Rhino Factoids: Black Sabbath Gets Paranoid Over “War Pigs”

44 years ago today, Black Sabbath’s second studio album, Paranoid, belatedly hit record store shelves in the US, almost four months after its release in the UK, which provided the band with the first chart-topper of their career. If the album had maintained its original title, though, it’s a bit uncertain as to whether Paranoid ever would’ve come out in America at all.

If you’re a fan of Paranoid(and we hope that you are, although if for some reason you’re not, then maybe you should try spinning it again, because it’s a truly outstanding album), then you already know that it kicks off with the immortal metal masterpiece, “War Pigs.” This is not a coincidence: it was originally intended to be the album’s title track. Somewhere down the line, though, the record company learned of this plan and, well, to say that they freaked out a bit is probably somewhat of an understatement.

You see, kids, this was 1971, and the US of A was still smack dab in the middle of the so-called Vietnam conflict. As such, seeing the words “war pigs” emblazoned on an album cover wasn’t exactly something that would’ve provided Black Sabbath with an equal fanbase across the political spectrum.

Mind you, depending on who you ask, maybe that wasn’t actually why they changed the name of the album. In fact, Ozzy Osbourne himself has said that the switcheroo was connected with the label’s realization that the song “Paranoid,” which was released in advance of the album, was already seeing significant success, and they thought it’d be easier to sell the album if it shared its name with a hit single.

If that’s so, though, then the whole thing becomes even more interesting, because it means that the song that ultimately provided the album with its title track originally wasn’t even going to be on the album. In the liner notes to the band’s 1998 live album, Reunion, Geezer Butler claimed that the music was written in five minutes, “then I sat down and wrote the lyrics as quickly as I could, (and) it was all done in about two hours.” Or maybe it took even less, if you believe Bill Ward, who said in Steven Rosen’s The Story of Black Sabbath: Wheels of Confusion, “It took twenty, twenty-five minutes from top to bottom."

But, hey, as long as we’re talking about name changes, let’s jump back to “War Pigs” itself, which initially wasn’t called “War Pigs” at all: the song’s original title was actually “Walpurgis,” so named after a Satanic holiday.

“It’s sort of like Christmas for Satanists,” said Butler, in an interview with Noisecreep. “And to me, war was the big Satan. It wasn’t about politics or government or anything. It was (about) evil. So I was saying ‘generals gathered in the masses/just like witches at black masses' to make an analogy. But when we brought it to the record company, they thought 'Walpurgis' sounded too Satanic. And that’s when we turned it into ‘War Pigs.’ But we didn’t change the lyrics, because they were already finished.”

Hey, you can call the song what you want. You call the album what you want. As long as it still sounds the same, we’re good.