by Tony Iommi
It was a shame, really, because I messed up the relationship by being constantly out of it. She was a nice girl and we got on well. It just started coming apart, certainly when the Eric thing happened. We were together for about two years. Then we went our separate ways. Lita was later managed by Sharon Arden. She phoned me and said: ‘I’m looking for a manager. What about Sharon?’
I said: ‘I don’t know. It’s up to you.’
Sharon got Lita to do a song with Ozzy that went to No. 1, so she did all right for her. For a while. Until she dropped her.
61
Together again, for a day
I was in the middle of doing my album when they asked us to perform at a huge show. All these people were doing it and it was for a very good cause. I said: ‘Sounds good. Let’s do it.’
So, in July 1985, the original Black Sabbath line-up got back together for a one-off gig at Live Aid in Philadelphia. We probably thought that it might be the first step towards getting back together again. We got on well when we saw each other there and I think we all hoped it would happen, but the powers that be have to allow you to do it. It has to be in aid of charity, otherwise management would think somebody was making money out of it and it wouldn’t happen. And there was no greater charity cause than Live Aid.
The organisation offered us a time slot in a rehearsal facility. We got to the space and were supposed to rehearse three songs. Instead of doing that we ended up talking about old times. We were there chatting away, then we played for a bit and then stopped when somebody would say: ‘Oh, remember so-and-so?’
Not much of a rehearsal, really.
This girl came in and stood at the back, watching. I mentioned this to somebody: ‘Can you tell her this is a closed session?’
I didn’t know who it was. She had dyed her hair dark and looked nothing like Madonna, but it was Madonna and she wasn’t very happy about being tossed out.
We went back to the bar afterwards, had a great time together and got solidly sloshed. The next day we were on at something like ten o’clock in the morning. I had a dreadful hangover so I put my dark glasses on, and then we played ‘Children Of The Grave’, ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Paranoid’ in the bright sunlight. It was a great thing to do and we were certainly aware of the importance of the occasion, but it was over very quickly.
Meanwhile, Don had issued Ozzy with a writ, because he thought we were going to get together again and that Sharon was going to manage us. Don wanted to stop anything happening, because he made his point that he managed me and that there was no way we were going to do anything without him. Don and Sharon – they were both as paranoid as each other. Don sent a writ to Ozzy; the guy who presented it right there at Live Aid looked like a fan, so Ozzy thought he wanted his autograph and signed it. I didn’t actually see the writ, as Sharon whipped that away right quick.
It put a little bit of a dampener on the occasion.
I don’t know whether Live Aid made a difference. You do the thing, they raise the money and what happens then? They buy the food or whatever they need, but you’re never 100 per cent sure who gets what. But I think it was a good thing to do anyway.
We got to Philly, had a drunken night, got hung over, did the gig and disappeared. The subject of getting back together didn’t even come up. I got on the plane back home and didn’t see them again for years.
62
Twinkle twinkle Seventh Star
I was now the only guy left in Black Sabbath. Without a band, I got the idea of doing a solo album with all different singers. I made a list of people I wanted, like Robert Plant, Rob Halford, David Coverdale and Glenn Hughes, but it opened a huge can of worms trying to get somebody to sing. I ran into all sorts of contractual stuff, the record companies didn’t let them, so it was: ‘Oh no, we are doing an album, I can’t sing on yours.’
Eventually the idea was dropped. We then tried this guy called Jeff Fenholt. He was another one who had played the lead in Jesus Christ Superstar, in the Broadway version of that musical. So we had had Ian Gillan, who was the original Jesus Christ Superstar, and here we had the Broadway Jesus wanting to join Black Sabbath. We tried Jeff out and he had a good voice. I cut a couple of demos with him in Los Angeles. One of the tracks was ‘Star Of India’, which later turned into ‘Seventh Star’. Another one was ‘Eye Of The Storm’, which ended up on the album as ‘Turn To Stone’. And we had a track that eventually turned into ‘Danger Zone’. Of course these demos got out and found their way on to a bootleg album. Again. They called it Eighth Star or something like that.
