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DISGRACELAND
Black Sabbath: Satanists, Severed Limbs, Dismembered Fingers, Mountains of Cocaine and the Invention of Heavy Metal
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Jake Brennan
Double Elvis. So one thing you probably don't know about me is that I just picked up golf and as you can likely assume, I am horrible at it. Okay? That said, I'm also loving it. And I don't care how annoying it is to be trapped behind me on the course. I might not be banging any holes in one anytime soon, but I am banging back. 5 hour energy transfusion shots or on the course. That's right. Inspired by the unofficial golf cocktail, this energy shot tastes great. Hints of grape, ginger, lemon and and and it's all without alcohol, but with as much caffeine as a premium cup of coffee. So look, if you're playing behind me and I just missed my chip shot for like the fourth time a chill B know that I'm doing the best I can, man. I'm hitting that five Hour Energy transfusion to keep me going as fast as I can and you should be doing the same. It's easy to stash your five Hour Energy anywhere in your bag. Ready for your early morning tea time, a late round, whatever five Hour Energy is there to help you tee off. Five Hour Energy Transfusion flavor is available online or in stores. Head to www.fivehourenergy.com to order yours. Today it's hot guys. Summer is here in full force down in the part of the country where I'm at. I'm emptying out my closet. I'm reorganizing and donating a bunch of clothes I don't wear anymore. What do I wear? What? What am I Constantly going back to? My Quint short sleeve T shirts. Quint's base layer T shirts are great. They're lightweight and they look good if I'm going out to dinner or if I'm just chilling at home working throughout the day. I rock the black. I rock the green. I rock the navy. These are high quality T shirts. Like everything else at Quint, high quality and reasonably priced. Quince works directly with top artisans to cut out the middlemen and give us luxury pieces without the markups. I've even turned my wife onto Quince. Quince has 100% European linen shorts and dresses for $30. Looks, swimwear, Italian leather platform sandals, and so much more. And again, the best part, everything with quints is half the cost of similar brands. Give your summer closet an upgrade with quint. Go to quint.com disgraceland for free shipping on your 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C E.com disgraceland to get free shipping and 365 day returns quints.com disgraceland Disgraceland 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 Satanists. Despite composing songs that 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 in 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 16, 1970. And that was the day Black Sabbath was to touch down in San Francisco for the start of their first US tour. It inspired a literal parade of Satanists 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. Satanist severed limbs, dismembered 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 his 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 sauced. Singer Ozzy Osbourne was with him doing the same. Bassist Geezer 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 protest 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 US 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 M16 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 Geezer. Tony knew Geezer was mentally notating it all, storing it up for lyrics he would one day write. Geezer needed fodder beyond the horror and sci fi films he devoured for inspiration. The real life horror detailed from the US 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 goldmine 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 profiteers 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 the 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 co worker to send down the next sheet of metal from the giant industrial sized press. His co worker was off elsewhere and Tony was impatient. Get the shift done, get the out of Dodge. With his band, 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 and management got wind of what he was doing, they'd likely fire his co worker 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 trance, 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. Weld, 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. 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 Reinhardt, 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. Leg. Django didn't let it hold him back. And Tony Iommi was inspired. He wouldn't 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 chords. And 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 in 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 basis when she married him and become Christine McPhee. Those Midlands bands with their blues and their trad tendencies would never welcome Tony Iommi and his new heaviness onto their side of the street. There was something darker in Tony's playing now. Something totally unreleased, related to R B and pub blues standards. Something more akin to the darkness of bluesman Robert Johnson. Something much heavier than anything anyone had ever heard before. Something now anchored in evil. So the convenience of being able to pay for almost everything these days digitally, yeah, it's easy. But guys, I don't know about you, it's also very easy to lose track of what I'm spending my money on. 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Over a million households are using it, not just the Brennan household. Wall Street Journal named it the best budgeting app of 2025 and it has over 30,000 five star reviews. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Use code disgraceland@monimalmoney.com in your browser for half off your first year. That's 50% of your first year at monarch money.com with code disgraceland hey discos, if you want more Disgraceland, be sure to listen every Thursday to our weekly After Party Bonus episode where we dig deeper into the stories we tell in our full weekly episodes. In these After Party Bonus episodes we dive into your voicemails and texts, emails and DMs and discuss your thoughts on the wildlives and behavior of the artists and entertainers that we're all obsessed with. So leave me a message at 617-906-6638 disgracelandpodmail.com orisgracelandpod on the socials and join the conversation every Thursday in our After Party Bonus episode. Ready for a new way to play? Chumba Casino lets you spin and play your way to fun anytime, anywhere. Enjoy classic slots, blackjack and live casino games, all with just a few clicks. Have fun with no fuss. Simply sign up and receive your free welcome bonus plus daily login rewards to keep the fun going. Let's Chumba no purchase necessary. VGW