling out “Sting Me” and then later “Suck Me” and Bill Ward’s brilliant use of his cowbell to count off another rhythm change. The song is about suffering from paranoia, depression, and delusions. It is, in fact, an actual psychological disorder. A megalomaniac is a pathological egotist with symptoms like delusions of grandeur and an obsession with power. The song “Megalomania” is somewhat disturbing, fascinating, and exhausting all at the same time and definitely an ambitious piece of work. 

Leading off Side Two is the Angus Young-type riff and vastly underrated rocker, “The Thrill of It All.” The song has a well-used handclap element (years before John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane”), as well as some of Ozzy’s most expressive, upbeat, and heartfelt vocals. Lyrically, there are some brilliant sentiments here, all couched in religion as Geezer, who wrote the words, wonders why the world is in such a shambles. [if Jesus can possibly still believe in man, if life is merely a transaction, something to be bought and sold.] Geezer got the title of the song from a book he was reading at the time. “The Thrill of It All” also shows how the band was not sabotaged by management alone: tape operator David Harris had mistakenly wiped the original master of the song and the band had to re-record it. Rather than get all upset about it, the guys credited him on the album with: “Tape Operator and saboteur — David Harris.”

The next song on the album, “Supertzar,” which initially had the working title of “We sell the worst chips in the country,” would become the band’s intro music for concerts for years to come. 

Tony wrote it in the confines of his living room with him playing guitar and his wife Sue on the orchestral harp and then later created the choir parts on his Mellotron. It’s transformed on the album to a song vaguely reminiscent of the classic Yardbirds song “Still I’m Sad.” 

When it came time to record, Tony booked the English Chamber Choir (not the London Philharmonic Choir as stated elsewhere). Not knowing anything about this, Ozzy walked into the studio, saw all these people, and walked out again, thinking he’d gone to the wrong studio. 

Also, during the song’s creation, Bill Ward had a mild heart attack and needed to take a 30-day hiatus to recoup. 

The seventh track from Sabotage is the uneven and somewhat unpopular (fan-wise) tune, “Am I Going Insane (Radio).” Ozzy originally constructed this song from a solo album he planned during the downtime between Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage. When that idea was scrapped, he brought this tune into the Sabotage sessions. Concerning his aborted plan of going solo, Ozzy later confessed, “I wasn’t prepared to own up to the rest of the band. I didn’t want to give up the success and recognition.”

Some people assume the “Radio” notation is due to it being a radio edit, but it’s not. Interestingly, “Radio” in the title is Cockney slang referencing a Birmingham business called Radio Rental. Instead of “mental,” a local would be called “radio rental,” and eventually, the phrase would shorten to “radio.”

The song ends with some disturbing laughter, voiced by a band friend, and then some bizarre, hysterical crying from what sounds like a mental patient. According to Bill Ward, the crying came from a tape of Ozzy’s daughter Jessica played at half-speed. But engineer Mike Butcher said the crying came from an unidentified tape found in the studio. No one knows for sure.

“The Writ” is probably the most formidable and biting song of the classic lineup era. It’s also Sabbath at their most progressive. The lyrics were written mostly by Ozzy Osbourne (as opposed to usually being handled by Butler) and pertain to the lawsuit with former manager Patrick Meehan that was plaguing the band during the recording of Sabotage. Delivering the song’s spitting venom with manic savagery, Ozzy sounds particularly angry and scornful in lines such as, [“Are you Satan, are you man? You’ve changed in life since it began,” and “You bought and sold me with your lying words.”] The title “The Writ” was apparently suggested by engineer co-producer Mike Butcher after one of the manager’s lawyers had delivered a writ to the studio during the recording. [A writ is an order issued by a legal authority with administrative or judicial powers, typically a court.]

Ironically, the same year Sabbath released Sabotage, fellow Brit band Queen released a diss track as well about their former manager. You will find the same level of seething anger from Freddie Mercury on the song “Death on Two Legs.” 

The quieter parts of “The Writ” sound very similar to the acoustic passages of Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed” in terms of the melody (but both tunes probably owe something to the Spirit song “It Shall Be”). 

For all the vitriol in “The Writ,” there was a note of hope and defiance in its closing line. “Everything is gonna work out fine.” And, in the short term, at least, those words would ring true. Patrick Meehan would not break Black Sabbath. 

In the spring of 1975, a month after recording was finished in London, Mike Butcher flew to New York to oversee the mixing and mastering of Sabotage. And it was here that the producer added, at the end of “The Writ,” a 31-second snippet of music he had recorded without the band’s knowledge. “Microphones were plugged in all around the studio,” Butcher explained. “So one night, when Ozzy and Bill were messing around on the piano, I pushed the record button.” 

