Black Sabbath FAQ: All That’s Left to Know on the First Name in Metal

Black Sabbath Versus Blue Öyster Cult

The Black and Blue tour was a bad-blooded 1980 coheadlining excursion between the Sabs and Blue Öyster Cult, fraught with all sorts of difficulties, from crew fight through ego battles of th’ bands, through to the problematic issuance of a shoddy live VHS of the debacle. In the middle of the brouhaha was one Sandy Pearlman, longtime manager and conceptualist of Blue Öyster Cult, new manager of Sabbath circa the Dio era.

The specifics of the long jaunt are complicated in and of themselves. The idea was for the two bands to switch off headlining depending on relative strength of the market visited. As well, all manner of sundry acts popped on and dropped off as the undercard. To top it off, Sabbath experienced a switch at the drum stool midstream, from Bill Ward to Vinny Appice.

As background, Sabbath had started out their new life with Ronnie touring their gleaming new Heaven and Hell album all over Europe with French hard rockers Shakin’ Street as main opener, but also NWOBHMers Girlschool, Angel Witch, and Samson along on various select dates, all of these in the UK. Incidentally, this tour would also birth Viking metal heroes Manowar, given that Ross the Boss, very much a New Yorker, had wound up with Shakin’ Street after life with the Dictators, connective tissue being Sandy Pearlman. Ronnie thereafter introduced Ross to a “good bass player” on the Sabbath crew and the rest is fur-lined history.

“Ronnie introduced me to Joey DeMaio,” confirms guitarist Ross the Boss, on this interesting wrinkle to the Black and Blue tour. “I was guitar player on tour with this French band Shakin’ Street, supporting Black Sabbath on their English tour. We were in the UK, and Ronnie comes up to me, like the second show, and he’s saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I really love your band, the Dictators; I know all about your history and all about CBGB’s, the New York rock scene, the Dolls, all that stuff. I’m a big fan.’ And I said, ‘You’re a big fan?!’ I’m like taken aback. He was the sweetest gentleman, greatest person you would ever want to know, greatest singer. Just a great guy, positive guy, never a bad thing to say about anybody. He goes, ‘By the way, we have this guy who is traveling with one of our technicians. His name is Joe DeMaio, and he plays bass. And you should check him out. You should talk to him.’ And I go, ‘Okay, I will’ [laughs]. Some twenty minutes later I introduce myself, or he introduced him to me, and Joey and I kinda hit it off, and we talked about things and had the same interest in metal and music and hard rock, and we decided to start jamming together. So when Black Sabbath were onstage, we would sneak into their dressing room and use their warm-up amps to play together.”

Another connection, as Ross explains, is that legendary soundman John “Dawk” Stillwell wound up moving from the Sabbath camp to Manowar, along with Joey and Ross. “Yeah, when Ronnie came on to be the lead singer of Black Sabbath, Ronnie got Dawk to redo their equipment. And all of a sudden Tony Iommi had these great Marshalls, which he recorded Heaven and Hell on, so the sound of the band changed. The sound of Black Sabbath really changed; they got an amazing sound on Heaven and Hell. And I said, ‘I want those Marshalls.’ So I wound up getting seven of them [laughs]. Dawk customized every piece of gear we played out of, everything. The cords, the pickups, everything that we used. And he’s Manowar’s ‘technician’ still to this day.”

In any event, back to the factual bits of the tour: Once Sabbath hits the States, Black and Blue is worked up, like I say, with a roiling undercard, city to city, consisting of bands such as Riot, Molly Hatchet, Sammy Hagar, Saxon, and Girlschool, but mostly Shakin’ Street. The association with Blue Öyster Cult lasts from mid-July 1980 through the end of October the same year, the bands basically blanketing all of America but no other territories.

“I’m trying to think exactly what happened,” recalls Sandy Pearlman, hit with this blast from the past. “There were some problems with the initial phases of the Black Sabbath tour of 1980. It just wasn’t doing that well. And I suggested that we put them together with Blue Öyster Cult, and the shows did very well. Yes, I was right—it was the Billboard Tour of the Year, and every venue we played was sold out, everywhere. We set records in some places for attendance. In Aloha Stadium in Honolulu—I think it’s been surpassed since then—but soldiers love Black Sabbath and Blue Öyster Cult, soldiers and sailors and marines and air force dudes, and they were within a ten-mile radius of Honolulu. As well as a bunch of Hawaiians, who love heavy metal. So we got it all, and it was a fantastically successful tour.