Jeff seemed a nice enough guy. It might have worked with him, even though I wasn’t 100 per cent convinced that he’d be able to do our older stuff. But then Jeff Glixman came in to produce the album and he didn’t think Fenholt was working out, recording-wise. And that was that.
A little later Jeff Fenholt suddenly became this big TV evangelist. I couldn’t believe it, because when we met him he was saying things like: ‘Oh yeah, I fucked that chick.’
The New York Times did a thing about him being with Black Sabbath and they wrote that he saw the light, rejected evil and all this bollocks. We were right back in the satanism thing because Fenholt was going on about it. I was getting phone calls to do Larry King Live about him. I thought, I’m not getting involved in that! You try and talk religion on TV in America and you have no chance. Especially him being an evangelist now; they’re all going to side with him and I won’t have a leg to stand on!
Around the time we did some demos I thought Geezer was going to return. His wife and manager, Gloria, said he wanted to come back as well. But the next thing I knew, he had joined Ozzy.
‘Bloody hell, what happened!?’
Glenn Hughes was, as I’ve said, one of the singers on my wish list. He came in and sang, and I thought, bloody hell, he’s good! He was so impressive that I thought it would be great to use Glenn on all the songs of what was to become the Seventh Star album. But it was difficult to work with him. Fucking hell, he did ten times more coke than me!
It just turned into a nightmare. He’d go: ‘I’ve got this idea, I’ve got this idea!’
He’d snort a big line and say, all hyper: ‘Listen to this, listen to this!’
‘Yeah, okay. Good.’
‘Yeah, but I’ve got this other one, listen to this!’
He drove you up the wall. Even he himself now says: ‘I don’t know how you put up with it.’
What made it even worse was that he had all these hangers-on coming down to the studio as well. I tried to get rid of them, because I could see that they were just leeches. I guess he could afford this big entourage at the time, as he’d just come off the Deep Purple thing, but it didn’t last. He lost a lot of money and ended up selling all his stuff.
When we were doing Seventh Star, we recorded the album with Glenn Hughes and Eric Singer, and we had Dave Spitz on bass, a good player we’d found through Jeff Glixman. It was a first for me to play with musicians that young. I was thirty-seven at the time, and Dave and Eric were about ten years younger than me. It felt funny because, when I talked about old times, they didn’t know what I was on about. They would ask me stuff and I’d start talking away and then I’d find out, hang on, they haven’t got a clue, I can’t go back that far because they can’t relate to that.
‘Remember so-and-so?’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘Oh . . . you forgot.’
And then I’d realise, bloody hell, they weren’t even born then!
We started recording in LA, but we finalised the album in Atlanta, Georgia, because Jeff Glixman could get a good deal on a studio there. The basic tracks had been done already, so only me and Glenn went down there. I had taken this big stereo to Atlanta with me. Glenn had nothing to play his stuff on, so I lent it to him. I had just bought it and he swapped it for some coke. I said to Glenn: ‘What happened to my stereo?’
‘I lent it to somebody.’
‘Oh . . .’
Then I saw th
is coke dealer with my stereo and put two and two together. Glenn was uncontrollable, but he sang like a dream and absolutely effortlessly. He’d sit in the studio, slouching, with a mic, and . . . sing! Just incredible, a God-given voice.
We didn’t take a long time recording the album: some tracks were actually done in the first or second take. We also tried to finish quickly because I paid for it all. The record company came up with a good advance later, but I fronted everything myself.
