Black Sabbath - War Pigs (Live in Paris 1970)

The Eternal Idol A preview interview with Tony Iommi from Guitar World Magazine - December 2008

The Eternal Idol
He shaped the course of metal with his fiendish riffs and wicked guitar tones. Forty years after Black Sabbath’s birth, Tony Iommi reflects on his riff-tastic career and his legacy as the grand wizard who defined metal for the ages.

Almost 40 years ago during the summer of 1969, an event transpired that changed music forever. When guitarist Tony Iommi banged out a heavily distorted three-note octave-tritone riff during rehearsal, he and his bandmates realized that they had invented a new sound that would make their band stand out from the other blues-based rock bands of their day. Singer Ozzy Osbourne penned lyrics about a black-clad Satanic figure, and the band named the song “Black Sabbath,” inspired by the title of a 1963 Italian horror flick starring Boris Karloff that was showing at the midnight movies in a theater across from the band’s rehearsal space. In addition to being the beginning of the band Black Sabbath (which formerly went by the name Earth), that moment was the birth of an immortal genre of music known as heavy metal.

Other undeniably heavy bands preceded Black Sabbath, among them Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Who. But only Black Sabbath brought together all of the lasting elements that define metal, including minor pentatonic guitar riffs, occult-inspired imagery and a raw, aggressive sound. Arguably, no other metal band has been more influential than Black Sabbath. They alone have inspired several generations of bands such as Judas Priest, Venom, Iron Maiden, the Eighties heavy trinity of Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer, Death, Pantera and Mayhem, as well as nь-metal bands like Korn and Slipknot.

Through his discovery of the tritone/augmented fourth interval—once called diabolus in musica (the devil in music)—and his preference to write in minor keys, Tony Iommi became the founding father of heavy metal. Iommi’s contributions to the genre as a guitarist are encyclopedic, and one of his biggest innovations came about literally by accident. After chopping off the tips of his right hand ring and middle fingers while cutting sheet metal at a factory job, the left-handed guitarist experimented with various means to make the guitar more comfortable to play. One of his solutions—tuning down the strings a whole step or more—presented the added benefit of making chords and riffs sound heavier. Down-tuned guitars are commonplace in metal today, but Iommi invented the practice almost two decades before other players discovered their sonic benefits.

The band Black Sabbath has survived many personnel changes since that fateful day in 1969 when Iommi, Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward decided to change Earth’s name, image and musical voice, but Iommi has remained the one constant throughout. While the initial classic Ozzy Osbourne–era lineup released eight studio albums over a nine-year period, Iommi has kept Black Sabbath alive over the years, releasing 10 additional Black Sabbath studio efforts with a constantly revolving lineup, including the version with Butler, singer Ronnie James Dio and drummer Vinny Appice that is now known as Heaven and Hell. “I can’t think of any other band that has been through that,” says Iommi. “Black Sabbath has had the same singers and drummers come and go two or three times. It’s gone around in circles.”

Today, Iommi remains as prolific as ever. In addition to getting together onstage with Ozzy, Geezer and Bill every few years to reintroduce classic Black Sabbath to new generations of fans, he keeps his creative juices flowing with Heaven and Hell, who continue to tour and are currently recording new material, and via solo efforts like 2000’s Iommi and 2005’s Fused. He’s also collaborating with Gibson on three new Tony Iommi signature guitars that should hit the market later in 2009.

To pay tribute to Iommi’s remarkable contributions to metal as a guitarist, Guitar World invited him to discuss his entire career and share stories about his lesser-known exploits, from the brief period he spent as a member of Jethro Tull in 1968 to how Black Sabbath inspired Spinal Tap’s legendary Stonehenge scene. Although the genre that Iommi fathered four decades ago may have officially reached middle age, thanks to Iommi and the legions of players he has influenced, it has never experienced any crisis.

GUITAR WORLD What inspired you to play guitar?
TONY IOMMI Initially I wanted to play drums, but I wasn’t allowed to bring drums in the house because they were too loud. After that, I really fancied the idea of playing guitar, probably from seeing all the old rock and roll bands like the Shadows, who were a British instrumental band. I really liked the idea of playing instrumentals, and the Shadows were the only band in England that were doing that. The Shadows really got me into guitar.

GW How old were you when you started playing?
IOMMI I was probably about 12. I played accordion before that. Everyone else in my family played accordion, so I got one as well. In those days you used to just sit in your room and you didn’t know what to do, so I learned to play accordion. From there I moved on to different instruments, and I eventually discovered the guitar.

GW Was it a challenge to find a decent left-handed guitar?
IOMMI It was a big challenge trying to find any decent guitar, let alone a left-handed one. In England, the only ones you could find then were very cheap. If you wanted a left-handed guitar, you had to order one from a catalog and then wait three months for it to show up. A few years after I started playing, I was lucky enough to come across a left-handed Fender Stratocaster that somebody who worked in a shop had tucked away and told me about.