What he’d captured was a joke song named “Blow on a Jug.” “This stupid fucking thing,” said Ward. “A drunken song that Ozzy and me would sing together in a van or on a plane. That’s me on piano and Ozzy blowing on one of those brown cider jugs, playing it like a tuba.”

Ward insists he had no idea that “Blow on a Jug” would end up on the album. Originally, it only appeared on early pressings.

The rumor that the Nitty Gritty Band originally played the song “Blow on a Jug” is not true. The real story comes from a Hollywood festival Sabbath played in 1970 along with Mungo Jerry. At the time, Sabbath saw these festivals as a competition in who could win over the crowd. During one performance, Mungo Jerry busted out some jugs, and the crowd went wild.

“He was playing fucking jugs, and he stole the day!” Ozzy said. “After Mungo Jerry, we didn’t have a hope. Blowing on fucking jugs!”

Just as the Beatles followed the melody on Side Two of Abbey Road with the light-hearted and totally unnecessary “Her Majesty,” so Sabbath closed the monumental Sabotage with a similar tribute  — only theirs is to Mungo Jerry. 

Now with all the music recorded, the band needed to create an album cover.

Sabotage was the first Sabbath album to display the group on its front cover. The original idea for the record’s artwork was based on a famous painting by the surrealist artist Rene Magritte, named “Not to Be Reproduced.” A man in a dark suit is standing facing a mirror; the reflection in the mirror shows the man’s back, not his front. In essence, his image has been sabotaged. The concept was conceived by Bill Ward and his drum roadie Graham Wright and executed and overseen by the Amsterdam design company Cream also known as The Cream Group. 

Originally, the idea was to go for a corridor from a Dracula’s castle-type thing. Sabbath was going to be standing in black suits in front of full-length mirrors hanging from the wall, and the reflected image was supposed to be reversed like Magritte’s. 

The job of making all of this happen fell to the record company, Vertigo, which announced the photoshoot a couple of weeks later. Instead of an old castle, the photo session would take place in a small photography studio in SoHo. The band showed up thinking they were just meeting to talk about the album cover, not to shoot it.

In fact, Ozzy showed up in a kimono, “a homo in a kimono” as he would later describe his appearance. Bill wore his wife’s revealing red tights, but he never wore underwear. Ward said of the shoot, “I had this old pair of jeans that were really dirty, so I borrowed my wife’s tights. And so that my bollocks wouldn’t be showing under the tights, I also borrowed Ozzy’s underpants because I had none.” Geezer’s looking dapper with his moose knuckle on full display, and for some reason, he’s holding an umbrella at his side. It remains a mystery as to why Tony is the only one sitting and dressed as if heading to Studio 54. 

Thinking they would superimpose images at some later time, they rushed through the photoshoot, and the outcome was far from what had been envisioned. Ironically once again, the sleeve design was intended to illustrate the idea of sabotage but had instead become a victim of sabotage itself. By the time the band had a chance to review, it was too late to change the cover. (They hated it.) What we are left with is a cover that manages to be simultaneously embarrassing and perversely endearing.

Upon release in late 1975, Sabotage got a mixed reaction. You had fans and critics raving about the album including Rolling Stone critic Billy Altman who wrote “Sabotage is not only Black Sabbath’s best record since Paranoid, it might be their best ever.” But the sales of the album painted a different picture. Sabotage was the first Black Sabbath album that did not achieve platinum status in the US, and though it reached #7 in the UK, it completely fell off the charts after a few weeks. 

To date, Sabotage is still not platinum in the US, having sold only 900,000 copies, but the album has sold over 2.5 million copies worldwide, ranking it the 7th best-selling Sabbath album.

Behind the scenes, though, things continued to unravel. Just as Sabbath felt they had begun to get free of the mess they’d found themselves in after breaking with Patrick Meehan, their former manager struck another blow, authorizing the release in December of a double-album compilation entitled We Sold Our Souls For Rock’n’Roll. Featuring all their biggest hitters from their first five albums, the double album was released to coincide with the Christmas-present-buying season, and Sabbath didn’t know whether to be pleased or not – worse, the band members made no money whatsoever from this marketing scheme.

In some respects, Sabotage seems like an album with no real identity or unifying theme. Yet, as good as the album is, it’s also an album where you can tell the wheels are starting to come off a bit. This would become far more evident in Black Sabbath’s next release, where the band not only lost the wheels, but the whole car fell apart. 

“That album,” Bill Ward says, “It was so hard for us making it. But when I listen back to it now… God, it’s incredible.”