Disc:Paranoid.
Year:1970.
To talk about “Paranoid” is to talk about one of the turning points of metal, not to say the touchstone of the whole movement. It may not be the most representative song of the sound of the British quartet formed by Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, but it is their most famous song and the title track of their most successful and popular album. The trademark of the Sabbath sound were those heavy riffs that advanced like an enraged mastodon marking a time as incisive as overwhelming.
The smoking factories of Birmingham had been about to prevent Tony Iommi from deciding to extend his musical fragrance to the creation of his own songs when a guillotine used to cut metal sheets cut the tips of two of the fingers of his hand. Far from this accident provoking his resignation to continue playing guitar, the young Iommi developed a peculiar style from his deficiency, loosening the strings to mitigate the pain that the pressure of the same ones produced in his fingers, reconstructed with plastic prosthesis, and playing in a slower way.
Heavy metal had just been born. That corpulent and deep sound that nobody, not even other recognized precursors of heavy metal like Zeppelin, Purple or Blue Cheer had achieved, would mark a guideline in the songs of the “masters of reality”, dark and heavy hecatombs of watts with a compact and stony rhythmic base.
However, for this “Paranoid” (single released in August 1970, a month before the LP) the band put the pedal to the metal and, lo and behold, the result was the birth of their greatest classic. The album “Paranoid”, second in the Sabbathica discography, was number one in England and climbed to number twelve in the American charts with global sales at the time of four million copies.
At first it was going to be called “War Pigs”, title of another of the combo's milestones included in the album, but the pressures of their company to dismiss that critical reference to the Vietnam War forced to rename it with the name of the “Paranoid” song, which they had recorded at the end of the recording sessions in London's Regent Studios. Its title defined to perfection both the mental state of Ozzy who intoned with his peculiar high-pitched timbre, this song of a madman to the incomprehension and the vital dissatisfaction, as well as the reactions of madness that the theme provoked.
One of the first times they unloaded it in public was in a concert held at the Mayfair Ballroom in Newcastle; when the hypnotic notes sounded, a violent fervor flooded the audience, which literally razed the stage and the band's equipment at that very moment. And that insistent riff of three powerful chords accompanied by Geezer Butler's rhythmic cushion condensed all the magic spell that led Black Sabbath to be not only the patriarchs of metal but also true manipulators of the occult sciences.
My people a big hug for all, here I hope you like this work on this band which is one of the biggest bands in the world of rock and the fathers of metal as such, and this editorial which tells you about the theme that gives life to a whole genre and an era which has passed in the generations of the world, by this theme also many bands have been influenced. So I invite you to listen to them.
