Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality is, for all intents and purposes, an important early milestone for heavy metal. While their first, self-titled, album introduced the band to the world, and their sophomore effort, Paranoid, broke ground in the genre, it was Sabbath’s third album that really defined what heavy metal was capable of being. And I’m not the only one who feels that way…“Master Of Reality is where we found ourselves,” Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward previously told music journalist and Hammer legend Malcolm Dome, via Louder. “I know people feel that Sabbath invented heavy metal with our debut album – and that is true to some extent. But I believe that it’s with Master Of Reality that we proved the potential and power of the music.”So with all this in mind, let’s take a little stroll through the album and explore some facts you might not know.Credit: AmazonThe band intentionally wanted to be “heavier”Coming off of their first two albums, the second of which produced multiple massive hit songs — like “War Pigs” and “Iron Man” — Black Sabbath wanted to challenge themselves to be heavier.“We were excited to see where our writing would take us,” said bassist Geezer Butler. “It was quite an adventure in itself. We wanted the heavier songs to be heavier than anything we’d done before. Master Of Reality established the band as the purveyors of the heaviest music up to that point, and said, ‘Go ahead, beat that.'”“Sabbath was all about the dark reality of life,” he added, also noting that Black Sabbath didn’t want to write hooky songs for Master of Reality. “We’d grown up in the aftermath of World War Two, and Aston, where we were from, still had bombed-out buildings and neighbours with war wounds.”“At the time of Master Of Reality, Vietnam was raging, the Cold War was at its coldest, the Troubles in Northern Ireland were close to home,” Butler continued. “A few others were singing about the underside of life, but we had the heaviness to hammer the subjects home.”Black Sabbath: Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne (Photo by Chris Walter/WireImage)Ozzy had a tough time singing “Into the Void.”Among the album’s tracks is “Into the Void,” an iconic outro song that grew to become an archetype for sludge and doom metal. Turns out, that track was incredibly complicated to perform, with both Ward and frontman Ozzy Osbourne struggling to keep up with its speed and time signatures.“He had to sing really rapidly: ‘Rocket engines burning fuel so fast / Up into the night sky they blast,’ quick words like that,” Iommi wrote in his memoir of Ozzy recording the song. “Geezer had written the words out for him. Seeing him try was hilarious.”Tony Iommi is the one coughing in the album’s introThe album famously opens with a deep cough that ushers in the first track, “Sweet Leaf,” obviously about weed. But whose cough is it?“That’s me,” recalled Iommi. “Ozzy rolled this big joint… I had a couple of puffs and nearly choked myself. They left the tape running, and it turned into the ideal start for ‘Sweet Leaf.'”“We used to smoke pounds of the shit, man,” Ozzy later told High Times. “We used to buy it by the fuckin’ sackful. We used to be so fucked-up all the time. Wake up in the morning, start the day with a spliff, go to bed with it…”The band didn’t really partake in drugs while recordingEven with that cough and pot-themed intro, the band actually didn’t do drugs much while they were actually records, with Butler remembering that “we never got totally blasted while recording songs – listening back was when the real spliffing began.”Rolling Stone hated itMaybe the wildest and most unbelievable thing about Master of Reality is that when it came out, fans loved it, but critics hated it. Especially Rolling Stone writer Lester Bangs, who criticized it for being a “thick, plodding, almost arrhythmic steel wool curtains of sound.”Dismissing the hate, Butler said, “Before Sabbath, I saw Rolling Stone’s review of Zeppelin’s first album, which I loved and they trashed. I realised how out of touch and worthless critics could be. So when they trashed Sabbath, it was like a badge of honour.”The post 5 Facts About Black Sabbath’s ‘Master of Reality’ You Might Not Know, Including Who’s Coughing in the Introduction appeared first on VICE.