“Black Sabbath resented having Blue Öyster Cult on the show, resented splitting the income,” continues Pearlman. “They regarded this…one day, one of their onetime roadies pulled me aside and said that the problem here was that this was Black Sabbath and Van Halen all over again. Van Halen had opened for us, as they did for Blue Öyster Cult, by the way, in the early ’70s—Black Sabbath in the late ’70s, Blue Öyster Cult in the early ’70s. And they really had trouble dealing with bands that were opening for them being as big or bigger than them. So there was a tremendous amount of resentment, and at some point…I can’t remember when the tour reached Denver. Bill Ward was not in the best of health at the time, was having trouble making all the shows, playing them. He traveled by RV, separately, and sometimes they didn’t get in as early as other times. But having said that, that really wasn’t the problem. It’s just that his health wasn’t great, and it was always kind of dicey whether he was going to go on or not. And when we got to Denver, he either didn’t get in early enough or he just couldn’t go on. There’s nothing deep, dark, and mysterious about his ill health—it just wasn’t good. We brought physicians in sometimes to the show, because he was having trouble actually performing.”

Fact is, Bill was still torn up about his best friend, Ozzy, not being in the band and had been drinking heavily to bury his grief and stress over the situation. “That’s up to you to say, not me,” continues Sandy. “So in Denver he did not go on, and it was sold out, and the gross was, for the time, 1980, enormous. And afterward, some of the Sabbath retainers pulled me aside and said, ‘Well, how many tickets did you have to give back?’ And I said, ‘Oh, fifteen.’ So, McNichols Arena held like eighteen thousand people [note: This was August 21, 1980, after Bill had logged over a month of U.S. dates], so they were thinking, ‘Oh, fifteen thousand.’ ‘No.’ ‘Fifteen hundred?’ ‘No, fifteen.’ And Blue Öyster Cult had just taken all of what was not a large amount of money these days, but in 1980 it was an enormous sum of money. And so yeah, they get to keep everything. And so they decided that was it for Bill—I’m talking about Black Sabbath, not me. They fired him, and Ronnie called up Vinny, and there we are.”

That’s the end of the story as far as Sandy Pearlman is concerned, the last we’re going to hear from him on the subject. He obviously doesn’t remember—or chooses not to remember—any of the problems that went on. But let’s not forget—there’s always been a strange pathology between BÖC and Sabbath, with Pearlman right in the thick of it. This goes right back to the origins of the Blue Öyster Cult, the name itself (and the name Judas Priest, for that matter) meant to echo the name Black Sabbath. Indeed, Columbia had been upset that Sabbath ended up on Warner Bros. and was known to want a rival act on their roster. Enter Blue Öyster Cult, who had previously been more of a West Coast psych rock band, variously named Stalk-Forrest Group, Soft White Underbelly, and Oaxaca. To make a long story short, both the name of the band and the heavying up of their sound were somewhat of a ruse by Sandy, the band, and producer Murray Krugman to get the band signed. Hammering the point home, a song on the debut album, “Cities on Flame with Rock and Roll,” bears more than a small resemblance to “The Wizard” by Black Sabbath.

And here we are, main support for the tour stateside and in Europe, is a third Sandy Pearlman act, Shakin’ Street, stuck in the middle of this thing: three French guys, Ross, and a female lead singer named Fabienne Shine.

“Black Sabbath was a different band from Blue Öyster Cult,” recalls Shine. “Blue Öyster Cult were like a family; and plus because we were signed with Sandy Pearlman, and he was our producer, we were very close to Blue Öyster Cult. Black Sabbath definitely had an edge and were a bit more of a difficult atmosphere—because Tony Iommi was a tough guy. He was like Louis XIV [laughs]. He always made me think of Louis XIV, because he looked like a king, also because of that hair, and he had a huge following. And I remember one day we were in England, and the drummer, Bill Ward, didn’t show up, or when he showed up, he showed up two or three hours later, completely drunk, and they couldn’t play. They did play later, but of course, he was soon out of the band. They got somebody else. It was tough with them, but they were such a great group, so fabulous. But yes, with Blue Öyster Cult, you couldn’t compare the relationship. It’s not that he was paying less attention to Black Sabbath, but Sandy made Blue Öyster Cult. It’s like he was their father—Sandy was the dad. Because like I said, it’s a family. They created their band at school, with Sandy Pearlman.