GW It’s fascinating how the factory accident led to you tuning down your guitar to make it more comfortable to play, but at the same time it also made what you played on the guitar sound heavier.
IOMMI Everything I did was to make it more comfortable for me, first and foremost. It used to hurt a lot to play because my fingertips were very sensitive. If my plastic fingertips ever came off, which did happen one time, my fingers would be sliced right open by the strings and there would be blood everywhere. I really had to work with my guitar setup so I could be able to play. There were some limitations, but I had to try to get over it. That’s how I came up with all of these other things, such as a 24-fret neck and lighter strings, so I could do more. But it really helped us get the sound we were looking for.

GW I would imagine that tuning down also made it easier for Ozzy to sing.
IOMMI Whenever we tuned down, he would just end up singing even higher, so I’m not sure it helped at all! All of a sudden he could reach the higher notes.

GW How did you briefly become a member of Jethro Tull?
IOMMI I was in a band with Ozzy, Geezer and Bill before we called ourselves Black Sabbath, and we were playing a show supporting Jethro Tull. That was the same night that [Tull guitarist] Mick Abrahams handed in his notice. After the show they asked me if I’d be interested in joining them. It was a bit of a shock. I felt really bad leaving the other guys in the band, so I asked them how they felt about it, and they said that I should join Jethro Tull. I called Jethro Tull back the next day, and they told me that I’d have to come down for an audition. I went, “Ah, fuck.” I’d never auditioned for anything in my life, and I hated being around crowds of people. But I did go to London, and there were dozens of guitar players there, including Martin Barre [who eventually became Jethro Tull’s guitarist]. I was just going to walk out of there, but one of the guys came running out and asked me to just give it a chance. I told him that I wasn’t going to wait around there with everybody; it just wasn’t my thing. He told me to go sit in the cafй across the road and have a cup of coffee and that they’d come get me when everybody was gone. That’s what they did. The came and fetched me, I played, and they said that I had the job.

Read the complete interview with Tony Iommi in the Holiday 2008 issue of Guitar World, on sale October 14!

Biography

Black Sabbath is an English heavy metal band formed in 1968 in Birmingham, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom, originally comprising Ozzy Osbourne (vocals), Tony Iommi (guitar), Geezer Butler (bass), and Bill Ward (drums). In the early 1970s they were the first to pair heavily distorted, sonically dissonant blues-rock at slow speeds with lyrics about drugs, mental pain, and abominations of war, thus giving birth to generations of metal bands that followed in their wake. They are often credited with creating the heavy metal genre as well as the doom metal genre.

Black Sabbath was formed in Aston, a poor district of Birmingham damaged by bombing during World War II, under the name Polka Tulk Blues Band (soon shortened to “Polka Tulk”), later Earth. Initially a blues-rock band, Earth moved in a darker direction when their bassist, Geezer Butler, a fan of the black magic novels of Dennis Wheatley, wrote lyrics for an occult-themed song titled “Black Sabbath” (the song name was inspired by a 1963 Mario Bava film), and Tony Iommi wrote a riff based on the tritone, sometimes called “Diabolus en Musica” (“the Devil in Music”). In their Last Supper concert film, the band stated that the song is based on an experience Geezer had one night when he saw a black object at the end of his bed and noticed the next day that an occult book Ozzy had given him was missing. When the band found themselves being confused with another local band called Earth, they adopted the song title as their new name.

As the band evolved, they added more European folk elements and gothic flourishes to their sound, which was unlike any other group during their time. Their lyrics dealt with darker issues than most conventional rock. Towards the late 1960s, bands were into the peace movement and the dying hippie culture, whilst Sabbath chose to distinguish themselves by dealing with heavier issues; the occult, war, apocalypse, drugs, and gothic storytelling. Their music also conveyed a sense of anger and anti-establishment, the likes of which had not been heard before.

It was this mix of dark lyrical themes and a slower, ominous sound that made Black Sabbath a significant element in the genre that would later be known as heavy metal.

Despite their doom-laden image, much of the group’s early material featured acoustic guitars, piano, symphony orchestras, keyboards, and even horns. After the band’s first four albums, the group became increasingly psychedelic, experimental, and progressive, leaving much of their dark metal roots behind. The last two Osbourne-fronted albums, Technical Ecstasy (1976) and Never Say Die! (1978) left a lot of fans dissatisfied with the band, as drugs and alcohol abuse began to take its toll on each member.

Osbourne was fired in 1978 for becoming increasingly unstable and unwilling to work with the material that, by this time, Tony Iommi was writing more or less entirely himself. Osbourne started a highly successful solo career in 1980.

