10 Legendary Songs That Were Completely Improvised
3. War Pigs - Black Sabbath
Most of the members of Black Sabbath weren't really thinking in terms of heavy metal when they were first getting their band together. Though they always liked the idea of putting scary elements into their music, they were thinking in terms of hard rock and blues rather than inventing a whole new genre underneath their feet. They were still students of the blues jam days, and it's in one of those jams that they found one of their greatest songs.
For most of Sabbath's first record, you can hear their sound starting to fall into place, alongside some covers by blues musicians like on the song Warning. Since they didn't have that much material to choose from back in the day, Warning became one of the main songs that they would jam on in the clubs, often stretching it out over 10 minutes some of the time. During the instrumental section though, a light bulb went off when Tony Iommi started vamping on two chord stabs.
Leaving a lot of space in the mix for the drums, those two chords would turn into the skeleton of War Pigs, with the gaps being filled in by terrifying lyrics from Ozzy Osbourne about what the horrors of war are really like for the people on the ground. Then again, the blues has always focused on the darker side of what life has to offer, so Sabbath just took it to its darkest conclusion on here.