Black Sabbath had gotten heavily into partying and were especially fond of Peruvian marching powder (aka cocaine), which caused them to fidget and talk, nonstop, sometimes making sense. Touring with them looked good in a press release, but Gentle Giant’s musical adventures were a stretch for the ears of most Sabbath fans, and even when we turned up the amps and played our loudest songs, the kids screaming ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Paranoid!’ weren’t interested in watching a technically complex, sonically dynamic band try to win them over with subtlety or musical variation. They wanted to be stung by the buzz of steel wasps again and again. We joked around and did our best to gain the crowd’s favor, as we had done when we played with Sabbath as Simon Dupree & The Big Sound, but back then Sabbath hadn’t cemented their fanbase. Now, they had, and Gentle Giant wasn’t on most of these kids’ radars.
Once, Ozzy and I were sitting next to one another on a plane heading for a gig. He was drowning himself in alcohol, spilling almost as much as he was consuming, when he stopped and turned to me.
‘Derek, are you a millionaire?’
‘What?’ I replied.
‘Are you a millionaire?’ he repeated. ‘I think I am, but I’m not sure.’ He returned to drinking. A minute later, he said, ‘Can you believe I’m a millionaire? It’s nice, but it’s strange. It’s good.’
Neither of us knew it at the time, but we were both being ripped off by our manager—him far worse than me—and neither of us was anywhere close to being a millionaire. In fact, he and his bandmates were practically broke.
Touring with Black Sabbath was bittersweet, filled with euphoric highs and depressing lows. And there was plenty of time to relax—not because Sabbath only booked gigs every few days (as they did in their later years), but because they canceled multiple dates on the tour. The day after the Charleston debacle, we played Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. As soon as we got offstage, the promoter announced that Sabbath couldn’t make the show, leaving the middle band, Black Oak Arkansas, with the misfortune of playing a double set that pissed off the Sabbath fans.
The next three concerts were postponed, so we had a three-day vacation in Nashville. It was a good place to be. They had good restaurants and some cool music stores and pawn shops, where we bought a couple of nice guitars.
Then there were other days when we wished we were on the road with a more serious band like Jethro Tull. After another Sabbath cancellation, we got stuck at the Holiday Inn in Warren, Ohio, for four days. The town was so bereft of culture that it was like being in prison. As aggravated as I was, I felt bad for Black Sabbath, and I worried that one or more of the guys would overdose and die on tour. Once you’ve grown up with nothing, it’s hard to know when (or how) to say no to a diet of free booze, drugs, and sex. It was sad for us as we’d known all of them before they were famous, but while it was always great to see them, they were never the same.
It wasn’t enough that our first tour of America was plagued with cancellations. There was also a full-scale, arson-fueled riot—and it wasn’t even Black Sabbath’s fault.
We were booked to play the three-day Erie Canal Soda Pop Festival, held between September 2 and 4 in Chandler, Indiana. The event took place on Bull Island, a nine-hundred-acre facility on the border between Illinois, Indiana, and Kentucky, and went down in music festival history as one of the most poorly organized and badly run events of the era. We took a bumpy ninety-minute ride to the site on September 3. We thought we were hours ahead of schedule, but when we got there, so many of the bands on the bill hadn’t shown up that we immediately had to take the stage. The audience had been standing for hours in the heavy rain.
We stepped onstage and prepared to deliver a great show, only for an electrical generator to short-circuit, causing Kerry’s organ to malfunction. We had to end the set early, but that was a scratch on the surface of the snafus that plagued the event. Many of the big bands on the bill canceled or refused to play due to poor communication, mismanagement, and an absence of security. To their credit, Black Oak Arkansas, Foghat, Eagles, Cheech & Chong, Albert King, Canned Heat, Rory Gallagher, Ravi Shankar, and The Amboy Dukes showed up and performed, but fans who’d braved the storm to see Black Sabbath, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Seger, Slade, The Doors, Nazareth, The Faces, and The Allman Brothers Band were shit out of luck. The venue ran out of food and water after more than two hundred thousand fans stormed the grounds, which were equipped for a mere sixty thousand, and looting, rioting, and mass destruction ensued. We got out of there soon after we played, and we later found out that unruly rioters burned the main stage to the ground. In addition, someone died of a heroin overdose, someone else drowned in the Wabash River, and some unruly crowd members killed a local resident’s cow.
The last show we played with Black Sabbath was on September 15 in Los Angeles, at the Hollywood Bowl. Captain Beyond opened, and we played next. It looked like it would be a triumphant end to a chaotic tour. The streets felt like a movie set. There were towering palm trees, music culture everywhere, and the Hollywood sign glinting in the sunlight on Sunset Boulevard. The smiling Giant from our first album was staring out from a city billboard placed by our label to advertise the release of Three Friends. Then, everything turned to shit.
Before the show, the singer from Captain Beyond accused me of hitting on his girlfriend (which I had not done), and a fistfight almost broke out between us before their set. From the moment we took the stage, the audience made it clear how unwelcome we were in their city. While we played, they flung beer bottles, quarters, and other projectiles. Normally, we could keep our cool in uncomfortable situations, and for a few songs we dodged the thrown objects, but when a cherry bomb landed onstage and exploded a few feet from my mic stand during the intro for ‘Funny Ways,’ we felt like we were in danger, and I felt like I had to say something. So, we did something no performing band should ever do. We stopped playing.
‘Hey, guys,’ I said into the mic. ‘Can you please calm down and cool off? We’ll be finished playing soon enough.’ I thought being polite might encourage them to stop throwing stuff. Then Phil stepped up to the mic.
‘You’re all a bunch of cunts!’
It was an accurate assessment, but not one that calmed the crowd. The boo that followed was louder than a drum solo, and the sky immediately filled with too many objects to duck. We finished our set and walked off without anyone getting hurt, though we had to change and shower to get the beer, soda, and spit out of our clothes and hair.
If our performance confused the crowd, Black Sabbath were even more confounding. Everyone in the band was wasted. It was Los Angeles, for fuck’s sake—who would expect anything different? But we all counted on a powerful show. Sure, Sabbath were heavy partiers, but when they showed up, their heavy music overshadowed their inebriation, and they usually destroyed, playing songs that shuddered with pure power.
I wondered how much of that intensity came from the cocaine. During the LA show, the salad bowls of blow the band were snorting backstage took its toll. Toward the end of the show, Tony Iommi dove into an extended guitar solo. One second he was bending hellish noises from his overdriven guitar, the next the instrument was feeding back tonelessly and Tony had face-planted on the ground. He didn’t trip or collapse, and at first we thought it was part of the show and he would jump up and melt more faces. We looked forward to it, and we all looked at each other and laughed about how entertaining Tony was.