Black Sabbath's Paranoid Explained

In the interview, Geezer talks about the song, "Paranoid," and how the album cover was chosen. "The whole story of how we created that song is funny," Geezer said. "It became the most popular song from the album, but it wasn't something we thought much of when we wrote it. In fact, we finished the record and then the producer told us we needed one more song to finish up the album, so we just came up with 'Paranoid' on the spot. Tony [Iommi] just played this riff and we all went along with it. We didn't think anything of it."

But then, Black Sabbath's record company decided that, because they thought "Paranoid" was the best song on the album, Paranoid should also be the title of the LP. "We had originally wanted the record to be called War Pigs, and that's what the record company was planning as well when [they] came up with the record cover, which is really horrible to begin with," Geezer said. "We didn't like it at all, but the label put it together, so we were stuck with it. The cover was bad enough when the album was going to be War Pigs, but when it was Paranoid it didn't even make sense [laughs]." - more on this story

- Bryan Wawzenek of Gibson.com