April 6, 1974. Black Sabbath inflame America at their expense

On April 6, 1974, i Black Sabbath For 250,000 fans at the first edition (of two) of the California Jam Festival held at the Motor Speedway, Ontario, California festival.

It was a record concert that would remain for a long time in the memory of all participants, for both positive and negative reasons. But here is the true story of the greatest show of Black Sabbath always

“We go and play our music,” says Ozzy Osbourne to a young ABC TV journalist. “We don’t go to detonate the stage … let’s just play our music. Because this is what it is.” They did not know that that performance would weigh in their history and … on their bank account.

It is the afternoon of Saturday 6 April 1974 and, standing on the International Motor Track of Ontario, the twenty -five year old Ozzy seems extraordinarily relaxed in view of what will be the greatest show of Black Sabbath. To tell the truth, this is due in part to the excellent quality cocaine that Osbourne and his companions as a band Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward had snorted on board the helicopter who was transporting them to the County of San Bernardino, but also to the fact that, having had confirmation of their place in the Line Up of California Jam just a few days before, the Sabbath had had the luxury of Think about it too much.

From any point he looked at the thing, the festival was a great event, which at that moment was, by the will of the Deep Purple, also the one with the most powerful audio system used in a concert. A 12 -hour show, with headliners the British giants Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmerwith the participation of the nascent stars Eagles and e eArth, Wind & Fire. Furthermore, the event on the Motor Speedway Motor Speedway circuit would have been broadcast throughout America by the ABC Television by amplifying its scope and promotional aspect and, with tickets at the price of a few dollars (10 in presale, 15 in the cashier), aimed to attract the largest paying audience ever gathered in a single place for a concert.

The day of the show had been sold 250,000 tickets. Just three years after their first 0 American with a dilapidated Staten Island theater, the name of the Black Sabbath in third place on the billboard was a recognition of their popularity among the fans of the American hard rock, and an indicator of their reputation as a unmissable band of the time.

Yet only 48 hours earlier the quartet was at home with their families in Birmingham, with the impression that their booking agent had removed them from the billboard, given that a dispute among the co-headliners on who should close the show threatened to make the entire company derail. Only when the promoters informed Patrick Meehan, manager of the Sabbath, that the lack of presence of the quartet would have led to a cause of $ 250,000, Tony Iommi was commissioned to wake up his incredulous bandmates in the middle of the night to inform them that they had to be in Los Angeles with the first flight at the start.

“We didn’t want to be the show, but our manager forced us,” Osbourne admitted to the magazine Musician in 1994. “He sent us to America in the economic class on Friday”.

“Since we hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months, we hadn’t done the tests,” said Ozzy in 2015. “I remember that we had to do a test of our set in a hotel room with the guitars disconnected, without amplifiers”.

“So fly to the last minute towards the largest audience that we had ever seen was a little unnerving,” said TOny Iommi The same year, remembering the concert that described as “a little lively” in his autobiography “Iron Man”. “I remember I was terrified, because it was broadcast live by TV and radio to all the United States, and we knew that what we had done on that stage would be documented and shown for the rest of our life”.

“We couldn’t refuse such a high profile concert, even if I was enjoying my break in England,” he remembered Geezer Butler In his autobiography “Into the void”, adding: “We knew we would have all the others die”.

The noise by the public who welcomed the arrival of the Black Sabbath on the stage was such that Bill Ward’s voice cracked while trying to start the band for the opening of the set, “Tomorrow’s Dream” and had to start the count a second time. But for the hour he followed, the Sabbaths were not wrong almost a blow. “Come on, let’s party!”. He screamed Ozzy before “Children of the Grave” and the Californian rock community was more than ready.

“I don’t remember much of that day because I was struggled with cocaine,” he said Geezer Butler. “We were all completely out of my mind. But after thinking:” Yes, it wasn’t bad. “We were a group to whom no chance had been given, to whom she had been said to go play music ‘as you have to, so on days like that it seemed to have beaten all the chances”. Interviewed after the show by the ABC journalist himself who had welcomed him at the airport, Ozzy Osbourne seemed sincerely impressed by the welcome received by the Birmingham band.

“I have no words,” he admitted. “The boys leave me speechless, I can’t believe it, really. It was like an ocean of people, and when all the arms of the people were in the air … I really have no words. I am really stunned by all this. If all rock shows, outdoors, could only be fine half of this … this is the sense of everything”.

As often happened to the Sabbath, however, their triumph had a rather bitter aftertaste. “Our manager gave us 1000 dollars to the head and removing us on the plane, in the economic class,” Ozzy recalled to Musician magazine. “Many years later, we discovered that we had received $ 250,000 for the show. Obviously our manager was held.”

As for the California Jam Festival, a second edition was held on March 18, 1978, which was attended by Aerosmith, Foreigner, Heart, Mahogany Rush, Dave Mason, Jean-Michel Jarre, Rubicon, Santana, Bob Welch and Ted Nugent in front of 350,000 paying

The registration of the concert of April 6, 1974 of Deep Purple (one of the 28 dates in America of the “Burn” promotion tour) were published on the album “California jamming“Released in 1996 and on the video”Live in California 74“(VHS from 1981 and reprinted on DVD in 2005).

This is the lineup of the performance of the Black Sabbath

Tomorrow’s Dream
Sweet Leaf
Killing Yourself to Live
War Pigs
Snowblind
Cadabra saus
Sometimes I’m happy
Supernaut
Iron Man
Orchid
Paranoid

Encore

Embryo
Children of the Grave