DISGRACELAND - Black Sabbath: Satanists, Severed Limbs, Dismembered Fingers, Mountains of Cocaine and the Invention of Heavy Metal

Episode Date: October 26, 2021

Black Sabbath are solely responsible for conjuring the diabolical power of heavy metal. When guitarist Tony Iommi lost his fingertips as a teenager, he turned to a less painful style of playing— a style that produced a new, genre-defining type of gloom and heaviness. The band climbed through the seven circles of British podunk hell to international rock star success, but the lore of their dark imagery compelled the freaks to flood out of the woodwork and to their shows. Despite composing songs that warned against the evils of the occult, Black Sabbath attracted legions of devil worshippers, occultists and 1970s freak-flag-flying practitioners of the dark arts. Kids went mad for their metal. Critics hated it. And much to the band’s dismay, Satanists found their battle cry in the heavy gloom that Black Sabbath had awakened. This episode was originally published on October 26, 2021. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠Instagram⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠X⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠ ⁠TikTokSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed, I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.

He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? You'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things,

Tana Monjou, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgrace, Iand, is a production of Double Elvis. The stories about Black Sabbath are insane. Their guitarist, Tony Iommi, lost his fingers

and still became one of the most influential guitar. players in music history. They quite literally invented a genre of music, heavy metal, and rose to the top of the pop charts without any help from the critics who hated the band. But kids loved them. So too did the Satanus. Despite composing songs it warned against the evils of the occult, the band attracted legions of devil worshippers, occultists, and 1970s freak flag-flying practitioners of the dark arts. They had giant amounts of cocaine shipped into the studio and empty speaker cabinets. Groupies lined up down the block, lit themselves and others on fire literally, and throughout the 70s, Black Sabbath made great music. Unlike that music I played for you

at the top of the show, that wasn't great music. That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Oil Can Swank, MK1. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to Mama told me not to come by three dog night. And why would I play you that specific slice of party foul out cheese, could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on July 16th, 1970. And that was the day Black Sabbath was to touch down in San Francisco for the start of their first U.S. tour. It inspired a literal parade of Satanist to take to the streets in their honor, kicking off one of the strangest, heaviest, most evil tales in rock and roll. The Wicked Story of Black Sabbath.

On this, a special Halloween episode, Satan's, severed limbs, dismembered fingers, mountains of cocaine, and the invention of heavy metal with Black Sabbath. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi wasn't scared. He'd seen worse, but as bandmates, they were a different story. Drummer Bill Ward was chasing his fear down the bottom of a bottle,

off drunk somewhere. Close but no doubt sossed. Singer Ozzy Osbourne was with him, doing the same. Bassist Gieser Butler was near Tony, sitting on a U.S. Army-issued cot listening intently as the Vietnam vet detailed his recent horrors. Young women, girls, really. Some as young as 10 years old, raped.

Stray dogs used for target practice. grown men lighting themselves on fire in protests of the South Vietnamese government, and a baby used as a bomb. There was no account of how the baby actually died. Its mother hollowed it up, got rid of its internal organs, and somehow managed a way to insert a bomb into the baby's dead body. When U.S. soldiers showed up in her village, she ran out of her hut screaming straight toward the platoon's lieutenant with her baby in her arms.

They looked so helpless. the Vietnamese mom and her newborn, so needy. The lieutenant dropped his M-16 and opened his arms. He was as shocked as the rest of his men when the mom turned tail and sprinted back toward her hut after handing him her child. It took exactly one second for him to realize something was very wrong, and by then it was too late. He looked down at the baby in his arms, the baby that was clearly dead, and then he was blown to bits. The story shocked Tony and Gieser. Tony knew Geiser was mentally notating it all, storing it up for lyrics he would one day write.

Geyser needed fodder beyond the horror and sci-fi films he devoured for inspiration. The real-life horror detailed from the U.S. soldiers at the American Army base they were at in Germany, a stopover of sorts, a place to give the vets a minute to collect themselves mentally to cool out before returning to civilian life, was a gold mine of inspiration. Tony Iommi looked around the base. He and his Sabbath bandmates were here to play a gig to entertain. But it felt like they were the ones being entertained. Maybe entertained was the wrong word.

Whatever it was, it felt like they were getting more out of the bargain than the soldiers. It was a lesson. These fucking guys, their lives were permanently altered. For what? So American War Propheteer's stock could go up a couple percentages of a point? These kids were fucking hopeless when they went into the war and were hopelessly fucked now that they were out of it. Working class, all of them.

