After the Sabbath: The Door Opens (1970) | Self-titled and Paranoid

A twist of fate and a newspaper ad brought together four young men from a nowhere suburb near Birmingham in the late ’60s. Four unemployed outsiders, broke and strung out, trying to pull out of themselves the kind of sound that could knock people to the floor. They wanted to make noise, as much as possible. To shake and rattle anyone who needed a real shakeup. In other words, everyone.

After a few failed attempts at naming themselves, including a brief, unsuccessful tour under the name Earth (already taken by another group), the name Black Sabbath entered their shared vocabulary. It came from the 1963 Italian horror film Black Sabbath (Italian: I tre volti della paura, “The Three Faces of Fear”), directed by Mario Bava and starring horror legend Boris Karloff.

In their early phase, each member came with a different musical background. Hendrix, Cliff Richard, the Beatles, Cream. Swing, jazz, progressive rock. But when the band sat down to figure out what kind of music they really wanted to make, the only thing they could picture was the raw blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. Unlike Blue Cheer or Cream, who had also dabbled in this territory, Black Sabbath took American blues-rock and tore it apart. Slowed it down, stretched it, roughed it up, cranked it, and filled it with something darker and meaner. Why? Because that’s what set them apart.

Black Sabbath (1970)

No rock album – not musically, not lyrically, not atmospherically, not visually – had ever delivered pure horror with such precision as their debut in 1970. The urge to shock and to sound different paid off. The fear was in everything: every riff, every scream, every mystical line, and most of all, the cover. A single glance at it told you everything you needed to know about what was inside. A thick forest, a river or swamp or whatever that was, and in the center stood a cloaked figure in black. In the background: a large building. Ancient? Abandoned? Haunted? Who knows. The inside gatefold featured an upside-down cross and a bleak poem, which predictably drew fire from conservative circles and raised questions about what kind of rituals these band members were into when they weren’t spreading this godless noise.

Out of a dark, rainy night came the opening track. Unsettling, neurotic, chaotic. The song “Black Sabbath” crawled into place. Written by bassist Geezer Butler and inspired by Bava’s film, it described a vision of horror, built on a slow, collapsing guitar and a crushing bass. Ozzy screamed about a shadowy figure pointing at him, a grinning devil in the background, flames eating through everything.

The blues kept going with the harmonica in “The Wizard”, another song about a strange, mystical figure. “Behind the Wall of Sleep” twisted into hallucination. In “N.I.B.” we met Satan himself, carried by a killer bass solo. “Evil Woman” (a Crow cover) told the story of a witch, more or less. “Wicked World” and “The Warning” (originally by Aynsley Dunbar) were both raw statements of despair, the latter running over ten minutes of aggressive, nearly instrumental blues.

Black Sabbath, the debut, grabbed rock by the throat and dipped it in tar. The heaviest thing rock had produced up to that point, musically, lyrically, atmospherically. The album was built on a new kind of trinity: aggression, noise, and fear. And plenty of it.

Paranoid (1970)

With a debut that had been met with relatively open arms in the UK, Black Sabbath didn’t sit still. Just a few months later, still in 1970, they released their second album. It marked a clear step forward – in subject matter, in sound, and in chart success both in the UK and the US, despite ongoing disdain from magazines, music critics, and radio stations. The album was originally set to be titled after its opening track, “War Pigs”, but concern about how it might play with American audiences during the height of the Vietnam War led to a last-minute change. They named it Paranoid instead – another track from the album.

If the first record had all the makings of a horror soundtrack, Paranoid added more layers. It became a classic portrait of despair. The tone was more confident, more varied. It dove headfirst into war, isolation, vengeance, drugs, hallucination, deep depression, and blank existential dread.

Forgive the drama, but I honestly believe that the world of music – rock in particular – would feel hollow without the twisted, vengeful opening of “Iron Man”, the echoing bass and threatening drums of “War Pigs”, the riff in “Paranoid”, or the hazy calm of “Planet Caravan”. In “Hand of Doom”, the band offered a cold, direct depiction of drug addiction. “Electric Funeral” and “Fairies Wear Boots” continued the darker, mystical threads left hanging from the first album.

Paranoid reached number one in the UK albums chart, and the US soon followed. Sabbath may have been unmistakably British, but the core of their music leaned deeply American. A full song dedicated to the horrors of war in “War Pigs”, a nod to Vietnam in “Hand of Doom” – it all helped their appeal to a US audience that recognized the sound but wasn’t used to hearing it turned inside out.

“War Pigs” was especially blunt, even graphic, in its portrayal of war crimes and the hypocrisy of those in charge. Unlike the anti-war music coming out of the hippie movement in the US, Sabbath’s version came from a different place. They weren’t idealists. Not even close. They came at war with a viewpoint that was cynical, violent, pained, and almost pathologically passive. Interestingly, the original lyrics to “War Pigs” had nothing to do with war. They were an over-the-top fantasy about a witch hunt. That version eventually surfaced years later on an Ozzy Osbourne compilation called The Ozzman Cometh, for anyone interested.

As I mentioned earlier, the first album’s cover summed up its entire content in a single image. With the second album, it was the name – Paranoid – that did the same. Like the song, the title captured everything inside: the tone, the words, the riffs, the haze. Direct. Precise. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Looking back now, I can say with some confidence that “paranoid” is probably the best single-word descriptor for Black Sabbath in those years. This album was the cherry on top, but it was also just the tip of the iceberg.