Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  I said: ‘I haven’t got a witness.’

  ‘Well, you need a witness.’

  There happened to be a big teddy bear in the room and I said: ‘There’s the witness right there.’

  He went: ‘All right.’

  And that was it. He never said: ‘You can’t do that.’

  It actually stood up in court. When it came to the divorce, I said: ‘We didn’t really have a witness.’

  They said: ‘Well, who was the witness then?’

  ‘I had a teddy bear as a witness.’

  That went down well. But it didn’t seem to make a difference.

  So that was it. We got married at the Sunset Marquis.

  After all the tours with Dio we moved back to England. That’s where Melinda gave birth to our beautiful child. Toni was born in 1983. We had some happy times, but then I found out Melinda had problems. She would go to shops and come back with all these dresses with the labels still on them. She wasn’t paying for them and I still don’t know why. It wasn’t a lack of money, I was really embarrassed because I knew people in the shops. Perhaps she thought I would pick up all the bills. Of course it put a strain on the marriage: we had a lot of rows. She would fly off the handle and get really nasty. In the end she went back to Dallas with Toni. When we were splitting up my accountant phoned me from London and said: ‘What the fuck is going on? I’ve got $100,000 worth of bills on your American Express Card, and I’ve got this other bill on your MasterCard. How much money could you be spending in a month?’

  ‘What are you talking about? I don’t spend that sort of money!’

  ‘Well, somebody does!’

  It turned out that Melinda did this deal with the limousine company, where she had a twenty-four-hour bodyguard and a twenty-four-hour limo. She must have thought I was going to murder her or something. I don’t know how she did it, because she wasn’t a co-signatory on my card, but I got these enormous bills and I had a huge problem: I had to pay up. And that was the end of that.

  The English courts didn’t want to know either, because Melinda refused to come over from America. They said: ‘Maybe if you can get her back here . . .’

  It took me a long time to get a divorce. Her side just made it as difficult as possible, trying to get more money. I had lawyers coming over from America and going through all my accounts. Strange as it may seem, it was my responsibility to put all these people up when they came over, and they wanted to stay at, like, the fucking Ritz in London. The bills these people ran up were unbelievable. And it was just dragging on and on, because they were convinced I was hiding a lot of money. They were thinking, he’s got billions tucked away. As they do. It was a bloody nightmare. It was a terrible relationship for our daughter, Toni, as well.

  Melinda had her mum in Dallas looking after her much of the time.

  A really weird situation. I never actually met Melinda’s mother, but she was apparently a nice woman and she didn’t agree with any of what was going on.

  I wasn’t allowed to see my daughter, because for some reason I was the asshole in this whole thing. After a long while they finally said it was okay for me to see her, but only in Dallas or Los Angeles. I couldn’t take her anywhere. That door was closed shut.

  Years later I got a phone call from the children’s protection thing in America, saying that Toni had been removed from home. The neighbours had complained and the people from child welfare had gone around there and found that she was basically living in a slum. I thought, what am I going to do? I want to get her here! But I wasn’t allowed to take Toni out. I had to go through a court case over there again to get her.

  It broke my heart, but it would be years before Toni was allowed to come home.

  52

  Friends forever

  In September 1980, Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz album was released on Don Arden’s Jet Records label. After he left, we hoped that everything was going to be okay, but what do you do? Before we came to the end we tried to help Ozzy as much as we could to get him on the road, to pull himself together and do something. But it was such an uphill battle.

  His being away from the band probably helped him, because he could finally do everything he wanted and get it all out of his system. For him it was either just fizzle out or get on with it, so it was good that he put a band together. And he had Sharon there; she was really taking care of him.

  I didn’t listen to Blizzard of Ozz at the time, because we were so wrapped up with what we were doing ourselves. Not that I wasn’t interested; I certainly followed how he was doing on the tours and stuff, as we all did. I suppose there was a bit of a competition going on between us as well, but good luck to him. I was pleased to see that he’d got himself together and was doing the things that he wanted to do. He was probably very happy, because with us everything was built around the band, whereas now everything was built around him and he and Sharon had total control.