“But there were egos,” continues Shine. “And Eric [Bloom], the singer for Blue Öyster Cult, also had a temper. And so yeah, it’s always been a little bit of, not jealousy, but those two bands were rivals. It’s the same story since the beginning of rock ’n’ roll. But Ronnie James Dio was extremely cool. He was the coolest of them all. He kept an extremely low profile, very shy, never talked much; he came, he played, he came with his wife or with his son. He’s a family man. Ronnie made Black Sabbath look like a very kind band. Oh my God, he just completely turned popularity onto their side. The Black Sabbath band, like I said, they’re a band with an edge. It’s like Led Zeppelin. First of all, they’re English, which already is different. American is so much sweeter, much kinder than English, more sophisticated, and how do I say, more personal. And so already from that, there was a big difference. And so Ronnie James Dio coming in…that’s the thing, you see? Ronnie being an American, coming to sing with Black Sabbath, all of a sudden, they became a kinder band and their popularity took off.

“It was kind of a drag,” acknowledges Shine, asked about the politics behind who would close the show, Sabbath or BÖC. “A lot of times Blue Öyster Cult had to go first, like the opening band. That created a lot of bad feelings. But sometimes Black Sabbath had to open the show, and that…I mean, they couldn’t stand that! This is the reason, mostly, why Sandy chose us to open the shows for those two bands—because he wanted an opening band. This way, there was no opening band, or more like we were the opening band—Sandy was a genius. Sandy Pearlman was a genius. He took a French group with a female singer to open for those two huge bands. We were totally unknown, and we did so well, you know what I mean? We did so well. We had encores practically every day. I mean, it was a very, very difficult tour for us, to win that. You know, we had to be good. In England, in Scotland, it was so tough for us, so rough. Being French, very, very rough, especially with Black Sabbath. It was fabulous, but scary, really. It was scary to go onstage to open for those two bands at the same time. Especially in front of a hundred thousand people like at the Oakland Coliseum—and we had two encores that day! It was a fairy tale, I’m telling you; it was magical. But that was the strategy. Because Sandy Pearlman couldn’t have those two huge bands opening for each other, he decided, ‘Okay, I’m going to pick a third band.’”

Even the name Blue Öyster Cult was considered a bit of a cooked-up play on Black Sabbath, not to mention the band’s about-face into hard rock from an earlier sound that could be described as West Coast psych.

Photo by Rich Galbraith

The Denver date of which Sandy Pearlman speaks—the end of the road for Bill—was on August 21, 1980, Bill admitting that his addictions, mainly booze, were slowing his faculties to a crawl. Bill’s last show on the tour would be the Bloomington, Indiana, stop two days earlier (he had first announced his intention to leave two weeks earlier, in Wichita, Kansas). The promoter at the Denver date raised hell, ordering everybody he knew in the city not to let Sabbath escape his wrath, which they in fact did, by covertly finding some taxis to get them out of Dodge.

The next gig was scheduled for Salt Lake City, and negotiations to get Bill to play the gig went right down to the wire, the crew even setting up all the band’s gear, but to no avail. Bill was on autopilot, famously talking about not even remembering the recording sessions for Heaven and Hell, also admitting that his depression was complicated by his mother passing away and the turmoil surrounding Ronnie replacing Ozzy. Bill’s fear of flying and general dislike of traveling had run him ragged as well, so he was hopping from gig to gig, as Sandy says, on an RV driven by his brother Jim, accompanied by his wife and his son Aaron. Things actually got worse for Bill and not better, Ward letting it be known that he retreated to California with his wife and did nothing but drink, do drugs, and sleep for upward of a year.

