Cruisin' (excerpt from chapter 8)

At first, I found it unusual that a friend's car had this cool eight-track tape player with great speakers but that he didn't own any taped music. Cruising in his Chevy Malibu, we played the radio but I tired of the redundancy of pop hits. It wasn't very long before I convinced my buddy to go shopping. He had a pretty good "clean hands" job at the local drug store, so on payday we made a visit to the local K-mart and headed for the tape bins. My friend liked the AM radio hits of the Beach Boys, Three Dog Nite and the Guess Who, so he grabbed their latest releases. "What else is good, Tom?" he asked, obviously willing to buy more. I reached for a copy of Santana's "Abraxis." As I did, he was admiring the dark, eerie cover art of a tape called "Paranoid", by Black Sabbath. "Uh, you might like it, it's loud," I said. I knew that it was a harder rock n' roll than they played on AM, but I wasn't very familiar with the band.

My friend took the handful of tapes and we checked out. In the Malibu, we listened to the Beach Boys and the Guess Who, good music only interrupted by the loud clicking of the tapes changing tracks. When we got to the main street of town, the windows came down and I popped in the "Paranoid" album. With the first strains of "Iron Man", my sports-minded friend was hooked and he cranked up the volume until the dashboard rattled. It was Ozzy Osbourne, singing in devilish style to a driving, hard beat. Instant cool.

I should have realized that Black Sabbath would interest my friend. Growing up with him, I knew he was obsessed with old Frankenstein, Dracula and Wolfman flicks, even the classic late night TV show called "Shock Theatre." There were times in his house, late at night, when we would watch this stuff, only to fall off our chairs as his Dad jumped out from another room to scare us. His father had a weird sense of humor, which sometimes emerged from my friend. We would go on many, many cruise nights, never picking up girls but listening to the same eight-tracks over and over. In the case of Black Sabbath, in particular the "Iron Man" song, he insisted we listen to it over and over and over and over. Many years later, in 2008, the heavy metal anthem would be introduced to new listeners in the popular "Iron Man" movie, about the fictional comic book superhero.