Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or . . .?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, what have you got?’

  ‘Ice cream.’

  ‘Ice cream!?’

  Really peculiar.

  ‘Well, we’ll have that then!’

  Everybody would be dying to get out to the gig so that they could get something from our catering. But we had so much caviar to the point where we went: ‘Oh no, not caviar again!’

  Europe had been great, Germany was sensational and Russia was good for us as well. The album was doing good and the gigs were sold out. To me it felt as if we had turned a corner.

  It felt real again.

  68

  TYR and tired

  For our next album, TYR, we went back to the Woodcray Studios in February 1990, with me and Cozy producing it again. On Headless Cross, Tony had just come into the band and he assumed, oh, Black Sabbath, it’s all about the Devil, so his lyrics were full of the Devil and Satan. It was too much in your face. We told him to be bit more subtle about it, so for TYR he did all these lyrics about Nordic gods and whatnot. It took me a while to get my head around that.

  I particularly liked ‘Anno Mundi’. It starts with a choir singing in Latin ‘Anno Mundi’ and ‘The Sabbath Stones’ are really powerful, slow, pounding tracks. I like those heavy riff-type things, and ‘The Sabbath Stones’ is particularly heavy.

  We did a video for ‘Feels Good To Me’, a ballad. It was a love story about some girl on a motorcycle and some boy who cheats on her and falls out with her and all that stuff. It also had footage of us playing on stage somewhere. It was a bit of a sloppy video, over the top for the sort of stuff we did.

  You could compare TYR to Headless Cross like you could compare Mob Rules to Heaven and Hell. If anything, TYR had a heavier feel than Headless Cross. There’s the Ozzy thing and the Ronnie thing, and then there’s this. It’s like these albums belong to a lost era. I am even struggling to remember stuff from that time, because in a way it’s wiped from my mind. Geezer came to the show at the Hammersmith Odeon and we got him up to do ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Children Of The Grave’. It was the first time we played together since Live Aid, five years earlier. The reaction from the fans was great. I think whenever somebody from the original line-up gets up, they love it. I know I certainly enjoyed it.

  After the Hammersmith gig we went to Europe. In the Jaap Edenhal in Amsterdam Cozy used CO2 gas that was like a pressure cooker blowing its top with steam shooting up from the stage. When that happened it blew a couple of tiles out of the ceiling, which then came down on his head. So Cozy literally brought the roof down!

  69

  It’s Heaven and Hell again

  In December 1990, after the final dates of the TYR tour, Geezer came back. He had enjoyed getting up on stage with us at the Hammersmith Odeon in September. Neil Murray said at the time that he thought it was really good when Geezer played. Neil was the sort of person who would go: ‘You should try it again with Geezer.’

  We did, Geezer came back and Neil was never vindictive about it.

  After Ronnie departed back in 1982, we didn’t speak for many years. It wasn’t like there was a lot of bad blood, but it was just a little uncomfortable. And he and Vinny were off doing the Dio stuff and they were doing quite well with it, so it was highly unlikely that we were going to team up again. But one day Geezer got on stage at one of Ronnie’s shows and played on ‘Neon Knights’ with them. They hadn’t seen each other for ages and really got on well. Geezer said to me: ‘It was really good. It felt great to play with Ronnie again.’

  When I saw Ronnie again we started talking about doing a line-up. Vinny wasn’t playing with him any more at the time and Ronnie went: ‘I’ve got a really good drummer, Simon Wright.’

  I went: ‘Well, we are thinking of using Cozy.’

  That was a bit awkward because Ronnie and Cozy had played in Rainbow together and didn’t really get on that well. Eventually we went with Cozy anyway and started writing for what was to become Dehumanizer. It was a difficult time because we had already rehearsed with Tony Martin, who now had to leave the band. It wasn’t really fair on him. We had made a few great albums with Tony, but everybody was excited about the idea of getting Ronnie back, certainly the people at the record company and our managements as well. In a way we got the old line-up back, except for the fact that we now had Cozy on drums.

