Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  I find when you’re coming up with the riffs and you’ve got the right people around you to put them together, it can go very quickly. There’s actually no reason why we couldn’t have played everything in one day, because we were doing that at rehearsal. It’s just that you get into that thing where you think, we’ll do a track a day. And then you’d want to do a guitar overdub, or Ronnie would want to do an extra vocal, and a track would take a couple of days. I could have saved an absolute fortune working this fast in the past, but you can’t work that way with everybody. It takes a certain combination of people to be able to do it.

  The Devil You Know was released in April 2009. Listening to it, you can hear we were really inspired and had a great time making it, and therefore it was nice to see that it was received incredibly well. The critics were raving, some calling it the best metal album of the year. In America it debuted at No. 8 in the Billboard album charts. I’d been at it for forty years and it hadn’t always been smooth sailing, but The Devil You Know was another high point. I couldn’t wait to tour the album and take the show on the road once again.

  We started off in South America, playing big crowds that were always wild. The European summer festivals were really good and Wacken was especially great. The crowd was fantastic and it was very well organised. We filmed it for the Neon Nights – Live at Wacken DVD that came out in November 2010. I was very pleased with the way that turned out and I’m really glad we did it because it was Ronnie’s last filmed show.

  The Sonisphere Festival in Knebworth was the last gig we played on this side of the Atlantic. It just pissed down with rain when we walked on and it stopped when we came off. Bloody marvellous that was. But even so, that was a good gig as well.

  We spent August in America, with Coheed and Cambria supporting us. On the 29th we had our last show at the House of Blues in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I was thinking, why are we playing there? It’s such a small place! But it was looked on as a nice little gig to finish up with, and it was all right. It had been such a great tour that we didn’t want it to end.

  But it did.

  The House of Blues turned out to be our last gig ever.

  88

  Farewell to a dear friend

  While we were on that last tour, Ronnie was suffering quietly. He did say to me a few times: ‘I’ve got a problem with my stomach. I keep going to the loo and I’m taking this ant-acid stuff.’

  I said to him many times: ‘You want to go and get a check-up.’

  He’d go: ‘Yeah, when we finish I’ll sort myself out.’

  He battled through it. He really did give it all until the end. He wasn’t well, but he still went on and did the shows, and he performed as usual. After he finally went in to have a check-up, somebody told Ralph Baker what was going on and he in turn called me to tell me Ronnie had stomach cancer. It was awful to hear that. I called Ronnie and we stayed in touch. After a while things were looking up. He said: ‘I’m coping with it. I’m doing a bit better.’

  He was very positive towards it all, he had a great attitude. He went into hospital and after a while they said: ‘We think we’ve cleared it.’

  Things looked great, so we arranged to do another tour of Europe, something like twenty gigs from mid-June through to mid-August 2010. But then we got the terrible news that the cancer had spread to Ronnie’s liver. And that was it; once that happens it’s very difficult.

  I was talking to him one day and I said: ‘I’m looking forward to doing this tour.’

  But Ronnie said: ‘Well, I don’t know how I’m going to be. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.’

  He went downhill very quickly. Thank goodness Geezer and Gloria were in Los Angeles. They really stood close to Ronnie and his wife, Wendy, and went to see him in hospital a lot. Geezer was there right till the end.

  I really didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to Ronnie. I’d had the phone call saying he didn’t have long and I said to Ralph: ‘We had better go out. Let’s book a flight.’

  But the next call was: ‘It’s too late.’

  It was that quick. I think the last thing I got off him was a text. He did stay in touch texting me, because sometimes he couldn’t call. Talking was tiring him out a lot, because he was very ill. And he braved right through it.

  A couple of days before the funeral me and Maria went to see him in the chapel of rest. He was lying in the coffin and when I saw him I broke down. To see him like that was very hard. It really hit me then that he was gone.

