The Who’s Roger Daltrey says his band invented heavy metal — and he believes the evidence is already on the record.

Most fans credit Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath with creating heavy metal in the late 1960s, forging a darker and heavier sound in industrial Birmingham after Iommi abandoned the Stratocaster-style guitar he nearly launched the band with.

But others have long argued they helped lay the groundwork. Paul McCartney famously tried to “dirty up” rock music with the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter,” while Blue Cheer turned Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” into one of proto-metal’s defining early statements.

Daltrey’s argument, however, has less to do with specific songs than with the Who’s sheer volume, aggression, and use of feedback at a time when few bands were operating at that intensity.

“We were just different than everybody else,” Daltrey tells Rolling Stone. “Americans don’t really know the Who from the early ’60s, but as the drummer of Deep Purple [Ian Paice] said recently in a magazine, ‘The Who started it all.’ We were the first heavy metal band.”

For proof, Daltrey points to Pete Townshend’s pioneering use of Marshall amplification and the destructive stage theatrics that later became synonymous with hard rock.

“Jim Marshall invented the 4×12, 100-watt stack for Pete Townshend,” Daltrey said. “All the guitar smashing that Jimi Hendrix became famous for, in his style, was basically copied from Pete Townshend.”

In truth, Ronnie Wood laid the groundwork for the 4x12 stack, but there’s some truth to Daltrey’s claim. Townshend’s quest for ever-louder stage volume helped push amplifier design into new territory, laying groundwork for the massive guitar tones that would later define hard rock and metal. The Who’s confrontational performances and instrument destruction also established a blueprint for the genre’s rebellious spirit.

Daltrey even argues that albums like The Who Sell Out and Tommy helped elevate rock into something more ambitious and theatrical.

“We elevated rock to be maybe up its own ass in a way, you could say it,” he said.

Whether that makes the Who the inventors of heavy metal is another question entirely.

While the band undeniably influenced rock’s volume, attitude, and presentation, many fans still view Sabbath as the group that fully established metal as a distinct musical language. Iommi’s downtuned riffs, ominous songwriting, and industrial heaviness created a sound that countless bands would follow.

Other musicians have also staked their own claims. Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page both argued that the guitar riff in “Beck's Bolero” was among heavy metal’s earliest defining moments — although they never agreed on who actually wrote it.

Ultimately, the strongest argument for Sabbath may be the reaction the band provoked.

“When Sabbath first played in the USA, people were frightened of us,” Iommi once told Classic Rock. “They thought we’d turn them into a frog! It was very peculiar. They were frightened to death!”

That sense of menace and shock became central to heavy metal’s identity — and it’s a large part of why many fans still place Sabbath on the throne, even if the Who helped build the stage beneath it.

In the mid-1970s, Black Sabbath found themselves in unfamiliar territory. Punk was on the rise, rock was changing fast, and the band’s slow, ominous heaviness suddenly felt out of step with the moment.

“It was really a no-win situation for us,” guitarist Tony Iommi once told Guitar World about the band’s 1976 album Technical Ecstasy. “If we had stayed the same, people would have said we were still doing the same old stuff. So we tried to get a little more technical, and it just didn’t work out very well.”

Searching for a new direction, the band headed to Criteria Studios, the Miami facility where acts like the Allman Brothers Band and Grand Funk Railroad had recorded major albums.

But Sabbath weren’t the only major act working there.

In a neighboring studio, Eagles were deep into sessions for their soon-to-be blockbuster Hotel California, joined by newly recruited guitarist Joe Walsh. The band had already been recording there for months — and, according to Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler, they’d left more behind than just tape reels.

Butler told Mojo the group had left the mixing board's faders “so clogged with cocaine they wouldn’t move.”

“Before we could start recording we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board,” he told Uncut. “I think they’d left about a pound of cocaine in the board.”

While Sabbath dealt with the aftermath of their neighbors’ indulgence, the Eagles had complaints of their own — namely, Sabbath’s volume.

“We were too loud for them,” Iommi told Uncut. “It kept coming through the wall into their sessions.”

According to accounts from the time, the bleed from Sabbath’s thunderous rehearsals was so strong that the Eagles had to redo takes of “The Last Resort” because the metal band could be heard through the studio walls.

The two groups would leave Miami with very different results. Hotel California became one of the biggest albums of the decade, topping the Billboard 200 and cementing the Eagles’ mainstream dominance.

Sabbath’s Technical Ecstasy fared more modestly and remains one of the band’s more divisive releases — an experimental attempt to evolve at a moment when the ground was shifting beneath them.

