

The fusion of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath yielded some very nice songs. (They even had a mistakenly sized Stonehenge prop.) All that said, Born Again is far from a musical disaster. The demon baby artwork has been called the single ugliest album cover of all time, and the tour was such a disaster it inspired This Is Spinal Tap. This extremely brief period of Black Sabbath has been mocked for years. He was clearly the best man for the job, and in 1983 they entered the studio to cut Born Again. Luckily for them, Deep Purple were on hiatus at this point, and Ian Gillan was looking for a gig. Doing it a third time seemed virtually impossible. Scoring a huge album with a second singer was almost a miracle. This was their second high-profile vocalist to leave the band in just three years. This was the last album with Dio for over a decade, and it began a long period of decline for Sabbath.īlack Sabbath briefly went into crisis mode when Ronnie James Dio quit the group. The competition was probably a good thing, and tracks like "The Sign of the Southern Cross" and "The Mob Rules" rank up there with anything in the Sabbath catalog. When they released Heaven and Hell Ozzy had yet to kick off his solo career, but by the time of Mob Rules he was scoring massive hits and packing arenas. Drummer Bill Ward checked out midway through the Heaven and Hell tour, so Vinny Appice took his place behind the kit. Heaven and Hell is an absolute classic, and just one year later they followed it up with Mob Rules. Ronnie James Dio infused Black Sabbath with incredible energy when he joined the band in 1980. "It was a bitter time for us." Despite the endless problems, the LP has some very nice moments, particularly the title track and "A Hard Road." "It's hard to relate to that album," says Iommi. They started from scratch, but nobody was really happy.

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"We have a studio booked and no singer!" They played with Walker on a single TV show and cut a few songs with him, but then Ozzy came to his senses and returned. "We were grasping at straws," Iommi wrote in his memoir Iron Man. A burned-out Ozzy quit the group shortly before recording, so Tony Iommi turned to Dave Walker. The Ramones opened for them on their last tour, and the band started to realize their sound was a little passé. It was their eighth album in as many years and they were simply tapped out, not to mention terribly hobbled by cocaine and alcohol abuse. The original lineup of Black Sabbath was on its last legs when they went into the studio to cut Never Say Die! in early 1978. Image Credit: Courtesy of Vertigo Records
