Iron Man

The Zoo Crew has got Iron Man spinning off Paranoid, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know this is the one that makes the room lean forward. Black Sabbath cut it in 1970, four working lads from Aston in Birmingham who had no idea they were about to hand rock and roll a riff that still stomps through gyms, ballparks, and garages all these years later. Bill Ward has said that in America you will hear it at most sports events, and that the tune has grown so big it no longer belongs only to Ozzy, Geezer, Tony, and him. It belongs to everybody who ever felt that slow walk coming up behind them.

The story of how the song got its name is better than the comic-book rumor. Geezer Butler, who wrote the words, has told interviewers for years that his parents would not let him near American comics. He knew Batman and Superman and that was about it. His pile was the Beano and the Dandy. When folks kept asking if he had written the thing about the Marvel superhero, he would just say he had never heard of the bloke. The spark came from Ozzy Osbourne in the rehearsal room. Tony Iommi had a riff going, and Ozzy, half joking, said it sounded like a big iron bloke walking about. Why not call it Iron Man, or maybe Iron Bloke. Geezer took the title and ran it through the science fiction he was reading at the time, right in the middle of the space race, when pollution and war were already on the evening news.

What he wrote is a caution, not a cape story. A man travels ahead, sees how grim the future is going to be, and comes back to warn everybody. The trip turns him into a creature of metal. He still has a human brain and he still wants to do the right thing, but people mock him and turn on him, and the frustration drives him to take his revenge. Geezer later told Eddie Trunk it was sort of based on Jesus Christ, a man who goes out and does good, tries to spread the word, and gets crucified for telling the truth. The difference, Geezer said, is that Jesus died to save people, while Iron Man takes his revenge. He also folded in the politics and the grime of the age, the way he usually did with those science-fiction plots, so the metal man ends up standing in for anybody who tried to tell the truth and got laughed off the street.

Tony Iommi has his own memory of the riff, and it is worth hearing in his words. He was in a rehearsal room and Bill Ward started playing this boom, boom, boom. Tony answered with that bent two-note climb and then dropped into the main figure. Most of his riffs, he has said, arrive on the spot, and this was one of them. In his head he saw something creeping up on you, a monster, and the guitar just followed the picture. That is why the opening feels like footsteps on a factory floor. The famous line at the top, I am Iron Man, has its own little workshop tale. Ozzy did not have a robot box. The best-known version is that he sang it through a fan, or through one of those early modulators of the kind that gave the Daleks their voice on Doctor Who. However they got it, the result sounds like a man talking from inside a suit of scrap iron, and it has never been improved on.

Paranoid itself was cut fast, the way the first album had been. The band set up, played, and got out. Iron Man was no afterthought filler the way the title track sometimes gets described. Tony has said he always relates to Black Sabbath and to Iron Man when people ask him about the Ozzy years, and he has noted that Paranoid the song was written to fill out the album and only became the single because it was short. Iron Man was the long walk, the one with the theatrical middle where Bill opens up and the whole band shifts gear. Geezer has called it fairly simple and still full of depth, and he has said he is proud of what they pulled off. Listeners who came in happy did not always leave that way. That was the point.

To get how four blokes wrote something like that, you have to go back to Aston. Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward were looking for a way out of the factories. Ozzy had been a short-haired mod who loved soul, an apprentice at Lucas where industrial accidents were common talk. Tony lost the tips of two fingers on a sheet-metal guillotine and nearly quit the guitar until a foreman played him Django Reinhardt, the jazz man who kept playing after a fire took the use of fingers on his fret hand. Tony made himself leather thimbles, slackened the strings, and that downtuned weight became the Sabbath sound. Geezer and Bill came out of local blues and psych outfits. They first gathered as the Polka Tulk Blues Band, a name Geezer lifted off a talcum-powder shop in Handsworth, and the early lineup even carried a sax player and a second guitarist. Two gigs in, the extra hands were gone. They shortened the name to Earth and took every job they could get, sometimes waiting outside a hall in the van in case the booked band did not show.

The turn came when they noticed the queues across from their rehearsal room, people paying money to be frightened by horror pictures. Tony said it was strange, all those folks lining up to get scared, and asked why the band should not write scary music. Geezer, deep into Dennis Wheatley and a brief flirt with the occult, woke one night sure he had seen a dark figure at the foot of the bed and stopped the dabbling cold. Out of that came the song Black Sabbath, named for the 1963 Boris Karloff film, with the tolling bell and the rain. Audiences lost their minds for it. Another band already had the name Earth, so they took the song title for themselves. Tony told writer Mick Wall that the name sounded mysterious, gave people something to think about, and gave the band a direction. From there the first album and then Paranoid arrived only months apart, and heavy metal had a shape even if the critics were still calling it the sound of heavy metal being smashed together, a line Geezer read in an American review and never quite lived down.

That is the band behind the record you are hearing. If you want the long history, the official home is Black Sabbath, where the Paranoid years and Iron Man sit in the band's own account of how those first two albums shifted rock. Their verified page on Facebook keeps the old photographs and the road stories moving, including shots from the Polka Tulk days. Over on Instagram they have posted from the last time Iron Man was played with the original four, at Villa Park in Birmingham. The band's account on X is the place for news straight from the camp, and they still nod back at Paranoid when they have something to say. For the folks who argue eras and bootlegs into the small hours, the long-running fan circle Black Sabbath on Facebook has been the complete gathering spot for years. Stay with the Crew. Iron Man is walking, and the next record is already on the spindle.