“It became very experimental for us,” Iommi later said, recalling long nights alone in the studio “farting about” and plugging into unexpected gear like a Vox AC30, a combo best associated with Queen and Rory Gallagher.

Still, the album stands as a curious artifact of a strange moment in rock history — when the pioneers of heavy metal and the kings of California soft rock were working side by side in Miami, separated only by a studio wall… and, apparently, a mixing desk full of cocaine.

Laney Amplification founder Lyndon Laney has died aged 77, following a battle with cancer. Tony Iommi, a man who helped turn Laney’s valve amp passion into a global force, has led the tributes.

The news has led to an outpouring of love for a man who, alongside Jim Marshall, was one of Britain’s finest amp builders.

“It is with deep sadness that we acknowledge the passing of Lyndon Laney, founder of Laney Amplification,” Laney’s statement reads.

“Lyndon established Laney Amplification in 1967 and, through vision, dedication, and an uncompromising commitment to quality, built the company from modest beginnings into an internationally respected and successful brand. His work helped shape the sound of generations of musicians, most notably that of his long-term friend Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath.

“Lyndon’s influence extended far beyond business success; he was admired for his warmth, integrity, humor, and quiet determination.”

Like Black Sabbath, Laney emerged from Birmingham in the late 1960s, and is set to celebrate its 60th anniversary next year. In true rags-to-riches fashion, Lyndon Laney crafted his first amp in his dad's garden shed, with the business born after friends started requesting more builds for themselves.

The tube amp fanatic very quickly established a relationship with Black Sabbath guitarist Iommi. That would prove to be the cornerstone of the Laney legacy. It was his 1970 creation, the Laney LA 100 BL, made specifically for Iommi, that powered the first two Black Sabbath records alongside Iommi's trusted Gibson SG, Monkey, after fate intervened to stop him from launching Sabbath with a Stratocaster.

Iommi has remained fiercely loyal to Laney's tones over the following decades, with a special edition of his signature amp and a slew of reissues and other signature models following since, including last year's Laney Black Country Customs Tony Iommi TI100.

“I’m so sad to say that I lost my very dear friend Lyndon Laney to cancer on Friday,” he writes on Instagram. “I am absolutely devastated. We go back to the late 60s, when I first met him and started using his Laney amps.

“He was a really lovely guy, and his great passion was building valve amps. He also loved his cars, as I did, and we had so much in common. We’d sit down and talk about ideas and what to build into my amplifiers.

“I am so honored to have known him and his family,” he continues. “James, his son, has been running the company for some years now, and he has carried on the business and has pushed it forward with some brilliant ideas.”

Today, Laney boasts a roster of high-flying artists, including Billy Corgan, Nathan East, Vernon Reid, and Guthrie Govan. It has continued to push forward with fresh ideas and innovations. The 1972 KLIPP amp, the first of its kind to feature a boost channel, and the DP Range, which, in 1988, emboldened bass amps with graphic EQs for the first time, are shining examples of that.

In 2024, it released the world’s most powerful FRFR cabinet as it continues to adapt to the changing needs of guitar players. The 4x12 cab is nearly as loud as a jet plane taking off.

Reflecting on the “privilege” of knowing and working with Iommi during an interview last year, Laney said, “We've had some fun on the way.”

“We've worked bloody hard, haven't we?” Iommi returned. “You used to be in there night and day, dedicated to it. I'm not going to use anything else, and without you, we wouldn't be here.”

With a smile, Laney returned the compliment: “It goes both ways,” he said. That it does.

At Villa Park on July 5, what would become Ozzy Osbourne’s final performance was filled with emotion, spectacle and heavy-metal history. But behind the scenes, during a quiet soundcheck, a brief, brutally honest comment from Tony Iommi revealed everything about the decades-long bond between the singer and his guitarist — and left a lasting impression on Ozzy’s son, Jack Osbourne.

The all-star farewell — billed as the final bow for Black Sabbath and its iconic frontman — featured emotional reunions and lingering storylines, including Jake E. Lee’s long-awaited return after decades of estrangement. But it was Ozzy’s death just weeks later, at age 76, that cast the night in an even more poignant light.

Speaking in the aftermath, Iommi said he believed Ozzy sensed the end was near — even as he quietly held out hope of making one more record with Zakk Wylde. Still, Iommi — who had privately worried about his bandmate attempting two full sets — wasn’t about to spare his old friend’s feelings.

“He was so nervous about making sure that they were happy and everyone was good,” Jack recalled while appearing on The Magnificent Others, hosted by Billy Corgan. “But he was also really happy about it. He was. He felt good.

