Seattle, March 1972, under a grey gunmetal sky. Black Sabbath are on their biggest US tour yet. Private planes and limos and all their chicks for free. Plus all that blow. Or ‘Charlie’ as they called it back then. Sabbath’s third and most recent album, Master Of Reality, had become their first US Top 10 hit. They were still in their early twenties, and they weren’t even peaking yet. The future was theirs to fuck with.
A hundred shows into an eight-month tour, four nights earlier they had watched Joe Frazier become the first man to beat Muhammed Ali in a boxing ring. Now they were at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle – famous for being built on stilts by the water’s edge, making it an ideal spot for fishing from your hotel room window. The Edgewater was also scene of the now infamous Led Zeppelin ‘mud shark’ episode, where a willing groupie reputedly agreed to be tied-up and pleasured with a fish for the amusement of various wasted band members and roadies.
Every band that stayed there since wanted their own shark adventure. Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne took the shark he caught and hauled it into his bathtub, filled it with water, then forgot about it and left for the gig. When he returned several hours later and found the shark dead, he began disemboweling it with a knife, leaving blood and fish entrails all over the walls. Guitarist Tony Iommi, meanwhile, who had also caught a shark, managed to hurl it through Bill Ward’s hotel room window, where it landed on the hapless drummer’s bed. “He was very surprised,” Iommi deadpanned. “Not pleasantly…”
At the end of the US tour the band were given a long weekend off, a three-day gap before flying to Japan for two shows at the Koseinenkin concert hall in Osaka. It’s the venue where Deep Purple would make their Japanese debut three months later, and tape the shows for their legendary live double album. Sabbath could have beaten Purple to it. Except that they were denied entry visas because of their various criminal convictions: Ozzy for theft, Tony