They reminded Tony of himself and his mates from back in Birmingham, north of London, the Midlands, a tough city, industrial. Most of the men in this room could cut it in Birmingham. After Vietnam, anyway, no problem. Though Tony himself wasn't so sure he could handle Birmingham anymore, its bleakness was suffocating. Once the hub of the Industrial Revolution, then bombed to oblivion by the Germans during World War II's blitz,

post-war Birmingham was a churning. smoking heap, rebuilding itself into a working-class hub, one gray drab factory block at a time. But no amount of time would be fast enough for restless teenagers like Tony Iommi, doomed to live their adolescence under a black cloud. But Tony overcame more than the constant churn of Birmingham's gloom. He overcame tremendous adversity at the age of 17. If he was careful and lucky, the sheet metal factory gig he held down as a welder would only be a part-time thing. Playing guitar at that time in 1966 before Black Sabbath and his top 40 band mythology

would hopefully open up roads that led out of Birmingham. And they were headed out the next day on tour, but first Tony needed to get through his shift at the factory. Tony was working on the line, welding, patiently waiting for his coworker to send down the next sheet of metal from the giant industrial-sized press. His coworker was fucked off elsewhere, and Tony was impatient. Get the shift done. Get the fuck out of Dodge.

his band. Fuck the co-worker. Tony started working the press and the welding. He reached down the line, pulled the press with one hand, pulled the metal out of the mouth of the machine with his other, weld, repeat. He was efficient with his technique, and if he wasn't careful, the management got wind of what he was doing. They'd likely fire his coworker and double Tony's workload, without any extra pay, no doubt. Tony needed to finish and get out of there. He continued his two-man process on the assembly line. It became automatic. trans-like, an industrial zen. One hand on the press, another hand pulling the metal out.

Weld, repeat. One hand on the press, another hand pulling the metal out, weld, repeat. One hand on the press, another hand pulling the metal out, well, repeat. One hand on the press, another hand. Suddenly, the press had gripped Tony's other hand. The pain was sharp and blinding. Instinctively, Tony pulled his hand out of the machine. The machine had his right index and ring fingers firmly in its teeth.

and when Tony pulled his hand out, the machine peeled the skin on his two fingers completely off. All that remained were the exposed bones of his fingertips. The pain blinded him, but not before catching a glimpse of his mangled hand. As a guitar player, his fretting hand, he gathered his destroyed and dismembered fingertips, threw them in a bag of ice and headed to the hospital.

But there was nothing the doctors could do with them. Tony Iommi was sunk, finished before he even, got started. He was suicidal. A life of drudgery lay on the horizon. Fingerless guitar players weren't a thing. Except, they were. In an effort to get Tony out of his funk, a friend hipped him to guitarist Django Reiner, a blazing jazz man who played with only two fingers on his fret hand due to an accident he sustained in a fire. The accident also left him without the use of his right leg. Django didn't let it hold him back, and Tony Ayomi was inspired. He wouldn't

and let it hold him back either. Django used the only two fingers he had left for his solo work. He used his dead fingers for the cords. Tony Iommi got to work. He fashioned homemade finger caps out of plastic liquid dishwashing bottles. He melted the bottles down using a soldering iron in his welding skills to cram the molten material into the ends of his fingertips. He then used glue leather to further attach his new fingertips. Like Django Reinhardt, Tony's physical limitations now informed his playing.

Tony could only use the lightest guitar strings due to the pain that would shoot up his hand and arm every time his fingers touched a string. Tony also had to tune his guitar down, way down, so the strings were looser and easier to manage. The result was a low, gloomy, new type of heaviness from his guitar that hadn't quite been heard before. Most other Midlands bands on the scene that Tony was then playing in tended to work the traditional blue-eyed soul and R&B side of the street. bands like The Crawling Kingsnakes featuring John Bonham, who would later go on to drum and Led Zeppelin, the Spencer Davis group helmed by a young Steve Winwood, who himself would go on to found the band traffic, and later launch a mega-hit solo career, and Sounds of Blue, featuring a young keyboardist named Christine Perfect, who would later join another blues band named Fleetwood Mac and take the last name of the band's bassist when she married him to become Christine McPhee.

Those Midlands bands with their blues and their trowd tendencies would never welcome Tony Iommi in his new heaviness onto their side of the street. There was something darker in Tony's playing now, something totally unrelated to R&B and Pub Blue standards, something more akin to the darkness of bluesman Robert Johnson, something much heavier than anything anyone had ever heard before. Something now anchored. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me?

