Sabotage is the sixth studio album by the English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, released on 28 July 1975. The album was recorded in the midst of a legal battle with the band's former manager, Patrick Meehan. The stress that resulted from the band's ongoing legal woes infiltrated the recording process, inspiring the album's title. It was co-produced by guitarist Tony Iommi and Mike Butcher. "It was probably the only album ever made with lawyers in the studio," said drummer Bill Ward. Iommi credits those legal troubles for the album's angry, heavier sound. According to the book How Black Was Our Sabbath, "The recording sessions would usually carry on into the middle of the night. Tony Iommi was working really hard on the production side of things with the band's co-producer Mike Butcher, and he was spending a lot of time working out his guitar sounds. Bill, too, was experimenting with the drums, especially favouring the 'backwards cymbal' effect." Osbourne, however, grew frustrated with how long Black Sabbath albums were taking to record, writing in his autobiography, "Sabotage took about four thousand years."
According to Iommi, the Sabotage sessions were the scene of a legendary jam session between Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. Iommi's recollection may be inaccurate, however, as records show that Zeppelin were on tour in the US at the time Sabotage was being recorded. Ward's recollection of the exact timing of the Zeppelin jam session is also fuzzy. "I don't even know what album we were working on", the drummer explained. "But one of John (Bonham)'s favourite songs was 'Supernaut' – so, when they came down to the studio, he wanted to jam 'Supernaut'." It is more likely that the jam session took place during the recording of the previous album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
The brief instrumental "Don't Start (Too Late)" is an acoustic guitar showpiece for Iommi, titled for tape operator David Harris, who often despaired at Sabbath being prone to start playing before he was ready to start recording.
"The Writ" is one of only a handful of Black Sabbath songs to feature lyrics composed by vocalist Osbourne, who typically relied on bassist Butler for lyrics. The song was inspired by the frustrations Osbourne felt at the time, as Black Sabbath's former manager Patrick Meehan was suing the band after having been fired.
The hidden track "Blow on a Jug" at the end of "The Writ" was performed by Ozzy Osbourne and Bill Ward as they were playing around at the piano between recording sessions; the song was recorded without their knowledge. The 31-second skit was a parodic tribute to the band Mungo Jerry who used jugs in their performances. According to Ward, "Blow on a Jug" was "a drunken song that Ozzy and me would sing together in a van or on a plane. That’s me on piano and Ozzy blowing on one of those brown cider jugs, playing it like a tuba."
Artwork
Sabotages front cover art has garnered mixed reactions over the years and is regarded by some as one of the worst album covers in rock history. The inverted mirror concept was conceived by Graham Wright, Bill Ward's drum tech, who was also a graphic artist. The band attended what they believed was a test photo shoot for the album cover, thus explaining their choice of clothing. Said Ward, "The only thing we didn't discuss was what we'd all wear on the day of the shot. Since that shoot day, the band has survived through a tirade of clothing comments and jokes that continue to this day". Ward, in fact, was wearing his wife's red tights in the photo. In the US, it peaked at the Billboard 200 at number 28. The album was certified Silver (60,000 units sold) in the UK by the BPI on 1 December 1975 and Gold in the US on 16 June 1997, but was the band's first release not to achieve platinum status in the US.
The band toured the US in support of Sabotage in 1975, which included a filmed appearance for the prestigious series Don Kirshner's Rock Concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Sabbath played "Killing Yourself to Live", "Hole in the Sky", "Snowblind", "War Pigs" and "Paranoid". During Iommi's guitar solo during "Snowblind", plastic snowflakes were dropped from above on the audience and the band, a gimmick used during the band's live shows during this period. According to the book How Black Was Our Sabbath, "The audience was limited to just a couple thousand fans, and it seemed like the whole of LA got wind of it." Due to the band's expanding use of orchestras and other new sounds in the studio, the tour in support of Sabotage was the first in which Black Sabbath used a full-time keyboardist onstage, Gerald "Jezz" Woodroffe.
| rev1 = AllMusic
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| rev3 = Encyclopedia of Popular Music
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| rev4 = The Great Rock Discography
| rev4Score = 7/10
| rev5 = Rolling Stone
|rev5Score = favourable
| rev6 = The Rolling Stone Album Guide
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| rev7 =Sputnikmusic
|rev7Score = 4.7/5
| rev8 = MusicHound Rock
| rev8Score = 3/5
|rev9 = Spin Alternative Record Guide
|rev9score = 9/10
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For the second time, a Black Sabbath album initially saw favourable reviews, with Rolling Stone stating, "Sabotage is not only Black Sabbath's best record since Paranoid, it might be their best ever." Guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen told Nick Bowcott of Guitar Player in 2008 that the riff to "Symptom of the Universe" was the first Tony Iommi riff he ever heard and that "Tony's use of the flat fifth would have got him burned at the stake a couple hundred years ago." In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked it 32nd on their "100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time" list.
In 1991, Chuck Eddy ranked Sabotage 20th in his 1991 book of the 500 best heavy metal albums, naming it the band's best and most eccentric album, consisting of "strange cut-up pastiches inside stranger cut-up pastiches" that hark back to the Firesign Theatre and William Burroughs and ahead to Queensrÿche's Operation: Mindcrime (1988). He added: "Everything—concise solos, voices chanting 'opcit, opsist, obsessed...', evil laughs, seven seconds from some ancient jugband 78, choruses grunting 'suck me!'—jumps out from nowhere. Like in a great hip-hop mix, every sound disorients you, surprises you, but somehow every sound fits so perfectly that you couldn't imagine it anywhere else". Rob Michaels of the Spin Alternative Record Guide comments that the album's use of strings and "studio trickery" represented a maturation over Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, resulting in the group's most consistent recording. Despite that, this entire recording has been available on bootleg releases for many years.
- Disc four of the 2021 Super Deluxe edition features a single edit for “Am I Going Insane (Radio)”, followed by “Hole In The Sky” (being the B-side on the vinyl version), with artwork replicating the very rare Japanese release of the single.
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