“He was soundchecking, so he wasn’t going to go out there with his A-game on. He was just making sure everything worked and ran through the set. And Tony said, ‘Hey, you’re singing flat.’ And my dad got really pissed off. He was upset.”

Ozzy’s wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, brushed it off in the moment.

“Oh, you know Dad,” she told Jack.

At the time, Jack was taken aback. Only later did he fully grasp what the exchange really meant.

“I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing because, out of the 40-whatever-thousand people at that stadium, the only person there who could ever say to my dad, ‘Hey, do better,’ was Tony. And I think everyone needs someone like that.”

Their relationship, of course, had never been simple. A resurfaced 1990 interview shows Ozzy still bitter about the manner — and perceived hypocrisy — of his 1978 dismissal from Sabbath. It wasn’t always smooth, but their connection endured. At Villa Park, Jack saw it plainly.

“Tony and my dad’s relationship had its times of being contentious,” he said, “but they were brothers. They were the closest family that anyone could ever ask for. They’ve done life together.

“As I look back on it, I’m like, ‘No, I think that that was okay to say,’ because they knew it was the last time. It was, ‘Get out there. Everyone needs to give it.’”

Corgan, who had worked with Iommi on the electric guitarist’s 2000 solo album and fronted the Smashing Pumpkins, said he witnessed firsthand how Ozzy’s success reshaped Iommi’s perspective.

“What really struck me was — I’m not saying he underestimated your dad, but I think he was as surprised by your dad’s success as anybody,” Corgan said. “He had this guy right there, and he thought, Oh, this is not working, and obviously they parted ways.

“And then when your dad went on to greater heights and greater heights, there was this feeling of, ‘How did my little brother climb that ladder?’ When I got to know Tony in the ’90s and 2000s, that surprise turned into a sort of admiration.”

Meanwhile, Lee has also reflected on his unlikely hiring — landing the Ozzy gig despite a disastrous audition — while Lita Ford has shared her own surreal experiences hosting the Prince of Darkness at a family holiday gathering.

A long-buried Ozzy Osbourne interview has resurfaced online — and it captures the vocalist at his most unfiltered, accusing his former Black Sabbath bandmates of hypocrisy in the years following his dismissal from the group.

Osbourne famously split from heavy metal’s progenitors after the release of their eighth album, Never Say Die!, in 1978. The recording sessions were fractious, with the members battling heavy substance abuse. It came to a head when Ozzy temporarily quit halfway through.

He was briefly replaced by Dave Walker (Savoy Brown/Fleetwood Mac), who fronted the band on the BBC’s Look Hear, before Ozzy returned to complete the record.

While work began on the band’s next album, Heaven & Hell — ultimately fronted by Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio — guitarist Tony Iommi fired Osbourne over his substance abuse.

Speaking in a 1990 interview uploaded to YouTube by Sunset Vinyl, Ozzy zeroed in on what he saw as the two-faced nature of his dismissal.

“We were always very heavily into alcohol and drugs, but the drugs got worse as it went along, because we thought that was the thing to do,” he said. “We sampled LSD in a big way. When we discovered cocaine, that was another wonderful thing.

“We’d sit there waffling our fucking brains out about how we were going to conquer the world, talking horse shit for three days, and end up with a jaw ache, waiting for the next Valium to bring you down.”

As Ozzy makes clear, the drug issues at the heart of the band’s implosion weren’t his alone. Iommi, bass guitarist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward were equally culpable.

“I can’t change it, but there are things I would have done differently,” Iommi told the BBC in 2013 of his own substance abuse. “Had I known the things I know now, I certainly wouldn’t have dabbled to that extent.”

Asked whether he agreed with Ozzy’s assertion that “cocaine was the cancer of the band,” Iommi didn’t hesitate.

“It was, absolutely,” he said. “Initially, we thought it was great, and it helped us create. But at the end of the day, when it came to the point where we had to replace Ozzy, we were in a bad way. It did a lot of damage.”

Iommi later described firing the founding member and two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer as “awful.” But in 1990 — seven years before the classic lineup officially reunited — Ozzy was still eager to call out what he saw as rank hypocrisy.

“It was ironic that the three of them fired me because I’m drunk all the time,” he said. “Tony’s locked himself away in his room with his bag of Quaaludes and a fucking vase of cocaine. And he’s got Bill come and fire me, and he’s got a can of Budweiser in his hand, because I was always getting drunk [laughs].

“As I look back, it’s funny now — you know, the pot calling the kettle black.”

Heavy metal history, however, may owe something to those chaotic years. Without his firing, Ozzy Osbourne might never have launched his solo career — certainly not with Randy Rhoads by his side — and his story would have unfolded very differently.