The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherokee. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast, Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network.

Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film, grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra pee and an E at the end. So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you have,

figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the exactly right network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week, I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true

crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never Why you do, you know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network.

Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The firsthand horror stories of Vietnam made it into Black Sabbath's lyrics as Tony Iommi knew they would. The song was an eight-minute explosion entitled War Pigs. It wasn't released until much later, though, in 1970 on Sabbath's second album, Paranoid. But the band wrote it earlier. Back around the time, they were putting together their first album. But before Tony Iommi could work himself through the explosiveness of war pigs, he had the devil to contend with. Villagers, scores of them, rampaging through their cobblestone streets, violently laying waste to anything in their path, smashing street lamps with rocks, setting fire to bells of hay with their torches and stampeding over their shock and protesting.

fellow countrymen, those who weren't at the performance and who had no idea what was happening. It was the music that set them off, stirred in them something dormant, their anger, their hatred, their will to do, whatever it was they felt compelled to do. And at that moment, that feeling led to destruction. The crowd at the concert hall stormed out after the final movement. Roused into trance-like communal action by the performance of Camille Saint-Saint's dance Macab, based on the Henry Casal's poem describing a visit from the devil to a graveyard at midnight on Halloween, to summon the dead from their graves and join him in a dance. The piece is macabre subject matter to not stir the crowd into violence.

It was the sound of the piece. More specifically, its composition, the scotura, a detuning of the E and the violins to E flat, a move that created a tritone, the most unsettling sound in all of music, a sound outlawed by the church in the Middle Ages for this exact reason, because it inspired violence, evil. The most unholy of sounds was attained by flattening the fifth note in the chord progression. Typically the fifth is deployed for tension.

Flattening the fifth, increased the tension, and added an element of gloom, of unease. And when people heard it for the first time, they could not process it. It was so foreign to anything they'd heard prior in popular music that it drove them to violence. After one too many performances featuring the tritone resulted in violence, the tritone, in addition to being outlawed, became known as Diabolos

in Music, the Devil in Music, or The Devil's Interval. Back in 1968, Tony Iommi didn't know any of this. All he knew was his band was in need of songs if they were going to make a record and make it out of Birmingham. His lyricist slash bassist Gieser Butler sat on his sofa, very stoned. From the stereo, the classical orchestral suite, Planets by Gustav Hulse, blared. The first movement's title, Mars, the bringer of war, caught Geiser's attention. The heaviness of it reminded him of the heaviness of Vietnam. Gieser sat listening, cradling his bass, and casually played along to the piece. Tony picked up on Geiser's playing,

and rather than anchor the melody with root notes like most bass players would, Geyser shadowed the melody with his playing and filled notes into the spaces. It was more jazz than blues and far from standard rock. Tony picked up his guitar and began playing. along as well. But when the movement ended, Tony kept playing, but he dropped the key down from A-flat to G to make it sound darker. It was heavier than anything the two had messed with before with their bandmates Ozzie and Bill. Up to this point, they were just another blues band from the Midlands. They played under the name Pocateuck Blues Band and then under the name Earth. Both names

were indistinguishable from the blue-eyed hippie drivel of the day and suited the nowhere rock pub music that they were making. Total blah. But this is a little bit of the same. But this is a little bit of new riff was something else to have promise. That night, Geyser sat alone in his bedroom with the riff, echoing in his head. He read as Alistair Crowley. Geyser, like most of London's hip underground, was obsessed with the early 20th century occultist. Geyser was also obsessed with religion, the pageantry of it all. As a kid, he wanted to be a priest. His bedroom walls were covered with crucifixes and iconic imagery in stark contrast with the esoteric individualist ideas from Crowley. Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn he was filling his head with at the moment.

Magic with a K, dark magic, power, sexual power, ritualistic sex, self-gratification at any expense. All of it was the forbidden fruit that flew in the face of Gyser's Catholic upbringing. It fascinated him, the darkness, the evil. Gyser took it a step further and mixed among the religious imagery on his walls, satanic images, inverted crosses, drawings of Satan himself, and a picture of Crawley. He even painted his walls black. His bedroom was a diorama of good and evil. In it, he faded off into sleep, Crowley's magic in theory and practice resting on his chest.

