“We're just gonna go on and play our music, man,” Ozzy Osbourne tells a young woman reporter from ABC TV. “We don't go on and blow the stage up... we just go on and play our music man. Because that's what it's about.”
It's the afternoon of Saturday April 6, 1974, and standing on the tarmac at Ontario International Airport, the 25-year-old singer seems remarkably relaxed ahead of what will be Black Sabbath's biggest show ever. To be fair, this is partially due to the high grade cocaine Osbourne and his bandmates Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward had been snorting aboard the helicopter transporting them to San Bernardino County, but it was also due to the fact that, having had their spot on the the inaugural California Jam line-up confirmed just days earlier, Sabbath didn't have the luxury of over-thinking.
By any metric, the festival was a big deal. A 12-hour rock concert, co-headlined by British giants Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and featuring rising stars the Eagles and Earth, Wind & Fire, the event at the Ontario Motor Speedway track was to be broadcast across America by ABC Television and, with tickets priced at £10 in advance, it aimed to attract the largest paying audience ever gathered in one place for a concert. By the day of the show, 250,000 tickets had been sold.
Just three years on from their first American gig at a rundown Staten Island theatre, Black Sabbath's slot third from top on the bill, was both an acknowledgement of their popularity among American hard rock fans, and an indicator of their reputation as one of the must-see live bands of the era.
Just 48 hours earlier the quartet had been at home with their families in Birmingham, under the impression that their booking agent had removed them from the bill as a dispute between the co-headliners as to who should close the show threatened to derail the entire endeavour. It was only when the promoters informed Sabbath’s manager Patrick Meehan that the quartet’s non-appearance would result in a $250,000 lawsuit that Tony Iommi was tasked with waking his disbelieving bandmates in the dead of night to inform them that they needed to be in Los Angeles on the next outgoing flight.
"We didn't want to do the show, but our manager forced us to,” Osbourne admitted to Musician magazine in 1994. "He sent us over to America on economy class on the Friday.”
“Because we hadn’t seen one another for a couple of months, we hadn’t rehearsed," Ozzy told me in 2015. "I remember we had to do a run-through of our set in a hotel room with the guitars unplugged, without any amplifiers.”
“So then to fly in at the last minute to the biggest venue we’d ever seen was a bit nerve-wracking,” Tony Iommi told me that same year, recalling the gig that he described as "a bit hairy" in his autobiography Iron Man. “I remember being terrified, because it was being broadcast live on TV and radio across the States, and we knew that what we did on that stage was going to be documented and shown for the rest of our lives.”
“We couldn't really turn down such a high profile gig, however much I was enjoying my break back in England,” Geezer Butler recalled in his autobiography Into The Void, adding, “we knew we'd blow everyone else to death.”
Such was the noise which greeted Black Sabbath's arrival onstage that Bill Ward’s voice cracked as he attempted to cue in the band for set opener Tomorrow’s Dream, and he had to start the count a second time. But for the hour that followed, Sabbath barely put a foot wrong. “C'mon, let's have a party!” Ozzy squealed ahead of Children Of The Grave, and California's rock community were more than ready.
“I don’t really remember much about the day because I was coked out of my head,” Geezer Butler later told me. “We were all totally out of our skulls. But afterwards you think, Yeah, that wasn’t bad. We were a band that was given no chance, told to go and play ‘proper’ music, so days like that felt like we’d beaten all the odds.”
Interviewed after the show by the same ABC reporter who had greeted him at the airport, Ozzy Osbourne seemed genuinely awestruck by the reception the Birmingham band had received.
“I'm lost for words,” he admitted. “The kids just blow my mind, I can't believe it man, really. It was just like an ocean of people, and when all the people's arms were in the air... I'm just lost for words, baby, I really am.
“I'm just knocked out with it all. If every rock show, open air thing, could go half as good as this... this is what it's all about.”
As was so often the case with Sabbath, however, there was a rather bitter aftertaste to their triumph.
“Our manager gave us each $1000 and put us back on the plane, economy class,” Ozzy recalled to Musician magazine. “Many years later, we found out we had received $250,000 for the show. Our manager, of course, kept it all."
