Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  ‘Why, what . . .?’

  ‘Just tell me what happens. What do you do at these meetings?’

  ‘Oh, Martin, we can’t . . . it’s secret, it’s all very hush hush, we can’t talk about it.’

  I loved it. I really lived on it. I was looking forward to going in the next day, just to wind him up some more. Martin changed from being this confident chap to being a nervous wreck, going: ‘What’s happening, what’s going on?’

  ‘Nothing . . . nothing.’

  I got the doll out again and he said: ‘You’re sticking pins in it! It’s me, isn’t it? That’s me!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That doll! That’s me, I’ve seen it!’

  Fantastic, it was a real gem and it lasted the entire recording session. We never told him. He’ll read this book and go: ‘The bastard!’

  We used Martin on the next album, Mob Rules, as well.

  And carried on . . .

  At a certain point our time was up at Criteria Studios. We needed a break anyway. Martin certainly did, because we had driven him loony. So we came back home to England.

  I was doing a tax thing, where I needed to stay out of England for a year. I miscalculated and came back a couple of days too early. My accountant said: ‘Get out, get out!’

  ‘What do you mean, get out?’

  ‘Just get on a plane somewhere. Go to Jersey!’

  I went to Jersey and Geoff came with me. I booked this Grand Hotel because it was the biggest hotel there, so I thought that was the place for us. We went down to the bar for a drink and I got pissed as a parrot. I was talking to the barman and he said: ‘How are the rooms?’

  I warbled: ‘Ah don’t like mah room.’

  He said: ‘Why don’t you change it then? Talk to the manager.’

  He got the manager in.

  ‘Ahh don’ like mah roommm.’

  He was going on about changing my room and I was sitting there drinking and eating all these olives. I ate so many olives they made me throw up right there in the bar. Good thing I didn’t get sick all over this manager before he agreed to give me another room. He said: ‘Yeah, no problem. We’ve got a great room.’

  I didn’t even get what he had said.

  He went: ‘It’s got electric curtains.’

  And he carried on about it having this and that, but I couldn’t take it all in. I just heard: ‘It’s a big plush room.’

  So I said: ‘Yeah, I’ll have that!’

  I didn’t feel very well then and went to bed. At eight o’clock in the morning the phone rang and they told me my new room was ready. I felt dreadful and really didn’t fancy changing rooms at that point, but I felt obliged to because of the olive thing the previous evening, so I did. I went to this other room and it was really nice. It had this big, round waterbed and electric curtains and everything: really plush. I phoned Geoff and said: ‘Come down and we’ll have breakfast in my new room together.’

  So he did. We stepped out of the door afterwards and there were five maids outside, all laughing.

  ‘Fucking hell. What’s the matter with them?’

  I didn’t realise they had put me in the bridal suite. They thought we were a couple of gays.

  ‘Ah, no!’

  From then on I’d say to Geoff: ‘I’ll meet you downstairs. Don’t come to my room. We’ll have breakfast downstairs.’

  From Jersey it was on to Paris, as I still couldn’t go back to England. The rest of the band flew in as well. We booked Studio Ferber over there and we came up with the last song of the album, ‘Neon Knights’. We felt that we needed a fast number like this to balance out the slower songs on the album. I find that writing fast songs is difficult. I can write slow songs or mid-tempo ones until they’re coming out of my ears, but fast songs I really have to think a little bit more about. I suppose that’s because of the way I’ve always done stuff with Sabbath: most of the things were ploddy.

  After Paris we finally went to London. We did overdubs and the final mix at the Town House Studios. That’s where I set Bill on fire. We made Heaven and Hell and for a few horrible moments Bill got a little too close to hell there . . .

  48

  Ignition

  I had set Bill Ward on fire before, but this time things got out of hand. While he was rolling around the studio howling, I was laughing my head off. But when he continued screaming and writhing the horrible truth sank in: my drummer was going up in flames!