We finished Seventh Star in August 1985. Gordon Copley’s original bass playing is on ‘No Stranger To Love’. We kept that from the very first sessions. It just seemed to go well with that track. I thought it was a great song, but what I didn’t like was doing the video for it. The first day they took some footage of me and Glenn playing away. The next day I had to be there at something like 5.30 a.m. to do this shoot with the girl from Star Trek, Denise Crosby, Bing’s granddaughter. I’m not very good at videos anyway, but I had to do this love scene with her, which was very embarrassing. They put this black eyeliner on me and everything else. It wasn’t what we were all about at all, and I hated it. To make matters even worse, they had me walk into Los Angeles canals at seven o’clock in the morning, in the freezing cold with mist rising. I had just bought these new boots so they were well and truly knackered after that.
Seventh Star was released in January 1986. It was supposed to be a solo album. I certainly didn’t want to release it as a Black Sabbath album, because I hadn’t written it as a Black Sabbath album. I wanted the freedom for it to sound as it did and tour without calling the band Black Sabbath, also because Glenn was uncomfortable about that. But when the question of the name came up, Don said to me: ‘The record company says that you owe them a Black Sabbath album, so they want this one.’
‘Ah . . .’
In the end it was billed as ‘Black Sabbath featuring Tony Iommi’. Neither I nor Glenn was pleased with it, because we felt we weren’t doing the record justice presenting it this way. And to go out and play ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Iron Man’ – it just wasn’t right.
Seventh Star reached No. 27 in May 1986 and it dropped off the charts after five weeks. Not really a big seller. I don’t think I even noticed it, because of all the aggro we had within the band.
We had a tour coming up, but somebody was about to choke on it.
63
Glenn falls, but there is a Ray of hope
The Seventh Star tour kicked off in Cleveland, Ohio, in March 1986. We had a big stage set with lasers and everything. Don Arden’s idea again, but I had to pay for it all. Of course. To say the tour got off to a bad start is an understatement, because it went disastrous with Glenn. I had hired this bodyguard called Doug Goldstein, who later managed Guns N’ Roses, to watch him and to keep all the hangers-on away from him. But no sooner did the tour start than Glenn disappeared back to Atlanta. Doug brought him back just in time for the show. We were at the side of the stage and he went: ‘I can’t go on, I can’t go on.’
So I literally threw him on: ‘Get out there!’
I hated being like that but I had to do it.
Doug Goldstein ended up doing all sorts of things to pin Glenn down. While staying in rooms with adjoining doors, he actually attached a string to his toe and tied it to Glenn’s hotel room door, so as soon as Glenn moved Doug would know about it. It was a bloody nightmare. But Glenn was cunning; he managed to get drug dealers in somehow.
I wasn’t there when it all happened. I just know that our stage manager, John Downing, ended up thumping Glenn on the day before the first show. John was tough, very forceful, and he could handle himself. He was good at what he did. He had worked for Jimi Hendrix and The Move in the past. John said that he couldn’t control Glenn and that he took a swing at him, so he clocked him. That was John Downing’s side of it, but he is dead now so we can’t ask him about it any more. He drowned. While he was on tour in Europe, John had had a row with some bootleggers and when he was coming back to England on the ferry, they were on the same boat. The story goes that those bootleggers lobbed him overboard and his body was washed up a couple of days later.
John broke Glenn’s nose. Don Arden apparently said to John: ‘He had to go on stage, why didn’t you thump him in the back of the head?’
Typical!
Glenn claimed that the blow caused a blood clot in his throat. Sure: of course it wasn’t the coke. It obviously affected his voice. It does sometimes, it dries your throat up. Glenn is such a great singer but he was just unable to perform. On top of that, he was getting extremely paranoid. I spoke to Don about it, and I said: ‘We are going to have to pull the shows.’
‘We can’t pull the shows. If we do, they’ll sue us!’
‘Oh . . . fucking hell!’
I simply couldn’t afford to run that risk, so what we had to do was locate another singer and bring him in a couple of days before we actually fired Glenn. This way we’d be able to get him to see the show and see how it all worked, before taking over. We’d go down to the gig in the afternoon to rehearse with him, to get him into the role of it. Then, when it all happened with Glenn, the new singer would be able to go on stage to continue with the rest of the shows.
