The lost jam session of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin

In the 1970s, there were no bigger or more influential rock bands than Black Sabbath and gods Led Zeppelin. But any rivalry between the two bands was overshadowed by their long-standing friendship which culminated in one of the greatest lost jam sessions in history.

In 2016 Ozzy Osbourne he told Classic Rock: “We knew Robert Plant and John Bonham from our days in Birmingham. We had heard Robert with his first bands and he told us he was going to join the Yardbirds. Then one day we were at a club in London called Blazes and the DJ played a song. So I went up to him and said: ‘What’s the name of the band that’s playing? That’s fucking Robert Plant singing, he’s a big deal in Birmingham’. She said: ‘It’s the Yardbirds, but they just changed the name to Led Zeppelin.’ I thought, ‘Fuck!'”

THE Black Sabbathat the beginning of their career, they played with the drummer of Led Zeppelin, John Bonhamas recalled by the guitarist Tony Iommialso on Classic Rock, also in 2016. “When we were playing clubs, sometimes John would join us and want to come on stage and play with us. The first time we said, ‘Okay.’ So he got up and played Bill’s drum kit, destroying it completely. Bill was furious, so from then on, every time John came up and asked, ‘Can I try too?’, Bill would say, ‘No,’ and not him. allowed you to play.”

As reported Dave Everley in his Loudersound storyIommi said in 2014: “There was a rivalry between Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, but not a bad rivalry. We never misbehaved with each other. We didn’t know Deep Purple well, but we were friends with Led Zeppelin.”

It was during the making of the album of Black Sabbath “Sabotage”in 1975, that the two groups finally met in the recording studio. This is the memory of Tony Iommi: “We were recording at Morgan Studios in London and John came to visit us. He brought Planty and John Paul Jones with him, Jimmy Page was the only one who wasn’t there. They came in and John said, ‘Let’s play ‘Supernaut’!’, because he loved that song. So he sat behind the drums and we started playing it. Obviously he didn’t play it perfectly, but we carried on and had a jam session.”

Robert Plant observed from the sidelines, Bonham was the main architect of the jam. Luckily, the battery of Bill Ward that time it was not destroyed by Bonzo’s impetuosity. Iommi continues his memory: “We were just improvising, making things up. Our recording session completely fell apart.” That jam between Black Sabbath And Led Zeppelin was also remembered by Bill Ward in 2011 with Rock Cellar: “Within about 30 minutes it escalated into something really crazy. Bonzo was kicking my drums! I can still hear him playing that intro on the hi-hat, over and over again. He was playing ‘Supernaut’ in a completely different way, screaming ‘Supernaut!’ pretty much all the time. It was crazy.”

Second
Ozzy Osbourne
the surprise visit to the studio of
Led Zeppelin
he had an ulterior motive. “They were signing bands to their record label. They’d already signed Bad Company, so John, Robert and John Paul Jones came to the studio to try to get us too. But we’d just had a fucking war with our manager, so we told him to fuck off.”

Tony Iommi
he stated that that jam session was recorded, but the session of
Black Zeppelin
unfortunately it has been lost. “The tapes are probably somewhere, but I don’t know where. And they ruined our session anyway.”
Bill Ward
on the contrary, maintains without any doubt that the version of
‘Supernaut’
Of
John Bonham
and the entire session, was never recorded in any way. “There was no musical contamination between the two bands and nothing was recorded. I think at some point Geezer and Robert wrote something together, but it was just a personal thing between them. But the Black Zeppelin recordings, as people like to call them, never existed.”