Iron Man (9 page)

The single ‘Evil Woman' didn't do much, but the album went to No. 8. Jim Simpson had booked us a lot of gigs before it came out and we were still honouring them for something like £20, next to nothing. We said to him: ‘Hang on, how many more of these gigs are we going to be doing?'

‘Oh, we've got months of these to go.'

It was getting silly. Even the people who ran the clubs we played at were going: ‘You should be getting more than this! What are you doing playing here?'

We thought, well, fuck this, we've done enough! So when heavyweight manager Don Arden called, telling us he was interested in working with us, we went up to London to see him. Wilf Pine picked us up in a Rolls-Royce. Wilf was a nice bloke when you knew him, but, on the other hand, he was quite vicious. Fucking hell, I've heard tasty stories about what he did for Don Arden. Everything looked really heavy around Don. You saw lots of gangster-like characters floating about. We got to his office and it was a bit overpowering, with Don going: ‘You're going to be great. You're going to have billboards up everywhere. I'm going to get you to the top!'

And so on. He went: ‘Sign here!'

We just couldn't do that. It was all too bombarding. So we came away, thinking, oh God, what are we going to do now? He'll probably have us killed! He kept getting in touch with us, arranging to take us out to dinner and all that sort of business. He
never let go. Then one day, Wilf got in touch. He said: ‘I've got another guy that wants to meet you. I'm going to bring him up to Birmingham.'

It was Patrick Meehan. He seemed a lot calmer than Arden and said the things we wanted to hear: ‘You've got an album out, nobody is pushing the record. You should get better gigs . . .'

All that stuff sounded good to our ears. Instead of being up on billboards, we just wanted to be out playing. He just had the right way about it at the time, so we ended up signing with Patrick Meehan.

Looking back at it now it was quite strange that Wilf, who worked for Arden, would suggest Meehan to us. Wilf probably thought, oh well, they don't want Don but maybe they're interested in Patrick. Which we were. But we didn't know how close the relationship between Arden and Meehan really was. In the past Patrick Meehan's dad had worked for Don Arden, so there certainly was a connection.

Wilf wrote a book a few years ago. There's a picture of me and him in it, and then on the other side of the page there's one of Wilf and John Gotti, then the head of the New York Mafia. I thought, fucking hell, how did I get mixed up in this?

Patrick Meehan had learned the ropes from his dad, who also had a management company. It was all very much roses at first. Meehan talked a good talk and in the early days he really got things going. He was the one who got us to America. The whole thing changed for us. We were travelling in private jets everywhere. Any time we wanted anything, we'd just phone him up: ‘I want to buy a new car.'

He'd go: ‘Oh, okay, what car?'

In my case a Lamborghini or a Rolls-Royce, or whatever.

‘Where is it?'

I'd tell him where it was.

‘How much is it?'

I'd tell him how much it was.

‘I'll send them a cheque and I'll arrange to get the car over.'

And that was it. If I wanted to buy a house: ‘Where is the house? How much is it?'

And I got the house. That's how we lived. But we never saw any significant amounts of physical cash, even though there was a lot of it about. We got some money put into the bank, but not a lot. But for us, coming from what we came from, a few hundred quid in the bank was brilliant. I believe that we never really knew how much money we actually made. We had accountants involved with us, but we never really questioned what their role was or who they were taking instructions from.

‘Oh, it's a big accountancy firm, it must be all right!'

We knew nothing at all about the business side of things. When we went down to the office it was always come in all's great: ‘By the way, sign these papers. It's basically so-and-so, I'll tell you about it, all from the accountant.'

And you'd think it was all above board.

But I liked Meehan. We all liked him at first and we believed in him.

After recording
Black Sabbath
we immediately started writing songs for our second album. Some of them were written when we were on the road in Europe, like ‘War Pigs'. When we played that grim place in Zurich, we jammed a lot and that's where the initial idea came from. Later, during rehearsal, we turned it into a song. We had writing sessions in whatever rehearsal place we used at the time, putting tracks together. We also did some work for
Paranoid
in Monmouth, in Wales, because we wanted to go somewhere where we could lock ourselves away. We were one of the first bands there, after Dave Edmunds. At the other places we'd have to go in and then go home, but here we could all be together and around each other all the time.

