Ozzy Osbourne: Cocaine Became ‘Misery Beyond Belief’
Black Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne said that cocaine became a “misery beyond belief” in his life and that he couldn’t work out what he was thinking when he embraced the drug in 1972.
The American sessions for that year’s album, Vol. 4, became notorious for the amount of coke the band went through. It’s estimated that while it cost around $65,000 to cut the record, the band spent $75,000 on drugs. At one point, they flushed away up to $5,000 worth of the drug when they thought they were about to be raided by cops, only to discover it was a false alarm. As a result of the experiences, they wanted to call the album Snowblind, but their label vetoed the idea.
“You’ve got to remember, coming from the backstreets in Birmingham, now we’ve got a house in Bel-Air with a hit record, people know our music and we were the kings of the planet,” Osbourne told Rolling Stone in a recent interview. “So we experienced everything we could.”
He noted that they wrote the song "Snowblind" "because it was the most amazing discovery of our lives. 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.”
The singer recalled talking to a stranger at the pool of their mansion. “I said to him, ‘We had some great coke yesterday,’ and he goes, ‘Oh, I sold it to you. ‘Oh, okay. What do you do?’ He said, ‘Oh, I work for the Food and Drug [Administration].’ He was an official. I went, ‘Oh, fuckin’ hell.’ He went, ‘No, you’re all right.' ... He may have been winding me up; I don’t know. When you’re on that fucking bullshit powder, everything seems fantastic for five seconds, and then you become a misery beyond belief.”
Osbourne added that Sabbath "shoulda wrote Paranoid as the next album after Vol. 4, because we all became paranoid wrecks.”