Group voidware prohibited by law 21 TNCs apply 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 bales of hay with their torches and stampeding over their shocked 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 the 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 sans danse Macabre, based on the Henry Casalis poem describing a visit from the devil to a graveyard at midnight on Halloween. Halloween to summon the dead from their graves and join him in a dance. The piece's macabre subject matter did not stir the crowd into violence. It was the sound of the piece, more specifically, its composition, the scoratura, 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 inspired violence, evil. The most unholy of sounds was attained by flattening the fifth note in the chord progression. Typically, the fifth note is deployed for tension. Flattening the fifth increased attention and added an element of gloom, of unease, that 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 performers, performances featuring the tritone resulted in violence. The tritone, in addition to being outlawed, became known as diabolos in musica, 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, bassist Geezer Butler, sat on his sofa, very stoned. From the stereo, the classical orchestral suite Planets by Gustav Holz blared. The first movement's title, the Bringer of War, caught Geezer's attention. The heaviness of it reminded him of the heaviness of Vietnam. Geezer sat listening, cradling his bass and casually played along to the piece. Tony picked up on Geezer's playing, and rather than anchor the melody with with root notes like most bass players would, Geezer 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 Ozzy and Bill. Up to this point they were just another blues band from the Midlands. They played under the name Pokotuck 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 new riff was something else. It had promise. That night, Geezer sat alone in his bedroom with the riff echoing in his head. He read as Aleister Crowley. Geezer, like most of London's hip underground, was obsessed with the early 20th century occultist. Geezer 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's 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 Geezer's Catholic upbringing. It fascinated him. The darkness, the evil. Gizer took it a step further and mixed among the religious imagery on his walls, Satanic images, inverted crosses, drawings of Satan himself in a picture of Crowley. 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 Hold's planets in a distant chorus in Earth, eerie whispered incantation. Geezer's spine straightened. The hairs on his arm rose up. A breeze bristled over his chilled skin. And when Geezer 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 goat's head, sacrificing virgins, ancient gods of the underworld devouring their children. And the picture of Aleister Crowley staring down at him with his stony face and deep bottomless black eyes. Geezer broke from Crowley's stare and looked to the side of his bed. There, a figure in black. Geezer's heart forced itself up into his throat. He left from the bed, flipped on his light and the figure was gone. Geezer 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 rift 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 in this new approach, this darkness. Diabolosa 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 riff of the tritone, of the imagery in 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 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 Bros. Released the album in North America. But when the PR department pointed out that launching a Black Sabbath 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 LaBianca murders. Murders where 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 Beals Helter Skelter. When the timing of both Black Sabbath's tour and Charles Manson's trial was discovered to coincide, due to fear of bad press, Warner Bros. Abruptly canceled Sabbath's US tour. But Anton lavey didn't get the message. Lavey 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 Aleister Crowley's mantle in the the occult in the new century. Lavey 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 funerals, and in coordination with Warner Brothers Records, planned a Black Sabbath parade to kick off Black Sabbath's US Tour in San Francisco, where Black Sabbath were supposed to make their U.S. debut at the famed Fillmore 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. Lavey and the Satanists had taken Crowley'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 lavey and his Satanist, and whatever other freaky San Franciscan riff raff Levey 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 Folsom Street. Anton lavey was at the head as master of the 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 scepter. He towered over his assembled freaks, fellow Satanists, elaborately dressed drag queens, a group of juggling little people, fancy boys in hot pans sashaying alongside the paraders. A Mexican mariachi band marching in step with the large scale floats assembled for the occasion. A grand A group of Black Panthers made the scene, clearly confused by the parade's name. A flatbed truck with a Hee 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. Satanists. What he thought, hath Black Sabbath wrought a group of Satanists and freaks marching in the name of his band was shocking, yes, but not nearly 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. Epic views, waterfall, mists, summit, sunsets. It's all better outside. And with alltrails, you can discover the best of nature. With over 450,000 trails around the world. Download the free app today and find your next adventure. Thanks for selling your car to Carvana. Here's your check. Whoa. When did I get here? What do you mean? I swear it was just moments ago that I accepted a great offer from Carvana online. I must have time traveled to the future. It was just moments ago. We do same day pickup. Here's your check for that great offer. It is the future. It's. It's the present. And just the convenience of Carvana. Sorry to blow your mind. It's all good. Happens all the time. Sell your car the convenient way to Carvana. Pick up. Times may vary and fees may apply. Just got a new puppy or kitten. Congrats. But also yikes. Between crates, beds, toys, treats, and those first few vet visits, you've probably already dropped a small fortune. Which is where Lemonade Pet insurance comes comes in. It helps cover vet costs so you can focus on what's best for your new pet. The coverage is customizable, sign up is quick and easy, and your claims are handled in as little as three seconds. Lemonade offers a package specifically for puppies and kittens. Get a'llemonade.com pet your future self will