Three minutes the album did not have
The riff is so plain it feels like a taunt: three chords, a downhill run, no atmosphere to hide in. Ozzy Osbourne sings as if he is reading the words off a page that is still warm, because that is close to what happened. Paranoid does not brood. Brooding takes time, and time was the thing they had just been told they lacked. The song is a panic attack with a backbeat, finished before anyone could decide it was too simple to be the future of heavy music.
In June 1970, at Regent Sound and Island Studios in London, with producer Rodger Bain, Black Sabbath were cutting the album that was going to be called War Pigs. They thought they were done. Bain, or the clock, said they were short of the length an LP required. Tony Iommi has remembered being asked for another song while the others were out, and coming back with a riff for a three-minute track, a length the band did not usually bother with. Geezer Butler wrote the lyric fast, about depression and the cracked thinking that follows it, and Osbourne sang it while reading, and asked, according to Butler, what the word paranoid even meant. The whole thing was done in a couple of hours. The single hit, the label renamed the album, released in Britain on 18 September 1970, and a filler became the title. War stayed on the record. Paranoia got the cover.
Live, the song is the short sharp shock between longer pieces of weather. It does not need a light show. It needs the riff, which a beginner can play and a master cannot improve. That is the insult and the gift. Sabbath built cathedrals elsewhere. Here they built a door and left it banging.
The song Paranoid was written as an afterthought. We basically needed a three-minute filler for the album, and Tony came up with the riff. I quickly did the lyrics, and Ozzy was reading them as he was singing.
(Geezer Butler, Guitar World, 2004)
The speed of the writing is now part of the myth, and the myth is accurate enough to be useful: Butler has also said the music took about five minutes and the song about two hours. Bill Ward has said even less. The disagreements about the stopwatch do not touch the audible fact. You can hear a band that has not had time to decorate. The guitar tone is the same iron they used for doom, applied to a pop length, which is why the track reached people who would never sit through a ten-minute warning about generals and witches. Simplicity, here, was not a commercial theory. It was a deadline.
What remains is a riff that outran the album’s original name. Paranoid still sounds like a man who cannot finish a thought before the next one arrives, which is a precise description of the state and of the session. Osbourne’s question about the word is the best sleevenote the song has. He sang the diagnosis before he owned the dictionary. The dictionary caught up. The riff did not need it.
