Tony Iommi recalls the birth, 55 years ago, of “Iron Man”

“In my head, I felt it like a monster.” Tony Iommi speaks of the moment in which he composed instantly “Iron Man“, calling it one of the two songs of Black Sabbath To which he feels linked and told Guitar Player that the song is an example of his desire to write “something dramatic and great”.

Since the homonymous record debut of the Black Sabbath in 1970, the Anglo Italo Brazilian guitarist has marked and influenced the dark and threatening sounds of the Heavy Metal with his electric guitar Gibson Sg Special of 1964. With his technical choices and particular measures Iommi It has conceived some of the best and most threatening riffs in the history of Heavy-Metal.

Iommi will meet the original formation of the Black Sabbath – together with Ozzy Osbourne, the bassist Geezer Butler and the drummer Bill Ward – on July 5 for the first concert of the quartet after 20 years and, apparently, for the last performance together. It is therefore the best time to remember the contribution of Iommi to the guitar and the birth of one of his first convincing songs: “Iron Man“extracted from” Paranoid “according to the band’s album released in September 1970 (the record debut dated February of the same year).
“Iron Man” is certainly among its best compositions and is one of the songs that the guitarist considers the quintessence of the Black Sabbath. “I’ve always been linked to songs like ‘Black Sabbath’ and ‘Iron Man’ ‘,” he says. “Many also think of ‘Paranoid’, but that was written as a filler for the album, it has never been designed to be anything else.” Iron Man “is different.”

So Iommi in 2021 reminded the birth of the song in Greg Prato in Greg Prato: “I was in a rehearsal room and Bill Ward started playing this boom, boom, boom, which in my head he felt like a monster”.

While Ward played the battery, Iommi made his guitar moan by procuring something similar to the “creal of the doors of an old mausoleum”. This was followed by the characteristic riff of the song. “Most of the riffs I did I invented them on the spot, and this was one of those,” Iommi said. “It came out like this. He married the battery, with what Bill was playing. I saw this thing in my mind, of someone who approaches me and seemed to me the right riff.”

“Iron Man” has a strong sense of the dramatic that the author traces even to classical music. “I think it was the drama of everything,” he said to GP. “I listened to the old classical music, with its dynamics, and I wanted that type of dynamic in what we were doing, something really dramatic and big. And that’s what I tried to get with the guitar. I wanted this big and powerful thing It wrapped you, as happens when you go to see a horror movie.

While many Heavy-Metal groups have tried to evoke that sort of magic for their success, Iommi explains that the Black Sabbath did not think they reach the size or try to influence someone when they started. “It is difficult to believe that it happened, because you never think about it,” he told Guitar Player in 2013. “You’re just playing something you like. Of course you don’t think:” Oh, this will last forever, and this will be voted like The best riff of all time. “But seeing it now and hearing it is fantastic”. What can you say better about your music? “.

Returning to their history and the role of the Black Sabbath in the development of the Heavy Metal Iommi said: “Oh yes, we did this and that, because at that moment you do it only for you and you do you like people. But during the Years was tried by people who told us that we changed their life by playing and that we helped other bands to develop something. without boasting of this “.