I just finished watching the new DVD in the Classic Albums series (if you get VH1 Classic, chances are you’ve seen or scrolled past it on your program guide), which is essentially a documentary about Black Sabbath‘s Paranoid put out by Eagle Vision with interviews from all four original members of the band and input from critics, Roger Bain, who produced, and, I guess just because he likes the record, Henry Rollins, who I think might have more face-time on the disc than Geezer Butler. If not, it’s pretty close.

Let’s try and put the junk-strokery of Paranoid aside (all praise be upon it), if for no other reason than I have nothing to add to the already generations-long line of lauding it has received — Black Sabbath are the best band ever and we all know it. The simple truth is there wasn’t much of a story to how Paranoid was made. Sabbath were starting to get popular and they needed to put out a new album to capitalize on that burgeoning popularity, so they just so happened to release Paranoid (not my favorite of their albums, but godly nonetheless), and well, you know the rest. “Hand of Doom,” “Electric Funeral,” “Fairies Wear Boots,” “Iron Man,” “Planet Caravan,” “War Pigs” — these songs are essentially the foundation upon which the ensuing 40 years of heavy music have been built. Like I said, best ever.

As far as the DVD goes, it’s interesting to hear the members, who all appear in separate interviews, talking about how they came up with the material, but what it boils down to is, “Tony Iommi wrote an amazing riff and we turned it into a song.” That’s apparently how it went. Not quite as action-packed as Deep Purple‘s Classic Albums installment for Machine Head, which had burning buildings, band members climbing out of windows and recording in hallways, but of course the circumstances were different, and if I had to choose between the two records, well fuck it, Machine Head wouldn’t stand a chance.

But the mundane circumstances that may have birthed it aside — drugs, working class misery, an already well-documented partially-severed finger — Paranoid is still about as close as humans can come to divinity, so for that, it’s well worth seeing the Classic Albums DVD. There’s some archival performance footage and the song-by-song format really lets Iommi, Geezer, Ozzy and Bill Ward get in-depth about the tracks; a fair tradeoff for seeing people like the dude who edits Mojo and Kerrang! talk about how much the record rules, which presumably you already know if you’re watching.

And yeah, there is a lot of Rollins. He likes him some Sabbath, and though it might have been interesting to hear from some other musicians, maybe who were in later incarnations of Black Sabbath either in the Dio years or after, I guess Rollins picked up the phone when they called, so there you go.

All told, it’s probably not much Sab-obsessives didn’t already know, but if being sick of heaping acclaim onto Paranoid is something that can happen to a person, I certainly wouldn’t know about it. And you do get to see Tony Iommi play the opening of “Fairies Wear Boots” on solo guitar, and that pretty much rules, so no complaints. I’ll probably only watch it 700 more times.

Black Sabbath’s Website

Eagle Vision

Tags: Black Sabbath, Eagle, Gods

This entry was posted on Friday, May 21st, 2010 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.