by Tony Iommi
Everybody went: ‘Hahaha!’
‘I’m serious, it’s the police!’
Again: ‘Hahaha!’
I had literally to get one of them and go: ‘Look!’
And then: ‘Oooh, it’s the police!’
We quickly scraped all this coke and dope off the table. We had our own little stashes in our rooms as well, so we all rushed up there, trying to snort as much as we could before flushing the rest down the toilet. Then we said to one of the au pairs: ‘Quick, answer the door!’
She did and, of course, the police came in. We were sitting in the ballroom, all quiet-like, eyes wide open. They said: ‘What’s going on in there?’
‘Mmmm, nothing ... Why?’
You could obviously tell we were out of it. They wanted to know what we were doing there, and we told them we’d rented the house and so on and so on. It was hell on earth. If they’d have searched us, we would have gone down very badly. But they left after we explained about Bill’s button mistake.
We flushed a lot. Afterwards, of course, it was: ‘Oh fuck! It’s all gone, man! Quick, phone the bloke up again. Get him over!’
In the Record Plant, though, we were a bit more serious. Being in control in the studio we were free to experiment a bit more. The first three albums could’ve all been from the same batch really, but Volume 4 was when we started introducing different things. I’d found a piano in the ballroom up at the house and I used to play that thing when I’d had a million lines of coke. I’d never played the piano before and I started learning it right there and then, within a couple of weeks. Mind you, I was up all bloody night every night with a line of coke, play for a bit, another line of coke, play, so I was probably up for the equivalent of six weeks. And while doing that I came up with ‘Changes’. Ozzy came in and said: ‘Oh I like that’, and started singing to it. We got the Mellotron in and Geezer started playing that, like an accompaniment, an orchestral thing. And that was it, we decided to record it. It sounded really weird; I couldn’t believe it was us. I actually felt pretty embarrassed, because when we recorded it at the Record Plant, Rick Wakeman came in and he said: ‘Who was that playing the piano?’
I thought, oh no, he’s going to say: ‘That’s crap, that is.’
But he liked it.
I suppose we could have asked somebody like him to play these keyboards, but Geezer and me wanted to do it ourselves. Both of us were learning, it was a challenge.
If ‘Changes’ was unusual, ‘FX’ certainly was way out there. We were mostly naked at the time when we recorded it. When you’re in the studio for hours on end smoking dope, you go a bit mad. We started playing and were dancing around half naked, just being stupid. I hit my guitar with my cross, it went ‘boing!’ and we went: ‘Ooh!’
‘Boing!’
‘Aah!’
Everybody then danced past the guitar, hitting it. We were just playing about. We didn’t think of using this as a track, but they recorded it with a delay and we thought, oh, yeah, hmmm, and we put it on the record. I always put so much work in every song, putting all the different changes in and everything, and here we had a track that came about accidentally because a couple of stoned people were hitting my guitar, and it ended up on the album. A total joke! If only we’d had videos of it, it would have been amazing.
Or not.
‘Laguna Sunrise’ was actually inspired by a sunrise at Laguna Beach. I was there with Spock, one of the guys of our crew who was a good guitar player as well. We were up all bloody night and I just started playing this acoustic guitar and came up with this idea. We also tried to work out the orchestra bit for it. I had never done that before, as we had never used orchestras up until then. I don’t know how to write music out, but Spock did, so we tried to work out the notes for the orchestra to play: ‘What’s that dot there? Okay, put that down.’
We went into the studio and, of course, the orchestra wouldn’t accept it. They wanted all their parts written out properly and once we got somebody in to do that, they were great. On the end of ‘Snowblind’ we also used orchestras, and again later on ‘Spiral Architect’ off the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album. And ‘Supertzar’, off Sabotage, is me playing heavy guitar with a choir and a harp player. I did things like that to get a different sound into our music.
