Today, Black Sabbath teamed with Rhino Records to release a deluxe box set of their second album, Paranoid, which comes with a new mix, demos and live concert audio. To help get the word out, Rhino released a rare demo of "Paranoid." What's most interesting is the sequencing is a little different, as are some of the lyrics.
Take a listen:
According to Rolling Stone, Geezer Butler writes in the liner notes that the lyrical inspiration for the song came from guitarist Tony Iommi's thunderous riffs:
"I just thought it was the heaviest thing I'd ever heard, so I wanted to reflect that in the lyrics," he said. "Ozzy had said the riff sounded like some big iron bloke walking through the city, so I thought, 'Oh, that sounds good. I'll make it about some guy that gets turned into steel, and goes into the future in a time machine kind of thing, and then he comes back and wants to warn the world that they're on the wrong way of doing things, and people just don't take any notice of him.' It sort of reflected what people thought about the band, the way we were slagged off in the press. Eventually the iron man in the song gets his revenge on them."
"I thought the lyrics to 'Iron Man' were really sad," Ward says. "I asked Geezer what it was he wrote and I didn't really understand it. So I listened to it again over and over. I'm what people call an 'orchestrational' drummer, so I play to what the lyric is saying. I tried to make it sound sad."
Grab Black Sabbath's Paranoid: Super Deluxe edition on Amazon.
