You know, sometimes even the most seasoned of heavy metal musicians are just, kind of, winging it. Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward has even admitted that when it came to the band’s iconic tune “Paranoid”, he never played it “the same way twice.”
Ward made the confession during a June show on LA Radio Sessions with Mike Stark. The pair had been speaking about the song “Spiral Architect”. This is the closing track on the band’s fifth studio album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. The iconic skinsman spoke candidly about the improvisational nature of playing the song live. This eventually led to him revealing that it happened more than most fans ever noticed.
“Well, most of our show was improvisation, when I think about it,” Ward said, as transcribed by Blabbermouth. “As you know, Tony would go into big-league guitar solos. That was one of the things that in the show [took up] sometimes up to 40 minutes.”
Black Sabbath released ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ in 1973
“At first, we were doing nearly two-and-a-half-hour sets, or even longer,” he continued. “So it wasn’t unusual for… Back then, a guitar solo was a big thing to look forward to. It still is. It was difficult to put into a song where we knew where we were going in all the parts, where improvisation wasn’t really allowed.”
Ward added, “But we did have songs where — and I’m trying to think of them, and my memory’s failing me — we did have songs where we were allowed to fall out, where the song would break out, break off, and where we allowed drum solos or guitar solos or bass solos, depending on what that might be.”
After Stark criticized some live bands for playing “the record that they made in the studio note for note,” Bill dropped the bomb. “Oh, we changed up things all the time like that. I never played ‘Paranoid’ the same way twice,” he confessed. “I wouldn’t know how to. But I tried to stay in the pocket on most of the stuff. As a drummer, I tried to keep it in the pocket as how we originally did it. But some nights it’s just, like, ‘What the hell, I’m gonna put this in.’”
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