Black Sabbath

The early Black Sabbath were an unstoppable band, their creativity rapidly made available to the public: the self-titled debut, released in England in February 1970 and in the United States in June of the same year, was immediately followed by a second album, "Paranoid", released at home in September and in the United States four months later, in January 1971.

In July 1971 came "Master Of Reality" as well, bringing the tally to three albums in 17 months. Then again, the masterpiece with which they sketched out some of the defining traits of heavy metal and doom was recorded in just a few hours, following an approach that kept polishing and post-production to an absolute minimum. Riding the enthusiasm of a certain audience for "Black Sabbath", and despite the savage reviews from much of the critical establishment, Ozzy Osbourne and co. tried to capitalize on their decent showing on the UK charts, where they reached number eight, and were back in the studio as early as June 1970.

When they got into the studio, though, they needed a filler track of about three minutes, so guitarist Tony Iommi came up with one of his riffs, simple and punchy, over which bassist Geezer Butler improvised a set of lyrics that Ozzy Osbourne read out more or less as they were already rehearsing, live in the studio, with the tape rolling. The song is simple and direct, built on an E pentatonic scale that acts as the engine of a heavily guitar-driven track, one that is born and grows around that instrument. The lyrics, which never actually mention the word "paranoid" and are said to owe their title to one of Butler's nicknames, are a perfect example of the youthful unease so often at the heart of heavy metal's history. The opening verse is, in this sense, iconic:

Finished with my woman

‘Cause she couldn’t help me with my mind

People think I'm insane

Because I am frowning all the time

Essentially a song about depression, "Paranoid" - which in an early version also included a "The" in its title - has become Black Sabbath's only true major hit, thanks to its immediacy. On Spotify it racks up almost double the streams of the band's second most-streamed track, which also happens to be on this same second album, "Iron Man".

Reaching number four on the UK singles chart, with strong showings also in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and South Africa, "Paranoid" remains, even decades after its original release, one of heavy metal's true classics, a song that guitar students still turn to as a cover to practice on, and one of the turning points for the entire genre, crystallizing - with considerable commercial success too - a simple, winning formula. Black Sabbath themselves would go on to use the same songwriting approach for many other tracks, starting from a distorted guitar riff and building new songs on top of it, some far more elaborate than "Paranoid".

That's precisely the case with another classic from the album, the already mentioned "Iron Man", which was originally titled "Iron Bloke". While "Paranoid" clocks in at 2:48, this one comes close to six minutes. Once again, it's Tony Iommi's distorted, deafening electric guitar that steals the show. "Iron Man", right from its famous opening (built on eight mechanical beats, a filtered vocal and a battered low E string), already tells us of the band's move away from the blues. The blues has nothing mechanical or artificial about it - quite the opposite, it favors a narrative built on blood, sweat and tears. Where the blues tells of lived experience, here we're deep in science-fiction territory, an adventure involving time travel, magnetic storms, plot twists and tragic deaths:

He was turned to steel

In the great magnetic field

When he traveled time

For the future of mankind

In this sense, “Iron Man” is perhaps the most credible manifesto of heavy metal, not only for its title and not only for its solo, with its Morricone-esque sweep at the end. “Iron Man” enjoyed a second youth thanks to the famous Marvel film of the same name from 2008, in which it was featured over the end credits, even if the parallel with the comic-book hero stops at the name. VH1 named the track the greatest heavy metal song of all time, one of those calls that even those who disagree won't have much trouble justifying.

The third classic, and this can be said without any charge of generosity, is the majestic opening track, “War Pigs”. Markedly a protest song, openly opposed to war like other Black Sabbath songs, it was originally meant to center on “Walpurgis Night”, an ancient pagan celebration of spring held on the night between April 30 and May 1, which holds particular significance in witch lore. Geezer Butler regards the celebration as a kind of Christmas for satanists, and it was precisely from the idea of absolute evil that he developed an anti-war song. Even after the title was changed, deemed too satanic, the references to witches and evil in the lyrics remained intact. These were the Vietnam years, and even though military service was no longer compulsory in England, many young men like Butler feared being called up to fight a war perceived as senseless.

In its scant eight minutes, including the coda titled “Luke’s Wall”, “War Pigs” has everything you could ask of a heavy metal classic, starting from its first two minutes, with the opening guitar strikes, slow, deep and hard, and then that stop-and-go interplay that made history, with opening lines rightly enshrined in the rock canon:

Generals gathered in their masses

Just like witches at black masses

Evil minds that plot destruction

Sorcerers of death’s construction

In the fields, the bodies burning

As the war machine keeps turning

Death and hatred to mankind

Poisoning their brainwashed minds

Afterwards, though, a groove that stands as one of the album's last blues remnants serves as a pretext to build tension, ahead of the first solo and, above all, as an anticipation of the second part, which essentially retraces the first, except that it evolves into a more elaborate and psychedelic solo from Iommi, initially built around a melodic phrase and then, also thanks to Bill Ward's rhythmic jabs on drums, developed more freely and epically into a tragic vocal-like cry from the instrument, following an epic that, in Black Sabbath's discography, is better expressed only in the already-discussed “Iron Man”.

