The riff that defines Tony Iommi: “Knock your fucking socks off”
“Black Sabbath never used to write a structured song. There’d be a long intro that would go into a jazz piece, then go all folky, and it worked.”
While it might not have seemed unstructured to listeners, Ozzy Osbourne claimed the above during a 2006 interview with Rolling Stone, going on to wax lyrical about how proficient the band’s guitarist, Tony Iommi, was at his role. While many people regard him as being one of the finest guitarists in the history of heavy metal, Osbourne expressed his view that he should perhaps be held in even higher regard.
“Tony Iommi — and I have said this a zillion times — should be up there with the greats,” he continued. “He can pick up a guitar, play a riff, and you say, ‘He’s gotta be out now, he can’t top that.’ Then you come back and I bet you a billion dollars, he’d come up with a riff that’d knock your fucking socks off.”
It’s hard to find yourself disagreeing with the ‘Prince of Darkness’ and his overwhelming praise for his former colleague, but if this combination of jazz and folk influences being injected into their sludgy metal sound twinned with the ability to proverbially remove one’s footwear were the epitome of everything Iommi was about as a guitarist, then what is the finest example of his work that exemplifies his specific skillset?
While the band’s self-titled debut album is filled with crunching riffs that find themselves segueing into passages that showcase a lighter, jazzier touch, particularly on tracks like ‘The Wizard’ and their 10-minute interpretation of Aynsley Dunbar’s ‘Warning’, it’s on their follow-up, Paranoid, where the band are not only stepping up their game, but Iommi is beginning to find an extra level of flair. For all of the imperfections that Black Sabbath had, they were all but ironed out a matter of months later with their second album.
Once again, there are a number of cuts from Paranoid that could quite easily be regarded as containing Iommi’s defining guitar moment, but it’s tough to disregard the instant impact of the album’s opener, ‘War Pigs’, with it having all the hallmarks of his playing as outlined by Osbourne in his glowing appraisal.
While it might not be as overt in its jazz and folk influences as other songs in the band’s catalogue, the origins of the song certainly suggest otherwise. Drummer Bill Ward recalls early live performances of the song developing extended jam sections to make up for the fact that the band didn’t have enough material to fill out the allotted set duration at their shows.
With this, the band were able to incorporate sections where Iommi unleashes loose guitar solos that meander in the same way that any soloist in a jazz ensemble would do, and even though it seems structured, when you break things down, the track has a certain improvisational air about it, where the band seemingly don’t care too much about which part they’re heading into. On top of this, every screeching sound that Iommi makes after each of Osbourne’s lines in the verse feels like an ad-lib rather than something that was planned, adding an extra jazz flair.
‘War Pigs’ can’t be denied as not just one of Black Sabbath’s signature songs, but one of the greatest rock songs of all time. If people listened to ‘Black Sabbath’ and thought that there was no way the band or Iommi could conjure up another barnstorming riff to open an album with, then ‘War Pigs’ is undoubtedly him silencing his doubters and, as Osbourne so eloquently puts it, “knocking their fucking socks off”.