Bill nearly didn’t make it to the end of the recording process. We were rummaging around the house one night and in the garage we found all this Dupont paint. We grabbed these spray tins of gold paint and this clear lacquer. We got back into the house and there was Bill, pissed as a parrot and on the floor. We said: ‘Can we spray you?’
Of course he said: ‘Yes.’
We took all his clothes off, sprayed him, and he had everything gold. We then got this clear lacquer and sprayed him with that as well. It was bloody funny. Bill was lying there, all shiny, then he started making these weird little noises. Then he started throwing up and he went into this violent seizure.
Oh, fucking hell.
We phoned for an ambulance and we thought, how the hell are we going to explain this?
‘What’s wrong with the chap?’
‘Well . . . he’s sort of lying there and he’s . . . gold.’
And then trying to make it sound serious: ‘And he’s being really sick.’
‘Excuse me, what exactly is wrong with him?’
‘Erm . . . he’s sprayed gold and he’s on the floor, naked.’
They came out and gave us a right bollocking: ‘You idiots. Don’t you realise you could have killed the man!’
Everything was gold, his arse, his beard, the whole lot. Apparently it blocks all the pores up and you can die from it. They made us show them the tins of paint that we sprayed him with, and this lacquer as well. They read the tins, all seriously worried, and then they injected him with something. Meanwhile, we were standing there like naughty boys, going: ‘Is he going to be all right?’
We dashed back to the garage again, found some thinners and used that to get the gold off him as quickly as possible. It was quite a job cleaning him up. It was a fun idea, but it really backfired.
Recording Volume 4 was great. We had the Dupont house, the sun was shining, there was the swimming pool, women, everything. And coke, lots of coke. We had such a good time that we didn’t want it to end.
Towards the end of our stay one day we partied a little too hard. We were at the house and started messing around. First we threw a few things and in the end we got the hosepipe in, squirting it at each other. Ozzy painted himself in all these different colours, which caused such a mess. And then the doorbell rang. It was the owner of the house, John Dupont. Ozzy answered the door, soaked and with all this paint on his face. Dupont went: ‘What the hell is going on in here?’
He came in and it was a total mess. I was standing there with the hose, going: ‘Ah. How are you? Nice meeting you.’
He had a go at Patrick Meehan and we had to pay him. The situation was solved by money. As if he didn’t have enough, this John Dupont.
But crazy stuff like that happened because we were happy there. We rehearsed and came up with ideas and wrote stuff during the day and at night we went to the Rainbow Bar or whatever and partied.
That whole period was one of the most enjoyable times ever, and a song like ‘Snowblind’ makes it clear that it was also because of a certain drug. That’s why we wrote on the album sleeve ‘We wish to thank the great COKE-Cola Company’.
Just a little thank-you nod to our suppliers. I rented a house in Bel Air again a couple of years ago, when we were working on songs for the Heaven and Hell album, ‘The Devil You Know’. The Dupont house was on Stradella Road and, because I went out for walks a lot, I passed it every morning. Apparently it’s now owned by former Charlie’s Angel Jaclyn Smith, so I used to look in, trying to catch a glimpse.
But I never did.
30
This is your captain freaking . . .
When we toured America in the summer of 1972, we travelled around in a
private plane. We’d fly somewhere, stay there for a few days to do the gigs in the area, and then we’d fly off to somewhere else to do the same thing. If at all possible we’d stay in Florida so we could be on the beach during the day. Flying private planes was a Meehan thing. We had already used them back in 1971 on the Paranoid tour. In March of that year we toured the States with Fleetwood Mac, and they hopped on a flight with us. Ozzy sat in the front and we were all chatting away in the back. Suddenly the plane dived and went: ‘Vroooom!’
Ozzy had taken the controls. I don’t know why on earth the pilot let him do it! I shat myself. Bloody hell! But of course Ozzy thought it was hilarious. Everybody was screaming and shouting so he did again: ‘Woo-hoo!’
