Summer 1970, and paranoia is in the air. In less than a year, Woodstock’s vision of a kinder society has turned to ashes. The carnations placed in rifle barrels by Vietnam protesters have not slowed the shipment of body bags. The Cold War’s adversaries edge closer to their nuclear buttons. Meanwhile, amid the craters, rubble and roaming gangs of Birmingham’s Blitz-scarred Aston, the members of Black Sabbath are feeling the spirit of the age.
“I was scared stiff that we’d be dragged into Vietnam, and World War III seemed a very real event,” Sabbath’s bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler says, a half-century later. “I was really into flower power in the sixties. I went to the love-ins at Woburn Abbey in sixty-seven and sixty-eight, with kaftan, beads, and flowers in my hair. But by the time we wrote the Paranoid album reality had set in. A lot of my lyrics were my disappointment that the love era was just a pipe dream. The love-ins and protests were all in vain.”