He awoke in a fit, eyes wide, blackness all around, that riff from earlier with Tony ringing in his head. And then the sound of Gustav holds planets in a distant chorus, an eerie whispered incantation. Gieser's spine straightened, the hairs on his arm rose up, a breeze bristled over his chilled skin. And when Gizer noticed his windows and doors were shut, making any breeze impossible, his heart quickened, his eyes began to adjust. The darkness started to fade. He could make out the images on the wall. Pagan priests wearing goats heads sacrificing virgins, ancient gods of the underworld devouring their children, and the picture of Alistair Crowley, staring down at him with a stony face and deep, bottomless black eyes. Gyser broke from Crowley's stare and looked to the side of his bed. There, a figure in black.

Gizer's heart forced itself up into his throat. He left from the bed, flipped on his light, and the figure was gone. Gyser immediately began tearing down all the satanic imagery on his walls. When he was done, he put pen to paper and in a stream of consciousness depicted what he saw and what he felt. The next day, he brought his words to Tony and the rest of his bandmates. Ozzy helped shape them into a melody, and the words were a warning against the very real power of Satan,

a warning against the occult, a call to arms against evil. Tony called upon the riff they'd written the day before, the low G to the G octave to the flatted fifth, the D flat, the tritone, the devil's interval. They called the song Black Sabbath. Geezer nicked the title from the Boris Karloff horror movie, and they liked the song title so much they decided to give their band the same name. And this new approach, this darkness, Diabolos and Musica, the devil's music, even if it was a warning against evil and not a celebration of evil,

the horror of it all, of the dream, of the world, riff of the tritone of the imagery and the lyrics, of the sound of Tony's playing, the heaviness of it all, was completely unique. It perfectly suited them. Black Sabbath was born. From the day they unlocked that heavy diabolical power, they began their climb through the seven circles of British podunk held an international rock star success. Within months of the name change and the discovery of their new sound, they had signed with UK's Phillips Records, their self-titled first release in 1970, disgusted and appalled the critics, but it tapped into something elemental in the record-buying public.

Kids went wild over Black Sabbath's newfound heaviness and evil image, and with no help from the critics, Sabbath's debut album went to number eight on the UK charts. Warner Brothers released the album in North America, but when the PR department pointed out that launching a Black Sabbath tour at the same time as the trial of Charles Manson and his so-called family was just getting started, a trial to determine if Manson was guilty of masterminding the horrific Tate Lobionca murders. Murders were the word war was carved into a victim's chest, and pig was painted in blood on a victim's wall.

Words that Sabbath seemed to crib straight from Charlie and his girls, words far more violent and esoteric than anything in the Beatles' helter-skelter. When the timing of both Black Sabbath tour and Charles Manson's trial was discovered to coincide, due to fear of bad press, Warner Brothers abruptly canceled it, Sabbath's U.S. tour. But Anton LeVay didn't get the message. LeVay cut an intimidating figure, bulky and bald with a devil's goatee, posing with snakes and walking a pet leopard around the streets of San Francisco.

And in all respects, taking up Alistair Crowley's mantle of the occult in the new century, LeVey had written the Satanic Bible and was the high priest and founder of the Church of Satan. From this position, he presided over satanic marriages, baptisms, and funeral. and in coordination with Warner Brothers Records, planned a Black Sabbath parade to kick off Black Sabbath's U.S. tour. In San Francisco, where Black Sabbath were supposed to make their U.S. debut at the Fame Film War West, the Satanic Parade went ahead as planned, without the band. American practitioners in the Dark Arts had found their new heroes in Black Sabbath.

To them, the band's music was evil incarnate. They were a band that championed their cause, evil. LeVay and the Satanist had taken Crowley. Ollie's model of do what thou wilt to the extreme, and just like everything else in American culture at the end of the 60s, they were violently clawing for whatever would bring them personal satisfaction. They were the me decades slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born. With or without Tony Iommi and his bandmates, Anton LeVay and his Satanist, and whatever other freaky San Francisco riffraff LeVay could muster, all came out to parade through the streets

in honor of Satan and in the name of Black Sabbath. The parade kicked off on a Folsom Street. Anton LeVay was at the head as master of ceremonies, dressed top to toe in a black robe, the black pope as he proclaimed himself to be. A big upside-down cross hung from his neck. He even had a sceptre. He towered over his assembled freaks, fellow Satanists, elaborately dressed drag queens, a group of juggling little people, fancy boys and hot pants sashaying alongside the paraders, a Mexican mariachi band marching in step with the large-scale floats assembled for the occasion. A group of Black Panthers made the scene, clearly confused by the parade's name. A flatbed truck with a he-haw-style camp bluegrass band brought up the rear,

picking out Black Sabbath songs on banjos, fiddles, and acoustic guitars. A local TV crew made the scene, and the extremely weird event made the wires. Tony Iommi read about it in his morning paper and nearly dropped his cup of tea in shock. Satanus? What, he thought, half Black Sabbath rot? A group of Satanus and freaks marching in the name of his band was shocked. Yes, but not nearly as shocking as shocking as the murder he would learn about in the coming months. A murder inspired by a familiar figure in black. We'll be right back after this word, word, word.

