Paranoid, 50 years young today, is kind of genre-defining album. You can’t say you heard any heavy metal if you didn’t hear Paranoid. Right?
In my case, it was not even the first Sabbath’s album I heard. The wonderful and criminally underrated Technical Ecstasy was the first, in the early ’80s. It was not until 2000 that I actually sat down to listen to Paranoid in its entirety. So, happy 20th to that.
In 1989, I didn’t go to Moscow Music Peace Festival featuring acts like Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, Scorpions and, wait, I’m getting there, Ozzy Osbourne — with Geezer Butler! Missing it is one of my regrets, mostly because of that event’s zeitgeist, although probably the only band worth seeing there were Scorpions. You can see the footage in the 1989 documentary «Десант в гнездо гласности» where Ozzy sings Paranoid (rather badly, in my opinion).
Later the same year, I went to see Black Sabbath live at Olimpiyskiy stadium in Moscow. They played incredible 13 concerts there, on 19 through 28 November as a part of their Headless Cross world tour. By that time, only Tony Iommi was left of the original line-up. But the rest of the band was truly stellar: the vocalist Tony Martin, the great Neil Murray on bass, the great late Geoff Nicholls on keys and the greatest, late Cozy Powell on drums. Dismal acoustics notwithstanding, it was a blast. Amazingly, one of those shows is available on YouTube. And of course, they played Iron Man, War Pigs and Paranoid.
The kids first heard Iron Man in Futurama (Anthology of Interest I, to be precise) and then in 2008 film Iron Man. Needless to say, Paranoid made its way to Yuri’s MP3 player soon after that. Of zillions of Sabbath’s covers out there (I can’t honestly pretend that I heard even 1% of them), give me Hayseed Dixie’s version of War Pigs any time.
No comments:
Post a Comment