  But it was just awful. There was real friction between our singer and our drummer. Ronnie wasn’t mad about having Cozy in the band and I remember Cozy going: ‘If that little cunt says anything to me, I’m going to smash him in the face!’

  Ronnie went back to LA and so we brought Tony Martin in and rehearsed a bit with him. Ronnie returned once again, replacing Tony; it was just one big mix-up between these rehearsals. Then Cozy’s horse had a heart attack and fell on him, breaking his hip and knocking him out of action for a long time. If it wasn’t such a horrible thing to say, you could call his accident a blessing in disguise. I loved Cozy and he was a great friend, but you have to have the right combination in a band. We already had enough friction going on with everything anyway, so we needed to have something stable. Getting Vinny back was the obvious answer to all our problems.

  Having Ronnie in the band was a good musical move, because the two of us worked well together. Even so, writing Dehumanizer took some doing, because we changed it around and analysed it too much. There was a lot of pressure because everybody was expecting so much from us. First of all we put Ronnie in a bit of a corner because we didn’t want him to sing anything about dungeons and dragons and rainbows. It was a difficult thing to say to him, because he’d sung about rainbows on every album he ever did and here, all of a sudden, he was faced with us going: ‘Can you not sing anything about rainbows, please?’

  He had to rethink the whole thing.

  ‘I’ve always used rainbows!’

  ‘Well, you know, we think it’s a bit much.’

  It got a little uncomfortable, and there were tense moments. We rented a house in Henley-in-Arden and Vinny and Ronnie lived there while the rest of us drove down to rehearsals from our homes. We jammed a lot together and came up with loads of stuff. Vinny taped everything. He’d give us a copy and then we’d live with it a bit. We analysed and pulled them apart a lot, but in the end we came up with some good songs.

  Ronnie knew this German producer called Reinhold Mack, and we decided to use him. He had done Queen and ELO and Brian May said to me: ‘Are you definitely sure you are going to work with Mack?’

  I said: ‘Why?’

  He went: ‘Mwoah, hmm.’

  In other words, we’ve used him and I’m not sure if you should use him. It didn’t sound like his experiences with Mack were altogether positive. He did produce it, but I think that album suffered from too much of a live drum sound. We recorded the album at the Rockfield Studios. Vinny played in this room that had glass all around and when I hear the album now I just hear the brightness in that room. Vinny liked it – drummers love that big sound.

  Recording went well, though; it took us no more than six weeks. The album opened with ‘Computer God’. Geezer wrote the lyrics for that and since that album his input has gone from strength to strength. I’ve always wanted to get him involved musically as well: ‘Come on, show us one of your riffs.’

  His immediate reaction was always: ‘Oh, you won’t like it. You’re going to laugh.’

  But he’s never actually played me anything for me to laugh at.

  ‘After All (The Dead)’ was an amalgamation of Geezer’s stuff and mine. Geezer put one of the riffs in that song, which I thought was really good. He played a bit of guitar on it as well, just the little filly bit. When he played this idea to me, I couldn’t quite grasp what he was doing. He started playing it to show me, and I said: ‘I can’t get this, but you know it. Why don’t you play it?’, so he did.

  ‘Time Machine’ was a song that we’ve played throughout the years. We wrote it for
the Wayne’s World soundtrack, and recorded it well before we went in with Reinhold Mack. Leif Mases had produced Jeff Beck’s album, and Ernest Chapman managed Jeff, so that’s how we got him in just to do that song. Leif had done the ABBA stuff in the early days. From ABBA to Sabbath – quite a stretch!

  The final track of the album was ‘Buried Alive’, a mid-tempo song that had an almost grungy sound. If I say it like that, it sounds like we were influenced by grunge, but of course we weren’t. The grunge bands had obviously been influenced by us, and I heard a lot of them say that umpteen times as well. Even so, it wasn’t a particularly good time for our sort of music. Dehumanizer was very well received and it charted fairly high in the UK and the States, but we thought it would do even better than that, because we hadn’t been together for ten years.

  Apart from all that, I was not pleased with everything that happened when we recorded it. This band wasn’t fitting like a glove, it was a bit volatile. We were about to go on tour, but at the same time I felt the thing could blow up at any minute.

