Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" Is Wrestling's Greatest Theme Song

NOTE: Ozzy Osbourne died today — there will undoubtedly be dozens of great pieces about his life and legacy in the weeks, months, and years to come, but in 2020 I wrote an article about how Black Sabbath's "Iron Man" stood the test of time as wrestling's greatest theme song, and nothing about that statement is any less true five years later. Here it is, edited for clarity and to update some expired links:

This year will mark the 55th anniversary of the release of Paranoid, Black Sabbath’s second album of environmentally conscious, doom-laden Christian metal. Unquestionably their biggest album, songs like “War Pigs,” “Paranoid,” and “Fairies Wear Boots” have been blasting in the trucks of dads who don’t understand the album’s not-exactly-convoluted lyrics from the time of the 8 Track cassette to the dawn of classic rock radio to it’s spot in the rotation on satellite radio, an album hundreds of thousands of people who now vote against the legalization of marijuana got ludicrously high to because Black Sabbath’s album about getting ludicrously high hadn’t been recorded yet.

It’s also the album that has “Iron Man” on it. You know “Iron Man,” of course, even if you've never sought it out. Like Pink Floyd’s “Money” and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” it’s an almost impossibly long single that nevertheless dominates the Black Sabbath catalog, a song so inescapable that every beat is recognizable. If you caught a snatch of it on the radio, you'd know exactly where you were in it's world. You'd probably go "hell yeah, this song rips," or "damn, I just missed 'Iron Man,' which rips — I should go listen to 'Iron Man.'"

But if, by chance, you heard it while standing in a wrestling ring in the 1980s, your thought process would be a little different. If you were, say, the Mulkey Brothers of the National Wrestling Alliance, your mood would be less "this song rips" and more "I am about to get ripped apart," its every droning chord heralding the arrival of Hawk and Animal, The Road Warriors. It meant that you were in for a rough night, the most painful four minutes of your life, a studio audience cheering for your impending demise at the hands of two freaks from outer space who may have actually been turned to steel, as the song goes, in some great magnetic field. And given that Road Warriors matches were short and often began before introductions were made, the song might play out over the entirety of your beating. You take the Doomsday Device, you stare at the lights, and you eat your pin, meanwhile everyone who just watched you get your ass beat is thinking “hell yeah, this song rips.”

When we think about wrestlers using “real songs” as entrance music, the image and sound conjured is of wrestlers like Ric Flair and Randy Savage coming down the isle to a recording of a piece of classical music. But it used to be that the major stars of professional wrestling were played to the ring by songs performed by the biggest bands in the world. Back then, famed WWE composer Jim Johnston was still a drummer in a Detroit-area rock band and The Wrestling Album, produced in part by Cyndi Lauper’s manager David Wolff, featured “Real American,” a song written for the US Express, the tag team of Barry Windham and Mike Rotunda. Instead of that, Hogan entered to Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” from Rocky III, the film that launched him to superstardom. Junk Yard Dog came out to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.”

NWA video packages were heavy on real music. Sade’s “Smooth Operator” introduced Buddy Landel’s New Nature Boy character, Terry Funk entered the ring for his legendary I Quit match against Ric Flair to the score from Once Upon a Time in the West, and so on. And the smaller territories, man. You could lose a day watching vaguely homoerotic music videos highlighting the likes of Rick Rude, the Fabulous Ones, and, best of all, the New Fabulous Ones.

Now we have original themes, composed by the likes of Jim Johnston, CFO$, Dale Oliver, Downstait, def rebel, Mikey Ruckus, and others. Sometimes we’re gifted bangers. Sometimes we’re given something laughable. Most of the time we’re given something indistinct, one chord bleeding into the other to the point that the lyrics may as well be “This is / a wrestler. / He will / be wrestling.” The chart hits era of theme music, if you’re the kind of person who downloads VCR recordings of shows from the early-to-mid 80s, is an entirely different vibe, but not outright better. Those theme songs were not a wrestler’s song, but ours songs, a jukebox of arena anthems so big that they’re passed on by osmosis — not all of them stuck.

Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” did for The Road Warriors, but its magic is a peculiar one, a song melding itself to the iconography of a tag team despite being a thematic mismatch. True, what you're looking for in a theme song is tone more than content, and "Iron Man" does let you know what you're in for. But the song is a circular story about a man who travels in time, witnesses the apocalypse, is transformed into a hideous, lamentable, and ultra-powerful being of mass destruction by the trip, the apocalypse he envisioned actually his revenge against a society that abandons him and ignores his warning.

This is me nitpicking, but the Road Warriors were not loners, nor were they abandoned by society. Typically a group of three—Hawk, Animal, and wrestler-turned-manager Paul Ellering—the Road Warriors were beloved by fans (unless they were stabbing Dusty Rhodes in the eye) because, well, how could you not love them? They were massive slabs of beef clad in spike-laden leather, armored warriors from the future who looked like they could have easily staked out territory in any number of pop culture entities where ripped men dominate large groups of less ripped men, from He-Man cartoons to Schwarzenegger movies.

Their interviews were boastful, three men gleefully describing the impending evisceration of whoever was next on their dance card. They never particularly struggled, either. Ellering’s in-ring career was brief, as he injured his knee in 1982, but he was talented enough on the mic that he was hired by Georgia Championship Wrestling to be a manager. Hawk and Animal, already a fledgling team, were repackaged with gimmicks ripped from The Road Warrior, taking off once they were paired with Ellering. Wrestling is full of characters ripped from Mad Max, but once the Road Warriors were a thing, every subsequent act that looked more like guzzoline raiders than professional wrestlers were echoes of them rather than the movie, an act whose popularity seemingly knew no limit.

But what the Road Warriors couldn’t take from the film that inspired them was theme music. Composed by Brian May of Queen fame, the scores for Mad Max and The Road Warrior are moody, serious takes on the apocalypse, a fine accent for a film about the wasteland, but the distance between accent and introduction is vast. “Iron Man” is a suitable replacement—an ominous, driving song about obliterating one’s fellow man that breaks into a frenzied, cosmic bloodbath, its crescendo almost too perfect for Hawk and Animal's sprint to the ring. Check the beginning of this 1987 tag match they had against Jumbo Tsuruta and John Tenta in AJPW—the minute the drumbeat hits, everybody stands up.

Later in their careers, every one of the Road Warriors' themes had to contend with "Iron Man." Their Johnston-composed WWE theme, made ubiquitous in replacing "Iron Man" and more obvious ripoffs on WWE-owned footage, starts with a chord that's like a Guitar Center version of the opening, soul-crushing original. NWA/WCW, when the Road Warriors went back their way, either employed straight-up rips like “We Are Iron Men” or a more generic, Jimmy Hart-produced number that hides its thievery until the guitar solo. In the 90s, when Hawk went to New Japan Pro Wrestling and began tagging with Kensuke Sasake as the Hell Raisers, they were given the solo Ozzy number “Hellraiser.” No matter when, no matter where, and no matter what moniker they went under, the Road Warriors were pretty much married to “Iron Man” in a way few other chart hits are associated with the wrestlers who used them.

The first time I heard "Iron Man" was when I was out muddin' with my dad one afternoon, the song's opening thumping out from the speakers of his Ford Bronco. The first note obliterated me, like I just happened to be exactly where a comet made impact, Ozzy's distorted voice reaching me from beyond doom as if to taunt me for daring to exist on the same plane. This is exactly the kind of feeling you want to engender for a pair of guys with necks so thick their BDSM collars pop off if they breathe too heavy, for a couple of dudes whose typical response to being piledriven is to stand right up and do things more horrible than the inventor of the piledriver could envision in his nightmares. History is full of proof that The Road Warriors could be beaten, but in the minute or two "Iron Man" blared on the PA, before you even saw them, it felt like you were living in a world they'd already destroyed.

I make a lot of claims about the greatest things in wrestling history, all of them serious, but none more so than this: "Iron Man" is the greatest wrestling theme song of all time. It didn't just add to the mystique of Hawk and Animal, it was the mystique, inadvertently defining an element of modern professional wrestling that’s as essential to its presentation as the matches themselves. Every song given to every wrestler since has been chasing after what “Iron Man” did for the Road Warriors. Plenty have come close. Most of them will be left chasing.