  When somebody close to you dies, you always look for a reason. With Ronnie I think it was a bit of everything, really. I don’t think he got himself checked out early enough. He would put things off and go: ‘Oh, I’ll do it next time.’

  And his eating habits weren’t very good. He’d often drink instead of eating and some days he wouldn’t eat at all. I don’t know how he did that. He’d also eat at peculiar hours, because he had a really different lifestyle from anyone else in the band. We’d be in bed after the gig and Ronnie would stay up and have a few drinks for a couple of hours and then he’d stop off at a truck stop and eat at four in the morning or whatever time it would be. When he did eat, he never ate vegetables or anything; he just didn’t eat any healthy stuff. As long as I’ve known him, he was always very thin. When he was ill he lost weight, and he really didn’t have the body to lose weight. But when I saw him for that very last time, the way they had done him up, he looked fine. He looked as if he was asleep, but seeing him there, it broke my heart.

  We were going to do the High Voltage Festival in London with Ronnie. Of course we cancelled the whole tour, but the people organising that festival told us that they’d like to do a tribute show to Ronnie. We thought, that’s great. We had thought of doing that anyway, so this was the ideal opportunity.

  But who were we going to get to sing? Glenn Hughes came to mind, because he had known us for a long time and he was friends with Ronnie as well. As a matter of fact, there was a private memorial for Ronnie’s close friends and Glenn sang ‘Catch The Rainbow’ there in the chapel, one of the songs by Ronnie’s old band, Rainbow. There was a memorial again the following day for the fans in a big venue, and Glenn sang there as well. So we thought it was appropriate to have him on the show. We also invited Jørn Lande, who could sing the stuff we did with Dio really good.

  Doing that show was very emotional. To go on stage with two different people, and with Wendy Dio on the side of the stage crying, it was difficult for all of us. But we wanted to do it for him.

  We did it for Ronnie.

  89

  Not a right-hand man

  Throughout the years I have been very unlucky with my right hand. First of all I had my fingers chopped off of it, but that was only the beginning of a whole series of bad things that happened to it. In 1995 I had an operation on my right wrist for carpal tunnel. And when we did the Ozzfest in 2005 my arm really hurt. I did get cortisone injections for it, but the effects didn’t last long. I thought, what the bloody hell is this? I had X-rays and they said: ‘You’ve broken three tendons in your right shoulder. Three ligaments.’

  They put them back together and it was fine until about three years later. I was in New York, we were doing a gig on the night and I did some exercises with weights. You’re supposed to exercise to strengthen your arms, but I probably did it a bit too much and I heard this sound, like the snapping of an elastic band. I had broken another one in the same shoulder. My arm was shaking, I couldn’t control it and I thought, oh, no, it’s gone again!

  They gave me a cortisone shot and some painkillers to go on stage and I played the gig that night, but it was bloody painful. Fortunately it was the last gig of the tour. I had it checked out back in England and the surgeon said: ‘To be honest it was in a state when I repaired it last time. They were frayed really badly and we were lucky to be able to repair it, but I don’t think we can do it again. And also it’s wrong now. The tendon has shortened too much to reconnect.’

  Maybe
a top specialist would’ve been able to repair it, but I just left it. It does affect me when I’m lifting stuff above my head. If I have to put a suitcase in the overhead locker in a plane, for instance, that’s when I notice it.

  I’ve also been bitten badly by Rottweilers on my right hand and arm. I had four Rottweilers the first time this happened. About five years earlier we had ten pups and I gave a friend of mine one of them. When he went through a divorce he said: ‘Could you look after the dog for a while?’

  We had the dog back, a big bitch, but my dogs didn’t get on with her. They started attacking her, which was pretty brutal. I had to pull one of my dogs off her. His collar just came off in my hand and he dived back on her again.

  Blimey!

