Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  We said: ‘It’s Bill Ward.’

  Andy was all taken aback, going: ‘Bill’s got a doll out as well?’

  One time we all came out of a club in Birmingham at some ridiculous hour. We’d had a few drinks and we went down to a nearby lake. Bill was completely rat-arsed and we put him on this boat and shoved him out on this lake.

  And left him.

  Another time we carried a very drunk Bill into a park, put him on a bench and covered him with newspapers so that he looked like an old tramp.

  And abandoned him again.

  Once when he got sloshed we put him to bed and tried to take his trousers off. As we pulled at them, one of the trouser legs just ripped off. The next day he came down still wearing the same trousers, one leg on and one leg gone. He just didn’t care.

  One time at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Los Angeles we made a big banner saying: ‘I am gay, come and visit me.’ We climbed up on his balcony on the third floor and hung this banner from it. One of those stupid things you do. The manager of the hotel saw it and wanted him to take it down, but Bill didn’t know anything about it and didn’t know what he was going on about. The manager said: ‘There’s this big banner I want you to take down.’

  And Bill went: ‘Banner? What banner!’

  Of course he went out on the balcony and saw it.

  ‘Aargh!’

  He used to put his shoes out to air on the balcony. He would get up so late, I’d have been up for hours already, so I’d climb over to his balcony, fill his shoes up with soil and put plants in them. And he’d fall for it every time.

  It’s a wonder we didn’t drive him loony. It was always Bill who got it. And if you didn’t do anything to him for a while, he’d actually say: ‘Is something wrong?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘Well, you haven’t done anything to me today.’

  He’s different now. The last tours at least he was actually up for breakfast. He’s changed his lifestyle and he’s a lot more healthy now. Since his heart attack he had to stop smoking and, well, he had to stop everything.

  ‘It’s Alright’ was Bill Ward’s song. Although he used to be the singer with The Rest all those years ago, this was the first song Bill ever sang on a Sabbath album. We encouraged him to put it on because we thought it was a good song and Ozzy liked it as well.

  ‘Dirty Woman’ was a song about prostitutes, because we were in Florida and Geezer had seen all these hookers around there so he wrote about that. It’s not like we were into prostitutes. Well, we did have one or two in the early days. One night back then we were in the Amsterdam red-light district and I went into one of these places. I was sloshed and I fell asleep. Soundly snoring away, I went into extra time and the next thing I knew this guy was screaming at me: ‘Where’s the money!’

  And then he threw me out. I hadn’t done anything, except pass out in there.

  There were keyboards on all of the tracks, which was a bit different for us. I liked it, but Technical Ecstasy didn’t sell as many as the previous albums. Sabotage hadn’t broken any sales records either, but with this one the decline really started. It was especially disappointing for me, because I was really involved with the album from start to finish. But it was just one of those things. It was 1976, it was the time of punk, and there was a whole new generation of kids.

  41

  Ecstasy on tour

  For the Technical Ecstasy tour we didn’t have a very big production; just musical equipment, a snow machine and dry ice. Nothing fancy, no coming in through the stage or flying in from the rafters. But Bill had this brilliant brainwave of having a big sea shell built behind his drums. It was made out of fibreglass and it was loud, as it projected the sound. And every night he had tons of fresh flowers around his kit as well. He started getting more loony, but the shell was better than his original idea, where he wanted all these tubes around his kit with water going through it, changing colour. He had all these fancy ideas. They were great until you tried to get them to work: impossible.

  We started touring America in October. We had acts like Boston, Ted Nugent, Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band supporting us. The shows were all sold out. At the Halloween gig in Denver, Heart opened for us. When we were playing two girls stood on the side of the stage to watch us and Albert threw them off because he thought they were groupies. He said: ‘I fucked them two off. They were on the side of the stage, dancing around.’

  I said: ‘That was the other band!’

  ‘What band?’

  ‘Heart!’

  ‘Oh no!’

