“In the fields the bodies burning / while the war machine keeps turning / death and hatred to mankind / poisoning their brainwashed minds” – Black Sabbath, “War Pigs”
Bit of a Black Sabbath fixation lately. No apologies, have you heard Tommy’s guitar? Ozzy’s voice? Plus I’m a sucker for that real spacey 70s sound, where it sounds like it’s just drums-bass-guitar in a room, mics pressed close to cranked-up amps but still picking up cymbal bleed. Brendan says Sabbath is like “if Led Zeppelin sounded good” and I have to agree.
Still, it wasn’t until this year that I listened to a Black Sabbath album start to finish. What took so long. My goodness.
Previous entries:
Naked Raygun | Pure Hell | Big Joanie | The Beatles | The Beatles
How I Came Across This Album
Not to brag, but I play guitar. If you play guitar, the Ozzy Osborne trifecta of Tommy Iommi (Sabbath’s guitarist), Randy Rhoades (first Ozzy solo guitarist, wrote “Crazy Train”), and Zakk Wylde (Ozzy’s longest-tenured guitarist, known especially for the hypontic Les Paul) shreds its way into your brain practically by, uh, ozzmosis. An early guitar book my parents bought me was called something like 25 Greatest Guitar Songs Of The 20th Century, and “Crazy Train” was in it. Those Zakk Wylde signatures were all over the guitar magazines I read.
Of course, old timers always said Tommy Iommi was the best.
I won’t rehearse too much of the Godfather of Heavy Metal here. I don’t know enough about them, I certainly have not been taking the Sabbath fans in my life seriously enough. I know how much I don’t know, but let’s get into it a little. Tommy Iommi lost the tips of his middle and ring fingers on his fretting hand in an accident on his last day of work at a sheet metal factory. As a result, he sludged his guitar down to lower tunings, giving his strings a haunting wobbliness. He relied on power chords to a previously unheard-of degree—does a guy with 10 fingers write “Iron Man?” I mean, yeah, on a long enough timeline. It helps when your only strong fingers are index and pinky1, though.
What’s super sick about Iommi is the clear jazz influence, a willingness to jam out songs and write cool unison riffs to play with the bass and a clear passion for feeling the music in the room. Randy Rhoades and his neoclassical approach to metal is sick as hell, but it’s practically standard across metal. Not many bands now are willing to sound like three high guys in a room, plus Ozzy singing about LSD and losing his mind, plus Satan and military generals.
I’m getting ahead of myself. I came across this album because if you’ve ever been within 50 yards of a guitar shop, someone has told you to listen to this album. Plus, you know “War Pigs” and “Paranoid” and “Iron Man.” Your marching band probably played at least one of those songs. Today, we’re doing the whole album.
Track By Track
Enough Sabbath biography. I’m Bill S. Preston, Esquire, and I’m Ted “Theodore” Logan, and we’re Wyld Stallions, here to tell you all about the totally bitchin and bodacious album, Paranoid.
War Pigs
Absolutely one of the greatest songs of all time. Certain songs, I am simply unable to control myself if I hear them and I wasn’t expecting them. “Sweetness” by Jimmy Eat World is one such song, “Backseat Freestyle” or “Euphoria” by Kendrick Lamar, “B.O.B.” by Outkast. This is a perfect song. I don’t even care that he rhymes “masses” with “masses” in the beginning. The only difference between generals gathered in their masses and witches at black masses is that one actually has tangible negative effect on the world. Anyway. This song is perfect. The T Pain cover above is perfect. Tommy Iommi wrote this with two full fingers on his left hand.
Paranoid
An “afterthought” of a song that took 25 minutes to write, drummer Bill Ward said. It’s the second-best song on the album, the title track, incredibly iconic, a TL;DR of Ozzy’s biography.
Planet Caravan
Phenomenal track, great mood shift. I like when the metal bands play stoner jazz.
Iron Man
Gotta be honest, I have been over this song for a long time. The magic wore off this riff when I was around 14, the magic wore off Tony Stark around the time of Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the magic has worn off of cybernetics now that the AI execs are openly drooling about commodifying even more of your body. Go see how many seasons of Orphan Black you can make it through (I did three) and see if you’re still excited about body modification.
All that said, within the context of the album? Pretty good track. Would’ve changed my life if I was 15 in 1970.
Electric Funeral
Possibly Sabbath at their most Zeppelin? But like. I just feel it way more with Sabbath. It never feels like an act with Sabbath.
Hand Of Doom
This one’s about the plight of Vietnam vets being strung out on heroin and the U.S. government not taking care of its people. Again, I don’t know a lot about Sabbath. Frankly, I know both a lot and very little about metal. But I think it’s interesting that Sabbath had something a political edge, and that seems to have gotten totally sanded off of metal in general pretty quickly. Please let me know if there’s a cool leftist/anarchist metal scene I am missing out on.
Rat Salad
Not many bands I could listen to jam like this, but I really really enjoy this track.
Fairies Wear Boots
Look I’m just gonna block quote Wikipedia here, because this feels like the perfect Sabbath story:
“In the 2010 documentary film Classic Albums: Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, the band’s bassist Geezer Butler states that Ozzy Osbourne composed the lyrics after a group of skinheads in London called him a “fairy” because of his long hair. However, Butler also stated Ozzy’s lyrics often went off in random tangents, and the second half of the song was about LSD.[4] Osbourne, in the same documentary, said he wrote the lyrics about LSD. In 2010, Osbourne stated in his autobiography I Am Ozzy that he did not recall what the song was written about.“
WHAT DO I THINK?
THIS ALBUM RULES AND I APOLOGIZE TO EVERY SABBATH FAN FOR NOT TAKING YOU SERIOUSLY.
There is more Sabbath in my future. Probably the future of this blog, too.
Hey, in the spirit of “hang in there,” why don’t we end with the closing lines “War Pigs?” That first verse is sure intense. But hang in there:
Now in darkness, world stops turning
Ashes where the bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of Judgment, God is calling
On their knees the war pigs crawling
Begging mercy for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings…
O Lord yeah,
Chris
- a previous version of this post said “ring” when I meant “pinky.” Chalk it up to the fact that you can play power chords both ways. I opt for index and pinky, mostly. So far, my students seem to favor index and ring—which is how I was in high school. Of course, a full power chord uses index, ring, and pinky, but you can hear Tommy playing two-note chords mostly. There is a noticeable difference. ↩︎
I love the song Planet Caravan. It’s so moody and weird. I was surprised when I realized it was Black Sabbath.