Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  US success for Paranoid with both Patrick Meehans

  Brian May, me and Eddie Van Halen in 1978

  Ronnie, Vinny, me and Geezer, somewhere strange. Buffalo, NY, December 1981

  Geezer, Ronnie and me – Mob Rules! Toledo, Ohio, November 1981

  Vinny, the first time round. Vinny followed Bill on drums, starting in Hawaii in 1980

  Geezer, me and Brian May at Hammersmith Odeon, 1989

  With long-time collaborator, Geoff Nicholls

  Mum and I at Helford House

  Outside the Manor Studios. Yes, it’s a black cat!

  Cozy and Neil Murray in Mexico before we ran for our lives

  Got ya! Hi-jinks with Vinny at Rockfield Studios while recording The Devil You Know in 2008

  With Toni-Marie, my aunt Pauline and Maria

  My Birmingham star on the city’s Walk of Fame

  A press conference with Ian Gillan in Armenia, 2009. We received the Order Of Honour award for the charity single we made 25 years earlier

  Grown up baby: Toni-Marie

  Maria and I at the Classic Rock Awards

  Nijmegen, Holland, June 2005

  Man at work. Donington Festival, June 2005

  It came back at me, because I went to the loo one day in my bedroom and lifted the lid up, and, bloody hell, there was a snake there. Dead one again. Shat myself before I could reach the toilet seat.

  We played jokes on each other all the time. Joking around like that makes people get along better. It’s also a test I suppose, to see if somebody is going to be able to put up with it.

  Things were going very well, but we still had Don going: ‘It’s never going to work. If you don’t get Ozzy back, that’s it.’

  We were at work at the house and all of a sudden some guys turned up to take the furniture away that Sharon had rented for us. Gradually we were seeing things going missing. We warned each other: ‘Don’t let them in. They’ll take the couch!’

  It was absolutely awful, so we decided to sever our relationship with Don completely. He had wanted to manage us for such a long time, and now he had looked after us for only a short while. Sandy Pearlman, an American guy who managed Blue Öyster Cult, then wanted to take us on. We kept that on the back burner, because we went back to doing it ourselves, just like we had done before Don took over. We still had Mark Forster working for us, who had helped out with the day-to-day stuff since the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath days. He was like an assistant, travelling around with us, organising the hotels and transportation and whatnot.

  Mark had some physical problem, an elephantiasis-type of thing in his groin. The silly thing was, he’d be standing there and he’d have this big bulge and instead of trying to hide it, he’d put a stage pass on it, so the first place you’d look was down there.

  I got a call one day after the Ronnie line-up had broken up, to be told that Mark had died. They couldn’t find any family, so they asked: ‘Do you want his belongings?’

  I said: ‘No, I don’t want anything.’

  I felt really bad. Mark was English, but he must have married an American, because I think he had a son somewhere. I told them this, but I didn’t know where he was.

  Anyway, with Mark still being very much alive and assisting us at the time, we decided we had no option but to move out of the house. The Ardens had virtually emptied the place and the lease was up. We thought, let’s move away from LA altogether. It was the wrong place for us then.

  So we shipped out to Miami.

  46

  Bill goes to shits

  We looked around the plane flying to Miami and said: ‘Why is there nobody on this flight?’

  It turned out we were flying into a hurricane and everybody was leaving the place. We thought, everybody’s going out and we are coming in!

  We got there and everything was boarded up. We had rented Barry Gibb’s house, but we stayed at a hotel first for three days, because it was dangerous everywhere else. They boarded the building up completely. Getting ready for this storm you had to fill your bathtub and you couldn’t leave the hotel. They had sandwiches there, but of course they ran out of food in the end. One day me and Geoff stood on my balcony like two idiots and we saw all the trees swaying. Then we heard: ‘You! Hey you! Get back in the room! Get off that balcony!’

  It was this policeman.

  ‘You idiots, get in the room!’