  Linda Blair from the movie The Exorcist came to our gig in New Haven, Connecticut. Ozzy was a bit infatuated with her, probably because he’d seen the movie. Or maybe he identified with her, because in the movie she also peed all over the place.

  As a matter of fact, we all were very impressed by Linda once. We went to see The Exorcist at a cinema in Philadelphia a couple of years before and it scared the shit out of us. Back at the hotel we went into the bar to have a drink to calm ourselves down. The television there showed a programme with this priest talking about exorcism. That made it even worse. We got so scared that none of us could sleep, so we spent the night in the same room. Just pathetic.

  The bar of our hotel in New Haven had a glass wall behind it, so you could see into the swimming pool. Albert Chapman and me had a few drinks and we got this great idea: ‘Why don’t we go out there and jump in with no clothes on!’

  And so we did. It was one of those stick your arse against the window deals. I don’t know what they must’ve thought in the bar. Absolute madness.

  When we got out we needed a quick getaway, so we nicked a golf cart that was parked there. Two grown-up naked men in a golf cart driving around the hotel grounds! We made it back to the room, dried off, got dressed and went back into the bar like nothing had happened. Most of the people didn’t even know it was us, because all they’d seen was two arses up against the window.

  A pretty picture.

  We had met Frank Zappa at a party in New York a couple of years before. He took us all out to a restaurant, telling us how much he liked ‘Snowblind’. It was very kind of him and we became friends. On 6 December we played Madison Square Garden, with Frank introducing the band. He wanted to play as well. We’d put his stuff on stage but we had a really bad night. Frank was waiting to walk on and I thought, he can’t, it’s disastrous, everything is going wrong, my guitar is going out of tune, there’s noise and crackles and God knows what. So I said to him: ‘It would be best if you don’t play, really.’

  We got on well with him. In fact later on with Ronnie James Dio I phoned Frank, because Geezer had left. I said: ‘You don’t know any bass players, do you?’

  He went: ‘Yeah, you can use mine.’

  ‘No, we want a bass player that might be with us for a long time.’

  Me and Ronnie went over to his house. Frank opened the door with a parrot on his shoulder. He said: ‘Do you want a drink? A soda, ice tea?’

  We were thinking more along the lines of a beer.

  ‘No beer.’

  All he had were the more hippie sort of drinks. We went down to his studio and he said: ‘Can I play you my new album?’

  ‘Yes, please do.’

  I like some of his stuff, like Hot Rats, but when he played me this new album it wasn’t my cup of tea at all. There was so much going on and it was such off-the-wall stuff that I couldn’t absorb it. I thought, well, I don’t want to be rude, what am I going to say to him when it stops? Because he’s going to go: ‘What do you think?’

  And he did: ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Erm . . . what was that . . . on the third track . . . that eh . . .’

  ‘Oh, that was . . .’

  He started to explain the whole thing: ‘That’s these drums and . . .’

  And I only went there looking for a bass player!

  As a musician I think Frank was very clever, especially at arranging, and his band was tight as
shit.

  When I went to see them once in Birmingham, he said: ‘I’ve got a surprise for you tonight.’

  ‘Ah?’

  They played ‘Iron Man’. I was in the bar and I heard them play it and I thought, bloody hell! I went back out and I thought, I’ll thank him after the show. But he had such a bad night that he stormed off stage, really pissed off. So I thought, hmm, I don’t think I’m going to go back. Even so, it was a nice surprise.

  It was on this Technical Ecstasy tour that the mysterious ‘Tony’s twin’ was lurking about. This bloke plagued me for many years. Tony’s twin dressed up like me, he had a moustache and he was a guitar player as well. He made his own thimbles and even started marketing them and selling them. He turned up at our hotel all the time and people would think he was me. Eventually it fizzled out, although I heard from this guy again not too long ago through my website. He sent a picture of him playing, but he doesn’t look the same now; he shaved his moustache off and everything. Very peculiar.