Ozzy was recently the subject of an all-star tribute at the Grammys, while Lita Ford has recalled the time the Prince of Darkness came to her family home for Easter lunch.

As the low-end architect for Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler laid down the bass guitar lines that birthed heavy metal.

Yet, for a man who pioneered some of rock’s most formidable music, nothing struck terror into his soul quite like the prospect of angry Irish Catholic parents.

The band had already survived Tony Iommi’s nearly career-ending accident and brief, departure to play electric guitar with Jethro Tull. But when their self-titled debut dropped on Friday the 13th in February 1970, it carried a surprise that nearly gave Butler a heart attack.

As Butler told Steel City Con, the sleeve artwork was designed without the band’s input. And when he got a look at it, he was shocked to his core.

“We only saw it the day before it came out,” Butler said. “And in England, it was a gatefold cover. When you opened it, there was an inverted cross on the inside.

“And I went, ‘Oh no! If my dad sees this, he's gonna kill me!’

“My parents were ultra-Catholics, and I was still living at home at the time. So I sort of preempted them and left home. I just couldn't let them see the album cover.”

Butler also revealed the event that caused them to change their name from Earth to Black Sabbath.

“We turned up at this one gig, and it was all these old women and old men with suits and party dresses on,” he said. “We started playing all this heavy stuff, and a guy came up, and said, 'Stop! You're not Earth!’

“Apparently, there was another Earth, and they had a pop song in the charts. He said, ‘Here's your money, now piss off!’

“So, we knew that we had to change the name, and we'd just written the first song called Black Sabbath. And I said, 'Let's just call the band Black Sabbath,' and that was it.”

In related news, Tony Iommi, who promises that his highly anticipated solo album will be released in 2026, has been gifted a one-of-a-kind Red Special guitar from his friend, Brian May.

He's also spoken about the guitar he always coveted but could never get along with, facilitating his all-important switch to the SG.

Queen guitarist Brian May has gifted Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi a left-handed model of his Red Special replica that merges elements of the two guitarist's custom guitars.

Built by master builder Andrew Guyton, the electric guitar was placed in Iommi’s hands last week, which led to his celebratory Instagram post over the weekend.

“Huge thanks to my best friend @brianmayforreal and master builder Andrew Guyton @guyton_guitars for this incredible left-handed Red Special replica,” Iommi wrote on Instagram. “Andrew personally delivered it last week — a true gift from Brian, two years in the making. Christmas came early! 🎸🎄 - Tony

“Andrew said ‘It’s built with the exact vintage construction of Brian May’s original Red Special, but shaped to match Tony’s iconic Jaydee Old Boy neck. Features a built-in treble booster and authentic vintage-style pots and pickups to replicate the classic tone.’”

The original Red Special was built by May and his father in the early 1960s and became a key part of Queen’s sound and identity.

In creating Iommi’s guitar, Guyton carefully matched the neck profile of Iommi’s Jaydee Old Boy electric, the custom guitar built between 1975 and 1978 by John Diggins, the founder of JayDee Custom Guitars as a successor to Iommi’s original Gibson “Monkey” and black John Birch SG. The Monkey was itself a heavily modified Gibson SG Special that defined the sound of the early Black Sabbath albums, which in turn became a hallmark of the heavy metal genre.

Iommi and May’s friendship goes back decades and began out of mutual respect — Iommi has been a fan of May’s guitar sound, and May has rightfully recognized Iommi as the father of heavy metal. May has called Iommi his "dearest friend in the business,” while Iommi has dubbed May a "rock god.”

Although the duo have never released an album together, Iommi appeared at the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert to perform on "I Want It All" and "Stone Cold Crazy,” while May has played on Iommi’s self-titled 2000 solo album.

“I've never wanted to be a conventional guitarist in any way,” Adam Jones tells Guitar Player. “When I started playing guitar, my heroes were all about riffs, not leads.

“Then I got into more experimental players, such as David Sylvian, Robert Fripp, and Steve Howe. But I also liked Devo and Brian Eno.

“At the time, it seemed like everyone else was playing lead guitar, and I just got sick of it. I never went down that path myself.”

Speaking to the magazine in 2001, shortly after Tool released their groundbreaking and hugely influential album Lateralus, the reclusive guitarist discussed his methods for defying convention, whether by using alternate tunings, or employing unusual devices to create sounds with his guitar that have never been heard before.

“I just do what I do best, which is try to take Tool to the next level,” he said. “I’m always thinking of something new I can add in. I like to do volume swells with delay to create ambient sounds. I'll scrape the strings of my guitar with various things, and I place electronic devices over the pickups to get weird sounds.

