Black Sabbath’s Vol.4 is more than just a great album. It is a monument to excess. And if one track in particular sums up the craziness of this band’s life in the early ’70s, it’s the weird instrumental with the joke title: FX.
As Rolling Stone accurately described it: “Vol. 4 is one of those difficult ‘cocaine’ albums that bands were fond of making back then. Sabbath was rich, bored, huge in America, and it was the Seventies—you do the math.”
During the summer of 1972, the four members of the band lived together in a mansion in Los Angeles, and it was there that the songs for Vol.4 were written and rehearsed.
As Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi recalled in an interview with Classic Rock: “We lived in a beautiful house in Bel Air. It had a ballroom and bar leading out to the garden, and we rehearsed in the bar area.
“It was a big room. We had the gear set up there, but we never thought for a minute that all the sound was going out across the valley!
“It was dead quiet outside. You could hear a pin drop at night.
“We used to write in the day and jam at night. It was a great atmosphere. We had a fabulous time.
“In this ballroom there was a grand piano. I’d never played piano before. But that’s where I leant to play, and the first thing I wrote on it was Changes.”
A beautiful ballad, Changes was a radical departure for Sabbath.
And there were other experiments on Vol.4.
The album’s opening track, Wheels Of Confusion, has the complexity of progressive rock.
The heaviest number, Supernaut, turns funky halfway through.
And then there is FX. 1min 44sec of odd noises from Iommi’s guitar.
As Iommi remembered it, the band were working at The Record Plant studio when FX was created on the spot.
“It was a mad time,” Iommi told Classic Rock. “We used to have this coke flown in especially, in sealed containers, sealed with wax. You’d peel the wax off and there are these phials of coke.
“We’d sit up all night. We used to make our own entertainment.
“And there was one day when we were in the studio and I took my guitar off and put it on the stand, and as I put it down it went, Boing! And that became FX.
“For the life of me I can’t think why we ended up taking our clothes off, but that’s how we recorded that track, prancing around, naked, banging the guitar."
“It was one of those stupid things that you do," Iommi said. "We were stoned, of course.
"We were always joking around. That was our release - to joke around or play jokes on each other."