There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends, Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.

I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Remember when you'd walk into your local video rental place, and there were always those two employees behind the counter arguing about movies? Well, that's us. I'm Millie de Cherico. And I'm Casey O'Brien. And now we're arguing about movies on our podcast,

Dear Movies I Love You, from the Exactly Right Network. Can I say something about the Criterion Clause? Go ahead, dude. They're letting too many people in there. Okay, that's another film, grape I got two. Sadly, that rental place doesn't exist anymore. It's probably a store that sells running shoes. Or an ice cream shop with an extra P and an E at the end.

So consider us your slacker movie clerks in podcast form. I would like to establish a timeline of the moment you figured out who Channing Tatum was. Every Tuesday, we dig into the movies we can't stop obsessing over, from hidden gems to big screen favorites. New episodes drop every week on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a host of The Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters.

He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. American newspapers were a trip.

1971. A new decade. A dark dawn. The story screamed off the page. In Los Angeles, the Manson trial was high drama. Headlines informed Tony that recently, Manson family members tried robbing an army surplus store to free Charlie. In San Francisco, two members of the Black Liberation Army, a line of. violent offshoot of the Black Panthers, raided a police station, and fired off a round into the gut

of a police sergeant. He died. In New York, the press was obsessed with an Italian gangster named Joey Gallo, so much for that other New York Joe, Joe DiMaggio. And by the 70s, America was turning its lonely eyes to the dark side. Tony looked around the hotel lobby he was sitting in and saw it all. The rock scene was just an exaggerated microcosm of the American zeitgeist. It seemed that in America, it wasn't enough just to get on with life. You needed a schick. Some sort of thing that you identified with and that identified you as being unique among your neighbors, friends, coworkers, groupies, etc. Because everyone's just so fucking special, aren't they?

There were the leftover hippies, the speed freaks, the groupies, the nihilists, your Travis Bickle prototypes, political anarchists, yippies, zippies, black panthers, white panthers, Vietnam vets, heroin addicts, hell's angels, soul brothers, soul sisters, Harry Krishna's witches, witches, course, but growing number of stateness. They were all there milling about the lobby in most of the major American cities the Black Sabbath visited. Looking to score, looking for the party,

looking for that eternal buzz, looking to meet a rock star, fuck a rock star, possess a rock star. Tony sat quietly in the corner, dark glasses on. His features, even the silhouette of his high cheekbones, were mostly hidden. His hat perched low, head to toe, and black. He was remarkably

inconspicuous amongst the hub of happening around him. It was check-in time. Crew and members of his band and other bands on the bill that evening, the Jake Giles band and Humble Pie, were filing in. Musicians were swarmed for autographs, desk clerks and bellboys were overmatched. Tony crossed his legs and buried his head back into his daily paper. And what he read gripped him with fear. She was only 16 years old, from New Jersey. She was a good Catholic girl, didn't mess with the drugs or even with the boys. By all accounts, she was a beauty. She'd gone missing.

Three months, her family sweated it out, hoping for the best, fearing the worst. And then, one morning, it happened. Her father went out to retrieve the morning paper, as was his pre-work routine. Often he was aided in this task by the family dog, but not this morning. The dog, he'd presumed, was off somewhere else.

He opened his front door and looked to the bottom of the cement stew. Ah, there was the dog, sitting obediently, looking up at him with those big, innocent, doughy eyes. But between his teeth, where he'd usually hold his master's newspaper, something else, something similar in size, but something different, something ragged, something bloody, bruised, broken, something his master couldn't bear to comprehend, something beyond explanation, the arm of his master's missing daughter. Tony's eyes frantically scanned the rest of the text. text below the headline, girl sacrificed in witch right. Turns out they found the rest of the girl

in an area off a walk-on reservoir known as the devil's teeth. Quote-unquote occult symbols were found around the girl's body. Locals suspected a known coven of witches. Yes, witches in 1971 were blamed for a crime scene that had all the markings of a satanic sacrifice. The victim's body was outlined by sticks within the shape of a coffin. There were inverted crosses made of forest, placed about her body and her body was elevated on a mound of dirt, a makeshift altar. Tony looked up from his paper, shocked. He glanced across the lobby. Everyone seemed to be moving fast, this way, and that, looking for action.

