By Michael Drukarsh - As we round the corner toward a new year, many of us will be asking ourselves the “what if” questions as we look back on 2024 and hope that our choices for 2025 will lead to a better year ahead.
This got me thinking. There are a lot of key moments in heavy metal history that could have gone in a completely different direction if something else happened in that moment. I thought it would be fun to take a look at a few bands and ask, "WHAT IF"…
And so I present moments in Black Sabbath, the Ozzy Osbourne years:
1) In 1965, at the age of 17, Ozzy Osbourne was arrested and jailed for burglary. Admitting that he was not very good at it, and that spending a few weeks in jail certainly was a wake up call, Ozzy chose a different career path. "What if" Ozzy didn’t get caught, arrested, and thrown in jail after only a few weeks into his new life of crime?
2) Coincidentally, also in 1965, at the age of 17, Tony Iommi cut off the tips of two fingers, middle and ring of his right hand, on his last shift at a sheet metal factory. This unfortunate accident led to the down tuning of Tony’s guitar which many attribute to the birth of the heavy metal sound. "What if" Tony never lost his fingers tips?
3) In 1968, Iommi left the band Earth, featuring Osbourne, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward for a more established act, Jethro Tull. With only one recorded performance during the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus, Iommi would come to realize that he missed his mates and soon after left Tull to rejoin Earth. "What if" Tony never left Jethro Tull?
4) According to bassist for the band Earth, Geezer Butler, turning up to a gig in Derby, the band were faced with a very different crowd then they were used to, an audience of well dressed people looking as if they were expecting a totally different type of music. After playing a few songs and then being asked why they weren’t playing their hits, the band realized they were being confused with another band, a pop group also named Earth. This revelation quickly prompted them to change their name, choosing the title of their recently penned song "Black Sabbath". "What if" there was no other group called Earth at the time?
5) In 1970, following their debut album Black Sabbath, Sabbath wanted to keep the momentum rolling by quickly turning out another album. Needing to fill three minutes at the end of the album, Iommi quickly came up with the riff, Butler wrote the lyrics and Ozzy read them off the sheet as they recorded it. “Paranoid” went on to become one of their biggest and most recognizable songs. "What if" they didn’t need to fill that extra three minutes?
6) In 1977, when Black Sabbath were trying to record their 8th studio album, Never Say Die (in Toronto, no less), they were plagued by excessive drug use and burn out leading to Ozzy quitting the band (Ozzy was also dealing with his own grief, as his father was dying). Not ready to throw in the towel, Sabbath recruited Dave Walker of Fleetwood Mac and Savoy Brown fame to fill in the hole left by Osbourne. Walker had a hand in writing most of the lyrics for "Never Say Die" and actually performed with the band on January 6th, 1978 on the BBC show Look Hear. The performance included a very strange version of “War Pigs”, with Dave playing tambourine and harmonica, along with the newly penned single, “Junior’s Eyes”. Ozzy’s father passed away soon after the airing of the show on January 20th, and Ozzy would soon rejoin Sabbath. However, he refused to sing any songs that had any connection to Dave Walker, so before release, almost the entire album was rewritten and the track “Junior’s Eyes” became a tribute to Ozzy’s dad. "What if" the introduction of Dave Walker to Sabbath was a success and the Sabbath Mach II era started with “Never Say Die” a title, according to Bill Ward, that was chosen tongue in cheek as the band imploded from the inside, but instead turned into an optimistic nod to the future.
Dave didn’t last very long. Ozzy, after his return, didn’t last very long either, getting fired in 1979 paving the way for the true Mach II era of Sabbath featuring one Ronnie James Dio. But, a lot could have happened before that to change the trajectory of not only Black Sabbath and its members, but to the entire heavy metal genre!
Let me know what you think in the comments below and if there are any bands you’d like to see featured in the future!
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