  There was another bloke who plagued me later on. He claimed to be my son. He was about fifty, so I don’t know how he could possibly be my son, but he insisted he was. He used to find out where I was and phone up. My second wife, Melinda, answered the phone one day and it was him saying: ‘It’s Tony’s son.’

  Of course it threw her altogether; she thought I had a son then.

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve got a son!’

  ‘I haven’t got a son!’

  ‘I just spoke to him!’

  This guy actually changed his name to Iommi. Some band even made a record about him. It was titled something like ‘Practising To Be Tony Iommi’.

  42

  We Never Say Die

  Preparing for the recording of Never Say Die! we were trying to write songs, but it was hard. While we were touring America, punk happened. We even had The Ramones supporting us. I wouldn’t want to put them down at all, but I think that was a wrong match. They didn’t go down well and were getting things thrown at them all the time, so we had to take them off the tour.

  I didn’t know whether I liked this punk stuff. Aggression is one thing in the music, but when it comes to spitting and cutting yourself, it just seemed a little bit far off to me. But I liked some of the songs, certainly later. And some credited Black Sabbath as an influence.

  I thought, oh, I can’t see that somehow.

  Punk coming in threw us a bit. The Stranglers were at No. 1 at that time. I remember Geezer saying: ‘We’re a bit old hat now with all these riffs and stuff.’

  I almost felt like, God, what am I going to come up with then?! And again the other guys used to go down to the pub and then they’d come back asking: ‘Have you got anything?’

  ‘No, can’t think of anything . . .’

  Writing became very difficult, especially after Geezer saying that. It felt like we didn’t believe in what we were doing any more. I felt hurt. I kept thinking, if I’m going to come up with a riff, then they’ll probably say: ‘Oh, can’t we do something else?’

  The guys didn’t say that, but I felt like they would. All this when I had already booked a recording studio in Toronto, so the pressure was mounting.

  Then Ozzy left. He just didn’t want to do it any more. It was a really difficult period for us, but we never considered packing it in. We asked ourselves, will he come back? He might change his mind, we don’t know. But we also said: ‘We can’t just sit here, we have to do something.’

  Me and Bill knew this singer from old, Dave Walker, from the time when he was in a local Birmingham band called The Red Caps. He later sang with Savoy Brown and Fleetwood Mac and had moved to San Francisco. I remembered him having a good voice, so we got in touch with him. We were grasping at straws really, thinking, we’re here to write an album, we have a studio booked and we have no singer! We rehearsed with Dave for a while and wrote two or three songs with him. Word got out to the press and we even did a local Birmingham TV show with him, but we just didn’t feel it was right. Then Ozzy said: ‘I’m sorry’ and all that, and he came back. We told Dave and he went. However, Ozzy didn’t return until two or three days before we were due to go into the studio in Toronto. We couldn’t cancel that because we’d paid a lot of money up front. But we still had no songs apart from the three we’d done with Dave, and Ozzy wouldn’t sing those.

  We went to Toronto and it was absolutely freezing. We each hired apartments close to the Sounds Interchange Studios. We also hired a cinema with a stage in it, to write and rehearse new songs. We worked here from nine o’clock in the morning in the freezing cold, because the place had hardly any heating, and then at night we went to the studio to record. It was just totally wrong for us. Up to that point we’d write something and then live with it for a bit, giving the songs time to grow: ‘Do we like it? Let’s change this bit, or let’s change that.’

  In Toronto we never had that luxury. That’s why to me Never Say Die! is very much off the wall. There are some tracks I liked on it, but it’s hard to relate to that album because of the way it was done. It was a bitter time for us.

  Accidents never come singly. The studio turned out to be crap. I had booked the place, so it was my fault. I just chose it based on the list of the names of people who had used it before. It was really expensive, but the sound was as dead as a doornail, so me and the engineer tried to get a bit of live sound in there by pulling all the carpet up. The owner of the studio heard what we were doing, so he came down barking: ‘What’s going on!’

