The 1970 song Black Sabbath almost threw away: “Sitting on the floor smoking dope”
Every artist will have to deal with some sort of imposter syndrome now and again. Even though they might have a unique sound unlike anything else out at the time, there are just as many instances where artists feel that they have nothing left to say except for recycling the same schlock they already have in their record collections.
While Black Sabbath may have sounded like they crawled out of the crypt in the 1970s, the band thought so little of one of their classics that they considered ditching it.
When working out some of their first compositions, though, the group wasn’t thinking along the lines of the heavy metal sound they would cultivate. Primarily known for being a blues rock band, the band’s first song was ‘Wicked World’, which sat between Led Zeppelin and Cream, albeit with Ozzy Osbourne’s bellowing voice anchoring everything to the ground.
By the time the band got together to rehearse, Geezer Butler’s meagre attempts to play the classical composition ‘Mars: Bringer of War’ led to Tony Iommi utilising the tritone for the band’s next song. Sending shivers down everyone’s spine, the band’s namesake track gave birth to their signature sound, making songs that were designed to be far darker than anything else at the time.
That darkness wasn’t some carefully manufactured image either. Birmingham in the late 1960s was a long way from the flower-power idealism coming out of California, and Sabbath sounded like it. Factory towns, looming industry, and a general sense of grey post-war Britain seeped into everything they played. While most rock bands still leaned on swagger or psychedelia, Sabbath made music that felt genuinely threatening, which is exactly why younger audiences latched onto them so quickly.
While the group cranked out most of their debut album over a few days, they were quickly rushed back into the studio once their debut got into the charts. Looking to capitalise on their brooding sound, Paranoid came equipped with equally heavy subject matter, talking about the horrors going on in the Vietnam War on ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Hand of Doom’ while creating striking works of fiction on ‘Iron Man’.
For all the great anthems that populated the album, their label thought they needed a single to tie everything together. Since the band weren’t known for playing short songs, Iommi came up with the basis for the title track in less than an hour, working while everyone was on their lunch break and coming up with the song’s central riff.
While the band were used to following Iommi’s lead, they thought their song was a bit too close to what Led Zeppelin had already done. While they admitted to being massive fans of the British hard rockers, Geezer Butler remembered that the song was too close to Zeppelin’s ‘Communication Breakdown’.
Speaking about the song to Classic Rock, Butler said that the band almost elected to ditch the song to work on something else because of the similarities, saying, “We were short on material, and Tony just kind of came up with the riff on the spot. But Ozzy and I thought it was too close to ‘Communication Breakdown’ by Led Zeppelin. We always loved Zeppelin in them days, sitting round on the floor smoking dope and listening to that first album. So when Tony came up with the riff to ‘Paranoid’, me and Ozzy spotted it immediately and went: ‘Naw, we can’t do that!’”.
The irony is that ‘Paranoid’ ended up succeeding because of how stripped-back it was compared to the rest of the album. Most of the record dealt in lumbering riffs, whereas the title track got in, did the damage, and disappeared again in under three minutes. That directness made it perfect for radio, even if the band themselves barely considered it more than a last-minute addition knocked together to satisfy the label.
Despite the rest of the band’s objections, the song would become one of the definitive Sabbath anthems, with Butler writing lyrics about problems he had while fighting depression. Even though Sabbath may have introduced a darker side of rock and roll to the pop charts, there was a massive contingency of people willing to go along for the ride.