  70

  Bound and shackled

  The modestly sized venues we played during the Dehumanizer tour reflected the changing times, but we started off with a bang. In June 1992 we did huge shows in São Paulo, Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. That was a bit wild. There was one show where we shat ourselves. We were in the dressing room and we heard that the crowd was rioting. We weren’t supposed to be on until a certain time, but they wanted us on there and then. They were getting all overexcited and started invading the stage. We thought, Christ, if they storm it, we’ve got no chance backstage! Eventually they got them to move back and we went on, but that was a bit hairy.

  To be honest, we were more of a hazard to ourselves than the crowd was. One night in São Paulo I went to bed and left Ronnie and Geezer in the bar. They got drunk and had a disagreement. Geezer walked out all worked up about it and there was this big bronze statue in the centre of the lobby, which he decided to headbutt. Guess who came off worse?

  I didn’t know about it until the next day, when I saw him in dark glasses. I said: ‘You all right?’

  He mumbled: ‘Yeah . . .’

  ‘Well, blimey, what happened to you?’

  ‘Weuhh . . . long story . . . I dunno . . .’

  If he drinks too much, Geezer can get a bit violent. But he picked on the wrong bloke then. I couldn’t believe it; his eye came up like a balloon.

  On the last Black Sabbath and Heaven & Hell tours we had individual dressing rooms. We did that to give each other space. If I wanted to run over stuff and practise for a while, the others didn’t have to sit there and listen to me. And if they wanted to start chatting with friends, I didn’t want to listen to them. I prefer not to see anybody before a show, because I like to get my head around what we are going to do, while Ronnie would sometimes see people. And Geezer likes to lock himself away and sleep. But on the Dehumanizer tour we couldn’t have our own dressing rooms because of the size of the venues. It was me and Geezer in one dressing room and Ronnie and Vinny in another.

  This also came about because there was a bit of tension between both parties. We didn’t hate each other – it was just down to the different ways different people talk, what with Ronnie still being very outspoken and me and Geezer avoiding any kind of direct confrontation. But despite the downsized venues and the tension we were playing well and we pushed on.

  At the same time Ozzy announced his retirement. About two months before he was to do the supposedly last gigs of his life, on 13 and 14 November 1992, at the Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa, California, we were asked to perform there with him. It was Ozzy’s first farewell tour, so we genuinely believed that he was going to retire. So when they asked us to do it, we said: ‘Yeah, okay, of course we’ll be there.’

  We were going to open for Ozzy with the current band and then do three songs with the original line-up at the end of his show, to round it all off. We thought it would be a nice gesture to do it. We asked Ronnie and he said: ‘I’m not doing that.’

  In no uncertain terms.

  ‘I’m not supporting a clown.’

  He was adamant he wouldn’t do it, but we were used to him being very direct, so we put it in our tour schedule anyway. We thought, well, he might settle down and change his mind. Of course Ronnie didn’t, so that was the nail in the coffin. Fair dues to him: he did say from the outset that he wasn’t going to do it.

  We had agreed to come and play and it was all going ahead so we couldn’t really pull out. We needed to replace Ronnie for the two Costa Mesa shows and we thought, well, Tony Martin knows the songs. So we asked him first, but there was some problem with that. Then Rob Halford got in touch and he said: ‘I can do it if you want me to.’

  We got a rehearsal room for one or two days in Phoenix, where Rob lived, and we went through a new set to play on this show. We did some Ronnie-era songs and Rob even suggested doing some of the Tony Martin stuff. We also rehearsed some of the old Sabbath songs that we knew Ozzy would never do, like ‘Symptom Of The Universe’. Rob still had the range to be able to do that. In the end we had a tight set of eleven songs. It was one after the other, bang, bang, bang.

  We had managed to find a singer for the Costa Mesa gigs, but then somebody else threw a spanner in the works. Two nights before it was all supposed to happen, I suddenly found myself in jail.

  We had finished a gig in Sacramento. I came off stage, got into the tour bus and somebody knocked on the door: ‘Is Mr Iommi on board?’