  I couldn’t get him off and he was ripping the dog apart, so I got one of my big coats and jumped on top of the bitch, covering her up with it. My dog stopped then and Maria managed to get him inside, but the bitch was in shock and as I had her covered she turned around and ‘maw-maw-maw’: in a matter of just a few seconds she bit two fingers, the side of my hand and my thumb. She obviously didn’t know where she was; she was just in total shock after my dog had set on her.

  I thought, oh, fuck! Blood squirted all over the place and Maria shouted at me: ‘You shouldn’t have done that, you shouldn’t have risked it!’

  I just went: ‘Quick, get somebody to bandage my hand up!’

  Both of us shouting at each other, it was completely silly. I had to go to bloody hospital, off to surgery again, to get it checked and have rabies shots. They bandaged it all up but they couldn’t stitch it, because they said you can’t do that with bites. So I had to leave it, just cover it, put stuff on it, and that was it.

  Bloody hell!

  I got bitten on that arm again on another occasion. Maria was doing some work for the RSPCA, finding a home for animals. We had a big dog pen in one of our fields at the house and she brought a dog back to keep for a few days, while we looked for a new owner. It was a lovely Rottweiler that had been mistreated. Maria said: ‘Don’t go by the dog. Leave him alone for a bit.’

  Of course I took no notice.

  ‘All right, all right.’

  I went to dog: ‘Hello, hello . . .’

  I reached out to stroke it and ‘wraauw’, he caught my arm. Then he looked at me . . . and bit me again more or less in the same place.

  Fuck!

  They are so bloody quick! The dog just grabbed my arm and it was only a warning as well. If he had wanted to, he could have ripped the bloody thing off. But he was frightened and he didn’t know me from Adam. It was my own fault. I shouldn’t have bent over. You’re not supposed to do that. And he probably smelled my other dogs on me as well.

  It immobilised my arm, so it was off to the surgery again, to the same doctor. He must’ve thought, what the hell is going on there? And once again it couldn’t be stitched. We had a tour coming up and I thought, oh, for Christ’s sake, just typical, that is. My arm bothered me for a good few weeks, but it healed eventually.

  Maria had a go at me: ‘You’re a silly bugger for doing that. I told you not to!’

  But I did go down to see the dog again the next day in the pen, just to face my problem. You can’t be terrified forever. I was a bit overpowering with him the first time, so now I went to introduce myself properly. I opened the pen and went in there with a couple of biscuits. He stood there looking and I thought, don’t go for me again, please. But he was all right, he was great after that. We had him for about a week, until we found him a home.

  He’s probably killed the new owner by now.

  The worst thing that happened to my hand is the cartilage disintegrating in the thumb joint. I had already had problems with that joint for a couple of years. I had steroid injections, but they were just sticking the needle in roundabouts and some of it didn’t hit the right spot. Eventually I heard of this place in Birmingham called The Joint Clinic. This doctor called Anna Moon is a specialist in hands. She injected me under X-ray, so that she could see exactly where the needle went in, which was brilliant. I had steroids first, and then I tried this new stuff, like a jell that they use on knee joints. It looked like glue and I had to have three injections in between my joints over the course of a week. It basically buffered the joint like an artificial cartilage and stopped the bones from rubbing against each other. It was all right but it still didn’t work properly. My hand swelled up from all the playing and I had to put ice on it and take anti-inflammatories and painkillers all the time.

  Eddie Van Halen had problems with the joints in his hand as well and he saw this doctor in Germany, Dr Peter Wehling from Düsseldorf, who does stem cell treatment. It’s the only place that does this kind of treatment. Eddie told me it really helped him, so I went to see this chap. I did four hours of all different sorts of X-rays. They checked everything because they can’t treat you if you have any other kind of problem. On the X-ray they found a white mark in my joint and they said: ‘I don’t think we are going to be able to do this. If that’s what we think it is, you are going to be on antibiotics for six months.’

  I thought, oh, for Christ’s sake, and said: ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘We think it’s fluid in the joint.’