There would be five scheduled shows Sabbath would have to bow out of, with Vinny Appice joining in time for the Honolulu date on August 31, Molly Hatchet the opener. Three months previous, Vinny had actually been tapped for the possible drum stool in the new band Ozzy had been trying to get together but had turned it down, essentially because he had been scared off by big brother Carmine, who warned him about Osbourne’s reputation. The request to join—or rather audition for—Black Sabbath came through Sabbath tour manager Paul Clark, the suggestion pretty much on the strength of Vinny’s work with Axis and, previous to that, Rick Derringer’s hard rock project, Derringer. Cozy Powell’s name was mentioned as well, but sour relations between Ronnie and Cozy nixed that idea. A jam with Vinny was set up for SIR Studios in Hollywood and Vinny was in, at rehearsals, Geoff Nicholls expressing amusement at how tiny Vinny’s kit was compared to Bill’s, Bill’s massive setup also including a gong onstage.

“The very first gig was Aloha Stadium in Hawaii,” affirms Appice. “First rehearsal, I went down to play with them and they said, ‘Yeah, this is good,’ and then we all went to the pub [laughs]. Actually, Tony, Geezer, and a couple guys went to the pub, and I stayed there with Ronnie and Geoff Nicholls to rehearse; they were helping me out. And then the next day was kind of the same thing. We rehearsed and then went to the pub [laughs]. And I’m getting nervous, going, ‘You know, I need to get some rehearsal in here!’ And so luckily, we got it together, did four rehearsals. But yeah, the first day, they were so happy that it seemed to work, that everybody went and had a drink. Then we rehearsed a couple more nights in that place and then we moved to another place and then to Hawaii. So they had the confidence in me not to rehearse a lot or overrehearse.

“So we went out to play,” continues Vin, “and the next thing you know, I wrote all these charts out in a little book, and I thought, ‘This is cool, I’ve got my charts to go with, and this will help me along, just verse, chorus, verse, chorus.’ And then we went out to play, and it started raining, and the rain blew onstage so much the book got wet, the ink ran, and the book was kind of getting to be useless—pretty funny. So I wound up halfway through the set not even looking at the book because it was useless, and then we just looked at each other for the endings, with them all helping, Tony, Geezer, Ronnie, and we got through that show. It was fun. From what Ronnie said, Tony and Geezer were more nervous than I was. Because at that point, they’d never played with anybody other than Bill, onstage.”

“It was a rocking tour,” laughs Molly Hatchet guitarist Dave Hlubek, who remembers the Hawaii show fondly. “I’ll tell you what—they both were really on their game. We were playing absolutely sold-out venues, and it was awesome opening, and then BÖC and then Sabbath. But it was also a really conservative ticket price for those three bands. It wasn’t like off the charts like it is now. Aloha Stadium was probably the biggest memory that any of us had. Blue Öyster Cult had just finished, and it was actually a pretty clear day. It was us and then BÖC got up there and just rocked the house. We were out there listening, because for us, we were just amazed, awestruck. The place was just slammed sold out.

“And then Black Sabbath got up there, and they were just different, with a vague, underlyng aura or something. So they started playing, and the song they were playing, the lyrics, from what I remember, were very devil-oriented. And I do remember that it got real dark, real cloudy, out of nowhere, and it poured rain. And they were up there just rocking; people were going nuts. And then off to the left-hand side of the stage, the stadium caught on fire, while they were onstage—out of nowhere, and I mean, a major fire, in the grandstands there, and we thought ‘Whoa, this is a little strange—it’s a lot strange.’

“I think they caught it in time,” continues Dave, “so that nobody was really hurt, which was nice. But it just made you wonder what was going on, if the big boss upstairs who looks after all of us, if he was just a little upset about what they were singing about. Who knows? But it was a heckuva tour, and for us, as a young baby band, it was an exciting time, because these were bands that when we were at home, prior to making records, we were listening to on our car radio. And now we’re playing with these guys. It was real exciting, and they were very nice to us. But Sabbath, every time that they got up onstage, the audience, they got exactly what they came to hear. I mean, they delivered the goods every time.”

Back to the tour and its frictions: “I believe it was more the road crews that had a problem with each other,” figures newly minted front man for the band, Ronnie James Dio, always one to smooth things over. “I don’t know why. We really never had a problem with them. I’ve known Eric just forever. When he was going to school at Hobart University, my band, which wasn’t Dio then—we were probably Elf or Electric Elves at the time—were playing there, and he would always come to the shows. It was great, just wonderful. So he’s been a friend for a long time and I’ve known him for a long time. I’ve known Joe and Al and Buck, but Eric more than anyone else. So personally, I never had a problem. I don’t think Tony did and I don’t think Geezer really did. I think it was much more the crews who had an opposing feeling about it. So I think that was the problem more than anything else.”

