Black Sabbath
Paranoid

So I had started my turntable with this LP on it, loaned to me by a friend who, upon lending it, had uttered the following phrase: "You who always talk about Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin... listen to this!".

Meanwhile, the multi-spiraled Vertigo label had begun to spin, inducing a subtle hypnotic effect on me, and the needle started to drop on the record. Shortly after the characteristic and familiar small thump as it entered the groove in the vinyl, a cyclopean chord suddenly came forth, played by a couple of guitars in unison, heavily distorted, buzzing but also filled with dark tones, sustained in a very slow tempo by a haunting bass line and a dragging, lumbering drumbeat. After a couple of key changes, the sound of British World War II air-raid sirens emerged, cutting through the general rumble, a sinister prelude to the approach of German bombers over London (or rather Birmingham, Sabbath's city?): a devastating effect on the ears and imagination of me, a kid who, up until that moment, had regarded "In A Gadda Da Vida" by Iron Butterfly and "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin as the ultimate expressions of violent and threatening sound.

Suddenly, however, the track abruptly stopped, leaving just the simple hi-hat to keep time, alone and unafraid, comforted only by a pair of resolute instrumental breaks. By that point, more than a minute of music had already passed, and finally, a ragged and mocking voice, terribly unhinged yet effective, began to rail against generals, armies, maps scattered with model tanks, airplanes, and soldiers. Later, as the singer caught his breath between invectives, the group amused themselves by laying down riff after riff, with drummer Bill Ward progressively filling all the syncope with creative and anarchic rolls. Now, the two guitars, which had been working in parallel, one on the right and the other on the left to create a single, rich wall of accompaniment, began to diversify: the right guitar's solo was contemporary and different from the left's. But then they converged again, in a unison and sonorous musical phrase, followed by an arpeggio seasoned with imperious bicord stabs... The track's last extravagant trick was a tape acceleration that slid the song in a few seconds to triple speed and rising pitch before the abrupt, absurd final stop.

What are these eight minutes of oppressive power titled? "War Pigs"... damn! What an impact! So much so that this memory of my personal baptism with Sabbath is still very clear. From those days on, my history as a music enthusiast revealed rather moderately metallic tastes (beyond Alter Bridge and Saxon, I can't go... fundamental entities like Iron Maiden and Metallica don't enjoy my humble appreciation, not to mention the whole extreme scene, Grind and Nu and Stoner and so on, which I am not interested in at all), yet the youthful blow delivered to me by this English quartet was formative and useful like few others. It helped me to be less snobbish, to seek and sometimes find quality and admiration towards hard rock and bombing numbers.

This second Sabbath album was named Paranoid by the record label due to the considerable potential of the single extracted from it; the band had other plans for the title (as can be deduced from the cover, very "War Pigs"), but also a logical hunger for success and so they adapted. "Paranoid" the song came together in a flash, with the album almost complete... a half-hour jam session and the piece was done, another half-hour and bassist Geezer Butler had written the lyrics, so chronicles and interviews with the protagonists say. A story quite similar to that of "Black Night" by Deep Purple, which was kept off the album "In Rock" and destined only to make its way as a single.

What else can be said about these two and a half minutes of a unique and inimitable paradigm of compact, accessible, sinister, and commercial heavy metal? It sits there, perfect (for those who esteem such sounds and such exploits of simplicity and effectiveness), with Ozzy Osbourne's obscene lullaby snarled over Toni Iommi's astonishingly choked guitar, merging completely with Butler's muted bass. It was and always will be remembered as the best possible calling card, compact essential and piercing, of metal music.

When attending a Black Sabbath concert, even today it's impossible not to catch "Iron Man", another glorious song contained within this work. The deadly effectiveness, imaginative and pioneering, of the thunderous initial glissando achieved by Iommi pulling the vibrato lever and then slowly releasing it to the resting position, while Ozzy’s distorted and transformed voice introduces the science fiction story of the Iron Man, returning from the future to announce the apocalypse... But they do not allow him, and so he remains, content to watch its unfolding. It’s worth mentioning that all these political/pacifist or science fiction lyrics ("War Pigs" is joined by "Electric Funeral" about nuclear disasters and "Hand Of Doom" about the horrors of Vietnam and its veterans, often drugged with heroin to cope with the memory of horrific massacres suffered and especially caused) were more due to the bassist's pen than the group's frontman, who was, nonetheless, perfectly suited to interpret them.

Another song to mention is undoubtedly "Planet Caravan", a kind of very psychedelic interstellar journey in Kubrick style, rendered in an unsettling manner by Osborne’s unparalleled and invaluable voice, filtered and phantomized through a Leslie organ amplifier. This episode is the only one devoid of noise and energy among the eight forming the album but cannot be experienced serenely, having its fair share of anxiety-inducing qualities.

A couple of more lines about "Electric Funeral", a title and a program as the piece's pace is truly funeral-like, dominated by Iommi and Butler’s famous and prolific riff over which young Ozzy’s endless sneer revels unashamedly.

Like all entities that have genuinely made history, Black Sabbath emerged from a perfect meeting of musicians and personalities: the capacity and depth of riffing and Iommi's acidic soloing added to Geezer's leaden bass and his gloomy and pessimistic lyrical vein, multiplied by the creative and anarchic drumming of the madman Ward, and all elevated by the eerie and disturbed voice of Ozzy... the result is that ventures into the dark side of rock were (almost) first thought of, and surely executed better than anyone else by these Black Sabbath from Birmingham, England.