Which Led Zeppelin song inspired Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’?
In one fell swoop of three-fingered power, Black Sabbath tore down the veil of hippiedom and ushered in a new, darker, meaner, but overall more hard-hitting era for rock and roll. Kurt Cobain later claimed the band’s music had a big hand in inventing punk rock, and nothing exemplifies Sabbath’s proto-punk aesthetic more than their best-known single ‘Paranoid’.
Guitarist Tony Iommi’s iconic sliding riff and half-scratched power chords found a particular echo in British punk bands a few years later. While the ostensibly anti-metal punk movement may not have admitted it at the time, there’s no way early Damned or Buzzcocks riffs, or the Sex Pistols’ wall of guitar sound for that matter, could have existed without ‘Paranoid’.
Yet ‘Paranoid’ itself owes a considerable debt to a song released a year before it was written.
Black Sabbath famously wrote and recorded the title song for their second LP in double-quick time as they were looking to fill up the album’s tracklisting. Iommi came to the band with the riff, bassist Geezer Butler scribbled some lyrics, and it was recorded within half an hour.
In between, though, the band still had time for a fight about whether to record the song at all. While Iommi insisted he had something special with that opening riff, Butler and singer Ozzy Osbourne were convinced it ripped off a song from fellow hard rock band Led Zeppelin’s debut album.
A breakdown in communication?
“We always loved Zeppelin in them days,” Butler told Classic Rock. Sabbath members were well-versed in every track of the 1969 Led Zeppelin, including the pulsatingly punkish ‘Communication Breakdown’.
The song’s chords are virtually identical to the ones Iommi uses for ‘Paranoid’, and its opening riff plays almost the same, with notes stabbed rather than slid across Jimmy Page’s guitar.
“So when Tony came up with the riff to ‘Paranoid’ me and Ozzy spotted it immediately,” Butler explained. “[We] went: ‘Naw, we can’t do that!’” The two were so adamant that Iommi had lifted his song idea directly from ‘Communication Breakdown’ that they refused point-blank to perform it.
That is until they relented about 15 minutes later. Apparently, Iommi’s riff was just too good to turn down. And so it proved. “It became such a big hit for us, and is now probably our best-known song,” Butler concluded.
Led Zeppelin themselves were partial to a stolen song or two, nabbing most of the chords, drums and counter-melody from Little Richard’s ‘Keep A-Knocking’ for their song ‘Rock and Roll’. Not to mention chunks of Willie Dixon’s ‘You Need Love’ for ‘Whole Lotta Love’, and Jake Holmes’ ‘Dazed and Confused’ pretty much outright.
Page and the band would scarcely have batted an eyelid at the similarities between ‘Paranoid’ and their song. In any case, while Iommi won the argument in the studio, the final victor was surely rock music itself.