“The problem was that we had the same manager,” continues Ronnie. “And I believe that he…because he began that band and was there from the inception, and in fact, the band was really patterned after Black Sabbath, therefore Blue Öyster Cult, Black Sabbath, whatever. And I think his allegiance was much more to them than it was to us. And that annoyed us, of course, as it should. And it reached a culmination point in Madison Square Garden, on that show, that has been documented, I guess, because the Black and Blue tour was done there, and it became kind of a full-length feature film of some kind, and they were given everything and we were given nothing. They had all their pyro, everything; we had nothing, not a thing. And I think that really defined what the problem was. ‘Hey, you’re our manager too. Shouldn’t we be using those kinds of specifications?’ Within the film itself, there was a video that they had done that was part of that, and ours was only the presentation at Madison Square Garden. So I think that was a lot of the problem.”

Ronnie acknowledges that Sandy was, on the main, good for Sabbath’s career trajectory.

“Oh yes. He had good ideas. I like Sandy. I don’t think anyone else did, but I’m maybe a bit more of an understanding person. He was very alien to them because he’s a guy from New York, and he was managing Blue Öyster Cult as well, and maybe there was some friction between what Geez and what Tony felt. I don’t want to put words in their mouth; I’m not really sure. I really think that it was…he did have good ideas, he did some good things, but I think a lot of them were lent so much more to Blue Öyster Cult than they were to us.”

“The problem was that our band was managed by Sandy Pearlman, and he managed Blue Öyster Cult too,” says Vinny, in succinct agreement with Ronnie. “So that was kind of a conflict of interest, because we were doing the tour together, and he was kind of favoring them. He would say we couldn’t use all our stuff. We had crosses and all this stuff to use onstage, and he said, ‘Well, you can’t do it,’ while meanwhile Blue Öyster Cult would go on with a giant Godzilla, for the song ‘Godzilla.’ So there became to be a lot of friction, not so much within the band itself, but the way we were being treated by our manager—there’s the conflict right there.”

Geezer Butler remembers the tour as “chaos,” and I asked him to clear up just who was fighting whom. “Well, because their manager had always managed Blue Öyster Cult, knew they needed a boost, and he saw us as being…he managed that version of Sabbath, and came up with the idea of both bands doing the same tour. But both bands insisted on using their own PA and their own lighting system, and so instead of like where it’s half an hour between sets, it was like two and three hours [laughs]. And whoever was finishing the night off ended up going on at one or two o’clock in the morning. It was just horrible.”

Asked whether the crews were fighting as well, Geezer says, “I have no idea. I’m sure there were a few swear words exchanged.”

“It was like a war!” adds Blue Öyster Cult bassist Joe Bouchard, leaning more toward Geezer’s blunt assessment rather than Ronnie’s smoothing over of feathers. “No, that wasn’t blown out of proportion at all. It was a war zone. Okay, I’m talking about all these other bands, and most of the time I wasn’t really sure what was going on with other bands on the tour. Because I would be preparing myself for our performance and didn’t want to get too worn out. But I would follow what was going on with Black Sabbath on the Black and Blue tour. And it was not good; it was not good. I wanted to have a good time, because it was the biggest tour the year. But I think that Tony felt that they weren’t getting all that was deserved by them, and we were just copying their riffs. Even though we were two distinctively different bands. And they would always go on late and be a problem. If we did well, they would take an hour and a half before they would go out and play their set. And all the shows ran over time. I don’t know. It would be interesting to hear what Ronnie has to say about it.”

The credits for this this faux movie poster identified the producer as Martin Birch and the director as Sandy Pearlman—more evidence of how deep the ties between Sabbath and the Blue Öyster Cult had become.

So what was Ronnie’s role in there? How was he to deal with?

