The masterpiece that Black Sabbath wrote in minutes
Sometimes it takes me an hour to record 30 minutes on a stopwatch. The other day, my instant coffee took the best part of the morning to brew. However, I take solace in the fact that I am not alone; the vast majority of the proletariat are rendered human sloths by the highwire freaks who can rattle off a quick masterpiece between the ad breaks. The boys in Black Sabbath might not have been proficient at much but cranking out a classic was easy peasy.
It was the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael who once proclaimed: “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’.”
This notion of songs simply floating in the ether has more than a grain of truth to it when you consider that Black Sabbath penned a song that changed the world in a quicker time than it takes to poach an egg. In fact, you half wonder whether the brevity of inception was the key to the brilliance here—without any time for pretence or second-guessing to creep in, this anthem is brimming with an unencumbered creative flow, all sincerity, heart, and no shadow of a doubt. It was a band at the top of their game and launching a dark revolution.
After all, everything was fast paced in Black Sabbath, even hospital visits. The same can be said for ‘Paranoid’. “The song ‘Paranoid’ was written as an afterthought. We basically needed a three-minute filler for the album, and Tony [Iommi] came up with the riff. I quickly did the lyrics, and Ozzy was reading them as he was singing,” Geezer Butler once explained.
Four-and-a-half-fingered guitarist Tony Iommi adds: “The song was written as a filler for the album – it was never intended on being anything else. But it became a single because it was a short song, and because it became what it did, most people knew us because of ‘Paranoid’ in them days.” The irony is, they wouldn’t release another single for two years because they didn’t want to become known as a singles band.
With ‘Paranoid’ it’s a case of write what you know, and the results will come quickly. As Geezer Butler confessed: “Basically, it’s just about depression because I didn’t really know the difference between depression and paranoia. It’s a drug thing; when you’re smoking a joint you get totally paranoid about people, you can’t relate to people. There’s that crossover between the paranoia you get when you’re smoking dope and the depression afterwards.” They captured that essence in a brisk fashion that can only be borne from autobiographical thinking and solid practice.
