The song Tony Iommi didn’t want to be remembered for
Any artist is going to be concerned with the kind of legacy they leave behind after being in the game for a while. No one can claim to keep the fire burning forever, and if they have to eventually bow out at some point, it’s better to leave on a high note or have everyone remember the moments when the band were at their peak. However, as far as Tony Iommi was concerned, Black Sabbath had more than a few different chapters of their career that are worth going down in musical history.
Although everyone remembers the moments when Ozzy Osbourne was shrieking his heart out on the band’s debut, Ronnie James Dio is still one of the finest vocalists to ever perform with the band. At a time when they could have easily gone over horribly with the new kids in town, Heaven and Hell gave them an unintentional archetype for what the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was going to sound like when bands like Saxon started hitting the airwaves a few years later.
And when the band started to go through every single shakeup in the book, Iommi was always the one pushing them forward. Despite what everyone else might say, he WAS Black Sabbath for many people, and as soon as one of his thunderous riffs started, everyone knew exactly what band they were listening to, be it with Dio, Osbourne, Glenn Hughes, or the criminally underrated Tony Martin era of the band.
But there is always going to be a sweet spot when everything starts clicking for Sabbath. The band had an unexpected hit right out of the gate when people latched onto their namesake track because of its horror vibes, but there were also songs like ‘NIB’ that everyone latched onto as well. They could do much more than that, but whenever someone brings up the peak of Sabbath’s powers, it always comes back to ‘Paranoid’, and Iommi has never figured out why.
Sure, the song squeezes everything great about the band into a tight two-minute window, but Iommi felt that he would rather be known for other songs before that half-baked tune, saying, “A lot of people say ‘Paranoid’, but 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.”
There are some elements that are definitely great in context, but it’s easy to see where Iommi is coming from. Sabbath were known for writing massive epics half the time, so knowing them strictly for their short pop songs is like thinking that you have the crux of Led Zeppelin down by listening to ‘Good Times Bad Times’. It’s a fine tune, but you’re missing out on a lot more brilliance on the table.
Given it was only their second trip to the studio, that turned out to only be the calm before the storm as well. Despite Paranoid having more hits, Master of Reality is clearly the superior album, especially with every single demonic riff and the band getting even heavier thanks to Iommi tuning down his guitar to make everything sound ominous on songs like ‘Children of the Grave’.
So while ‘Paranoid’ is a delightful piece of heavy metal pop music by comparison, Iommi knows that the real fans knew how to do some digging on their albums. Sabbath was never meant to be a pop band, and if they were, they were going to make sure to make the most pitch-black take on a single as they could.