thank you. Your pet won't. They don't know what insurance is. American newspapers were a trip. 1971. A new decade, a dark dawn. The stories 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 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 shtick, some sort of thing that you identified with and that identified you as being unique among your neighbors, friends, co workers, 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, Yippee Zippies, Black Panthers, White Panthers, Vietnam vets, heroin addicts, Hell's Angels, Soul brothers, Soul Sisters, Hare Krishna's witches, and of course, a growing number of Satanists. They were all there, milling about the lobby in most of the major American cities that Black Sabbath visited. Looking to score, looking for the party, looking for that eternal buzz. Looking to meet a rock star. A rock star. Possess a rock star. Tony sat quietly in the corner, dark glasses on his features. Even the. Even the silhouette of his high cheekbones were mostly hidden. His hat perched low, head to toe in black. He was remarkably inconspicuous amongst the hubbub happening around him. It was Check In Time Crew and members of his band and other bands on the bill that evening. The Jay 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 for 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 below the headline. Girl sacrificed in Witchwright. Turns out they found the rest of the girl in an area off of Wak Ton 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 forestwood placed about a 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. The Hare Krishnas danced about with shaved heads and colorful robes. The groupie shifted awkwardly and revealing outfits. A pimp eyed the groupies with thoughts of recruitment. 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 necklace, a modest silver chain with an inverted cross. Satanist. 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 Satanists 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 out into the audience. Gone. Later, on tour in other cities, more Satanists made their presence known, as well as their love of the 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 shows again. Most mysterious were the Crowley adherents, Lavey's Satanists. The band received fan Mail written in blood. One fan in LA 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 in 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, and 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 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 smudged, obscured. 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, 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 Ham 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 in 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, rather treated 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 in crates the size of studio cabinet speakers. Coke was everywhere around Black Sabbath in the 1970s, just as it had been around Geezer Butler, one time obsession, Aleister 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 stoned so often that his bandmates regularly set his beard on fire to wake him up. Geezer 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, Geezer and Ozzy 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 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 fare, everyday behavior, for Tony Iommi's bandmates, nights especially for Ozzy. Ozzy Osbourne's behavior was now a constant issue as far as his bandleader, Tony Iommi, 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. Despite the murky song title and some inane lyrics that sound like Vanilla Fudge playing doggerel tribute to Aleister 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 four, 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 Geezer 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 Satanists. But it didn't matter. The incendiary lyrics of After Forever and the steamrolling heavy hookiness of their latest album's other standout tracks, Children of the Grave, into the Void, Snowblind and Changes the 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 Osbourn. 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 Satanists, 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. Ozzy had come back, but Ozzy's behavior was too much, even by Black Sabbath standards. Back during their first stint in Los Angeles, Ozzy'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 AC DC and wildly talented like Van Halen. By rock star standards, Zeppelin's frontman, Robert Plant, was practically an intellectual. The who singer Roger Daltrey commanded respect. Singer Bon 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 Osbourne 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 fistfight with Geezer. 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 Iommi'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 Iommi unceremoniously kicked his front man out of his band. The main maid was summoned to pack his bags. Someone called the car service for him. Ozzy was given 96 grand severance in a low rent apartment in Hollywood to stay in to nurse his 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 Geezer's bed in the middle of the night. There, then gone. Tony had no regrets. A new singer, short in stature, but big in voice and determination. Ronnie James Dio of the band Rainbow was brought into Sabbath's ranks to lead the charge for the kids, against the critics and further away from the Satanists. And Ronnie James Dio would do exactly that. With the first Black Sabbath album released without Ozzy Osborne and with do at the helm co writing material with the newly inspired Tony Iommi, 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 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 case 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 Satanist, innocent looking, round eyes, that look on his face, it was somehow familiar to Tony. It seemed to sit I didn't mean to do it, I swear. Such a disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is a special Halloween episode of Disgrace. Alright, thanks for checking out this episode of Disgraceland. This being a Halloween episode, we indulged in more poetic license than normal. So who know 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 Ozzy 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 Ozzy 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@gracelandpod.com if you're listening. As a Disgraceland 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 Membership members can listen to every single episode of Disgraceland 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 membership for details, rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, Tick Tock, Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Pod Rockarola He's a bad, bad man.