Black Sabbath’s fourth album, the appropriately-named “Vol. 4,” cost somewhere between $60,000 to $65,000 to make. That’s $10,000 to $15,000 less than what the band spent on cocaine while making the record. In case you need us to do the math, that’s $75,000 worth of the white stuff, and if inflation is taken into account, that’s more than $477,000 in today’s money. And while one may think that Ozzy Osbourne was doing most of the drugs at that time, given his penchant for self-destructive behavior, Tony Iommi argued otherwise, telling The Guardian in 2013 that everyone in the band was getting loaded in one way or another. “I was doing coke left, right and center, and quaaludes, and God knows what else,” the guitarist recalled. “We used to have [cocaine] flown in by private plane.”
According to bassist Geezer Butler, it was during the making of “Vol. 4” when he realized his drug use was spiraling out of control — as Sabbath’s main lyricist, he understood that it wasn’t a good idea to create music while totally wasted. He did, however, admit to The Guardian that Osbourne’s overindulgence was a problem during the making of “Vol. 4,” sharing that because the frontman wasn’t required to play any instruments, he’d be “[at] the bar getting legless or doing all kinds of things” while the rest of the band was writing songs.
