#OTD October 16, 1969: Black Sabbath Recorded "Black Sabbath" in One Day

The album cover for Black Sabbath "Black Sabbath"
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(Courtesy of Black Sabbath)

By October of 1969, the world had gone through some rather seismic changes. A man had walked on the moon. The Beatles performed the group’s last show on a rooftop. Woodstock happened.

When Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iomni, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler went into a recording studio on October 16, 1969, it’s safe to say the band didn’t think they were making history.

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“We just went in the studio and did it in a day,” Tony Iommi saidof the fateful day when Black Sabbath recorded the band's groundbreaking debut album. “We played our live set and that was it. We actually thought a whole day was quite a long time, then off we went the next day to play for £20 in Switzerland."

Over the course of that 12-hour session, the group would churn out a bona fide classic. Relentless from the foreboding opening bell of “Black Sabbath” through the climatic bombast of “Warning,” the foundational building block of hard rock and even heavy metal had been forged.

Back then, the group was just trying to make the most of precious studio time: "We thought, 'We have two days to do it and one of the days is mixing,' Iomni recalled. “So we played live. Ozzy was singing at the same time, we just put him in a separate booth and off we went. We never had a second run of most of the stuff."

“The record cost us 800 quid. If you listen to side two, there’s a couple of decent songs on it but the rest is like a fucking jam session,” Iommi told Metal Hammer in 2017. “We recorded it in a room that was hardly bigger than a toilet. But we were naïve; we thought: ‘That’s the way you make records.’ We didn’t know any better.”

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(Polydor/MCA)
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