Most were wearing some pre-approved subculture fashion, bell bottoms, fringes, leather headbands, beads. And the Harry Krishna's danced about with shaved heads and colorful robes. The groupies shifted awkwardly in revealing outfits. A pimp eyed the groupies with thoughts of her crew. His technicolor suit, hat, and cane made it clear who and what he was. White Panthers and red berets handed out pamphlets. Blue denim-clad roadies muscled their way through to the elevators. They were hard to distinguish from the hell's angels who were there to do whatever the hell they wanted.

And far away, in the opposite corner of the lobby, to the right of the entry, almost as inconspicuous as Tony, three figures clad like him head to toe in black. But in black robes, each wearing the same necklipers. A modest silver chain with an inverted cross. Sataness. Nervously, Tony looked down at his paper once again. Under the headline, Girl sacrificed in Witchwright. He stared at the image of the victim.

Smudged black ink obscured her face. All that was prevalent was the cut of her high cheekbones and next to her image a composite sketch of who investigators believed to be the suspect. An androgynous looking late teen or young 20-something. Long hair like the victims. big eyes. Other than that, fairly unremarkable. Tony looked up once again and across the lobby and the Satanus were gone. A twin bump of fear and relief speedballed through the young guitarist veins. On stage that night, the witches were in the audience, right up there front and center in the third

row, just staring at him, not moving, not enjoying the show in any way, just staring. There, plain as day in one moment and in the next, when Tony looked up and outed to the audience, Later on tour in other cities, more Satanists made their presence known as well as their love of Black Sabbath. They fought their way backstage to gawk at the band. Tony, along with Geezer and Bill, saw them outside of their tour bus at the airport, and soon anyone clad in black was a potential Satanist to the band. Throughout 1971 and 1972, as Black Sabbath climbed the charts in both the UK and the states, the lore of the band and their dark imagery compelled the freaks to flood out of the woodwork into the band's shows.

Again, most mysterious were the Crowley adherents, LeVay's Satanus. The band received fan mail written in blood. One fan in L.A. cornered Ozzy backstage and told him he had a plan for him to go to Mexico, to buy a corpse, to smuggle it back into the States and on stage so that Ozzy could bring it out during his set and stab it during the show. At the Hollywood Bowl, Tony walked off stage after his set. He happened to look behind him for whatever reason, and there was a man, a big man, and all black coming at him fast with a dagger raised above his head.

Security immediately saw what was about to happen and pounced on the dude. Tony was safely whisked backstage. At a gig in Memphis, Black Sabbath arrived to find their dressing room door dripping with blood in the form of a giant cross. The door was also nailed shut. At another gig in the Midwest, the band arrived back at their hotel, took the elevator to their floor of suites and found as many as 20 Satanists, all clad in black, sitting in the dark of the hallway, illuminated only by the black candles they'd set up around

them on the floor as they chanted softly. Freaky. All the while, Tony tracked the case of the slain Catholic girl from New Jersey. In whatever city he was in, Tony scoured national newspapers for items on the case. His curiosity compelled him. Who could do this? And why and how? Tony feared the worst.

Was it a Black Sabbath fan? And just who was this girl? There were no pictures of her in any of the recent articles he'd seen. And in the first article he'd read, her image was smart. There was still little info on the suspect. Supposedly, they still didn't know if the killer was male or female, just that he or she was in their early 20s, had long hair, and was suspected to be some sort of witch, an occultist, or simply a Satanist.

Of course, there are distinctions among all of those things, but the press didn't care to make mention of that. Tony Iommi didn't care either. This wasn't what he signed up for. Witches, ritualistic murder, giant bloody crosses, smuggled corpses, America coming undone before him. He was a rock guitarist, a man of the trades, not of the dark arts. His band, Black Sabbath, had invented a new form of rock and roll.

Out of thin air, the tritone, and Birmingham steel, they created heavy metal. A pummeling mix of detuned riffs, jazz-shadowed bass, industrial rhythms, and anthemic melody. Kids went mad for it. Critics hated it. The Satanists found their battle cry and the heavy gloom that Sabbath had awakened. The thought of it was too much. Tony needed an escape. Grass helped before, but the Sweet Leaf no longer provided the relief that he needed. Tony, like the rest of his band, retreated into heavy cocaine use.