  ‘Who wants to know?’

  ‘We’re with the District Attorney’s office and we’ve got a warrant for his arrest.’

  I thought, oh, no! What the fuck is this about?

  They said: ‘Can we come on board and take Mr Iommi?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, we can either come on board now, or keep the bus here until the proper papers arrive and come on board then and take him.’

  So I said: ‘Just let them come on.’

  My ex-wife Melinda had tried to do me for child support. She had claimed that I wasn’t paying it. Instead of checking that first, they just came out to arrest me. You’re immediately guilty until you’ve proven your innocence. They pulled cars behind and in front of the bus and that was it. They took me off the bus and said: ‘We’re not going to handcuff you now. We’ll take you in a car and we’ll go out around a corner where there’re no fans.’

  As soon as we were out of view they handcuffed me and put chains on my legs. I was sitting in the back of this car and we travelled for an hour to Modesto. That’s where Melinda lived, so that’s where they were going to put me in jail. I was wondering what the hell was going on.

  They put me in the holding cell with a guy with no shirt on, who kept saying: ‘You don’t want to be in this jail, man, they’ll kill you.’

  I was in Modesto County Jail all night and I couldn’t sleep because of the noise and the worry. I probably lost about ten pounds overnight. I kept thinking, does anybody even know I’m in here? I’m very grateful to Gloria Butler, because she kept phoning the cops up every fifteen minutes, saying: ‘Don’t put him in a cell with anybody else, you’ve got to put him on his own!’

  Eventually they did, they put me in a cell by myself. The guy next door to me was convinced I had come to kill him. He said: ‘I know you want to kill me, but I’m going to get you in the shower. I know Satan sent you!’

  Fucking hell.

  It was a Thursday night and they wanted bail money the next day, otherwise I would be in there over the weekend, until Monday. I had to get out to do a gig in Oakland the next night and the Costa Mesa thing with Ozzy the day after. They set bail at $75,000, an enormous sum of money because not paying child support was a big thing there. I had paid, it was all rubbish, but I didn’t have a leg to stand on. Eventually a lawyer came in with a briefcase with seventy-five grand in cash. Gloria had phoned Ralph Baker and Ernest Chapman and they had provided the money.

  I had to go i
n front of the judge all shackled and I felt as if I had committed a murder. As soon as I entered the jail, it got around like wildfire. A guy who was serving the coffee to everybody, through the bars in tin mugs, knew who I was and so pretty soon all the prisoners knew. The guards were walking me down to this chamber to see the judge and there were all these guys in these cells that I passed, going: ‘Hey! Tony! What’s up!’

  The governor of the jail, in his suit and tie, said: ‘I’m telling you now: we don’t want a John Lennon incident here. We are going to walk on each side of you, you’ll have one person behind you and one person in front of you, and you keep up pace with them.’

  It was unreal. Me with my handcuffs on and with these shackles around my legs, just trying to walk, and in the meantime all these kids shouting all this stuff.

  Unbelievable.

  It was on the front page of the papers of course: ‘Arrested!’

  I got out on bail but they took my passport off me, as I wasn’t allowed to leave America. The lawyer recommended I get out of California. He said: ‘Go somewhere nice and just sit tight.’

  So after doing Costa Mesa I went to Florida, as far away from California as possible without leaving the country. But I developed a complex about going out in the streets. Every time I saw a policeman, I felt guilty.

  ‘Where’s your passport?’

  ‘I haven’t got it. They took it off me.’

  All I did was sit tight and keep in contact with the lawyer. That set me back a bit, as he was expensive, a top guy coming to get me out. Eventually it all got sorted out and I got my passport back and I went home. But I don’t think I ever got the $75,000 back.

  It was a right mess, that whole thing.

  They got me out of jail in time to do the show that night in Oakland. It was Friday the 13th and it would be Ronnie’s last gig with us. We broke up after that. It never actually came to a ‘That’s it!’ We just parted company. Ronnie refused to do the Costa Mesa gig and said: ‘If you go and do it, you’ll be doing it without me.’