  It all started as a party bit. Bill and I had joked around a few times before, where I would hold a lighter to his beard and the thing would burn for maybe a second. It was always good for a laugh, so when we were doing some work on the Heaven and Hell album at the Town House Studios and he walked in, I said to him: ‘Bill, can I set fire to you again?’

  ‘Not just now, I’m busy.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’

  And I completely forgot about it. A couple of hours later Bill came over while I was doing things on my guitar and he said: ‘Look, I’m going back to the hotel, so do you still want to set fire to me or what?’

  Martin Birch, the producer, couldn’t believe it. He went: ‘Oh, blimey.’

  As Bill seemed so keen on doing this, I decided to make a bit of a production of it and dosed him in this stuff with which studio technicians clean their tape heads. His clothes just absorbed it. I lit him and he went up like a bomb.

  ‘Whoosh!’

  He fell to the floor and I kept pouring on the tape-head cleaner. I thought he was joking, but he was actually ablaze. The flames consumed his trousers and they melted his socks. He ended up with third-degree burns to his legs.

  Birch rushed him to the hospital. And then Bill’s mother phoned me up: ‘You barmy bastard . . .’

  What she called me over the phone practically singed my ear. Finally she said: ‘Bill might have to have his leg off!’

  Bloody hell, I felt so bad I didn’t know what to do. But he was okay, although he actually did get burn marks down his legs. Not too long ago I said to him: ‘You still got those scars on you, Bill?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve still got them, yeah.’

  I might have killed him, which is a little over the top for an innocent party bit. So I’ve not set fire to Bill since then.

  49

  Vinny says Aloha

  Bill was drinking in total excess, even on the gigs, which he never used to do. You didn’t notice it too much while he was playing. He was just getting more aggressive and angry, and physically he was getting in a bad way as well. He was constantly having little problems, panic attacks and stuff. It got to all of us, but we didn’t have to say anything to him, because one day he just disappeared. It was 21 August, 1980. We were due to do a gig in Denver, but he got absolutely legless, got in his bus with his brother Jim driving, and just cleared off. We didn’t even know he’d gone until somebody told us: ‘Bill has left.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Bill has left!’

  ‘No!’

  He never said goodbye, nothing, he was just gone. I had talked to Bill a lot, but it shocked me when he left. That really caught me by surprise. And we were in shit street. We had to cancel the gig. Ronnie was concerned because he really liked Bill: ‘We’ve got to get him back!’

  When we finally reached Bill, we heard that he didn’t want to do it any more. When we recorded the album he liked it, but the touring side really got to him. We had to go out and prove ourselves again; he couldn’t handle that and he didn’t want to know any more.

  Finished!

  So we had to find somebody to replace him. For me that was awful because I hadn’t worked with another drummer since well before Black Sabbath had even started. I relied on Bill a lot. We had played together for a hundred years!

  We had a huge open-air festival in Hawaii coming up which we were headlining, so we were panicking: ‘Christ, what are we going to do?’

  We had got some tapes from different drummers, and one of them was Vinny Appice’s. Ronnie had heard about Vinny, so he
said: ‘Let’s get in touch with him.’

  We literally had a day and a half to try Vinny out and agree whether he was going to be the one or not. If he was good, he was going to play in Hawaii with us, if not, we had to cancel the gig. And he was good.

  He came with this tiny little kit and he was playing away, but I was used to Bill with his huge kit. I thought, oh, he’s only using that right now for the rehearsal. We went to Hawaii and I walked on stage where we had this big drum riser for Bill to use, and on it was this same tiny little kit. It was like a kid’s set. I thought, bloody hell, you are never going to be able to hear him! I really went to bits backstage, pacing up and down, and Ronnie said: ‘It’ll be all right.’

  I said: ‘No! I’ve never played with another drummer for all these years!’

  I was absolutely terrified. We went on stage and it just looked funny, with a big wall of amps, a big drum riser, and then this puny little kit. But, blimey, he played them great!

  Vinny wasn’t 100 per cent sure of all the songs, so he had written out all these notes. It started raining and all the writing got smudged, so he couldn’t read it any more. He didn’t know where we were. But he did really good.

