Keep The Sabbath Holy

Yesterday I was swept up in a love affair that has spanned more than three decades. Over the end credits of "Iron Man", I heard Black Sabbath's ode to the scariest possible super hero. I confess that it came as no real surprise, since a good portion of the movies appeal for me came from that song's inclusion in the trailer I saw six months ago.
This was my first serious dip into the world of heavy metal. It began shortly after I made what was a most fortuitous trade back in high school: A friend of mine had been slavering for my copy of Van Halen's first album, and while I was fond of it, I knew that he owned Led Zeppelin's second record. This was back in 1979, and I got a lot of sideways looks when we made the exchange. Weren't those guys in Zeppelin into Satan worship and (insert worried look here) drugs? It was only a short time after that when I purchased "Paranoid" by Black Sabbath, an album that already almost ten years old. Now my friends were very concerned. "Are you going to get into that acid rock now?" A few months later, everyone I knew bought their own copy of AC/DC's "Back In Black", but I didn't bother to wag a finger under their hypocritical noses.
Back then I didn't have a lot of good modifiers for the kind of music that I liked. I knew that disco was evil, and I suppose my shift to something heavier was a reaction to growing up in a world that allowed the Bee Gees to star in a Beatles musical. "Iron Man" was my proto-metal experience. It told the tale of a misunderstood hero who is rejected by the people he tries to save. The song fed neatly into my teenage sense of alienation. It also packed as solid a sonic punch as anything I had heard before. Eventually I would find faster, louder bands. I discovered punk rock and speed metal, but they all stemmed from the DNA of that six minute slice of heaven (or was it hell).
Visitors to my house find that my music collection is very eclectic. Show tunes, folk singers, symphonies and new wave will tumble out of my iTunes in a random shuffle that defies easy categorization. But there are a few songs that cause me to stop and turn up the volume. Yesterday my son insisted on playing "Iron Man" before we went out the door to the movie, and then a couple more times when we got home, for good measure. You can only imagine how proud I was.