‘Iron Man’: the Black Sabbath song Bill Ward called a “disappointment”
The whole point of any good Black Sabbath song was to scare someone half to death. Though the blues was a central part of their sound, no one would have expected this kind of macabre storytelling and demonic riffs from a group of musicians who once upon a time cited The Beatles as an influence. Whereas everyone was about peace and love, Sabbath were about the dark side of life, but that didn’t mean Bill Ward had to like everything they did.
When looking at the setup of Sabbath, though, Ward tends to get underrated in terms of the band’s classic lineup. Since anyone who stands in the back of a riff god like Tony Iommi and the bonafide ‘Prince of Darkness’ Ozzy Osbourne was bound to get ignored, his drumming style is something you feel in your chest rather than appreciate in the context of the music.
Compared to other drummers who tended to just keep time whenever they played, Ward’s approach sounded like he was playing in a heavy metal jazz band. They weren’t shy about their jazz roots, and the kind of tasteful playing he put into tracks like ‘Hand of Doom’ feels like something that could have come out of a swinging jazz club had they not been singing about heroin.
Although the band began to take off shortly after their first album got on the charts, the pressure was to create something amazing on Paranoid. While almost everyone stepped up to the challenge when taking on songs like the title track and ‘War Pigs’, Ward thought there were a few blemishes on ‘Iron Man’.
It is still in the gates of Heavy Metal Valhalla, but Ward claimed that he could have gotten a better sound out of his kit, telling My Planet Rocks, “I had some disappointments, especially with the bass drum sound on ‘Iron Man’, which everybody raved about – they thought it was a great sound. But, I’ll be honest with you, I think I’ve nearly gotten over the bass drum sound.”
From a professional drummer’s standpoint, it’s not like Ward is that off the mark. The band only had a few days to record the album in the first place, so there were bound to be problems like the drum sounding a bit muffled in the mix. The studio isn’t just for making the best records possible, though…it’s about telling a story with sound.
Since the entire lyric sheet references a man who comes back from the future to exact revenge on the human race, those muffled bass drum hits sound like the hero’s boots stomping across the land, ready to lay waste to anyone who comes within his path. Even if Ward wasn’t happy with it, he ended up reinventing the way he played halfway through the song.
If that opening bend from Iommi wasn’t intense enough, hearing Ward galloping away on the tom-toms at the outro feels like the end of the world, as if ‘Iron Man’ has done his job and is off to search for even more poor souls to exact his existential vengeance on. Ward may have wanted things to be a bit more precise, but the dirtiness is half the reason why the song works so well.
