Happy Anniversary: Black Sabbath, Vol. 4

42 years ago today, “Wheels of Confusion” first rolled into record stores…which is kind of a roundabout way of saying that today’s the anniversary of the release of Vol. 4, the appropriately-titled fourth album from one of Birmingham’s hardest-rocking exports: Black Sabbath.

Released in 1972, Vol. 4 found the band leaving producer Roger Bain behind for the first time, with guitarist Tony Iommi twiddling the knobs instead. It could’ve been a disastrous decision – many a band has fallen apart as a result of being left to their own devices – but in the end, they managed to produce another strong effort, one which featured classic tracks like “Snowblind,” “Supernaut,” and “Tomorrow’s Dream.”

That’s not to say that Black Sabbath didn’t get a bit crazy during the course of recording the album, though. In his autobiography, Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven & Hell with Black Sabbath, Iommi stated outright, “That whole period was one of the most enjoyable times ever, and a song like ‘Snowblind’ makes it clear that it was also because of a certain drug,” later reflecting on the overall experience by saying, “The sun was shining, there was the swimming pool, women, everything. And coke, lots of coke.” Ozzy Osbourne doesn’t do much to dispel Iommi’s recollections of the atmosphere in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy, but he does make a point of saying, “In spite of all the arsing around, musically those few weeks in Bel Air were the strongest we’d ever been.” You know, based on the resulting album, he just might be onto something…