“Sweet Leaf” by Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath open "Sweet Leaf" with a tape loop of Tony Iommi hacking his lungs out, the cough coming from a joint he was sharing with Ozzy Osbourne, and that tells you exactly where this one is coming from. It's a heavy-lidded high point of Master of Reality, their third album, from 1971: a love song to cannabis, cut by a band that was smoking plenty of it at the time and was high while recording it.

Geezer Butler got the title off the lid of a pack of Sweet Afton cigarettes he'd brought back from Dublin. The riff Iommi hangs on it is thick enough to lean on, Butler's bass rumbles underneath, and Bill Ward swings it like a sledgehammer, with Rodger Bain producing for Vertigo. It later turned up on the 1976 collection We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll, Rolling Stone readers named it among the band's best songs, and between this track and the album around it, a whole school of stoner rock and stoner metal found its starting point.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.