  It was frightening. It got to a point where they said: ‘Now it’s too late to leave so you got to stay. Get to shelters!’

  We went: ‘Oh Christ. Here it comes.’

  We only caught the edge of the storm. There were lampposts blowing over, traffic lights flying around and trees being uprooted, but it didn’t hit with the full force. Still, it was bad enough to frighten the shit out of us.

  We stayed at Barry Gibb’s house for months. He’d moved into another place. We did the same as we did in LA: we created a rehearsal studio where we set all the gear up. We had Craig Gruber come in, a bass player who used to be with Rainbow, just like Ronnie. We kept Geoff because we got on so well with him that we tried him on the keyboards. He was fairly new to it, but he was good enough for what we wanted: play the chords and come up with some ideas as far as what to play behind the chords.

  We wrote more stuff, without Geezer this time. It was awkward for me and Bill, because we were so used to working with him. Everything felt like it was on a temporary basis, because we were still hoping that Geezer would come back. It was hard, but we carried on. Writing actually went really smoothly and we soon finished an album’s worth of songs.

  Bill was really boozing a lot. He had his wife with him there and she was drinking heavily as well. Bill would wake up in the morning, all bright, and he’d have a beer from the fridge, and another beer and another beer. I’d go: ‘Bill, how many beers have you had now?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve only had two.’

  But it would be about ten by then. It became known as ‘he’s only had two’.

  Throughout the day he’d go from this pleasant phase to being really dismal, changing as he was drinking more. We’d avoid him by nine or ten o’clock at night, because he would get into a real down state of mind and become aggressive. Meanwhile, his playing was fine. He’d drink in the mornings but he was playing all right if he’d only had a few. It was afterwards, at night, that he’d slip into the next stage. And if we decided to have a day off, bloody hell, he’d go for it all the way.

  As ever, Bill was the one we’d play jokes on. On one occasion, I got this number of Alcoholics Anonymous and the name of the guy in charge. I said to Bill: ‘Some fucking bloke’s called up. You’ve got an interview.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You’ve got an interview. Phone him up and ask for this guy’s name, and just say: “Can you help me, it’s Bill Ward.”’

  And he did. Bill went: ‘Hello? I’m Bill Ward. Can you help me, I’ve been told to call you.’

  They started going on about the problems of alcohol. We were in the back listening in, and he freaked out completely. I’d never seen him like that. The phone went up in the air and crashed to the floor. We all fucked off as fast as we could. He didn’t take it as a joke at all and was in a terrible mood for ages. We just kept out of the way for a good day.

  Still, in spite of his boozing we gave him the job of going down to the bank to collect the money for the wages for everybody. We wanted to give him a purpose: ‘Don’t get pissed in the morning, Bill, you’ve got to go to the bank!’

  ‘Oh, all right, yeah, okay.’

  He really took it seriously. He’d be up in the morning and fucking shave and dress up. He bought himself a briefcase and suddenly he became this business guy, going down to the bank and becoming all responsible. It was funny the way you saw the change in him every Friday, when he had to go to collect the money.

  Ronnie really liked Bill. However, having Ronnie join changed the dynamics of the band and that affected Bill. He wasn’t 100 per cent happy with the situation. He was accu
stomed to having Ozzy around, as we all were, but Bill just couldn’t get used to him not being there any more. Also I think the drinking didn’t help. As a matter of fact, things got so bad that he wouldn’t stay for very much longer. Bill might have missed Ozzy, but this certainly didn’t mean we could have gone for somebody that sounded like him. Then there would have been criticism all over the place, and besides, there’s only one Ozzy. We went with Ronnie because we liked the way he worked and we liked his voice. The music took a different turn after he joined us. For Heaven and Hell we were writing for a singer who was so different that it opened more doors. When you work with Ozzy for ten years you know roughly what he’s going to sing and how he is going to do that. You’re familiar with his capabilities. We didn’t know what Ronnie’s capabilities were and it was a matter of pushing all the time, to see what he could do. It was new blood in the band, I could play different chords, it gave me other places to go music-wise. And Ronnie really encouraged me to play solos, to break out a bit more. It wasn’t like I had a lack of solos in the old days, but Ozzy would never say: ‘Why don’t you put a solo there?’