The recording of the
Paranoid
album went pretty quick. We went back to Regent Sound, working with Rodger Bain again. It didn't take much more than three or four days, just a bit longer than the first one. Because we were in a fight a couple of nights before that, I recorded that album with a great big black eye. It was the days of Mods and Rockers and we were playing at this seaside resort. We had finished and Geezer went out to make a phone call. He soon came rushing back in, going: ‘Fucking hell,
loads of skinheads trying to get me, they're all waiting for us to come out!'

We went out to see what was happening and it was serious stuff. Ozzy grabbed a hammer and I said: ‘Who is the one that got you then, Geezer?'

He pointed at some guy and said: ‘It was him!'

I went down and, bang!, I hit this bloke and then they all came from nowhere. Fucking horrible, but you're in the midst of it then, fighting. Some bloke got me around the neck and I shouted: ‘Ozzy, hit him with the hammer!'

Ozzy hit him and at the same time he got jumped from behind and he slammed the bloody hammer backwards over his shoulder in that bloke's face. It was brutal. They were wearing these big metal-tipped boots and we were getting kicked in the face with them. We managed to get away, but we were a bloody mess.

Ron Woodward, my old bass-playing neighbour, had driven us to the gig because he had just bought this new car. We jumped in screaming: ‘Quick, drive, fucking get away!!'

But he took off like a slug on Valium, with us screaming our heads off, big black eyes, blood everywhere: ‘Put your foot down, drive, drive!!!'

All these skinheads were rushing down the hill, catching up with us, bats in hand, and Ron was making a getaway in slow motion. It turned out he was afraid to speed because you're not supposed to do that with a brand new car. We got away, but it took us ages to get home because he drove so slowly. I finally walked in the house and Mum was in the bedroom.

‘How did the show go?'

I opened the door.

‘Oh, great!'

Lyrically, the album
Paranoid
was political, or certainly ‘War Pigs' was. That wasn't because of any negative reactions to the supposed ‘occult' first album, because we never ever regretted what
we've done. It just happened that way. But not all of
Black Sabbath
was, for lack of a better word, occult, and not all of
Paranoid
was political. ‘War Pigs' actually started off as a song called ‘Walpurgis', which suggests it might have been a supernatural song. This is not necessarily the case. Maybe it was just a working title, with no lyrics written for it whatsoever. I don't know why Geezer changed it from ‘Walpurgis' to ‘War Pigs'. The lyrics were definitely his department. I always liked what he did, so I never questioned him.

Rodger Bain and Tom Allom speeded up the ending of ‘War Pigs'. When we first heard that, we thought, that's strange, why would they do that? But we had no say in it in those days.

We smoked a lot of dope, so that might be why some of the lyrics are a bit unusual. Like ‘Iron Man', which came from a comic about a robot which became alive. I suppose there was a serious thought behind that, really, that somebody living couldn't get out of that body, couldn't get out of this thing. And look at ‘Fairies Wear Boots'. What a lyric! But nobody questioned it, people accepted it.

After we recorded all the tracks, Rodger said: ‘We don't have enough. Can you come up with another song? Just a short track?'

‘Oh? Yeah, I suppose.'

The others popped out for lunch, and I started playing DadaDadaDadaDada DadaDadaDadaDadada, dudududududu-dudu, Dada da: Paranoid. When the others came back I played it to them and they liked it. Geezer came up with the lyrics, I can't remember if Ozzy had any input in that one. When we'd start playing a new song, Ozzy would improvise and just sing anything, ‘Flying out the window' or whatever, and probably wouldn't even know what he was singing. And then Geezer would go: ‘Oh yeah, I can use that!'

