07 IRON MAN BLACK SABBATH
(1970)
MOST PLAYERS WOULD BE PROUD TO HAVE WRITTEN JUST ONE
CLASSIC RIFF. IOMMI HAS PENNED COUNTLESS...
The biggest hook in a legacy littered with them
Tony Iommi’s influence on heavy metal and rock in general is one that cannot be overstated. Most players would be proud to have written just one classic riff – the left-handed Black Sabbath six-stringer has penned countless, sometimes several within the same song. Indeed, Iron Man has a few of its own to offer, though it’s the slow doomy blues of its main riff that singlehandedly delivers on their themes of armageddon and revenge, narrating the plight of a time-travelling robot man forsaken by those he’s trying to help. Iommi has often spoken of how his most famous ideas came to him in the moment and on the spot – this American single from their second album Paranoid being no different. “I was in a rehearsal room, and Bill started playing this boom, boom, boom,” Iommi recently revealed, noting how “in my head I could hear it as a monster” or “someone creeping up on you”. The opening drones were played using a behind the nut bends on the open low E, giving his guitar a machinelike growl as Ozzy announces the immortal words ‘I am Iron Man’ from behind a metal fan. The main riff is in B minor, using powerchords that follow up the pentatonic scale before more dissonant-sounding slides from the minor 6th to the 5th – all fretted on the thicker strings for a fuller sound and further intensified by drummer Bill Ward’s snare hits. It’s this juxtaposition, the lethargic opening segment against its busier second half, that demonstrates Sabbath at their most memorable, mutating familiar bluesy roots into something darker and doomier. Like most tracks on Paranoid, it was performed on Iommi’s left-handed ‘Monkey’ 1965 Gibson SG Special, which was swapped for the righthanded SG Special heard on Sabbath’s debut – the backup guitar that served him well after his Strat gave in. Just before recording album number two in June 1970, now armed with a guitar he didn’t have to play upside down, Iommi went to see luthier John Birch for some upgrades, including a new P90-style Simplux neck pickup and a rewound bridge pickup for more power. The signal then went through a modded Dallas Rangemaster treble-booster and into his single-channel Laney LA 100 BL head and matching cabinet. When TG interviewed the Black Sabbath hero in 2010 he explained how the pedal was engaged to “give my sound a bit more oomph” and push the signal going into his Laney, thus attaining the kind of “overdrive I was looking for, which amps in the early days didn’t have.”