  He wasn’t that involved in it. Or maybe he was for a bit and then his attention span would go and he’d be off. He didn’t put much in the pot. That wasn’t his fault. He just wasn’t that musical. He couldn’t play an instrument so he wouldn’t know what chords to go to, whereas with Ronnie we were working more like a band, because if you sat down with him, he’d have a guitar as well, or a bass, and he’d go: ‘What about this chord?’

  ‘Oh yeah . . . yeah!’

  And then we’d improve on that. Ronnie had this huge involvement, which was great.

  Ozzy would sing with the riff. Just listen to ‘Iron Man’ and you’ll catch my drift: his vocal melody line copies the melody of the music. There was nothing wrong with that, but Ronnie liked singing across the riff instead of with it, come up with a melody that was different from that of the music, which musically opens a lot more doors. I don’t want to sound like I’m knocking Ozzy, but Ronnie’s approach opened up a new way for me to think, oh yeah, I can go here from that.

  Ronnie brought quite a lot as far as the sound of his voice goes as well. He knew what he wanted and he could tell us in music terms: ‘Why don’t we try an A there?’

  Ozzy couldn’t; he wouldn’t know what an A or a D was. At best he might go: ‘We’ll need something else there.’

  ‘Any ideas?’

  ‘Not really. What about, erm . . .’

  We also became more professional. Ronnie always wanted to make everything better, he always pushed, both on stage as well as off. It was good for us, because it pushed all of us. Over the years we probably got a little bit lazy and relied too much on the things we knew, but Ronnie challenged us. That way we became more of a band again: we got tighter, trying to protect the band, protect what we had. And we believed in what we had.

  47

  Heaven and Hell

  We recorded Heaven and Hell at the Criteria Studios in Miami, the same place where we had recorded Technical Ecstasy a couple of years earlier. For the first time since Master of Reality we had somebody else producing it, which was a great help. Martin Birch took a lot of the strain off me. He had done a few good albums by big name bands already, like Rainbow. Ronnie recommended him, so we thought we’d try him.

  We were back in Florida, which meant there were drugs galore. A neighbour next to Barry Gibb’s house had constant supplies of coke like you wouldn’t believe. I’d visit him and he would have pounds of it in a big pile on the table.

  ‘Here, help yourself.’

  It was unbelievable. Here we were at four o’clock in the morning: ‘Can we just pop around for a bit?’

  And he would be up!

  ‘Yeah, just pop around.’

  We just went over the top because it was there, on our doorstep. It didn’t stop our creative juices flowing.We’ve always had a fifth member, a presence, a guiding light if you like, that led us in the right direction. It was there when we were in Miami at Barry’s house and we wrote ‘Die Young’. In that song there’s a break. In the part where Ronnie sings ‘die young’, it drops down to a quiet passage. At that time Ronnie had never done stuff like that, with a drop-down, it was always out and out, go! I said to him: ‘We’ve done it for years in a lot of the Sabbath stuff, we put a quiet bit in the middle of it.’

  And Ronnie said: ‘Oh, yeah, it works!’

  It was another learning experience for him, seeing how we wrote and what you can do, somewhere else to go, a different area. I felt I knew where to go on these things. I think we all did, we all felt: this is the fifth member guiding us. ‘Die Young’ is a well-structured song. It was the second single, after ‘Neon Knights’, and to this day it goes down really well.

  ‘Children Of The Sea’ was the one that we had already done when Ozzy was still there. I still have a version with him singing on it somewhere, with a different lyric and a totally different vocal melody to what Ronnie did with it. When we recorded the new version, I wanted it to sound like galley slaves rowing a big ship. In my head I could hear this monk-type chant, so we said to the guy at the studio: ‘Anywhere we can hire some monks?’