In 1979 Tony Iommi recruited former Rainbow members; singer Ronnie James Dio and bassist Craig Gruber. Gruber was recruited because Geezer Butler was unhappy with Osbourne’s departure, and was rumoured to have quit the band. Gruber was dismissed and Geezer rejoined. Black Sabbath’s first album with Dio, Heaven And Hell, proved to be a success, and saw the band’s highest American charting since 1975’s Sabotage. It was on this tour that Dio popularised the “devil horns” hand gesture, which has since become a symbol of heavy metal music in general. The album also marked the inclusion of Quartz’s guitarist-turned-keyboardist Geoff Nicholls (Nicholls has not been consistently credited as an official member, and has always been forced to play live shows from off stage (except on the Seventh Star tour in 1986 where he played on stage) supposedly for aesthetic reasons, but he has co-written many songs and has stayed with Black Sabbath through all subsequent incarnations, until he finally left in 2004. Adam Wakeman, son of Rick Wakeman, took over in 2005). Also during the tour, drummer Bill Ward quit the band for personal reasons (both his parents died within a rather short period, and Ward was struggling with alcoholism and other addictions). Drummer Vinny Appice joined to complete the tour and then record the next album Mob Rules, in which an early version of the title track appeared in the film Heavy Metal.

Ronnie James Dio and drummer Vinny Appice left the band after supposed disputes concerning the mixing of the live album Live Evil, and pursued a solo career together. Black Sabbath re-enlisted drummer Bill Ward, and, along with ex-Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan (who agreed to join the band whilst heavily intoxicated), released Born Again in 1983. It reached a respectable number two in the U.K. music charts, a success not seen since Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, ten years previously. However, the album was not received particularly fondly by critics or fans alike, and not even by singer Ian Gillan. The tour that followed was to provide a wealth of material for the spoof documentary on rock ‘n’ roll culture, Spinal Tap. Drummer Bill Ward was still recovering from poor health and so did not tour for the Born Again album. Instead, fellow Brummie Bev Bevan, formerly of The Move and The Electric Light Orchestra, took to the drumstool for the tour obligations.

Once the tour was over, Ian Gillan left the band to rejoin his Mk.2 Deep Purple band mates. From here on the line-ups of Black Sabbath changed relentlessly, with Tony Iommi being the only constant member. Between 1986 and 1995 Black Sabbath released 7 studio albums and one live album, including a reunion album with the Mob Rules line-up (1992’s Dehumanizer). In 1997 the original line-up reunited for a proper world tour (as opposed to the one-off Live Aid in 1985, and Costa Mesa gigs on Ozzy’s “Farewell” tour in 1992) and have toured on and off since.

Currently the Mob Rules line-up have reunited once more under the banner Heaven & Hell and toured the world in 2007, promoting Black Sabbath - The Best of: The Dio Years featuring three new tracks and a release of Black Sabbath Live at the Hammersmith Odeon, 1982. They released a live CD/DVD and released a studio album of entirely new songs in April 2009.

VH1’s “100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock” ranked them second, behind Led Zeppelin. They were inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame and the UK Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

Aside from being arguably the first heavy metal band, Black Sabbath also directly influenced many later metal sub-genres with their sound and imagery. Examples can be seen especially in doom metal and stoner metal, which are directly descended from Black Sabbath’s original sound, with songs such as “Black Sabbath”, “Into The Void”, “Hand Of Doom” and others showcasing Black Sabbath’s staple doom sound. Other sub-genres influenced by Sabbath’s sound also include speed metal and thrash metal on the opposite side, “Paranoid” and “Symptom Of The Universe” are considered early examples of these genres. Black Sabbath’s lyrical use of hell, death, Satan and horror as imagery also greatly influenced heavy metal, as these themes are prevalent in nearly all heavy metal sub-genres.

In December 2008 Iommi filed a lawsuit against merchandise company LiveNation for continuing to use the Black Sabbath name and Tony Iommi’s likeness to sell merchandise, even after their contract had ended. On May 26, 2009 Osbourne filed suit in a federal court in New York against Iommi alleging that he illegally claimed the band name. Iommi noted that he has been the only band member for the full forty one years of the band, and that his bandmates relinquished their rights to the name in the 1980s, therefore claiming more rights to the name of the band. Although, in the suit, Osbourne is seeking 50% ownership of the trademark, he has said that he hopes the proceedings will lead to equal ownership among the four original members.

Alphabetical Personnel:
Don Airey - keyboards
Vinny Appice - drums
Bev Bevan - drums
Mike Bordin - drums
Jo Burt - bass
Geezer Butler - bass
Terry Chimes - drums
Gordon Copely - bass
Laurence Cottle - bass
Bob Daisley - bass
Ronnie James Dio - vocals
Dave Donato - vocals
Ian Gillan - vocals
Ray Gillen - vocals
Rob Halford - vocals
Glenn Hughes - vocals
Tony Iommi - guitar
Ron Keel - vocals
Tony Martin - vocals
Neil Murray - bass
Geoff Nicholls - keyboards
Ozzy Osbourne - vocals
Cozy Powell - drums
Bobby Rondinelli - drums
Eric Singer - drums
Dave Spitz - bass
Adam Wakeman - keyboards
Rick Wakeman - keyboards
Dave Walker - vocals
Bill Ward - drums
Jezz Woodruffe - keyboards

Black Sabbath Paranoid