Black Sabbath Spent $75,000 on Cocaine in 1972

That Black Sabbath indulged in cocaine during the '70s is hardly news. But the cost of their abuse isn't as well-known. Apparently, the group spent $75,000 on cocaine in 1972 alone.

"We were young blokes, doing what young blokes do," guitarist Tony Iommi told the Guardian, before acknowledging the recklessness of their younger days. "Nobody could control anyone else. I was doing coke left, right and center, and Quaaludes, and God knows what else. We used to have [cocaine] flown in by private plane."

What's even more astonishing is that the album they recorded that year, Vol. 4, cost only $60,000 to make. In his 2010 autobiography, I Am Ozzy, Ozzy Osbourne said that the band was so indebted to the drug that the LP was nearly called Snowblind (a cocaine-influenced song of the same name did make the cut), but the record company wouldn't allow it. Black Sabbath did, however, get the last word. In the album's liner notes, they not-so-subtly write, "We wish to thank the great COKE-Cola Company of Los Angeles."

The excesses involved in making Vol. 4 proved a bit much for bassist Geezer Butler. At one point on tour, he drank something that had been spiked with acid, and he tried to jump out of his hotel window. "Tony and Bill [Ward] had to hold me down on the bed," he recalled. "I started going off drugs after that."

Though Butler was able to sober up quickly, the same couldn't be said of Osbourne. After 1978's Never Say Die!, he was fired from the band due to his substance abuse and replaced by Ronnie James Dio.

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