“Well, at the beginning of the tour I talked to him and told him what a fan I was. Because I knew him when he was in Ronnie & the Prophets. Way back, when I was still in high school, I would go see him play. And I was always a big fan, and when I got to college, he was in the big college band in Ithaca. And here it is, it’s 1980, and he is headlining with his band and I’m in my band, and there was a lot to celebrate and be happy about. But no, they were nasty. They were nasty. There was probably some internal stuff going on. Ronnie will probably tell you more about that. You know, Bill Ward left in the middle of the tour. Just left all of a sudden. So, what could have been an enjoyable co-billing…it was war [laughs].”

And Ronnie’s problem was…? “You know, I’d really don’t know. Because after that first show, we didn’t talk. Maybe I would see him once in a while, but after that he became aloof and never came near us. And like I said, I’ve been a fan of his since I was in junior high school. He’s a very talented guy. Now Geezer, he was okay. Geezer came out because he liked my bass sound. And he asked me, ‘Can I play through your bass stuff? Play through your bass rig.’ And I said sure, come on out. So I was at a sound check and he came out, and I’m letting him play through my bass gear, and he went out like a week later and bought the same stuff that I was using. And I don’t consider myself to be a real bass maven, someone who is really into the high-tech of it. But it did sound pretty good, and when he played through it, it sounded great. So Geezer was like, okay. But Tony was not good.”

Clarifying the scheduling issue, Bouchard explains, “If they had to open they would go on late. They just didn’t like that at all. And eventually we said, ‘Well, rather than throw the schedule off for the whole thing, let’s go on first, and we’ll let them close the show.’ Even though we were supposed to alternate night after night. We said, ‘No, this is just too frustrating. We’ll go on first and then they can do their thing.’ So yeah, I would say most of them, we let them go on. We didn’t want to…but that was good for us, because we played very good, very tight on that tour. Even though there might have been some personal friction in the band, we put that all aside, because our main goal was to do a much better show than Black Sabbath. So it was good, because competition brings out the best in a lot of people. And so some of the Black and Blue shows were some of the best we ever played. And not because we were doing it for the money; we just wanted to show those guys! [laughs]”

And with respect to who exactly was warring, Joe figures, “It was the crew, yeah. It was the crew all the way from…you know, and the problem was, Sandy was caught in the middle, because he was managing both bands at the time. He made a lot of money on the tour, but he said it was some of the hardest money he ever made. And probably if he had the chance to do it, he wouldn’t. He was in charge of getting those other guys onstage, and trying to keep the peace, when crowds were all hyped up and ready to riot. As the shows went on, we had a major riot in Milwaukee. I’m sure you heard about that. We were banned from Milwaukee for years after that. They would not let Blue Öyster Cult play in Milwaukee, even though we had nothing to do with the riot. I was back in my hotel. I’m sitting there watching Johnny Carson on late-night TV, and I hear a siren, and I think, ‘Oh, I wonder what’s going on?’ And then I hear four sirens. And then I hear like twenty-five sirens. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh no.’ And so what happened is, Black Sabbath went on real late again, and somebody threw something on stage, so they walked off; somebody said something, you know, Ronnie can tell you. But I wasn’t there; I was at the hotel. But I heard like 150 cop sirens going past the hotel heading to the venue—oh my God, what the hell is going on? And they pretty much destroyed the whole hall, in Milwaukee.”

Geezer has told the story of this violent incident many times, saying that there he was, onstage at the Mecca Arena, October 9, 1980, two songs in, performing the bass intro to “N.I.B.” He hears something hit a cymbal and then whack!, he’s hit in the head by a bottle and there’s blood everywhere (Geoff Nicholls claims the projectile was actually a brass cross, and in the meantime, it was Fergie from the crew that got hit with a bottle). This all happens with the lights somewhat down, Geezer retreats and then the “idiot” road manager eggs on or at least admonishes the crowd. Amusingly, Geezer says that he found himself languishing in the hospital and was soon joined by fans in Sabbath shirts, injured in the ensuing riot. And with respect to the riot itself, the damage was essentially to the seating, railings, door glass, and windows in the arena, with security left helpless and even under attack themselves.

And of course, as discussed, as if a riot in Milwaukee wasn’t enough, Sabbath were under additional pressure due to strife dealing with their out-of-control drummer, er, sorta like Blue Öyster Cult, come to think of it, with an increasingly unruly Albert Bouchard. “You know, I don’t know if it was Bill or if it was Vinny,” muses Joe. “I didn’t talk to Bill; I rarely saw him. I would see him onstage and that’s it. And then all of a sudden, he hopped in his motor home and took off, and nobody saw him after that. I mean, this is the biggest tour of the year.”