It didn’t do much for Bill’s fear of flying. He used to get terrified and needed to take Valium to get on a flight. He soon started driving instead of flying. He had a GMC mobile home and his brother, Jim, drove him from one gig to the next. Occasionally they’d have to stop at one of those places where you have to dump all the contents from the toilet. One day Jim was pushing the button that was supposed to release all the shit and nothing was happening, so Bill decided to get underneath to see what was wrong. He had got into CB Radio, like the truckers, and he was going through a stage of talking like that, with all this ‘breaker 1-9, come in Bulldog, 10-4’ stuff. So Bill was under the bus, going: ‘There’s a negative on the shit, Jim, a negative on the shit. Nothing’s happening, negative.’
He was banging away at stuff, then his brother pulled a lever again and all this shit and blue sewage stuff just went all over him.
Blwerkk!
Bill just went: ‘I’ve got a positive on the shit, Jim, positive on the shit.’
Jim pulled the bus forward and there was the outline of Bill on the ground with this pile of shit around it. His face was covered in it and he looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It was one of those classic moments.
Typical Bill.
31
A rather white wedding
My first wife was Susan Snowdon. I met her through Patrick Meehan in his office in London. Meehan was from a very well-to-do family himself. He mixed with high-society people, had the suit and the Rolls and went to all the in places. I presume that’s how he met Susan. She wanted to do some singing, so I said: ‘I’ll write you a song.’
Of course I never did. She came up to my house one day and it was a bit awkward: I found out she couldn’t sing at all and she found out I hadn’t written a song for her. But we did go out to dinner, and that’s how it all started.
We were totally opposite people. Susan’s parents and her family were all right, but some of her friends, bloody hell: ‘Oh, what do you do then, you play the, ah, what is it, a plink a plonk, ah, you do this?’
Very condescending. I really did not want to go near these people. Susan reacted to my friends in much the same way as I reacted to hers, so she’d go and see her friends and I’d go and see mine. That might not sound like a very solid basis for a relationship, but we lasted for eight years, a fairly long time. Of course I was on tour most of that time. We had a very peculiar relationship. She was always too posh for me, really.
We planned to get married on 3 November 1973. Before I could marry Susan, I had to meet her parents at their enormous mansion and ask her father for his daughter’s hand. I was really nervous when I got there. They brought the cakes out and the tea and teapots and little cups and I thought, God, I hope I don’t knock something over. But her father and mother were very down-to-earth, honourable people. I got on really well with them. Of course, when we got married, we were going to have the reception at their house. I was thinking, oh bloody hell, what’s going to happen when they see my friends?
But first I needed to survive my stag night. It was only John Bonham, me and a driver. We went to clubs around Birmingham, and the last one we hit just before closing time was Sloopy’s on Corporation Street. John said: ‘Let’s go and have one last drink.’
Right, one last drink . . . he had the bloody bar lined up with twelve bottles of champagne and twelve glasses, and he said to the bartender: ‘Pour them out!’
I thought he was going to treat everybody in the club, but, no, he said: ‘This is for you.’
‘Fuck off, John, I’m getting married in the morning. If I drink that, you’re never going to see me there!’
‘Well, I’ll drink them then.’
Which he duly did. Of course, within half an hour he was absolutely paralytic, and he was going: ‘Whuehheu . . .’
To make matters worse, the club was closing and we had to get out. Sloopy’s was upstairs and the stairs to the exit were steep. On our way out John grabbed the owner of the club around the neck and of course the bloke fell down the stairs. He hurt himself so he wasn’t very happy. Our driver and me finally managed to get Bonham out of the club and into the car, and we took him home first. When we got to John’s house he didn’t have his keys on him. It was four o’clock in the morning. I pressed the doorbell: nothing. Again: nothing. Then the lights went on upstairs. His wife, Pat, opened a window and shouted: ‘He’s not coming in!’
I said: ‘Pat, please, let him in. I’m getting married in the morning and he’s got to be there.’
‘He’s not coming in!’
‘Please!’