  They checked again and found a hole in my joint where one of the doctors had at some point injected a steroid right into the bone. That’s why I was getting a swelling in my hand. They said: ‘Now that we know what it is we can actually go ahead with the procedure.’

  They took blood from my arm, sent that to the lab overnight and grew new cartilage from it. Then, a day or two later, they injected it back into me wherever it was needed. The doctor changed his surgical gloves about three times in the course of the five minutes it took to give me the injections: that’s how clean they were. I had to be there at the clinic for a week. Go in the morning, have the injections, and then back to the hotel. They took quite a few big files of blood in case I needed a top-up later, which I did. They grew the cells and I went in every day for that week and the difference was amazing. It really, really helped. I wasn’t getting any pain any more.

  I did have to go back to see Dr Wehling again a couple of months later, because the next joint up and also my left hand were playing up. I had a full body scan as well to see if there were any problems anywhere else. There was just a little bit at the base of my spine and at the top of my neck, in between the neck joints, but that was just normal wear and tear.

  All these guitar players, like Jimmy Page and Pete Townshend, used to jump up and down and roll on the floor on their knees. Years later you really feel that. Like footballers, they get these joint problems because of all the abuse. I just stood there with the guitar for forty years, but you’re standing funny when you’re playing guitar, so all that gradual wear and tear and putting more weight on one leg and all that caused back problems for me. Dr Wehling gave me injections in my back as well and after about four days of those I never had another problem there again. All the pain disappeared. It’s great.

  The last time I saw him, he said: ‘It should be growing all right now.’

  They didn’t even X-ray it to check it; he just knows that it’s growing now. He said to keep him updated about what’s going on. It does hurt a bit in certain places now, but it’s nothing at all like it was. When I’m playing for a bit, I forget about it. Since I’ve had this stem cell treatment I haven’t felt the need to take any painkillers or anything. It’s just been brilliant.

  Until something else goes . . .

  90

  A good place

  I would very much like to do something again with Geezer and Vinnie and another singer, but, of course, if we do start something new it would be under a different name. Heaven & Hell was very popular and it took up all of our time, but even after it ended I stayed very busy writing and getting involved with all sorts of projects. One thing that was a lot of fun to do was the ‘Out Of My Mind’ charity single with Ian Gillan. It was a quarter of a centu
ry ago that we recorded our first charity single, ‘Smoke On The Water’, in aid of Armenian earthquake victims. It was a big thing with just about everybody involved, like Brian May, Bryan Adams, Ritchie Blackmore and David Gilmour. We did a video of it and raised a lot of money. And then, in 2009, twenty-five years later, President Serzh Sargsian of Armenia got in touch. He wanted to give an award for what we’d done back then to Ian Gillan, myself and keyboard player Geoff Downes.

  We went to Armenia and they showed us what they had built with the money from ‘Smoke On The Water’. We had dinner with Prime Minister Tigran Sargsian and the British Ambassador Charles Lonsdale and they were all really nice. We were there for a few days and did a couple of press conferences. At one of those we started talking about maybe doing something else to raise more money, because, when they showed us around, we saw this music school which was just awful. It was like a tin shed, all cold and damp, so we thought, we’ve got to do something about this. On the flight back Ian and I discussed writing a single to raise more money. The first thing we did when we got back home was send them a lot of guitars and drums and whatever. We also wrote and released a couple of songs to help build a new school, that’s what ‘Out Of My Mind’ was all about.

  First Ian and myself got together at my house. I wrote the music and he did the lyrics. We wanted some other people to play on it, and Ian mentioned Jon Lord. I said: ‘Yeah, that would be great!’

  I suggested Nicko McBrain, and then we also got Jason Newsted on the bass and Linde Lindström on guitar. It worked out great, and we had a fantastic time recording it. The song turned out really well and we did raise a fair amount of money once again. And we had such a good time doing this that we’ve actually talked about making it into a proper band.