3/10/2024 0 Comments Black sabbath album no logoThe dark riff lord’s work is all over Paranoid, right from the moment an air raid siren and his plunging bends ominously signal the opening of War Pigs, a song initially called ‘Walpurgis’, but rejected as a title by record company Vertigo for its Satanic overtones. “That helped me develop my style of playing, bending the strings and hitting the open string at the same time just to make the sound wilder.” “I’d play a load of chords and I’d have to play fifths because I couldn’t play fourths because of my fingers,” Iommi later told Mojo. In doing so, Iommi inadvertently invented the sludgy, dark sound of British heavy metal, his style full of techniques that became rock staples for years to come – chunky powerchords, rhythmic solidity, pentatonic licks, fluid vibrato and searing unison bends. He would later begin tuning down to C♯, too. Iommi fitted Fairy Liquid bottle tops to his fingers and initially used banjo strings before settling on 8-gauge sets for his SG, because they were easier to bend. Told he would never play again, Iommi was spurred on by the story of Django Reinhardt’s recovery from severe burns to his hands suffered in a fire. In an industrial accident that’s become the stuff of rock legend, 17-year-old Iommi, on his last day at work in a sheet metal factory before becoming a full-time musician, severed the tips of his fretting hand’s middle and ring fingers. Iommi cut his teeth on British guitar greats such as Hank Marvin, Eric Clapton and John Mayall, but his pioneering playing style was forged out of necessity. The genre-defining sound of Paranoid owes most to the super-human determination of Iommi, a man who would be a rich source of inspiration for countless heavy-rock players over the next 50 years. Sabbath had perfected the doomy riff-heavy sound previewed on their debut album and conjured a record that would see the Birmingham quartet, along with contemporaries Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, change the face of British guitar music. With Iommi putting down his Strat and picking up a Gibson SG that he swapped with a right-handed player in a Birmingham car park, and adding a modified Dallas Arbiter Range Master Treble Booster to the mix, the stage was set.
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