Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Iron Hero

(But Never Really Got Around To Asking)

originally published February 15, 2006

Local favorites almost since the they were just a twinkle in sometimes-songwriter Lawson Grice’s eye, the members of Iron Hero will finally release Safe as Houses, the first album of the band’s year and a half existence. (And finally, WUOG will have eight more songs to add to its heavy rotation of the Iron Hero demo.)

Both rocking and delicate in all the right places, Safe as Houses is very nearly danceable and certainly makeout-able, with dark, dreamy hints of Sonic Youth and the best Britpop. But who wants to read yet another interview about the complications of recording, sound-checking with two drummers, or traveling with 10 instruments and six bandmembers (several of whom are tall, one of whom is unusually tall)? Here’s what you were really dying to know about the lighthearted gentlemen and their very serious music.

• Drummer Thomas Wilcox, frontman-guitarist Sam Gunn and multi-instrumentalists Lawson Grice and Jimmy Taylor all grew up in Macon and have known each other since childhood. They have played in bands together and once recorded an EP with the producer of several platinum records by the Marshall Tucker Band.
• Other drummer Nick Hasty and bassist Ben Simpson grew up in Canton and formed a bad punk-reggae band that played The Queers’ “Kicked Out of the Webelos” for their high-school talent show.
• The bandmembers’ first rock concerts attended were Little Richard (Wilcox), Billy Joel (Gunn), New Kids on the Block (Hasty), Vandals (Simpson), Rick Springfield (Taylor) and Pink Floyd (Grice).
• Iron Hero had its first show scheduled before ever practicing or being a full band. That was in May of 2004, upstairs at Tasty World. The flyer featured a centaur flying through a rainbow.
• The band’s full name for its debut performance was “Shit Fed Iron Hero,” and was acquired by entering a University of Georgia math professor’s name into a computer program that formulates anagrams out of your input.
• Iron Hero’s songs are written through the process of molding Hasty’s words into Gunn’s vocal tendencies that arise naturally out of the music.
• • Taylor has had surgery 18 times, 15 of which were on his leg due to being hit by a car in October of 2004. Hasty has had surgery five times for various reasons, and for a short period of time had to live in an enclosed oxygen chamber due to complications from asthma.
• While Taylor was out due to injuries, local musician Paul Nunn (Penguine, ex-Astra) filled in on guitar duties.
• A large portion of Iron Hero’s equipment was inadvertently funded by the Step Reebok program. Grice acquired his guitar through insurance fraud. The band used two basses on-stage until they had to return one of them to the person from whom it was on “extended loan.”
• Two Iron Hero members (Gunn and Hasty) occasionally contribute writing to the Flagpole music section.
• Wilcox owns 39 Depeche Mode albums, and is the advertising persona for Achim’s K-Bob (i.e. “the K-Bob guy”).
• The first cassette tapes owned by the members are as follows: Eric Clapton’s Unplugged (Gunn); The Doors’ Best of the Doors (Hasty); Weird Al Yankovic’s Even Worse (Wilcox); the Little Shop of Horrors soundtrack (Grice); Crash Test Dummies’ God Shuffled His Feet (Simpson); and Rush’s Presto (Taylor).
• The largest number of instruments Iron Hero ever used on-stage was 10: two drum kits, three guitars, three keyboards, two bass guitars and one glockenspiel.
• Both Wilcox and Grice have achieved the prestigious Boy Scout rank of Eagle Scout.
• Iron Hero’s members would reach a height of 37 feet if stacked head to toe, or if one member stood on top of another.
• An imaginary band from the year 2050 called Iron Zero remixes Iron Hero tunes into uncompromisingly devastating dance music. The songs can be heard at www.myspace.com/ironzero.
• Safe as Houses took 10 months to complete - 34 combined days of recording, mixing and mastering.
• Josh McKay (Macha, Tiny Sticks) produced the album; it was recorded by Andy Baker and mastered by Glenn Schick. Cody King created the album art and Winston Parker did the layout.
• McKay agreed to produce the album when Grice drunk-dialed him at 2 a.m. after getting wasted with Gunn at a tasteless sports bar in Macon.
• On the first day of recording, six of the eight members of Iron Hero, McKay and Baker all showed up wearing track warm-up jackets. The other two members then got jackets, and they collectively decided they would all don track jackets every day in the studio. In its entirety, this tradition lasted two days.
• The band came up with more than 100 possible album titles and spent the better parts of three evenings debating them. After all this effort, they ended up choosing a title that wasn’t on the list. Safe as Houses comes from the Elvis Costello song “Indoor Fireworks” (on the album King of America). The phrase originally referred to the soundness of investing in real estate before becoming a simile used for anything safe or secure. It resonates with the general lyrical content, although somewhat ironically.
• Simpson’s front teeth aren’t real.

Christa Tinsley

Christa Tinsley