Drug-Fueled, Sordid Tales From Black Sabbath's Heyday That Prove Just How Unhinged They Really Were

Black Sabbath was so enraptured with cocaine they included a paean to blow, entitled "Snowblind," on 1972's Vol. 4, a record that cost less to make than the band's coke habit while recording it. According to bassist Geezer Butler, the record came with a price tag of $60,000, while the snowstorm in which the band recorded cost $75,000. In fact, the band wanted to call the album Snowblind, in honor of their paean to coke, but the record label wouldn't let them. 

As Ozzy explains:

For me, Snowblind was one of Black Sabbath's best-ever albums - although, the record company wouldn't let us keep the title, 'cos in those days cocaine was a big deal, and they didn't' want the hassle of a controversy.

As Ozzy relates in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy:

Eventually we started to wonder where the f*ck all the coke was coming from. All we knew was that it arrived in the back of unmarked vans, packed inside cardboard boxes. In each box there were about thirty vials - ten across, three deep - and each one had a screw-on top, sealed with wax.

Drummer Bill Ward was instrumental in developing Sabbath's unique sound, and played some very interesting roles in the band. Ozzy Osbourne referred to him as his fellow "drug commando," while Tony Iommi once said "[Bill] was our outlet, the one everybody picked on. I used to do terrible things to him. I actually set him on fire once - honest to God." *record scratch* What?

According to Iommi, during the recording of Heaven and Hell in late 1979 and early 1980, he set Ward on fire. He doesn't say why, only that he asked, "Can I set you on fire, Bill?" to which Ward responded, "Well, not now, not now."

Iommi didn't push the issue, and forgot about it. An hour later, Ward said, "Well, I'm going home now. Do you still want to burn me, or what?" Iommi told Guitar World in 1992:

So I got this bottle of petrol, tipped it on Bill, set fire to him and -- voomph. I couldn't believe it! He went up like a Christmas tree. Well, he knew I was going to burn him, but he didn't know to what extent. He screamed and started rolling around on the floor. His clothes started burning and his socks melted -- the nylon socks stuck to his leg. I wasn't able to help him because I couldn't stop laughing.

It was actually pretty serious; he had to go to the hospital. I felt really bad. He had third-degree burns on his arms and legs and everywhere. The next day his mother phoned me up and said, 'You balmy b*stard. It's about time you grew up. Our Bill is going to have to have his leg off.' She exaggerated a bit. But things like that were a regular occurrence with Bill.

In 1972, while living in a Bel Air mansion and recording Vol. 4, Sabbath plowed through mountains of blow faster than Paula Deen churns out fried cheesecake. One night, drug commandos Ozzy and Bill Ward, soused out of their gourds, were sharing a fraternal piss side-by-side when the Prince of Darkness decided it was a good idea to spray Ward's crotch with an aerosol can he found lying around.

Ozzy told Rolling Stone:

I see this aerosol can and squirt his d*ck with it. He starts screaming and falls down. I look at the can and it says, WARNING: DO NOT SPRAY ON SKIN - HIGHLY TOXIC. I poisoned Bill through his d*ck!

Interestingly, and perhaps symptomatic of years of cocaine abuse, Ozzy remembered the story very differently while writing his autobiography, I Am Ozzy:

[O]ne day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks around the other side of the railing, and when Bill starts pissing over the railing, he sprays his d*ck with it. You should have heard the scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing, and starts rolling down the hillside...

'Ah, he'll be all right,' I said.

And he was, eventually.

Although he did have a blue d*ck for a while."

In the Rolling Stone interview, Iommi chimed in with another incident of Ward being seriously harmed by spray cans. 

Iommi: We sprayed Bill gold once. He was pissed drunk, so we painted and lacquered him. We never realized we could've killed him. 

Osbourne: The coke was good when it was working. We used to sniff and jam for days, recording everything on big spools of tape. But it was the beginning of the end. Cocaine was the cancer of the band.

As the poet Rick James once said, "Cocaine is a hell of a drug."

When Sabbath came to the US on tour in the 1970s, they fornicated like wild beasts in heat. Though unable to control their bestial urges, the members of the band lived in constant fear of STDS; more specifically, of catching something American and giving it to their girlfriends or wives at home. 

As Ozzy wrote in his autobiography:

When it was time to go back to England, were were all terrified of taking home an STD from one of the groupies and giving it to our other half. Catching some exotic diseases was always a big worry when we were in America. I remember one time during a particularly wild night at a hotel somewhere, Tony came running out of his room going, 'Aargh! My knob! My knob!' I asked him what was wrong, and he told me that he'd been messing around with this groupie when he looked down and saw all this yellow pus coming out of her. He thought he was about to die.

'Did the pus smell funny?' I asked him.

'Yeah,' he said, white in the face. 'I almost puked.'"

During a 1992 interview with Guitar World, Tony Iommi was asked to tell a crazy story about Ozzy. The guitarist revealed the following, from the band's heyday in the 1970s:

I don't know - there' s so many. [chuckles] Wait, here's one. Actually, it's quite funny. We were all in an elevator in this real plush hotel, and Ozzy decides to take a crap. As he's doing it, the elevator is going down to the reception floor. The door opens suddenly - and there's Ozzy with his pants around his knees. And all these people in fur coats are just staring at him with their mouths open.