argued over who’d done what. Then, if one of us wanted to branch out—like if Bill wanted to sing, or if I wanted to write some lyrics—it was cool. No one was sitting there with a calculator, adding up the royalties they’d win or lose.
Mind you, another reason why we could do what we wanted was because we had total musical control. No record mogul had created Black Sabbath, so no record mogul could tell Black Sabbath what to do. A couple of them tried—and we told them where to stick it.
Not many bands can do that nowadays.
One thing I regret is not giving more dough to my folks. I mean, if it hadn’t been for my old man taking out a loan on that PA system, I never would have had a chance. In fact, I’d probably have gone back to burglary. Maybe I’d still be in prison today. But I didn’t think about them. I was young, I was loaded most of the time, and my ego was already starting to rule the world. Besides, I might have been rich, but I didn’t have much ready cash. All I did was call Patrick Meehan’s office and put in my requests, which was different to having your own dough to throw around. In fact, the only time I made any real money was when I realised I could just sell the stuff that the management company gave me, which I did one time with a Rolls-Royce. The others soon learned the same trick too. But how was I supposed to explain that to my folks, when they just saw me swaggering around the place like Jack the Lad? It’s not like I gave them nothing, but I know now that I never gave them enough. You could tell from the atmosphere every time I walked through the door at 14 Lodge Road. I’d ask my mum, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Well, it’s obviously something. Just tell me.’
She wouldn’t say, but you could smell it in the air: money, money, money. Nothing but money. Not: ‘I’m proud of you, son. Well done, you finally made it, you worked hard. Have a cup of tea. I love you.’ Just money. It got really ugly after a while. I didn’t want to be at home; it was so uncomfortable. I suppose they’d never had any money of their own, and they wanted mine. Which was fair enough. I should have given it to them.
But I didn’t.
I met a girl and moved out instead.
4. ‘You Guys Ain’t Black!’
I was never the Romeo type, me.
Even after our first album went gold, I never got any good-looking chicks. Black Sabbath was a blokes’ band. We’d get fag ends and beer bottles thrown at us, not frilly underwear. We used to joke that the only groupies that came to our gigs were ‘two-baggers’—you needed to put a couple of bags over their head before you could shag them; one wasn’t enough. And most of the time I was lucky even to get a two-bagger, to be honest with you. The chicks who wanted to shack up with me at the end of the night were usually three- or four-baggers. One night in Newcastle I think I had a five-bagger.
That was a rough night, that was. A lot of gin was involved, if I remember correctly.
But none of that stopped me trying to get my end away.
One of the places where I used to go cruising for a good old bonk was the Rum Runner nightclub on Broad Street in Birmingham, where an old school mate of Tony’s worked on the door. It was a famous place, the Rum Runner—years later, Duran Duran would become the resident band there—so it was magic to have someone on the inside who could get you in without any trouble.
One night, not long after we’d signed the record deal, I went to the Rum Runner with Tony. This was before we’d met Patrick Meehan, so we were still broke. We drove there in Tony’s second-hand car, which I think was a Ford Cortina. It was a piece of crap, anyway. Albert greets us at the door as usual, the bouncers unclip the rope to let us through, and the first thing I see is this dark-haired chick behind the counter in the cloakroom.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked Albert.
‘Thelma Riley,’ he told me. ‘Lovely gal. Brainy, too. But she’s divorced, and she’s got a kid, so watch yerself.’
I didn’t care.
She was beautiful, and I wanted to talk to her. So I did what I always did when I wanted to talk to a bird: I got fucking lollied. But something strange must have been going on that night, because the old get-as-dribblingly- drunk-as-possible strategy worked: I pulled her on the dance floor while Tony pulled her mate. Then we all drove back to Tony’s place in his Cortina, with me and Thelma having a snog and a fumble on the back seat.
Tony dumped Thelma’s friend the next day, but me and Thelma kept going. And when I finally couldn’t take any more of the bad atmosphere at 14 Lodge Road, we rented a flat together above a launderette in Edgbaston, a posh part of Birmingham.
A year or so later, in 1971, we got married in a registry office.
I thought it was what you did: get some dough, find a chick, get married, settle down, go to the pub.
It was a terrible mistake.
A few months before the wedding, Black Sabbath finally made it to America. Before we went, I remember Patrick Meehan’s dad calling us into a meeting at his London office, and telling us that we were going to be ‘ambassadors for British music’, so we should fucking behave ourselves.
We just nodded and ignored him.
Having said that, I made sure to go easy on the booze until we reached the airport. But what I didn’t know is that airports had bars—and I couldn’t resist a couple of cheeky ones to calm my nerves. So by the time I got to my seat, I was as pissed as a fart. Then we found out that Traffic were on the same plane. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was on the same flight as Steve Winwood. For the first time in my life, I began to feel like a proper rock star.
Even with all the booze I put away on the plane, it seemed to take for ever to get to JFK. I kept looking out of the window, thinking, How the fuck does this thing stay up in the air? Then we flew over Manhattan, where the World Trade Center was being built—half of it was still just scaffolding and steel girders—and landed as the sun was setting. It was a warm night, I remember, and I’d never experienced that warm-night-in-New-York vibe before. It had a distinctive smell, y’know? I thought it was great. Mind you, I was beyond pissed by this point.
The flight attendant had to help me out of my seat, and then I fell down the steps.
By the time I got to immigration, the hangover had set it. My headache was so bad that I’d forgotten what I’d written as a joke on the visa-waiver form. Where it asked for your religion, I’d put ‘Satanist’. So the bloke takes the form off me and starts reading it. Then he pauses when he gets halfway down.
He looks up at me. ‘Satanist, huh?’ he says, in this thick Bronx accent, with a bored, tired look on his face.
Suddenly I’m thinking, Oh, shit.
But before I can start trying to explain myself, he just stamps the form and shouts, ‘NEXT!’
‘Welcome to New York’ said the sign above his head.
We got our luggage from the carousel and went to queue in the taxi rank outside the arrivals hall. Fuck knows what all the businessmen with their suits and ties and briefcases were thinking, standing next to this long- haired, unwashed, pissed-up Brummie, wearing a tap around his neck and a pair of smelly old jeans with ‘Peace & Love’ and a CND symbol on one leg, and ‘Black Panthers Rule’ and a black fist symbol on the other.
As we waited, this massive yellow car drove by. It must have had nineteen or twenty doors on it.
‘I knew the cars here were big,’ I slurred, ‘but not that big!’
‘It’s a limousine, you idiot,’ said Tony.
Before we left England, we’d already recorded our follow-up to Black Sabbath. We had it in the can only five months after the release of the first record—which is unbelievable when you consider the lazy-arsed way albums are made these days. It was originally going to be called Warpiggers, which was a term for a black magic wedding or something. Then we changed it to War Pigs, and Geezer came up with these heavy-duty lyrics about death and destruction. No wonder we never got any chicks at our gigs. Geezer just wasn’t interested in your average ‘I love you’ pop song. Even when he wrote a boy-meets-girl lyric, it had a twist to it—like ‘N.I.B.’ off the first album, where the boy turns out to be the Devil. Geezer also liked to put a lot of topical stuff, like Vietnam references, into our songs. He had his ear to the ground, Geezer did.