I checked with Joe whether he thought Blue Öyster Cult might have been guilty of any nasty behavior whatsoever.

“No. I mean, not that I know of,” says Bouchard. “I’m sure when there are two road crews and there is friction between the road crews there might be something. But I would say that on our end we were always very professional. Get onstage when you are supposed to, get offstage when you are supposed to. You know, there are only a few rules. Everything else, you can just go crazy. We had our fireworks. We had a motorcycle. There was no problem with that. The motorcycle…Eric would ride it out at the end, through all the smoke, and it was a nice thing we would do for ‘Born to Be Wild’ or something like that. But I thought our show was really tight and the band played great—we were out to show those Black Sabbath guys how it’s done [laughs]. But they had sort of a different vibe going on there. Who knows? They’ve done well over the years, and they are legends, and I’m still a fan even though we had a lot of disputes.”

Blue Öyster Cult drummer Albert Bouchard weighs in as well, answering first as to whether the Sabbath guys were particularly grumpy. “Yeah, I mean, Tony was. Tony was, and especially Ronnie Dio. Although I think Ronnie’s issues had more to do with Wendy, his wife and manager, and that she was trying to stick up for Ronnie’s integrity or status or rights or whatever. It seemed like Wendy was making a big stink about a lot of stuff. And what would happen is, the slightest thing, and the roadies get all incensed. And so it’s the Sabbath roadies versus the Cult roadies, and there are subtle sabotaging things. Also, if the set runs over a little bit…for us, I mean, it was good, because as a band, we would thrive on competition—if they did something, we would just try to retaliate with the music. So it was good in that it just pumped us up to do a great show and try to pull out all the stops, every time we could. But sometimes, if they were opening the show, it would be harder, because they could do stuff like take forever to come on and take forever to come off. So by the time we came on, the audience was exhausted. So it was easier when we were opening the show, because we could just leave the audience devastated, in our allotted amount of time. And Sabbath would have to get on and compete with what just preceded them. But yeah, as drummers, I thought that Bill Ward was a fine fellow. He was always nice to me, and I thought Vinny was even a finer fellow. Vinny is a great guy, and still a really good friend.”

“It was just that the Black Sabbath band were in a bad mood,” says Joe, as a closing comment. “It was a bad mood that didn’t go away. And still to this day, Tony will not let the company that wants to release the Black and Blue movie put it out, in America. And Ronnie went and did another interview talking about the Black and Blue tour, and Tony said, ‘I don’t want it out.’ And we don’t have the papers to get the release of that between all the artists, and the guy who produced it has passed away, and supposedly some of the papers probably went with him.”

Concludes Blue Öyster Cult front man Eric Bloom, specifically on the doomed commercial video, “It wasn’t all that good and I don’t think too many people saw it. It’s a totally raw performance with nothing fixed up, which doesn’t happen too much nowadays. Usually there’s postproduction, where they’ll fix a flat note or use a different camera angle when something’s played wrong, but we had none of that because it was too expensive! So as a singer, there are embarrassing moments.”

The video of which Eric and Joe both speak has always existed in a sort of limbo between official issue and bootleg status. For the package, originally issued on VHS, Betamax, and laser disc, the two bands were captured live at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York, notably home base for Blue Öyster Cult, on October 15, 1980. Tracks performed by Black Sabbath were “War Pigs,” “Neon Knights,” “N.I.B.,” “Iron Man,” “Paranoid,” “Heaven and Hell,” and “Die Young,” while Blue Öyster Cult countered with “Doctor Music,” “Cities on Flame,” “Divine Wind,” “Godzilla,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and “The Marshall Plan”—on the original issue, the tracks were toggled; i.e., a Sabbath then BÖC, Sabbath, BÖC, etc. A DVD release was slated for 2002 but then quashed, the tour and this document of it seemingly forever cloaked in controversy, acrimony, and the vagaries of one-upmanship demonstrated by two guardedly competing heavy metal bands looking for a second wind in a tough business that values youth over experience and wiles.