Black Sabbath did so much cocaine that a full-time dealer accompanied them on tour. And while recording their album, Volume 4 in Los Angeles, Columbia's finest cocaine was shipped to the Bel Air home the band was renting and crates the size of studio cabinet speakers. Coke was everywhere around Black Sabbath in the 1970s, Just as it had been around Geiser Butler's one-time obsession, Alistair Crowley, almost a century earlier, Crowley could handle his Coke.

So too could Tony Iommi. His bandmates, unfortunately, could not. Increasingly, like the Satanists who now followed them on tour, the behavior of Black Sabbath's other members grew more intense. Bill Ward would pass out, so drunk and so stone, so often, that his bandmates regularly set his beard on fire to wake him up. Gieser Butler once flushed 10 grand worth of Coke down their rented Bel Air Home's toilet in a delirious rush,

not realizing the cops at the door were only responding to Ozzy drunkenly sitting on the house alarm and setting it off. When the cops split, Gieser and Ozzie frantically tried to plunge the blow back out of the toilet. As for Ozzy Osbourne himself, even in his early days, he refused to be outdone by his bandmates or any other rock star. At Seattle's famous Edgewater Inn, where the infamous Led Zeppelin Shark and, incident allegedly took place. Ozzy rented his own room and his own fishing rod and caught his own shark from the ocean outside his window just as John Bonham supposedly had.

But then Ozzy took it one step further. He gutted the fish in the hotel bathroom. It used its bloody innards to repaint the hotel room's floors and walls. This was standard fair everyday behavior for Tony Hiomi's bandmates, especially for Ozzy. Ozzy Osbourne's behavior was now a constant issue as far as his band leader Tony Hayomi was concerned. Tony was fighting for his creative life,

trying to save Black Sabbath from the Satanists and the critics who were savaging the band on a regular basis. None other than the hippest of hip-rock critics, Lester Bang said of the band in Rolling Stone's only Black Sabbath album review to that point, quote, despite the murky song titles and some in-name lyrics that sound like Vanella Fudge playing doggarole tribute to Alistair Crowley, the album has nothing to do with spiritualism,

the occult, or anything much. Just like cream, but worse. But when it came to the kids who actually bought records, Lester's review didn't matter, nor did the mountain of other bad press. By 1973, Black Sabbath was as popular as any band in America with the exception of Led Zeppelin. Tony knew that their latest albums,

Master of Reality in Volume 4, had a lot to do with it. Maybe Tony was lying to himself, but he credited the depth of songs like After Forever and Supernot for the band's success. Creatively, they were massive steps forward from the earlier meat and potatoes riffage of songs like Iron Man and Electric Funeral. In the lyrics, Geeser kicked up for After Forever were particularly poignant from Tony's perspective. After Forever was a warning, a warning to stay the fuck away from Satan, just like their song Black Sabbath from their first album had warned of a figure in black.

After Forever warned of the consequences of the dark arts and try to put distance between Black Sabbath and the Satanus. But it didn't matter. The incendiary lyrics of After Forever and the steamrolling heavy hookiness of their latest album's other standout track, Sweet Leaf, Children of the Grave, into the void, snowblind, and changes. All rang out like a demonic siren call

to low-rent American occultists in need of validation. The Satanists, it seemed, were not warned off by After Forever. They did not get the message. And there was another person who apparently didn't get the message either. Tony Iommi's singer, Ozzy Osborne. By the end of 1978, somehow, someone thought it was a good idea for Black Sabbath to go back to Los Angeles. Some sort of change was needed and this was it.

Their 1976 record, technical ecstasy, was a disaster, a creative overreach by Tony, a neglectful mess by Geezer, Bill, and Ozzy. And the album even bored the Satanist who had all but abandoned the band by now in favor of other heavy acts who followed in Sabbath's gargantuan footsteps. For a time afterward, Ozzy had even left the band

and was replaced by Dave Walker from the band Savoy Brown. But now, for their 1978 album, another commercial whiff called Never Say Die, Ozzie had come back. But Ozzy's behavior was too much, even by Black Sabbath standards. Back during their first stint in Los Angeles,

Ozzie's behavior could be tolerated, but it was different now. Tony had to create music that would compete with the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Who, and now upstart bands that were wildly energetic like ACDC and wildly talented like Van Halen. By rock star standards, Zeppelin's frontman Robert Plant was practically an intellectual.