  He phoned around, trying to find some monks. It was a bit of a joke, really. But he came back all serious and said: ‘Well, we can only get one monk . . . but he can overdub!’

  ‘Ah!’

  I got him to come in and, ‘oo-oooo-ooo’, let him do his chant. We were in stitches. We had imagined this whole choir and we got one monk.

  But he could overdub.

  When we were in LA we had these JVC tape machines that had built-in microphones so we could record whatever we were doing, wherever. We were in the house and we just jammed around. I had this little amp, just a few watts, and we had a little drum kit, and we must have played ‘Heaven And Hell’ for ages. We really liked it. Ronnie was playing bits of bass on it at first and then we had Geoff take over. Ronnie would sing something and that would give you an idea where to go next. We just built the song up, jamming like that.

  In Miami, recording went well, but we wanted Geezer back, so I called him. He had sorted his stuff out by then, so we arranged for him to come in and play the bass on the album. Craig Gruber had put the bass parts down, but we took all that off without letting Geezer listen to them first. I was pretty confident that he would like the new music, because we often felt the same about stuff and I really liked our new songs. As a matter of fact, he was knocked out when he heard them. As soon as Geezer played his parts on it, it all came back to ‘this is the wall of sound’ thing, it made the music come back in shape again. Other bass players will just play something like ‘doom doom doom’, while Geezer will bend his strings and go ‘do-ommm’, to put more aggression into it. He’s just different from any other bass player I’ve ever heard. It worked out really good.

  Having Martin Birch there prevented me from being there all the time and getting over-involved in everything. Doing it all by myself in the past, I could go on endlessly and just play on and on, until I didn’t know what was good and what wasn’t any more. But with Martin it was: ‘Fine! We’ve got it!’

  ‘Ah. Well, I’ll just do one more take.’

  ‘No. It’s all right. We’ve got it.’

  Him drawing the line was good. And we probably saved a little money that way, too.

  We managed to frighten the life out of Martin. He was tough guy, but at the same time he was a little bit nervous. He did karate and had a black belt in this and that, but he could be got to.

  And we knew how to get to him.

  We discovered that he was really frightened of black magic, so we made it worse for him. I got a twelve-inch piece of balsa wood and I carved it into the effigy of a man. I wrapped it in black cloth and put it in my briefcase. I got my case out pretending to look for something, and I pulled this thing out so he could see the little figure.

  ‘What’s that!’

  I went: ‘Oh.’
r />   I covered it up quickly and closed the case.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.’

  But he did worry. He said to Ronnie: ‘Tony, he’s got something in his case. It looks like a little voodoo doll or something!’

  Of course Ronnie was in on it, so he played him up some more.

  After the others had gone, Martin would start asking questions. I would go: ‘Martin, really . . . It’s my own personal thing.’

  ‘Yeah yeah, what . . . What is that thing in your case?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  He really got worked up about this thing. Then eventually he thought it was a voodoo doll to stick pins in and the doll was him. He said: ‘I’m feeling really strange lately. You haven’t sort of . . .?’

  He thought that I was doing something to him and I wound him up some more. I said: ‘You’re not feeling . . . Are you feeling a bit weird today, Martin?’

  ‘Why! Why? Why should I? What’s happened! What are you doing?’

  He built the whole thing up himself, and I just encouraged him. I would’ve let it go but he just kept prodding me.

  ‘Are you into this black magic thing?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it!’

  And then we’d make stuff up. I’d say to Geezer, just loud enough so he’d hear: ‘Are you going to go to the . . . meeting, tomorrow?’

  Martin: ‘What meeting?’

  ‘Nothing, Martin, it’s just . . . just . . . you know . . .’

  He took the whole scam hook, line and sinker. We pissed ourselves laughing but he was in a terrible state. ‘Just tell me a couple of little things.’