  I said: ‘We just can’t get a good sound. It’s dead.’

  ‘You can’t pull the carpet up!’

  ‘Well, we did. It’s rolled up!’

  It was a nightmare. They said The Rolling Stones had used the studio, but maybe they just did some overdubs or something. I actually bought a stereo that had been left behind by Keith Richards, because I wanted to play music in my apartment. It had all these marks on the top of the speakers, where somebody had been chopping up drugs. We just smoked a lot of dope at the time. One day I smoked a little too much and I said: ‘I’ve got to go to my room.’ My apartment was three floors up. I used the stairs as I didn’t want to bump into anybody in the elevator. I walked up, put my key in the door, went into the room, put the light on and thought, strange, it looks different. It’s all been decorated. It’s got wallpaper and everything in here!

  I don’t know why I didn’t stop there. I walked into the bedroom and there was a guy and his wife in bed and they shot up and I had the shock of my life. They screamed and I went: ‘Aaaah!’, screaming right back at them. I just couldn’t get my head together at all. So I said: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I must be in the wrong room!’ and shot out of there.

  I had walked up one floor too many. My key had fitted in their door, which was really peculiar. I got to my own apartment and the next day the super came by, because my upstairs neighbours had made a complaint. I said: ‘Well, my key shouldn’t have fitted their door!’

  I told them what happened, conveniently forgetting about the fact that I was stoned.

  Despite the cold and the dope and the studio, we did manage to record an album. I actually sang backing vocals on ‘A Hard Road’. It was the first time I ever did that. And the last, because the other guys couldn’t keep a straight face. I was singing away, looking at them and Geezer was cracking up. I had to keep singing and he kept laughing. It was really embarrassing. Never again!

  ‘Swinging The Chain’ was a track that we originally did with Dave Walker. Ozzy refused to sing it, but we had to record it anyway, because otherwise we wouldn’t have enough to fill an album. Bill said: ‘Well, I’ll sing it then.’

  And so he did. We kept the music and Bill just rewrote the lyrics.

  It’s not like Ozzy didn’t want to do ‘Over To You’ either, but he couldn’t think of anything to sing on it, so we ended up bringing in these sax players instead. It was real funny period for us, what with Ozzy leaving and coming back. Going into the studio to record this alb
um, it was very iffy. And, of course, Ozzy didn’t last much longer anyway after that. He actually did end up doing one song we did with Dave Walker earlier, whether he knew it or not. Geezer wrote the lyrics for it and we called it ‘Junior’s Eyes’.

  The title track, ‘Never Say Die’, was released as a single, the first one since ‘Paranoid’. We’d said we would never do another single, because we were attracting a lot of screaming kids. But it had been a few years, so what the hell. It got in the English charts and we even did Top of the Pops with it. Again, that was a weird show to do. Bob Marley was on the programme with us. Bill at that time had his hair braided and everybody thought he was taking the mickey out of Bob. It wasn’t like that at all; it was just the way he happened to have his hair in those days.

  All in all, it took us quite a while to record Never Say Die!. We plodded on I suppose. We didn’t not get along – we always got along – but it was hard work, much harder than it had ever been before. In the circumstances we’d put ourselves in, it was really difficult to make an album and I felt a lot of pressure doing it. It was expensive as well. It wasn’t just the studio, but we also had to live there. We all became shoppers, going to the supermarket with our trolleys getting our groceries and coming back in thick snow. Shopping was also a reason to get out of the apartment, to go somewhere different for a change. And we went to this club on the corner of the road we lived on, called the Gasworks. The supermarket and the club down the street . . . so much for entertainment.

  Never Say Die! was doomed from start to finish. Ozzy leaving, trying out Dave Walker – it threw the whole thing out of whack. The album was just done day-by-day, so there was no format to it. You couldn’t sit back and think, oh, I can see that leads into the other. The songs didn’t relate to each other, it was so off the wall. The audience must’ve thought this as well: what’s going on here?