Alongside these three classics are five other tracks that may not be on the same level, but are not lacking in points of interest for that.

In track-listing order, the first is “Planet Caravan”, the album's psychedelic homage, sung through a Leslie amplifier. It can ideally be paired with “Solitude”, which would appear on the following album, “Master Of Reality” (1971), but compared to that track it is brighter in its hallucinated, cosmic reflections and more creative within the context of their songbook, being the first track in which the band sheds its metalhead garb to broaden its horizons. The song has its own cult following, and it's no coincidence that it was covered by Pantera as well as being used on a NASA mission in 2020.

Two other tracks are less famous but fundamental to heavy metal, both in themes and sounds. The first, “Electric Funeral”, is a concentrate of apocalyptic imagery dictated by the era's nuclear tensions, essentially the prototype for apocalyptic classics like “Raining In Blood” and countless atomic nightmares set to metal music in the Eighties. The opening lines are a template copied endlessly:

Reflex in the sky

Warn you you’re gonna die

Storm coming, you better hide

From the atomic tide

Flashes in the sky

Turns houses into sties

Turns people into clay

Radiation, minds decay

The other track is “Hand Of Doom”, an exercise in tension and yet another guitar showcase, featuring a menacing bassline and lyrics describing the nightmare of drug addiction.

As with “Electric Funeral”, a few improvements in recording technique and a sharper grasp of the very concept of heavy metal might have allowed these tracks to fully realize their potential, bringing them up to the level of the “Paranoid”-“Iron Man”-“War Pigs” triptych. Fans and countless bands, however, have known how to spot in these compositions a model worth studying and building upon. The “Hand Of Doom” recorded by Slayer and the “Electric Funeral” recorded by Pantera for the tribute album “Nativity In Black II” (2000), for example, show just how deeply songs like these run in the DNA of so many later bands.

The tracklist closes with two very different songs: the instrumental “Rat Salad” is a jam built around Bill Ward's drum solo, following a template used by many other hard'n'heavy bands of the era and now somewhat dated (think of “Moby Dick” by Led Zeppelin or “The Mule” by Deep Purple); “Fairies Wear Boots” (known in the US edition as “Jack The Stripper/Fairies Wear Boots”) is another guitar-driven track, elaborate and adventurous in its lyrics too, cut from the same cloth as “Iron Man” and “War Pigs”, but lacking a legendary riff, which keeps it a notch below.

Together with the self-titled debut and its successor “Master Of Reality”, “Paranoid” helped shape the very idea of heavy metal.

As the central chapter of a trilogy, it still carries traces of the band's earliest period while also containing some of the elements that would surface on their equally important third album. If “Black Sabbath” marked the birth of an evolved, sulfurous, spectacular hard'n'heavy sound still in touch with the blues, “Paranoid” ferried that sound fully into heavy metal, sketching out themes and solutions that would become typical of the genre, especially on the guitar front, while also anticipating the greater openness to other sounds found on its successor. It also replaced much of the gothic horror of the early days with social themes such as war and addiction, tackled with a degree of naivety, and sought its defining dimension in power rather than speed.

Once bands could have both power and speed, these ideas would become the starting point for a new wave of English metal acts, and once the sole aim became pushing the murky, doom-laden side of Iommi's slow, distorted riffs to the extreme, tracks like “Iron Man”, “Electric Funeral” and “Hand Of Doom” would become the starting point for countless stoner, sludge and doom bands. The fact that Electric Wizard, creators of the masterpiece “Dopethrone” (2000), owe their name to a blend of “Electric Funeral” and a track from the Black Sabbath debut, “The Wizard”, says a lot about the band's fundamental influence.

Black Sabbath's only real chart hit, “Paranoid” has sold over 4 million copies in the US alone in the decades since: a classic long seller, one that withstood the hostility of contemporary critics.

Fifty years on, it stands as a classic not just of heavy metal but of all Seventies rock, even though its influence would be felt most strongly over the following two decades. And all this despite the cover, a photo taken by Keith Macmillan of Roger Brown, having been conceived under the assumption that the follow-up to “Black Sabbath” would be titled “War Pigs”, with no connection whatsoever to the title eventually chosen, “Paranoid”. Osbourne would comment on the matter in his own inimitable way, in a 1998 interview with Phil Alexander: 

What the fuck does a bloke dressed as a pig with a sword in his hand got to do with being paranoid, I don’t know, but they decided to change the album title without changing the artwork

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07/08/2022