  And, yes, we heard him as well.

  That gig was real panic stations to me. Some idiot fired a real mortar bomb. We heard this ‘shhhhhhhhhh, boom!’ It exploded backstage. Luckily it was a real big area. None of us got hurt and I don’t think anybody else did either, but it created a big bloody hole. I still can’t believe somebody would do that. And where did they get one of them from? Pretty serious stuff!

  It might’ve been Ozzy actually.

  Missed!

  There’s quite a difference between the way Vinny and Bill play drums. Vinny came in with all these fast rolls, which Bill didn’t play at all. Bill was from the John Bonham and Cozy Powell camp. He was good, but he had his own style, he created his unique thing. Very unorthodox. Bill wouldn’t play a straightforward beat, he always put some little bits in, like a percussionist. He would hear these symphonies in his head and try to play like he had eight hands. We’d say: ‘Bill, you know, you’ve only got two arms.’

  But that was Bill. He’d listen to the songs and see all this dramatic stuff in them, timpanis and all that, so he’d think more percussion-wise. Vinny is just an out and out drummer, he’ll play the beat forever. He’ll also do these little odd rolls, but Vinny is a really precise drummer, whereas with Bill it was touch and go. Bill would do things and sometimes they would come off and sometimes they wouldn’t.

  Vinny’s drumming brought something else to the music. It made it tighter, it made it more precise, probably even more mainstream. Where Bill did something like ‘boom-tsj-pa-pa-pa’, Vinny would simply go ‘boom-tsj-boom-tsj-boom-tsj’. Less playful, but more precise. And probably with less character, because Bill had developed his own style and it was – Bill. You either like it or you don’t. And I like it.

  In playing with Vinny I had to retrain my mind as well. I thought, Christ, he’s really good, but he cannot be too precise on the old songs, he’s got to be a bit laid back. Black Sabbath was never exact on the timing. With Bill we would start off in one tempo and end up in another; it was a natural feel and Bill had that feel. I had to go through everything with Vinny, as I later have with every drummer, trying to coax him into playing the old songs as they were. But first things first. I said to him: ‘You’ve got to get a bigger kit if you’re going to be with this band!’

  He never forgot that. He has this huge kit now, with drums all over the place. I said to him: ‘Fucking hell, Vinny, have you got enough drums there?’

  And he said: ‘Well, you started it!’

  There was no answer to that!

  50

  Getting Black and Blue

  We started our Heaven and Hell tour in Germany in April 1980. We would ping-pong between Germany and the UK for a while, before making our way to the States in July. Ronnie flashed his Devil sign all over the place, the one with the outstretched first and fourth fingers, while holding the second and third down with the thumb. He gets credited for inventing it, but I’ve got a picture of Geezer from many years before doing just that. But Ronnie brought it more to light and, in so doing, made it his own.

  Our production featured a cross. We had this thing built that worked electronically. It flashed lights all around it and they changed in different sequences, and when we played ‘Heaven And Hell’ the cross was supposed to burst into flames. It hardly ever worked. One classic moment came when we were playing Madison Square Garden. Ronnie did this big build-up, saying to the audience: ‘I want you all to concentrate on the cross!’

  He was going on and on about it.

  ‘Keep concentrating!’

  He got to the crescendo and it was: ‘One, two, three!’ and the cross went: ‘Pfffft.’

  Like a bloody little sparkler. And Ronnie went: ‘Well, I guess you’re not concentrating enough!’

  It looked good when it burst into flames, but that night was one of those Spinal Tap moments. And that happened more often than not.

  By this time we had Sandy Pearlman managing us. He’d been after us from the time we parted ways with Don Arden. We had nowhere else to go. Sandy looked like a hiker. He had a cap on his head and a bag on his back. I’ve never seen him dressed up. He was all right at first, but he soon turned out to be a bloody joke.

