by Tony Iommi
Things went all right in the morning. After I came back from my lunch break, I pushed the pedal and the press came straight down on my right hand. As I pulled my hand back as a reflex I pulled the ends of my fingers off. Stretch your hand out then line up your index finger and your little finger and draw a line between the tops of them: it’s the bits sticking out from the two fingers in the middle that got chopped off. The bones were sticking out of them. I just couldn’t believe it. There was blood everywhere. I was so much in shock it didn’t even hurt at first.
They took me to hospital, and instead of doing something to stop the bleeding they put my hand in a bag. It quickly filled up and I thought, when am I going to get some help, I’m bleeding to death here!
A little later somebody brought the missing bits to the hospital, in a matchbox. They were all black, completely ruined, so they couldn’t put them back on. Eventually they cut skin from my arm and put it over the tips of my injured fingers. The nails had come straight off. They put a bit of beard back in one of them so that the nail would grow, they skin-grafted it and that was it.
Then I just sat at home moping. I thought, that’s it, it’s over with! I couldn’t believe my luck. I had just joined a great band, it was my very last day at work and I was crippled for life. The manager of the factory came to see me a few times, an older, balding man with a thin moustache called Brian. He saw that I was really depressed, so one day he gave me this EP and said: ‘Put this on.’
I was going: ‘No, I don’t really want to.’
Having to listen to music was certainly not going to cheer me up at that point.
He said: ‘Well, I think you should, because I’ll tell you a story. This guy plays guitar and he only plays with two fingers.’
It was the great Belgian-born gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt and, bloody hell, it was brilliant! I thought, if he’s done it I can have a go at it as well. It was absolutely great of Brian to be thoughtful enough to buy me this. Without him I don’t know what would have happened. Once I heard that music, I was determined to do something about it instead of sitting there moping.
I still had bandages on my fingers and so I tried playing with just my index finger and my little finger. It was very frustrating, because once you’ve played well it’s hard to go backwards. Probably the easiest thing would have been to flip the guitar upside down and learn to play right-handed instead of left-handed. I wish I had in hindsight, but I thought, well, I’ve been playing for a few years already, it’s going to take me another few years to learn it that way. That seemed like a very long time, so I was determined to keep playing left-handed. I persevered with two bandaged-up fingers, even though the doctors said: ‘The best thing for you to do is to pack up, really. Get another job, do something else.’
But I thought, bloody hell, there has got to be something I can do.
After thinking things through for a while, I wondered whether I could make a cap to fit over my fingers. I got a Fairy Liquid bottle, melted it down, shaped it into a ball and waited until it cooled down. I then made a hole in it with a soldering iron until it sort of fitted over the finger. I shaped it a bit more with a knife and then I got some sandpaper and sat there for hours sandpapering it down to make it into a kind of thimble. I put it on one of my fingers and tried to play the guitar with it, but it didn’t feel right. Because it was plastic it kept slipping off the string and I could barely touch it, it was so painful. So I tried to think of something I could put over it. I tried a piece of cloth, but of course it tore. I used different pieces of leather, which also didn’t work. Then I found this old jacket of mine and cut a piece of leather off it. It was old leather, so it was a bit tougher. I cut it into a shape so that it would fit over the thimble and glued it on, left it to dry and then I tried it and I thought, bloody hell, I can actually touch the string with this now! I sanded down the leather a bit too, but then I had to rub it on to a hard surface to make it shiny so it wouldn’t grip too much. It had to be just right so you could move it up and down the string.
Even with the thimbles on it hurt. If you look at my middle index finger, you will see a little bump on the end of it. Just underneath it is the bone. I have to be careful because sometimes if the thimbles come off and if I push hard on a string, the skin on the tips of my fingers just splits right open. The first ones I made fell off all the time. And it is trouble then; one of the roadies crawling about the stage, going: ‘Where the hell has that gone?’
So when I go on stage I put surgical tape around my fingers, dab a little bit of Superglue on that and then I push the things on. And at the end of the day I have to pull them off again.
I’ve only lost the thimbles a couple of times. I virtually live with the bloody things when I’m on tour. I keep them with me all the time. I’ve always got a spare set and my guitar tech has one as well.
Going through customs with these things is another story. I have the thimbles in a box and they search your bag and go: ‘Ah well, what’s this? Drugs?’
And then, shock, it’s fingers. I’ve had to explain it to customs on several occasions. And they go: ‘Whoah.’
Putting my fake fingers away in disgust.
Nowadays the people at the hospital make the thimble for my ring finger. They actually make me a prosthetic limb, a complete arm, and all I use is two of its fingertips that I cut off it. I asked: ‘Why don’t you just do me a finger?’
‘No, it’s easier for us to give you a whole arm.’
So you can imagine what the dustman thinks when he finds an arm in the bin. The thimbles I cut off it look like real fingers; there’s no leather on the ring finger one, I can play with the material it’s made of. They are too soft sometimes, so I leave them out in the air for a while to harden, or I put a bit of Superglue on them to give them the right feel again. Otherwise they grip the string too much. It’s a process that takes ages.
