ELECTRIC FUNERAL
Black Sabbath bids adieu on the iconic band’s farewell tour
Black Sabbath will not go away quietly. Not just yet.
Having sold its soul for rock ’n’ roll, the prototypical heavy rock band has paid the price over nearly 50 years: dismissal and derision, personnel turnover and, more recently, illness.
The last one finally pulled the brakes on the band’s previously inexhaustible forward lumber. Guitarist Tony Iommi — a less famous name than Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne but a more crucial member of the British rock band — was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2012. And while he’s been declared free of the disease twice now, recurrence has become his reality.
“I’m feeling all right, though I get a bit tired,” the 68-year-old musician says during a phone interview. “I get home and it’s umpteen checkups. This, that and the other. Scans. When I got back most recently they found a little lump behind my sinuses, so they took that out. That’s where we are at the moment.”
Through it all, Black Sabbath continued to make an unholy noise, though those days are drawing to a close.
Iommi’s tests and scans take place between legs of The End, Black Sabbath’s final tour, which finds three-fourths of the original lineup stomping through influential songs largely drawn from six albums Sabbath released between 1970 and 1975. The tour schedule was designed with Iommi’s health in mind. He won’t rule out occasional gigs with Osbourne and bassist Geezer Butler — drummer Bill Ward and the band parted ways, and not amicably. But getting from gig to gig on a typical Sabbath tour has proven too taxing for Iommi.
“If not for my treatment, I’d carry on,” he says. “But the flying is tough. And the late nights don’t help. I love being on stage with the guys. So I do feel sad that it’s coming to an end, really. I love playing still. If I could wave a wand and be on stage, that’s what I’d do.”
Alas, no such wand exists, as Black Sabbath were never really the dark conjurers skittish listeners feared in 1969 when the band moved away from blues rock and torched the last vestiges of the decade’s hippiedom and sweeping away its ashes.
Sabbath was just four guys with an ominous outlook and a complicated permutation for what rock ’n’ roll could sound like: industrial guitar riffs, disorienting changes in time signatures and narratives informed by cultural chaos of that era. Not all of the lyrical content has aged well, but the sound Iommi, Butler and Ward pioneered has held sway over two generations of musicians inclined to play heavy
stuff.
For Iommi it started with a setback. A bloody setback
Tony Iommi grew up in Birmingham, a tough industrial city in central England. He assumed two years of practicing guitar were for naught when he showed up for his last day of work at a sheet-metal factory and left the tips of his right
hand’s ring and middle fingers behind in a bloody accident.
“I had no options,” he says. “I asked the people at the hospital if I’d every play guitar again, and ‘give up’ was basically their answer. ‘Find something else to play.’ Great help, that. So I just tried to … make my own thing.”
A friend turned him onto the work of the great guitarist Django Reinhart, whose fretting hand was burned so badly in a fire he lost use of all but two fingers.
The skin on Iommi’s injured fingers sits right atop bone, so applying pressure to his guitar strings was painful. With a prisoner’s ingenuity, he melted down a plastic bottle and created a faux fingertip, which he then sanded down and covered with a piece of leather. Then he relearned his instrument, making modifications along the way, including the use of smaller gauge banjo strings, which caused less pain when he played.
“It was frustrating, but I was stuck, so I came up a new way of making sound,” he says. “I had to change the whole feel of playing guitar. That was my task. To go out and find a way to make the guitar sound big.”
‘They hated us’
A big sound wasn’t just a by-product of Iommi’s recuperation.
Between 1966 and 1968, Cream was a primary model for a modern blues rock band, spawning scores of imitators, including the Polka Tulk Blues Band — the name of Iommi’s act before it became Sabbath. “I couldn’t even say that name back in the day,” Iommi says, chuckling.
The group changed its name to Earth, another poor fit. Also another band had the same name, and its fans would show up and get future-Sabbath instead.
“They hated us,” Iommi says. “We decided that should never happen again. So we wanted to get a name nobody else would have.”
At that time, the group’s sound began to evacuate the prototypical British blues of the ’60s. During a rehearsal, they began to work up “Wicked World” based on an Iommi riff. Then “Black Sabbath.” The songs were mountainous and loud. The band noticed they could silence talkative crowds.
“We knew then what we wanted to do,” Iommi says. “It was a new course, a natural course that took us somewhere else.”
Those songs became two of the five on “Black Sabbath,” a debut album hammered out in a few hours with most of the music recorded on first takes. Iommi recalls wanting to redo “Warning,” a song that didn’t make the album, and being told no.
“We never knew any different,” he says. “We didn’t know you could do additional takes. We’d never been in a studio before. But we captured the basic essence of our sound. The mood. The vibe.”
Black Sabbath would play variations on that mood over five subsequent albums, an innovative and influential body of work created in a short period of time.
“Sabotage,” released in 1975, was the last great album by the original lineup.
After Osbourne left the group, Sabbath would do some strong work with singer Ronnie James Dio. But in the ’80s and ’90s, personnel came and went through a revolving door. The classic lineup reassembled in 2010, though it didn’t stay together long enough for drummer Ward to appear on “13,” released in 2013.
A year ago, the band announced plans for The End. Two runs of dates remain. The Houston show Thursday will be the band’s second to last show in the States. Then the band does Europe in January, wrapping things up in February in Birmingham, the industrial town where the men of Sabbath first forged heavy metal.
End of the process
Preparation for the shows has changed over the years. Set lists lean toward songs that still fall in Osbourne’s range.
“Some of those early songs are in such a high key, it’s impossible really for him to get there,” Iommi says. Then, wistfully with a quiet laugh: “When we were young … .”
Iommi’s own process starts hours before the show.
He wraps the two fingers and puts on the fabricated parts that helped him create his signature sound. One is remarkably similar to the bottle he constructed as a teen, with a piece of leather on the exterior.
“You have to change the leather every few weeks depending on how much you play,” he says. “Then you have to get the feel right. Rub it down. Otherwise the leather grips the string too much, and you can’t run your hand down the neck of the guitar. The other finger they make a mold for me now.
“For years, they’d send me a full arm and hand, and I’d cut the end off. Christ knows what the postman would think if he saw it. Then I put the arm and the band in the bin. So imagine the dust man cleaning up. ‘What’s this?’ But now I’ve found a company that makes me just the one finger. Not as much waste.”
Concerns that never crossed Eric Clapton’s mind.
“People don’t always know what goes on behind the scenes,” he says.
So this is the end of at least one aspect of Black Sabbath. The band has no plans to make a new album, though Iommi says he has a well-stocked freezer full of riffs, the trademark cornerstone of a Sabbath song.
“I’ve probably come up with thousands of them,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll try to remember one, and I’ll just come up with another instead. It’s quicker to write a new one than to find an old one.”