  Ozzy did come around once to see me when I was in LA at the Le Parc hotel with my wife, Melinda, working on songs for Mob Rules. He had been going through a lot of stuff and shaved his head again at that time. At two thirty or three o’clock in the morning there was a knock on the door. There he was, bald, and wearing a long coat.

  ‘Can I talk to you?’

  I let him in and he talked and talked, going through all these different phases of his life. It was just too overpowering for me. I hadn’t seen him for ages and suddenly here he was, opening up to me. He talked about everything, his last wife and Sharon and this and that and the other and whatever else. And then he went. It was really peculiar. He probably just needed a friend, somebody to talk to. But it was great that he came around.

  Throughout the years we remained friends, despite of a lot of bullshit that went on. As soon as it got to the business again, it was a problem. But no matter what, Ozzy and me, we are still friends. And we always will be.

  53

  The Mob Rules

  In December 1980 we went to Tittenhurst Park in Ascot to record a song for the movie Heavy Metal. It was John Lennon’s old house. Ringo Starr had taken it over and rented it out to people like us, who could go there to write, rehearse and record. We got there right after Lennon was murdered, so it felt really, really strange. We were there for a week and had lots of time to check the place out. We looked around in the cupboards: ‘Oh, what’s in there? Ah, more gold discs!’

  In the bedroom we saw ‘John’ written on one light switch and ‘Yoko’ on the other by each side of the bed. That was quite weird; you could just imagine them going: ‘Which one is mine now?’

  The room we rehearsed in was the white room that you always see in those old films about John and Yoko. They had a little studio in the back part of the house and we just used their gear. We set Vinny up in the hallway and I had my amp in the studio. We used Lennon’s engineer as well, so we heard all these stories. It was quite a nice few days. It had a great atmosphere and we got some good vibes from there.

  Heavy Metal was an animated film. They asked us to write a song for its soundtrack, but the movie wasn’t finished yet so they just sent us some black and white sketches of it and the storyboard. It was difficult to write to that, as you don’t have an idea of the timing of the scene. They just told us the length of the music they needed for this bit, and I suppose they animated more around what we came up with. We did an intro to go with this scene of these people before they turn into monsters. We made these effects, bubbling sounds and bass sounds and God knows what else, and then we went into the track ‘The Mob Rules’. We recorded it right there and sent it off to the movie people, who put it on the soundtrack as it was. We wanted to use it for our own new album as well, but our producer Martin Birch said: ‘Oh no, it won’t match up sound-wise’, so we ended up re-recording it. As a matter of fact, we re-recorded it twice, because first we had another great scheme of ours go wrong.

  Martin said: ‘You know how much it costs to do an album? Why don’t you buy your own studio? Because then we
could be in there for two months or three months or whatever, without worrying about the cost of it all!’

  It was a great idea. We sent Martin over to LA to have a look at a studio he’d found, to see what it was like. He said: ‘It’s good. It just needs a new desk.’

  We bought it and a bloody quarter of a million dollar sound desk, put that in, put the tape machines in and off we went to go and record in it.

  It was crap.

  We just couldn’t get a guitar sound. We tried it in the studio. We tried it in the hallway. We tried it everywhere but it just wasn’t happening. We’d bought a studio and it wasn’t working! We re-recorded a new version of ‘The Mob Rules’ but abandoned it. We finally just walked out and went to the Record Plant, where we had to pay again, so it cost us twice as much. Nobody could believe it: ‘I hear you bought a studio. So why are you in the Record Plant?’

  ‘Eh . . . well . . .’

  We ended up selling the desk. We sent this crew to pick it up and somebody thought they were burgling the place and called the cops on them. While they were doing their job a squad team was outside, ready to arrest them. But it was all explained and all sorted out. And then we sold the studio. Can Am it was called. It’s actually a thriving studio now. I don’t know what they’ve done to it, but now it’s working somehow.

