Free Iron Man by Tony Iommi

American hit by The Crows. Jim Simpson wanted us to do that because he said: ‘We need something commercial.’

    We reluctantly agreed to it, but things were changing our way already, because during that same session we also recorded our own song ‘The Wizard’. Simpson used these demos to get disc jockey John Peel interested in us. In November we played his show Top Gear , performing ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘N.I.B.’, ‘Behind The Wall Of Sleep’ and ‘Sleeping Village’. We were on national radio. Things started to move, things were happening!
    We didn’t choose to record with producer Rodger Bain, he was chosen for us. We met up with him beforehand and we liked him; he seemed like a nice enough guy. He was as green as we were, and he hadn’t done much before. He was in his early twenties, just like us, maybe a bit older. Being the producer, Rodger was overseeing the whole thing. He was good to have around, but we didn’t really get a lot of advice from him. He maybe suggested a couple of things, but the songs were already fairly structured and sorted.
    Our roadie, Luke, drove our gear to the Regent Sound studio off Tottenham Court Road in London on 16 October 1969, and put up the amps. The studio wasn’t much bigger than a small living room and we’re all in there playing away, with partitions between us and Bill. Ozzy was singing in a little booth at the same time as the band played. Everything was performed just like a live band. It was the most important thing we had ever done, so we were all pretty well on the case.
    I had never been in a studio before and didn’t know anything about recording and where to put microphones or anything. By the same token, I think it must have been hard for Rodger Bain and engineer Tom Allom to come in and work with us just like that. Two guys who had never travelled with us, did not know what we were like, did not know what we sounded like, but came in and suddenly were adding their thing to it. The biggest problem we’ve always had is explaining to the people who recorded us how we have our sound set up. My guitar and Geezer’s bass have to very much agree with each other, to make the wall of sound. All of
them just see a bass as a bass, dumm-dum-dumm, clean and neat. But Geezer’s sound is more crunchy, more raw, and he sustains stuff and he bends notes the same as the guitar, to make it fatter. Some of them would try to get him to take the distortion away, and it would be like tum-tum-tum.
    â€˜Fucking leave it! It’s a part of our sound!’
    It took a lot of convincing for people to understand that. They’d always separate the sounds as well. They’d hear the guitar on its own and go: ‘Oh, it’s so distorted!’
    â€˜I know! But play it all together as a band and see what it sounds like!’
    People couldn’t grasp that we were a band that sounded good together, no matter how an individual player sounded. Rodger Bain understood it to a point, which is why those early albums we did with him have a very plugged-in sound. It was basically a case of what you see is what you get: we just walked in, plugged in and played; thank you and good night. And that was it, there wasn’t much fiddling around with the sounds we had. The drums as well, they were just mic’d up and off we went, giving it that real, honest sound. And that was the sound that took off.
    Everything was done very quickly. We thought, bloody hell, we’ve got a whole day to record these tracks, great, that’s fucking brilliant! Later I heard Led Zeppelin spent a week recording their first album, but they were more experienced than us. They had Jimmy Page who had recorded with The Yardbirds and God knows who else before that. He had been in and out of studios, but we certainly hadn’t, so we didn’t have a clue.
    We did a track called ‘Warning’, with a long guitar solo. Because