Not every band lineup is meant to go the distance forever. As much as it might be fun to play music with a group of friends, there comes a point where everyone doesn’t see eye-to-eye anymore, forcing the group to be pulled in different directions before everything concaves in on itself. While Black Sabbath may have already been a rock and roll institution before the 1970s even finished, the decade’s final years spelt the end of the line for them with one album.
Then again, it seemed impossible for an outfit like Black Sabbath to succeed in the modern age. Compared to the other artists who were looking to make music based on blues progressions, the feral riffs emanating from Tony Iommi’s guitar sent shivers down the backbone of every rock fan who was born to listen to something heavier than the likes of Led Zeppelin.
Although Iommi may have been the ringleader behind the band, it took every member to make them superstars, from Geezer Butler’s nimble bass playing to Bill Ward adding a sense of jazzy swing into their repertoire with his innate sense of rhythm. Once Ozzy Osbourne started bellowing from above it all, they had a concoction of demented fury that no one else had, propelling songs like ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Paranoid’ up the charts.
While the group would continue to innovate their sound throughout projects like Master of Reality and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, they didn’t want to be confined to strictly heavy metal music. Throughout their best albums, help from artists like Rick Wakeman from Yes made for the greatest left turns the band ever made, including their attempts at sounding truly demonic on songs like ‘Sabbra Cadabra’.
Once they got out of their aggression over shoddy business deals on Sabotage, they weren’t willing to compromise anymore when walking into the studio for Technical Ecstasy. Instead of the progressive or metal sides of their sound, many of the songs on the record reflected their exhaustion over the past few years, putting decent songs like ‘Dirty Women’ next to mediocre exercises like ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Doctor’.
When talking about the album later on, Butler recalled that the project was the moment where the core ethos of Sabbath fell apart, telling Guitar World, “That was the ‘beginning of the end’ album, that one. We were managing ourselves because we couldn’t trust anybody. Everybody was trying to rip us off, including the lawyers that we’d hired to get us out of our legal mess. It was really just getting to us around then, and we didn’t know what we were doing.”
Osbourne had seemed to fully check out halfway through the album, leading to Ward taking the vocals on the Beatles-esque track ‘It’s Alright’. Although it sold decent numbers, it would mark the beginning of Osbourne’s dismissal from the band.
Not showing up to further rehearsals and barely taking care of himself, Osbourne would be let go after the follow-up project Never Say Die in favour of Ronnie James Dio, who took over for the group’s 1980 album Heaven and Hell. Osbourne would eventually find solo success with songs like ‘Crazy Train’, but Technical Ecstasy was when everything stopped being fun.
