Interview With Tony Iommi by JJ Koczan.

[Holymagica]

Interview With Tony Iommi of Heaven & Hell: Knowing The Devil
On heavy metal Mt. Olympus, Black Sabbath/Heaven And Hell guitarist Tony Iommi is more or less Zeus. Around the house we call him “The Man From Whose Fingers Heavy Metal Sprang” (clearly not into the whole brevity thing), and though there isn’t much that hasn’t already been said about the original riffer over the 40 years since the agonizing strains of “Black Sabbath” first appeared on the scene, there always seems to be more questions to ask—even though most of them round down to, “How the hell do you do it?”
Even Brian May asked that one.
2009 saw, among other things, the release of Heaven And Hell’s first full-length studio album, The Devil You Know (Rhino). The line-up of Iommi and fellow immortals, bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Vinny Appice and singer Ronnie James Dio (AKA Sabbath circa Mob Rules) took to the stage first in 2006 and haven’t stopped yet, headlining arenas, festivals and anywhere they can like a bunch of 20 year olds who didn’t already change the face of metal three decades ago. And for that, we’re thankful.
But there’s more to them than iconic status and major market touring (though they will be at MSG Aug. 25 and in Atlantic City Aug. 29), and Tony Iommi Himself graciously granted some of his time for a phoner to field queries he’s no doubt heard thousands of times before in order that the word might get out. We’re pretty thankful for that too.

Now that the album has been out for a while and people have had a chance to digest it, have you gotten a sense at the shows of how the audience has taken to the new material?

Yeah, actually. The new songs we’ve been playing have been going down very well. ‘Bible Black,’ ‘Fear,’ they’ve been going down very well.

Has your opinion changed at all since you’ve had a little distance from making it?

No, I like the album. You always criticize it somewhere along the line, saying, ‘We should have done this, we should have done that.’ But it’s what it is and we’re onward to the next one now (laughs).

The next one?

(Laughs) No.

In terms of putting the record together and capturing the band’s vibe and all that, how was that different from not only the three songs for The Dio Years, but in general?

It’s been just great. We had a comfortable time doing it. My idea doing this album was to be able to do it sort of live, to be in the studio and play live without having to keep going over and over it. We wrote the songs and then rehearsed them and then went into the studio so we could capture them pretty quick and capture them live instead of having to redo this and redo that and redo the other. It worked really well. I thought the whole process really worked comfortably. Quick.

Having worked with so many different people, so many musicians and singers, do you adapt your playing style at all, or is it just riffs and then the song comes together?

Usually it’s just riffs, depending on who you’re working with. Certainly with Ronnie I know what the style is going to be and we work together to make the song and all come up with a riff and that’s initially how it starts. Whoever comes up with a riff that we all like and then we’ll make it into a song. Ronnie’ll start singing on a riff and then we’ll look for another section to fit and it sort of builds up that way and all the ideas are thrown in to help.

Comparing someone like Ronnie to Glenn Hughes and working with different kinds of singers, does that affect what you’re feeling to write?

I think it’s a matter of the way of writing, because each singer has different ways. Glenn may hear something or Ronnie may hear something that another singer probably wouldn’t on a particular riff. Some of the songs when I was working with Glenn before, there was a couple of things he picked that I wouldn’t have thought he’d sing on that he did. It’s good because it sends you to another way of writing. They may hear something over a certain riff that you wouldn’t think they would and you sort of go, ‘Oh, that’s good, that’s interesting.’ Each one has their own different ways.

Speaking of Ronnie, something occurred to me listening to the song ‘Rock And Roll Angel.’ When a song is all put together and Ronnie comes back with the lyrics and it says, ‘Caravan To Superman’ and all that kind of stuff, do you ever just ask him what the hell he’s talking about?

(Laughs) Yeah. He usually comes along and says, ‘I’ve got this idea,’ and he explains it. He’s usually quite good. He has a way of explaining what he’s singing about. We do leave that to Ronnie. I certainly don’t get involved in doing lyrics, that’s for sure. I’m quite content doing all the riffs and the rest of the stuff.

A lot of guitarists give into that temptation, and you never really have.

No, not really. I could get involved with melody lines, but I don’t really get involved with the lyrics. Certainly in the old stuff, when we’d done the Ozzy stuff, he used to follow the riff a lot, ‘Iron Man’ and certain other songs he followed the riff. He sang the same as the riff. But as far as any kind of lyrical thing, I don’t get involved.

Maybe it just doesn’t matter at this point, but in terms of dealing with expectations, there’s the myth of Tony Iommi and there’s the guy who needs to sit there and write these riffs and go on tour. Are you conscious of what people expect from you and the band when you’re writing?

Well yes. They expect something of a high level, and I do myself. I try and do the best I can at that time and I wouldn’t expect any less. You have to go out and try and do the best you can, hoping that people are going to like it. You do have expectations to keep up with.

Is how something might be received a factor when you’re writing and arranging the songs?

No, how the writing is, is we agree we all have to like it. We have to feel it. You don’t think, ‘Oh, are people going to like this?’ You don’t really think like that because you have to write how you feel and you have to like it. You have to do it from your feelings. If I started writing for other people, I’d probably be doing pop stuff. Years ago, people’d say, ‘You shouldn’t be playing this stuff, you should be playing more commercial stuff.’ If I listened to them, god knows what I’d be playing. I have my own mind of what I want it to sound like.

Did you have that vision going into this record? Did you know what you wanted beforehand?

I knew I wanted to do an album that we kept it basic and with a lot of riffs, and that’s really the way I write. In fact, talking about a lot of riffs, I was with Brian May a couple weeks ago and he happened to say, ‘How do you come out with so many riffs?’ I don’t know, that’s what I do, and you can never sort of answer it.

You guys just did Wacken and other festivals. How was Europe?

Really good. Very good. They’ve all been good. The only thing that was a bit of a downside was the weather. We hit a couple of ones that it pissed down rain and we done one in England on Saturday and it was 50,000 people and 10 minutes before we went on, it decided to open the skies and really pour down. But the crowd were great. It’s just a shame it gets like that. Certainly in Europe you tend to get hot. But they were good, Wacken was good. There were 85,000 people.

Do you know what you’re doing after this U.S. run?

After this U.S. run, yes, we’re going to have some time off. I’ve got to have an operation on my hand, and that’s sort of a major thing I need to get done and I’ve been putting it off now. So we’re going to have some time off while I get that done. That’ll be a bit of a break, I think. Not for everybody, but it’ll be some time off from touring for me for sure.

What happened to your hand?

The cartilage is gone from the thumb in my fingering hand. It’s been like that now, to be honest, for a year and I’ve been taking anti-inflammatories and all sorts of stuff to try and calm it down, but it’s inevitable I’ve got to have the operation because the bone is rubbing on the bone. Funny enough, I talked to Eddie Van Halen this morning, because he’s had the same sort of problem, so I’m seeing him to have a chat about what happened to him. He thinks it’s very successful, so we’ll see.