  We wrote the rest of the songs for the Mob Rules album when we were in LA. We got a rehearsal room in the Valley somewhere, where we tried stuff and got ideas that we’d tape and take back to the house. I rented a place in Toluca Lake. After the rehearsals with the band, me and Geoff used to come back there, do a little bit of coke and work on some of the ideas. We’d put new bits to it, change stuff, add to it, try a few other ideas, and then the next day all of us got back together in the rehearsal room and tried it again.

  Geoff wasn’t my only visitor in Toluca Lake. Glenn Hughes came over one night with this guitar player, Pat Thrall. Of course I had some coke. Glenn went: ‘Erm . . . You don’t have a bit of . . . would you?’

  I’d say: ‘Yeah, I just have a little.’

  I went into the bedroom, took a bit out of my stash, came back out again and said:

  ‘I’ve got this.’

  ‘Oh, good!’

  And it was gone in no time at all.

  Glenn went: ‘You haven’t got any more, have you, have you?’

  Pat Thrall was absolutely shocked, because he had never seen Glenn in that state. They stayed until four or five o’clock in the morning, so I said: ‘Glenn, I’ve got to go to bed, I’ve got to be in a studio in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, just one more, just one more!’

  I said to Pat: ‘You’ve got to get him home.’

  He said: ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know how to handle him. What do I do?’

  ‘Just get him in the car and get him home!’

  I hated doing it to Glenn, but I finally had to throw him out of the house: ‘Out!’

  They would have been there to the death if I hadn’t done that. They did this project together: Hughes/Thrall. It didn’t last. I wonder why.

  That house was a horrible place anyway. It was hot in Toluca Lake and when I moved in there was no air conditioning. I had already wondered why I got it at such a good price. It was like a sauna in there. The neighbours probably thought I was weird, because I put all this tinfoil up against the bedroom windows, trying to reflect the heat. It was dreadful. I couldn’t wait to get out.

  I then moved into a hotel on Sunset Boulevard for a while. Ronnie came over and we put some ideas down in the hotel room. We found it was better to sometimes sit together swapping ideas, instead of working with everybody else around, because then they’re all waiting for you to come up with something.

  Heaven and Hell had done extremely well and the tour was a great success. The band members were getting along fine, but it took some effort on everybody’s part to keep it that way, because the whole thing felt like it could blow up any minute. After the record became such a great success, Warner Brothers extended the contract at the same time, offering Ronnie a solo deal. That felt a bit odd to us, because we were a band and we didn’t want to separate anybody. I’m not saying he shouldn’t have a solo deal, but it just seemed like the wrong thing to do at the time. We talked about it and Ronnie was fine. And we just carried on.

  By then Ronnie did come over a little more . . . I suppose, bossy. The way he conducted himself, the way he talked, it might have given that impression to the outside world, but he usually didn’t mean anything by it. Ronnie was just very outspoken. On the other hand Geezer and myself hated to be confronted with stuff. We have always been that way, trying not to offend each other, or anybody else. That backfired in the long run, because we wouldn’t say what we felt straight away. Instead we talked about it at first, and then it looked like we talked behind somebody’s back, which in turn caused all sorts of problems. Of course we wouldn’t respond to those immediately either, because we’d talk about it first, which in turn would cause some more problems, that we, of course, wouldn’t . . . Well, you know what I mean. It would ultimately lead to something that couldn’t be solved any more, no matter how much everybody did or didn’t talk about it.

  Be that as it may, the recording of Mob Rules went smoothly. ‘Turn Up The Night’ was a fast song and a good way to start the album. Working with Ronnie, somehow the faster ones came easier than before. Another stand-out track was ‘The Sign Of The Southern Cross’. We wanted a real power track on the album, just like ‘Heaven And Hell’ was on the previous one, and that was it: another huge, long song.