Geezer would do the lyrics before we started recording or, in some cases, even in the studio. And then it would be up to Ozzy to get it right. He would come up with the melody, and he'd
follow the riff in a lot of cases. I don't know how Geezer came up with the idea for the ‘Paranoid' lyrics, but he had quite a wide imagination. He would sit and listen to the music for a bit, and sometimes he'd want it to be quiet. He'd write a few things down, cross some out and write something else. And then he'd give it to Ozzy, and of course Ozzy would go: ‘What the fuck does this mean, Geez!'

Paranoid: I doubt we even knew what the word meant at the time. Ozzy and me went to the same lousy school, where we certainly wouldn't be around words like that. We knew what ‘fuck' meant, and ‘piss off', but ‘paranoid'? That's why we left it to Geezer, because we considered him to be the intelligent one.

All our tracks were five minutes-plus. We had never done a three-minute track, so ‘Paranoid' was like a throwaway: ‘This will fill the gap.'

We never thought that it was going to be the hit. Out of all our stuff, that's always the one that people put on compilations, use in TV themes and in films. And it took probably four minutes to write. It's that basic, simple thing, that catchy theme, that seems to appeal to people. ‘Paranoid' even brought us to
Top of the Pops
. We were very nervous doing that, because it was such a prestigious thing in Britain to be on that show. We were probably the loudest band they'd ever had on. I didn't like the atmosphere there at all, with the BBC people telling you what to do and all this rubbish. Things came to a head when I said: ‘Get that light off of me, it's driving me mad.'

‘We can't turn that off.'

I was like: ‘Well, get it off!'

Of course I played in the dark then. We never did it again after that. We weren't really a
Top of the Pops
band anyway.

If the
Black Sabbath
album with the inverted cross on its sleeve caused some controversy,
Paranoid
did its best to top that. At first we were going to call the album
War Pigs
and they'd done the
album cover up with a guy with a shield and a sword: the ‘war pig'. But then they wouldn't accept that title and changed it to
Paranoid
. We asked: ‘What's that got to do with that cover?!'

But it was too late to change it, because they needed a title quick.

‘No, we can't use
War Pigs
. What are we going to call it?'

‘It's got to be
Paranoid
!'

And that was it.

John Bonham and Robert Plant were both from Birmingham. Me and Bill, when we were in The Rest, played gigs together with Bonham a lot. He'd be in one band and we'd be in another and we'd play the same clubs. And Geezer knew Robert Plant more than I did in those days. Geezer and myself were out shopping one day and we bumped into John and Robert. They said: ‘We got a new band, we're getting together with Jimmy Page.'

‘Oh, great!'

We didn't know Jimmy personally, but we knew him from The Yardbirds, so we were happy for them.

The first time I heard Led Zeppelin's first album I thought it was really good. Their heaviness was in Bonham powering the drums. Jimmy Page played great riffs, but he didn't have the heavy sound; his was a different sound. But it was a great combination. However, our direction was the other way round; it was the riff, the heavier sound of the guitar. Where Zeppelin relied on thundering drums, we had our massive guitar and bass wall of sound.

Bill Ward has said that at the time we decided to out-heavy Led Zeppelin. I don't remember that, but we may well have. As you
did in those days. But in reality there's never been much rivalry between Sabbath and Zeppelin. We were both from Birmingham, we were all from the same gang if you like, so we always wished them well, as I'm sure they did us.

Nowadays everybody communicates with everybody else in other bands, but you never did that much then. We talked to the guys in Led Zeppelin because Bonham and Plant were mates. There was always this thing between bands from London and from Birmingham, from the Midlands. London musicians always thought that their bands were better than your bands. They looked down on people from the Midlands, and we in turn looked at Londoners as being snobby. There was a lot of competition because of that, with bands trying to outdo each other. It was always Zeppelin and Sabbath and Purple, but the rivalry was with Deep Purple, certainly later on, when we had
Paranoid
in the charts and they had ‘Black Night' out. It was then, when we were both climbing the charts, that we felt real rivalry.