  In the States he put us on tour together with Blue Öyster Cult. Because he had managed them for a long time, he favoured them over us. That’s why we did the Black and Blue tour, where they would close one night and we would close the other. We hadn’t been on a co-headliner before, because we’d always had bands supporting us. It seemed strange with them headlining, also because they weren’t that big. I suppose Sandy wanted to make them big by putting them in that position.

  It was a disaster because they used this big bloody fibreglass Godzilla thing on stage and it took them forever to break it down. On the nights we followed them, we were backstage an hour and a half before we could go on. The kids would get bored waiting, and blame us for it. And then we’d go into overtime with the unions. It was a bit unfair.

  Sandy didn’t manage us for very long. We fired him. He ended up getting paid off, so he walked away with a lump of cash. We just carried on with Mark Forster again.We were doing big shows and it was difficult for Ronnie to go out and stand in front of people who had seen Ozzy in that spot for ten years. Some of the kids hated it and they’d shout: ‘Ozzy, Ozzy!’

  But eventually Ronnie won them over.

  While we were touring Heaven and Hell, NEMS released Live at Last, an album of stuff we had recorded back in 1975. It was a Patrick Meehan thing. We were very upset about it, but it was at No. 5 in the charts by the time we got an injunction to stop it. The sound was awful on it and it interfered with what we were doing with Ronnie. The injunction collapsed on it and things were sorted out later. In 2002 it was released again, this time under the name Past Lives.

  On 25 September 1980, while we were touring America, John Bonham died. That hit me really hard, but I don’t think anybody who knew John could see him going any other way. He loved to do everything to excess. Him and Keith Moon were much the same. A bit loony, good friends as well, and they did burn the candle at both ends as much as they could. They got a bit mad; you never knew what they’d do next. I always thought, they can’t keep on doing it all the time, they’ve got to hit a wall somewhere, there is a downside to it. But when I heard, it made me think about the vulnerability of everybody. Christ, who’s next? That could happen to us! It knocked everybody for a loop, it was really depressing. John had such a lot going for him.

  About two weeks later, in the Mecca Arena in Milwaukee, somebody in the audience threw this big metal cross at Geezer and it bounced off his guitar and hit him in the face. They probably thought, oh, he’ll like this, a present, I’ll throw it on stage for him. People who do stuff like that are idiots. If it had hit him in the head it could’ve
blinded or even killed him.

  We walked off stage and because most of the audience had no idea about what had happened a riot broke out. They were fighting, breaking chairs up, throwing pieces about, it was mayhem. But what can you do? We could hardly walk back on, going: ‘Hello, we’re back again, everybody quieten down.’

  In November we started our first Japanese tour with dates in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka. I got food poisoning big time. It must have been the sushi. I was on stage, ran around in circles and just passed out, bang! They got me to hospital and they injected this stuff into me. It was the biggest syringe I’ve ever seen. God knows what it was, but it really worked. I should have got a load of that, really: ‘Can I have some to go?’

  While I got floored by sushi, Geezer managed to do it to himself. He freaked out one night and he broke the end of his finger. It must have been the sake. Him and Ronnie used to go to the bar, have too much to drink and get into a squabble among themselves. Of course the next day they would both regret it. Geezer would often get carried away, so breaking his finger probably happened that way. I wasn’t there when it happened. I just heard later that the next couple of gigs were cancelled because of that. Geezer had a splint on it for a while. For once I wasn’t the only one dealing with damaged fingers . . .

  51

  Melinda

  I met Melinda in a club in Dallas after we played there in the summer of 1980. She was an American who did a little bit of modelling. I started seeing her, we went together for quite a while and she came on the road with us. The band must have thought, what is he doing now? Because she came along to Australia, Japan, New Zealand, just everywhere.

  One day when we were in LA, we decided to get married at our hotel, the Sunset Marquis. I was doing Quaaludes and all sorts of bloody stuff, so I was on another planet really. I called up a vicar and said: ‘Can you come over and marry us?’

  He did and it was simple: sign these forms and off you go. Then the vicar said: ‘Who’s the witness?’