The home-made thimbles used to wear down, but these days the casing lasts; it’s only the leather that wears out. Each thimble probably lasts a month, maybe half a tour, and when they start wearing out I have to go through the whole thing again. I still use the same piece of jacket I started with all those forty-odd years ago. There isn’t much of it left now, but it should last another few years.
It’s primitive, but it works. You’ve either got to pack it in, or you’ve got to fight and work with it. It takes a lot of work. Making them is one stage, but trying to play with them is another. Because you have no feeling. You’re aware of this lump on your fingers, so you really have to practise at it to get it to work for you.
Part of my sound comes from learning to play primarily with my two good fingers, the index and the little finger. I’ll lay chords like that and then I put vibrato on them. I use the chopped off fingers mostly for soloing. When I bend strings I bend them with my index finger and I learned to bend them with my little finger. I can only bend them with the other fingers to a lesser extent. Before the accident I didn’t use the little finger at all, so I had to learn to use it. I’m limited because even with the thimbles there are certain chords I will never be able to play. Where I used to play a full chord before the accident, I often can’t do them now, so I compensate by making it sound fuller. For instance, I’ll hit the E chord and the E note and put vibrato on it to make it sound bigger, so it’s making up for that full sound that I would be able to play if I still had full use of all the fingers. That’s how I developed a style of playing that suits my physical limitations. It’s an unorthodox style but it works for me.
7
A career hanging off an extra thin string
Since I had my accident, I’ve had to rethink the whole thing, from the thimbles to how I play to the guitar itself. I can’t pick up any guitar and start playing it; it has to have the right strings and has to have the right weight of strings. I had all these problems from day one. And it was worse then, because at the time there were no companies making light gauge strings. There were no companies you could find to wor
k on a guitar either, so I had to do it all myself.
I was still playing a Fender Stratocaster at the time. I took that guitar apart countless times, trying to make it comfortable, filing the frets down, getting the strings to the right height. As opposed to normal people who still have the ends of their fingers, I can’t feel how hard I’m pressing down on my string very well. I tend to really press hard, because if I don’t the string will just flick off. I needed very thin strings, because bending thick strings was too hard for me.
The lightest gauge strings you had at the time were eleven or twelve; they were heavy because it was still in the style of the popular Play in a Day guitar tutor Bert Weedon’s thick strings. That’s what everybody had. They only made one set of strings, one certain gauge. I was the first to come up with the idea of making light strings, simply because I had to find a way to make the guitar easier for me to play. The heavy strings would just rip the leather off, I wouldn’t have the strength in my fingers to bend the strings, and it would hurt. The people in the music shops would say: ‘You can’t get any lighter. These are it.’
And I would say: ‘Well, are there any other strings that are thinner?’
‘No, apart from banjo strings.’
‘Give me some of those then.’
I used the two lightest banjo strings as the B and the high E strings on my guitar, which meant I could drop down the gauge on the remaining guitar strings to make them lighter. This way I managed to get rid of the thick low E string, using an A string instead. And that worked for me. Out of necessity I had invented the light gauge strings, combining banjo and guitar strings.
It was trial and error tuning the guitar, because if you tune an A down to E, the string tends to rattle on the frets. It was an art tuning it, and it was an art playing it.
Later on, when we had our first album out and the band was doing well, I went to guitar string companies trying to persuade them to make the lighter gauge strings. Their way of thinking was incredibly conservative: ‘Oh, you can’t do that. They’ll never work! They would never be harmonically right.’
I said: ‘Rubbish! It does! And I should know, because I use them!’
And then they’d say: ‘Nobody’s ever going to buy them! Why would anybody want that?’
They were all in such agreement about this that even I started thinking: maybe they don’t, maybe it’s just me who wants them because it makes me able to play and bend the strings. Eventually the people at Picato Strings in Wales said: ‘Yeah, we’ll give this a go.’
This was in 1970, maybe 1971. They made the first set of light gauge strings for me. They worked, they were great and I used them for many years. Of course, then all the other companies jumped on the bandwagon, guitarists all over the world started using them and light gauge strings became popular. But to this day people still say: ‘You won’t get a full sound.’
I’ve even worked with producers who have told me that I’ll need to use a set of thick strings to get a big sound.
My response to that is simple: ‘I’ve never used a set of thick strings and I do have a big sound.’
8
Meeting Bill Ward and The Rest
After chopping my fingers off, it took at least six months for the worst of the pain to wear off and to get going again. I always felt uncomfortable about it and I always hid my hand. The same with playing: I used to hate anybody seeing it.
‘What is that on your fingers?’
I later heard that some people actually thought it looked cool. There was a guitar teacher in New York who taught people how to play my things, and he had a pair of thimbles made. There was nothing wrong with his fingers, but he was convinced that these helped you to play.
My return to playing in a band came when I met Bill Ward. He was in The Rest and they all came around to our shop. They were trying to talk to me about joining them while people were coming in to be served. I said: ‘Yeah, we’ll have a go.’
