At their peak, Black Sabbath were perhaps the most hell-raising group out there. With many drug and alcohol-fuelled capers to their name, a number of the tales from this period are unfathomable to the contemporary audience. Arguably, the most bonkers stories of this collection are the anecdotes of the horrendous pranks the group played on drummer Bill Ward.
From setting the sticksman on fire to covering his body with gold paint à la Goldfinger, to the point that he was urgently rushed to hospital, Ward suffered some appalling treatment at his bandmates’ hands. This relationship is made a bit more incomprehensible when noting that sometimes, he was fully open to being pranked.
Perhaps the most bizarre of all of these instances is recalled in guitarist Tony Iommi’s book, where he details an incident when, after taking a break from unrelentingly pranking his drummer, Ward approached him and asked if everything was OK due to this strange sense of calm. Following this, after the group got up to their usual narcotics-based business, allegedly, frontman Ozzy Osbourne – the undisputed ‘Prince of Darkness’ – nearly poisoned Ward through his penis.
This story is from 1972 when Black Sabbath were living in a Bel Air mansion, with copious amounts of cocaine underpinning everything they did. This was to the extent that they even wanted to call the album they were working on at the time Snowblind. However, due to the controversy surrounding the drug, the quartet compromised with the record label and went for the tile of Vol. 4 instead.
Looking back on that hedonistic period, Osbourne wrote in his 2010 memoir, I Am Ozzy: “For me, Snowblind was one of Black Sabbath’s best-ever albums—although, the record company wouldn’t let us keep the title, ‘cos in those days cocaine was a big deal, and they didn’t want the hassle of a controversy.”
Speaking to Rolling Stone some years later, Osbourne recalled a version of the cocaine-fulled prank he pulled on Ward: “I see this aerosol can and squirt his dick with it. He starts screaming and falls down. I look at the can, and it says, WARNING: DO NOT SPRAY ON SKIN – HIGHLY TOXIC. I poisoned Bill through his dick!”
However, in his memoir, Osbourne relayed a different version, attempting to absolve himself of the responsibility and instead placing it at Iommi’s door. He claimed: “One day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks around the other side of the railing, and when Bill starts pissing over the railing, he sprays his dick with it. You should have heard the scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing and starts rolling down the hillside.”
He added comically: “‘Ah, he’ll be all right,’ I said. And he was, eventually. Although he did have a blue dick for a while.”