  The album was released 4 November 1981. When we originally looked at the cover with a picture by Greg Hildebrandt we said: ‘Wow, we really like this.’

  The only thing we took out was the faces in the masks of the figures. There was a little controversy about some stains on the floor in the picture. According to some people it spelled out ‘Ozzy’. Somebody mentioned it to us and we went: ‘What?’

  It was total rubbish. I never noticed anything and still wouldn’t know where to find it.

  Although I seem to remember that most reviews of Mob Rules were positive, some critics wrote: ‘It’s just Heaven and Hell part two.’

  You can’t please everybody.

  ‘It’s just a continuation of what you have done before.’

  ‘Well, yeah, it’s the band!’

  ‘I know, but it sounds like a continuation from your previous album.’

  ‘Yeah, it is. It’s the next album!’

  Or if it’s not, then they’re going: ‘Oh, it doesn’t sound anything like the last album.’

  ‘No, it’s a different album!’

  What are you supposed to do?

  54

  The Mob tours

  The Mob Rules tour started in November 1981 in Canada, followed by the States. Then we went back home for four dates at the Hammersmith Odeon starting on New Year’s Eve. We used lots of pyro with fire and bombs, and we had this bloke working for us who dealt with all that stuff. Before the shows we rehearsed in London in a big room behind an Irish pub. At the time there were a lot of IRA bombings in the city. Our pyro guy decided to test a bomb in the rehearsal room. It exploded and everybody left the Irish pub in a panic. It was chaos, absolute chaos. One of our guys was in the pub and he said: ‘I couldn’t believe it, everybody just shot out. Left all the drinks and everything, whoosh, gone!’

  Those bombs were really loud. They must have thought, hell, somebody is trying to blow us up! Mad, it was.

  My good friend Brian May came down to see me while we were rehearsing. I said to him: ‘Bring your guitar down and we’ll have a little bash.’

  He did and when we finished our set me and Brian just carried on playing. We were jamming away and meanwhile the crew gradually removed all the gear. We turned around and there was just one of my speaker cabinets and his amp, and we went: ‘Fucking hell, everything has gone!’

  We were totally oblivious to it, because we were enjoying ou
rselves so much. The pyro guy could’ve set one of his bombs off and Brian and me wouldn’t have noticed!

  We played the Hammersmith and the same pyro guy put his bombs underneath the stage. He tested one of them, it went bang and it blew a two-foot-wide hole in the floor on my side. If I’d been there, I would have been blown up. Christ, it was dangerous. The guy was becoming a liability, so in the end we told him: ‘You’re fired!’

  No pun intended.

  A couple of months later we were doing a show in Madison Square Garden. The guy who worked for me doing all my amps had built these big thick pipes. He maintained that he could put the pyro in these and it would give a real thud. He showed us and it really did. He then put them under the stage at Madison Square Garden and he set them off during ‘War Pigs’. On the first note: ‘Daa . . .’ it was: ‘Bang!’

  The stage leaped and because of the concussion all the tubes went out on my amps and on Geezer’s stack as well. It was just disastrous. We had only done the first note and the lot had gone. We were all right, but we had to stop.

  Boom! That was it, the end, thank you and good night!

  After a couple of weeks of touring the UK following the Hammersmith shows, we were supposed to go back to America in February.

  Then Dad died.

  He hadn’t been well for some time. He had emphysema, because he’d been a heavy smoker all his life. I was back at home in England. One night I got a call from my mother. Dad had fallen out of bed. I got on the phone to his doctor and I screamed at him, telling him to get over there. I shot over there myself with Melinda and found Dad on the floor, unconscious and breathing heavily. And then he just gave up and died.

  I witnessed him die. It was horrible.

  It was a difficult time. We postponed the start of the American tour, but soon I was playing away again, night after night, and travelling all over the place. Working hard . . . just like Dad had done all his life.