Finally Pat said: ‘All right, but he’s not coming upstairs then! If he’s coming in, he can sleep downstairs.’
‘Okay.’
She came down, opened the door and ran straight back upstairs. We carried John in, put him in the hallway, sat him against a radiator and I said to him: ‘You’re not going to make it tomorrow, are you?’
He put his thumb up and slurred: ‘Yeah, I’ll be there.’
The driver took me home and I thought, bloody hell, John’s never going to turn up and I’ll be without a best man.
I had to be there at some silly hour and I couldn’t believe it: eight o’clock sharp I saw Bonham coming up the drive, with his top hat and tails on, all dressed up. He lived a good thirty-five minutes from my house and I hadn’t even had a shave or anything yet. I opened the door and he was all chipper and energetic, going: ‘I’m ready. Are you?’
I actually felt worse than him. We got in the car and of course we immediately did a quick couple of toots. I thought, oh dear, so this is how the day is going to be. We got to the bloody church and, before we went in, all our lot kept disappearing behind the building, one after the other, having a line. Come back, snort and go: ‘Right!’
And then somebody else would go: ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
On my wife’s side they were wondering where they kept going off to and I was thinking, Christ, I can’t do this! Once inside, my friends were all sniffing and snorting, all those sounds going on in the church, it was terrible. And then you had her side, all immaculate and straight.
I had written this instrumental thing called ‘Fluff ’. They played the tape when Susan walked down the isle and it started going wrong. First it came on and then it went off and it came on again and everybody started giggling. A total disaster.
When the guy said: ‘Is there anybody here who’s got anything to say about why these two should not be joined in matrimony?’ I was convinced somebody was going to shout out. But they didn’t. They were just sneering. I was bloody glad to get out of that church.
When we got back to the house for the reception, they were all disappearing again. More lines. My mother-in-law said: ‘It’s funny, none of your friends are eating.’
Of course I said: ‘Oh really? I wonder why.’
John Bonham and Ozzy and a few others were notorious drinkers who’d play up once they’d had a few. That’s why we thought it best just to have a toast in champagne and after that not to have any more alcohol. It really didn’t go down very well. We had the champagne toast and then a top-up with apple juice and Bonham spat it out and went: ‘Fucking apple juice!’
Susan’s side never swore, so I thought, oh no, this w
ill upset the cart. My mother saved the day. She said to Bonham: ‘Don’t worry, John. We’ll go back to my house. I’ve got plenty of booze there.’
They all sneaked off to Mum’s house and carried on drinking there. If it weren’t for her there would have probably been antiques going through the walls, on account of all that apple juice.
32
Going to the big house
Susan didn’t want to live in my house in Stafford, so we decided to move to a place between London and Birmingham. We were looking at houses to buy, but couldn’t find anything we liked. One day her dad said: ‘Why don’t you come and live here? This house is far too big for us.’
Sue went: ‘That’s an idea.’
And so we did. We had a major part of this massive, 200-room house. My father-in-law built a partition between their living quarters and ours and we lived there for quite a few years.
Just like in Carlisle, we weren’t the only ones there. I saw an apparition going up the stairs one night. It wasn’t like a three-dimensional person, it was more like a figure. And I had more weird things happening there. We had these big, old-fashioned keys in the doors to all the bedrooms. I was in the lounge one night and I had my briefcase open. I closed it and I went upstairs to bed. I heard this big bang and ran downstairs again. One of the big paintings had fallen off the wall. I walked into the lounge and my briefcase was open. And I went to open the door and the keys had gone. All of them. Never found them again. I talked about this to my in-laws and they said: ‘Yeah, there is a ghost here. But he’s a friendly ghost.’
Things like that make you really think. A poltergeist, for a start, can be horrible, but . . . they can move an object! I’ve always been able to see things that most other people can’t. It’s hard to talk about it, because people think, right, he’s had too many drugs. But I actually did see things, like the Carlisle ghost. Saw him as clear as day.