Number 4
Tony Iommi
Hey, quick question:
What did you do when you were 22 years old? I know what I did. I was failing out of VCU because my first real girlfriend broke up with me right before the year started and, being hard headed and immature, I replaced her with another girl in a different town so I was gone all the time. Mattyman, as far as I know, was selling his body to the streets.
Do you know what Tony Iommi did when he was 22?
Create a new genre of music. That’s all.
And not only did he create a new genre, that genre was the biggest, baddest genre of them all: Heavy Metal.
You see, Tony is nothing short of the greatest heavy metal riff maker of all time. Don’t believe me? Well, don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself, if you’ve got the guts!
Besides his incredible, innate ability to create sounds so aggressive that he could make Oppenheimer jealous, Tony has a secret weapon…he’s missing the tips of two of his fingers on his right hand. He’s left handed. Which means that the fingers that make the chords and solos and stuff are the ones missing! So, Momma Iommi’s baby boy took a page out of Django Reinhardt’s book and created leather finger tips. This meant that his hand was a bit clumsy at first, so he worked with 5th chords, lovingly called “power chords”. And why are they called “power chords”? Because those were the chords that Tony Iommi used to create what we now know as Heavy Metal, that’s why! They bring the POWER.
Okay, in fairness, Tony didn’t invent the power chord. He wasn’t even the only guitarist to use it to create heavy music. But what Tony did do is fuse his unbelievable ability to write riffs that would make a gorilla’s balls drop with power chords and created many, many of the most famous riffs in all of music, heavy or not.
Iron Man, much? Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, anyone? N.I.B, y’all?
And, let me tell you a little story about a song Tony helped write. When making their second studio album, which they were going to call “War Pigs”, they ran out of original material. The sound guy doing the recording said something like “Hey, you guys have like 2:50 seconds of record left and like 20 minutes of recording time left before you have to leave. Do you have another song we can fit in here or do you just want to leave it blank?”
*snort snort snort snnnnnnnoooooooooooorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt* Tony (allegedly) replied. “Give us a minute, mate.”
So the drummer, Bill Ward, started to bang something out. Tony, inspired by the drums, just pulled the second most famous metal riff of all time out of the air, bassist Geezer Butler started writing the lyrics, figuring he’d just wing his bass parts, and one Mr. John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne started muttering nonsense (this time on purpose...allegedly) into the microphone to get the vocal melody. A few moments later Geezer handed Ozzy the lyrics, Bill Ward mumbled “1, 2, ah 1, 2 , 3, and…” and the band put together a song so incredible, so amazing, so lasting, that the version you have heard since 1970 is the same one they wrote and recorded in 15 minutes. It’s the 1st and only take. It’s so great that the record company renamed the album from “War Pigs” to the title of this spur-of-the-moment masterpiece:
“Paranoid”.
Iommi’s ability to overcome his handicap is what led to the creation of his sound, a sound heard around the world, and a sound that has launched a million other bands. Metallica, much? Anthrax, anyone? Slayer, y’all? Rick Springfield, ma’am? Wait. Maybe not that last one.
Toni has had the good fortune of playing in a band with two of the absolutely GREATEST voices in heavy metal history: Ozzy Osbourne, and Ronnie James Dio.
Or, maybe I should say that they had the good fortune singing for him.
Okay, I’m going to stop now, but I just want to close this one out by simply saying that Tony created his own thing, a thing so amazing and different that it’s been copied by a billion bands, none of whom are as good. He’s written some of the greatest metal songs of all time, including THE greatest metal song of all time (Iron Man), and what is widely considered THE greatest metal album of all time (Paranoid). And for that, he’s the 4th greatest guitarist to ever live.