Musicians and their crazy tryst with creativity

The other day I chanced upon a stunning revelation while listening to a chat between Queen’s Brian May and Toni Iommi of Black Sabbath. May casually asked Iommi how he came up with the iconic guitar intro riff of ‘Paranoid’, the song loved by every metal fan, and the answer blew me away (I know I am late on this).

Iommi, the godfather of metal, replied: “We didn’t have enough songs to fill the album, so the producer said we need another song and it can’t be more than two and a half minutes.”

Iommi said the other band members had just gone out to eat while he tried to figure out a riff for the filler track. He got one and showed it to the rest of the guys when they returned, and lo, one of the most enduring metal anthems was born.

Bass player Geezer Butler, in an interview to Guitar World, said ‘Paranoid’ was “written as an afterthought… Tony came up with the riff. I quickly did the lyrics, and Ozzy was reading them as he was singing.”

There you have it. Within minutes, a genre-defining song was ready. It is interesting that something an artist churns out without much thinking or a song that was added as a filler becomes the identity of the artist or the band.

Come to think of it, it’s rather funny how some of the greatest songs were created.

Take for instance Dire Straits’ iconic song ‘Money For Nothing’. Frontman Mark Knopfler has revealed that lines like ‘that ain't working’, ‘that's the way you do it’ of the hit number came from a male staff who muttered these words as he watched MTV on a wall of TVs inside a home appliance store. Mark asked for a pen and paper and started writing down the lines and they eventually became the ‘Money for Nothing’. Imagine, you walk into a home appliance store and come out with a song. Well, it was to Mark’s genius that he saw the opportunity of a great song in a hardware environment.

Not so much so for Gun N Roses’ lead guitarist Slash if you asked him what he initially thought of their biggest hit ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’. The famous opening riff, Slash has said, was just him fooling around and never took it seriously. “I really just thought of it as a joke,” said Slash.

Vocalist Axl Rose, in another room, happened to overhear Slash and Izzy Stradlin jamming over the riff and penned some words -- talking about his girlfriend. And when the band met for their next practice session, a rock and roll anthem of a generation materialised just like that. Slash recalls: “I never thought it was going to become a song.” Even today the Les Paul-wielding guitar hero is not done getting amused.

Now, imagine a band leader, that too not any ordinary band but one of the biggest in the world, being embarrassed of sharing with bandmates his newly-written song about missing his girlfriend. We are talking about none other than James Hetfield of Metallica and ‘Nothing Else Matters’. Yes, the singer of one of the heaviest metal bands on the planet writing a love song! For any hardcore Metallica fan, that was sacrilege.

"At first I didn't even want to play it for the guys,” he told Mojo.

Yet it made it to the famous The Black Album and was hugely instrumental in Metallica’s conquest of the mainstream audience — beyond the sphere ruled by thrash metal outfits. If the song angered one Metallica purist, it got a thousand more new fans. It helped the band become a global phenomenon and is now a permanent feature on their tour set list with the entire stadium joining Hetfield on vocals.

Before I sign off I will touch upon another crazy ‘situation’ but one that gave a band one of its most-loved songs. The band? Queen. The song? ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. Crazy? Indeed!

First, singer Freddie Mercury wrote the song in a bathtub. Second, he finished the composition using a guitar, an instrument he is hardly adept at. Third, the entire process took him under 10 minutes. He later revealed that his limited knowledge of the instrument actually helped him. “I couldn't work through too many chords and because of that restriction, I wrote a good song, I think,” Mercury said of the song.

Oh, by the way, English singer-songwriter Adele wrote her debut hit single ‘Hometown Glory’ following a fight with her mother over what she wanted to do with her life. She was only 16. She wrote the song in 10 minutes. A family fight paves the way to stardom?

It only goes to show creativity has no method. It seeks no discipline. It defies training. It comes and goes as it pleases. But when it does come, that’s when artists effortlessly bring out what’s inside them. And what’s inside them? Passion.