“We didn’t have enough songs for the album,” drummer Bill Ward recalls while making Paranoid.
That same ethos bled onto one of the band’s most iconic tracks, ‘War Pigs’, the song that sparked their second album into gnarled existence. We never had a second run of most of the stuff.” Ozzy was singing at the same time, we just put him in a separate booth and off we went. Even their debut album was pieced together in a day, as Tony Iommi recalls, “We thought we have two days to do it and one of the days is mixing. As Lester Bangs of Rolling Stone scathing wrote about their debut: “Discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitised speedfreaks all over each other’s musical perimeters, yet never quite finding synch.” In truth, he couldn’t have defined heavy metal – before the event – better if he tried.Įverything about the band was rough, tumble, and raw. While they may have changed the music scene forevermore, they were not universally taken to.
In short, ‘War Pigs’ is one of the great rock songs that has been offered up to date.īy 1970, they had released a self-titled debut and one of the greatest sophomore records of all time with Paranoid, and their legacy was cemented within a year of emerging from the factories of Birmingham with their fingers barely intact. This track is the Promethean force that all genres deserve to yield when they attempt to usurp the status quo, or at least shoulder out a small place to call its own amid the mainstream. It smashes the saloon doors off their hinges and starts firing shots before asking any questions.įrom the rumbling bass to the rafter rattling guitar, the pounding salvo of drums and no-holds-barred vocals, this song knows what it’s about and in doing so, it fills you with reassurance that what will follow is undoubtedly going to be an album of note. While some openers coax you into position, ‘War Pigs’ doesn’t have a hair-raising second to wait. The needle hits the groove on Paranoid, and following the great cackle and hiss of anticipation that emanates from the vinyl, like an orchestra’s last fine tunings before the wall of sound that follows, the opening track is the gunshot that starts a legendary race in the evolving progress of rock music.
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