From '01: The original members of Black Sabbath look back on 30 years of demonic riffing.

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Osbourne's performances with Earth may be lost to the mists of time, but there's no question that he was the ideal frontman for the original Black Sabbath. Against the bludgeoning onslaught of Sabbath's music, Ozzy worked his limited vocal range and hyperactive demeanor for all they were worth, bringing a much-needed sense of humanity to Black Sabbath's music. On record, Osbourne came off not like a high satanic priest or a metallic sex god, but as a regular shmoe who'd unwittingly become embroiled in situations far more complex and frightening than he could have ever imagined. Having been raised in the shadow of the atomic bomb and the escalating war in Vietnam, a large segment of the rock audience could certainly relate.

Onstage, Osbourne was a demented cheerleader, a wobbling dervish who thought nothing of mooning a crowd, or-in one famous case where the band was joined mid-set by a troupe of Belgian strippers -- whipping out his member to enjoy a drunken wank. Offstage, his ability to find (or manufacture) trouble quickly became legendary. Iommi often had to lock him in a backstage closet or dressing room before a show, just to ensure that the singer would still be around when it was time to take the stage. On other occasions, a passed-out Osbourne would have to be retrieved from behind a locked hotel room door by Iommi and various members of the road crew.

"I've always looked at it like, 'Some body's got to do it,' " Iommi says of his Oz-catching days. "And, unfortunately, it was me! Events like that probably happened in every other band -- only more so in our band, because of the people in it."

Butler agrees. "I think Tony was the great leveler of the band," he laughs. "He sort of steered the ship in the right direction. If there were four Ozzys, we never would've gotten anywhere!"

Butler's all-time favorite Ozzy anecdote dates from 1977, when Sabbath was touring Europe behind the Technical Ecstacy album. "We were in this hotel restaurant in Germany," he recalls. "We were drinking these liter mugs of ultra-strong German beer, so Ozzy was absolutely legless by the time we'd finished our lunch. We'd gone in there around noon; by four o'clock, Ozzy couldn't get up anymore, so he just started pissing under the table. We were like, 'Oh, come on, let's go if he's going to start all this!' So we got him up and dragged him to the elevators.

"Just as we got there, this busload of American tourists came in. They were all old people, in their sixties and seventies, and they were all being checked in by their tour guide. Ozzy gets in the elevator, and just as the doors are closing I see him starting to take down his trousers. I was like, 'Aw, no!' And then, instead of going up, the elevator goes down. By the time it comes back, all these old pensioners have been checked in and are waiting for the lift. It comes back up from the basement, the doors open, and there's Ozzy, going 'Unnngh!' with a great big pile behind him! He looks up, and everybody's like [gasps in horror]! Nobody said anything; the doors just closed, and he went up!"

"The great elevators of Europe had yet to be defiled in late 1969, when Black Sabbath entered the studio to record its self-titled debut album. The owner of a Birmingham blues club, manager Jim Simpson scored the band a deal with Fontana Records. Unconvinced of its new signing's commercial potential, the label decreed that the band's first single would be a cover of "Evil Woman (Don't Play Your Games with Me)," already a U.S. Top 20 hit for Crow, a blues-rock band from Minneapolis. When that release (mercifully) tanked, Fontana fobbed Sabbath off onto Vertigo, an up-and-coming progressive rock label. Recorded in less than a day, with then-unknown producer Rodger Bain at the controls, Black Sabbath shocked the English record industry by hurtling into the U.K. Top 10. Raw, bluesy and devastatingly heavy, Black Sabbath served notice that a new day was dawning for hard rock.

"I think that first album is just absolutely incredible," says Ward. "It's naive, and there's an absolute sense of unity -- it's not contrived in any way, shape or form. We weren't old enough to be clever. I love all of it, including all of its mistakes!"

"It was recorded very quick," Iommi remembers. "We wrote it over a period of months in Switzerland and Germany. We would play this club in Switzerland where we'd do five to seven spots a day -- play three quarters of an hour, take a fifteen-minute break, then play another three quarters of an hour, and so on. We had just about enough songs for one set. So we had to start making things up, and it was a great experience for us, because we used to jam, and all sorts of ideas came out of it." (When Iommi's painted Strat broke down after recording "Wicked World," he tracked the rest of the album using his spare Gibson SG. Since then, the SG has been his guitar of choice.)

On the strength of newly minted classics like "Black Sabbath," "The Wizard" and "N.I.B.," Black Sabbath (released in the States on Warner Bros.) soon made the Top 25 on the U.S. album charts as well, though the band quickly acquired as many detractors as they had fans. Rumors that Sabbath were satanically inclined were fanned by the record company's inclusion of an inverted cross on the album's inner sleeve, not to mention the line, "My name is Lucifer/Please take my hand," from "N.I.B."

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