They sounded really professional because they had two Vox AC 30 amplifiers. I also had an AC 30, so when you looked at it, three AC 30s, three Fenders – bloody hell, it must be a great band!
This was around 1966 or 1967. We had Bill Ward on drums, Vic Radford on guitar and Michael Pountney on bass. Singer Chris Smith came later because Bill used to sing in the early days of The Rest and he did a good job of it, too.
At that time we had no money. Bill used to go around picking up all these bits of drumsticks that the drummers of other bands had played with and broken. He couldn’t afford to buy any new ones, so he got used to playing with these half-sticks. Vic Radford had also chopped his finger off. I think he caught his middle index finger in a door and topped it off. Him losing his finger was a great help to me, because I had never met anybody else who had done that. I thought, bloody hell, both in the same band! He even tried one of my thimbles, but it’s something you really have to get used to. It’s just another world, it’s a totally different style of playing, and you’ve just got to change all the rules. And that’s what I did.
I didn’t follow any rules at all. I made my own.
We did a lot of covers: some Shadows, some Beatles, maybe some Stones, more or less Top 20 stuff. You had to play that poppy stuff, or else you wouldn’t get a gig. The Rest was quite popular; we started making a bit of a name, just locally. We’d play at the Midland Red Club, which was in the Midland Red Bus Depot. It was a social club where all the people who worked there would go. They had a band there every week. We used to play alternate weeks, and John Bonham was usually in the other band that played there. He’d last about five minutes in this band because he was too loud and they’d fire him. Then he’d sneak back in with another band and before long they would get rid of him for the same reason. He had this drum case with all the names of the bands he’d been with on it, and they were all crossed out. And the names would get smaller and smaller so that he could get them all on. All this was before bands had PA systems and drums were amplified. He just played them acoustically. But he hit those skins so hard, blimey, it was incredible. He was just so bloody loud!
The Rockin’ Chevrolets had long since broken up, but I was still with Alan Meredith’s sister, Margareth.
I was very jealous back then and I was very protective of Margareth. One night I was on stage playing away with The Rest when I saw somebody bothering her. I put my guitar down, jumped off stage, went around, punched this bloke out, got back on stage and carried on playing.
The stuff you do . . .
One time we were walking around Aston. I went to the loo and she waited outside for me. When I came out there was a gang of guys hassling her. I saw red. I went straight to the guy closest to her, grabbed him, and bang! Luckily, the others backed off. I used to do that a lot in those days. Always in a fight somewhere. But I’ve calmed down now. At last.
My relationship with Margareth even outlasted The Rest. They fizzled out because the bass player got married and decided to quit. The Rest was just a little band that had done all right for a while playing pubs. Little did we know it was the stuff Mythology was made of . . .
Later on in early Sabbath days I went out with Margareth’s younger sister, Linda. It was very strange going around to the same house, but then to pick somebody else up. There’d be me, sitting outside in my car waiting for Linda, and another guy would pull up in his car to pick up Margareth.
Linda and I broke up when I went off to tour Europe for the first time. I came back and told her that I wanted to end it, because for me Europe had opened my eyes to a different life altogether, something I had never seen before, living in Birmingham.
9
Job-hopping into nowhere
After leaving school I was expected to join the workforce. The first job I got was through a friend of Dad’s who owned a plumbing company. It was on a building site and I lasted no time at all. I couldn’t handle it because I don’t like heights.
My next big career move was getting a job treadmilling, which was making those rings t
hat have a screw on them and if you put them around a rubber pipe and you tighten them, they close up on it. It was piecework, so you got so much for however many you did, but you cut your hands to pieces doing it. I thought, I have to play with these! So I got out of there in a hurry as well.
I then got a job at this big music shop called Yardley’s in the centre of town. All the musicians met each other there, and the people who served them were playing away to show them how everything worked. I thought that’s what I’d be doing: ‘This is how this guitar works, this is the sound it’s got.’
But instead they had me getting all of the stuff out of the windows, cleaning all the drum kits, putting them back, cleaning the guitars, putting them back, and I thought, hang on, when can I sit and play? Then they had a burglary and they thought I was involved, because I was the new one there. They interrogated me and remained suspicious until they finally found who actually did it. I didn’t like what they had me doing, because all I did was menial tasks, and I didn’t like what had happened. So again I went and got another job.
Me quitting all these jobs didn’t go down at all well with my parents. They would both have a go at me: ‘When are you going to get a proper job instead of this playing the guitar thing!?’
After working at Yardley’s I got the welding job that cost me my fingers. And after my hand healed I got a job at B&D Typewriters. They taught me to drive and they gave me a van. I had to wear a suit and go to offices and service the typewriters on the spot. When I repaired stuff there’d be screws everywhere: where’s the screw for this and where’s that bit, oh no, little screws from here and there, oh my God!
But I really liked it, because I met a lot of girls that way. As long as I was repairing their typewriters they couldn’t work and they’d be chatting away, so I had no option but to chat them up. That actually backfired on me, because girls were phoning our office saying their typewriter had broken again. So the gov’nor would say: ‘You were only there a couple of days ago, I thought you repaired it!’