The Who's singer Roger Daltry commanded respect. Singer Bond Scott from ACDC was plugged into a different circuit board altogether, and Van Halen's frontman David Lee Roth was nothing short of a dynamo with his acrobatic stage presence and washboard abs. Ozzy Osborne was a buffoon. With those doughy eyes, those silly bangs that cropped his long hair and that perpetual look of stupidity on his mug

that always seemed to say, I didn't mean to do it, I swear. Ozzy passed out and pissed himself regularly. Ozzy got drunk and into a fist fight with geeseer. Ozzy got high on coke and crashed his motorcycle. Ozzy got pissed and tried shitting on a motorist in the middle of the street out of road rage. By Tony Ayomi's estimation, Ozzy Osbourne's buffoonery was so intense that he wondered if Ozzy was trying to sabotage the band.

Either way, it didn't matter. Ozzy had to go. And so, Tony Ayomi unceremoniously kicked his frontman out of his band. The maid was summoned to pack his bags. Someone called the car service for him. Ozzy was given 96 grand severance and a low-rent apartment. in Hollywood to stay in to nurse's wounds with copious amounts of cocaine, alcohol, groupies, and Domino's Pizza. He was out. Gone. Tony sunk himself further into his work, trying to put together

songs for a new Sabbath album with a new singer without Ozzy, and he also sunk further into his use of cocaine. In Hollywood, Tony Iommi connected with the dentist of the recently deceased Elvis Presley, and by all accounts, his legal drug dealer, Dr. Max Shapiro, who now kept Tony supplied with regular scripts of pharmaceutical cocaine. But Ozzy Osbourne, as far as Tony Iommi was concerned, was a ghost, just like those long-gone figures in black, the ones in the hotel lobby, in the crowd at the foot of Gieser's bed in the middle of the night, there, then gone. Tony had no regrets, a new singer, short and stature but big in voice and determination. Ronnie James Dio of the band Rainbow was brought into Sabbath ranks to lead the charge for the kids against the,

the critics and further away from the Satanus. And Ronnie James Dio would do exactly that with the first Black Sabbath album released without Ozzy Osborne. And with Dio at the helm, co-writing material with the newly inspired Tony Iomm, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward, the album, Heaven and Hell, was nothing short of a heavy metal masterpiece. More powerful than anything Sabbath had done in years, and as commercially successful as anything the band had done since the earlier part of the decade. Black Sabbath was back. Because like the devil himself, Ozzy Osbourne was cast out. Years later, Tony took his tea out by the pool on one of those indistinguishable Hollywood afternoons.

Perfect temperature, loads of sun. He strained his eyes to read his paper. There, in the National Section, a follow-up on the near cold case involving the Catholic girl sacrificed in the ritualistic occult murder in the devil's teeth area of New Jersey. There was still no arrest, but there was a better composite sketch of the suspect. better than the one Tony had seen in the paper a few years earlier. The suspect was now believed to definitely be a man. By the sketch, though, it was still a bit hard to tell.

He didn't look like much of a killer. He had long hair with cropped bangs like a girl, and for a supposed Satanous, innocent-looking round eyes, and that look on his face, it was somehow familiar to Tony. It seemed to say, I didn't mean to do it. I swear. Such a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is a special Halloween episode of Disgraceland.

All right, thanks for checking out this episode of Disgraceland. This being a Halloween episode, we indulged in more poetic license than normal, so no, Ozzy Osbourne wasn't a Satanist, and no, he wasn't responsible for the murder at Devil's Teeth. But that true crime is indeed true, even the bit about the dog and the victims aren't. Google Devil's Teeth Murder to learn more about it. Freaky stuff. Also, before you fire off your hate mail, I love Ozzie Osbourne.

I love Sabbath era Ozzy Osbourne. I love solo era Ozzy Osbourne. Pretty much all of it. Even the recent stuff. We released an entire episode on Ozzie that covers the hijinks of his solo years, as well as his brief stint in jail and dives deeper into the snowblind Bel Air era of Black Sabbath as well. So check that Ozzy episode out in the Disgraceland Archive. And happy Halloween, you sick bastards.

Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at Disgraceland, If you're listening as a disgrace land all-access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of disgrace land ad free. Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month. Weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise

and events. Visit disgracelandpod.com slash member. for details. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at DisgracelandPod, and on YouTube at YouTube.com

slash at disgraceland pod. Rockerola. He's a bad bad. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.

I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say it. Trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of family secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him.

Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts.

Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tana Mangeau, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.