Dave Spitz knew this young singer called Ray Gillen from a band in New York. He was a good-looking guy with a great voice. The girls loved him, and when he was with us there were suddenly lots of women coming to the shows. We brought Ray in during the afternoon of our third show. We ran through the songs and Glenn was wondering what was going on: ‘Who is that guy I keep seeing?’
It was really awkward, but it was the only thing left for us to do. It was either that or cancel shows. We had to go on with Glenn and then slot Ray in straight away. It was also difficult for me, because Glenn had always been a mate and I felt really underhand doing it. We’ve talked about it since and Glenn understands. We gave him all these chances and he just buggered them up.
That third gig went great from our side, but Glenn was so bad that night that I had a row with him after the show. I got angry because he was letting everybody down, including himself. He could hardly sing at all any more and Geoff had to take over on some of the vocals. Of course he sounded nothing like Glenn, but he just tried to finish the songs.
A lot of people underestimate how tough you have to be when you’re leading a band. You always become the arsehole. People don’t understand, they’re not there and they don’t see all the things that are happening, why you end up kicking somebody out. But there’s a reason why they’re not there any more. Either they leave of their own accord, or they are not pulling their weight and you get rid of them, because the band has to carry on.
The gig in Worcester, Massachusetts, on 26 March was Glenn’s last. When he discovered he was out, he banged on my door, screaming: ‘I know about this fucking singer!’
I thought, I’m not going to answer it now. He was raging!
Fate would have it that our next gig in upstate New York was cancelled thanks to another Christian protest, one of the many times that happened to us. And the irony of it was that the cancelled gig was in a town with the fitting name of Glens Falls. Luckily for both of us, ten years later and the drugs consigned to history, we’d hook up again for the DEP studios sessions.
Three days after Worcester, Ray Gillen did his first show with us. He was thrown in at the deep end, but he did really good. Finally we had somebody again who really wanted to do it and had the right attitude. Even so, ticket sales weren’t very good. With Glenn we did big gigs and we did good business. Now we were touring with an unknown guy, so the interest went off. It took all that time to build it up, and then it all came crashing down right quick. It was appalling. We had to pull the tour in the end, because we were losing too much money.
But we soldiered on, starting our UK tour in May, doing twelve dates ending with two shows at the Hammersmith Odeon in London. The halls weren’t that big, but ticket sales were all right. Of course, there was a bit of confusion about who was in the
band as well: Ian Gillan, Ray Gillen, it was hard. Ray was really a good find, but nobody knew him. We had to break him in, people had to come and see him. It would take time to build it up.
The big question was, did we have that time?
64
The quest for The Eternal Idol
While we were trying to get back on our feet with Ray Gillen, I got into a real hole. Don Arden stopped being my manager. He got done for fraud or something to do with tax evasion. They arrested him and put him behind bars for a while. I was asked to help him out, just like the other band that he managed, Air Supply. His lawyer said to me: ‘Look, Don’s in a lot of trouble. We need to help him out otherwise he’s going to die in that jail, he’s never going to be able to stand it. We’ve got three hundred grand off Air Supply. Could you put some money in as well? You’ll get it back. We’ll draw up these papers and everything will be sorted.’
So I did. I put about fifty or sixty grand in. Never got it back, of course, and neither did Air Supply as far I know. And suddenly all the papers we had signed got lost. What a mess. In the end somebody had to go to jail and Don’s son, David, got incarcerated instead of his father. David basically covered for Don and did the time.
At that point it was really difficult to find somebody who could manage us. Then Wilf Pine approached me. He said: ‘Patrick Meehan can help you out.’
Same old thing. It’s ridiculous and I know it was a stupid thing to do, but I got back with Meehan. The people who surrounded me were trying to rip me off anyway, so my thought was, it might as well be someone I know and who might do something for me while he’s about it. The devil you know. It’s all a bit vague now because it was a period when I was back into doing a lot of coke again. And so was Meehan.