“I get a lot of cool sounds out of an Epilady. It uses a spinning wire — almost like a guitar string — to rip the hair off a woman's legs. I place it over the pickups and control the speed of the motor by keeping my thumb on the coil.

“I got the idea from Dave Navarro, who I once saw perform a solo with a vibrator when he was in Jane's Addiction. I thought that was so cool. And then I started listening to German industrial bands like Einsturzende Neubauten, who use crazy stuff on their instruments to take their sound to another place. So I'll buy a bunch of toys, rip the guts out, and use the motors to make some noises.”

Remarkably, Jones songwriting craft begins with a staple known to most guitarists: blues scales.

“The best guitar parts I write come from noodling,” he said. “I’ll sit at home watching TV with a guitar in my hands, and just start playing a riff over and over. It's weird. A lot of the stuff I do comes from blues scales.

”My stuff usually starts off as these 4/4 things based on traditional guitar riffs, and then they morph into something that's kind of way out there. But it's good to have a launching point to evolve from.”

A key to his approach is his way of thinking about each song. Rather than dissecting a tune into its various parts — verses, choruses, bridges, solos and breakdowns — Jones thinks of them as a film director might… albeit it a film director who is also a massively talented electric guitar player.

“I think visually when I play guitar,” he reveals. “I look at each song as a little film. I like to start with an opening shot, and then segue into different scenes. I like to drift off in the middle, go somewhere totally unexpected, and then have everything resolve itself in the end. It's a whole experimental journey.”

To create those moods, he’ll often try drop tunings.

“I use drop-D because I like to have an evil tone, and I can get a lot of weird sounds and textures by simply moving my fingers around,” he says. “After I had been playing drop-D for a while, I started doing drop-B, and then, on the song ‘Parabola,’ I tried drop-B/E. It's normal 440 tuning, but the E string is dropped to B and the A string is dropped to E. It's even more evil-sounding than drop-D.”

He says he discovered drop-B/E tuning after recording “Prison Sex,” from the band's 1993 album, Undertow. That song is in drop-B, he says, “and I just wondered how the E would sound next to the low B.”

And while he says “I’ve tried DADGAD and tuning all the strings to the same note,” in the end, “I always go back to the dropped tunings.”

Jones traces his love of drop tunings back to none other than metal’s godfather: Black Sabbath co-founder Tony Iommi.

“It's why I'm obsessed with drop D,” Jones told Guitar World in June 2025. “The stuff he did — the tone, the playing the notes and then pulling off, you know, the open D, or whatever tuning they had that's comparable — it was just haunting, and the riffs were so good. I could play them, but there's a vibe, and it's wonderful. And if you don't hear it in Tool, you probably aren't really into Black Sabbath.”

Jones also credits Iommi’s creative approach to the instrument, which was required after the guitarist injured his fretting fingers in an industrial accident. He subsequently had to craft leather fingertip covers and play a Gibson SG with light strings tuned down a full step and, later, a step and a half. It gave classic Sabbath songs like "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” “Faeries Wear Boots” and “Iron Man” their doomy tones. But that quality was also down to Iommi’s unique vision as a guitarist.

“It's his emotion and his approach,” Jones says. “Maybe there's stuff he can do with his handicap that other people can't. It's fascinating. It just goes to those things where there's some stuff they can't teach in school. You have to experience it. You have to feel it. You have to do it on your own. It's nothing that you're gonna learn in a book."

Tony Iommi had a dream guitar when he was growing up. Years would go by before he had a chance to get his hands on one, only to find he couldn't play it.

Today, Iommi is intimately linked with the Gibson SG, the symmetrical electric guitar also favored by AC/DC’s Angus Young. But he actually started his career with a Fender Stratocaster, the guitar he played during his short-lived spell in Jethro Tull.

Three years before then, he'd nearly given up the instrument entirely after suffering a horrific hand injury. While working in a sheet-metal factory in the heart of industrial Birmingham, Iommi lost the tips of two of his fretting hand fingers in a gruesome accident. Afterward, he was told he would never play guitar again.

The oft-repeated story goes that the factory's foreman visited Iommi at his home and put on a record by jazz guitar player Django Reinhardt, who was famously virtuosic despite having lost the use of the fourth and fifth fingers on his fretting hand in a fire. That encouraged Iommi to play on, but try as he might, his injury prevented him from playing the guitar he'd dream of owning: a Gibson Les Paul.

“I always wanted a Les Paul, but I couldn't play it because of my accident,” he confessed during a press event relaunching his signature Gibson humbuckers. “I couldn't get up my top frets.”

By then he had long made his peace playing the SG, a guitar he said “suited me perfectly.”

Iommi had intended to launch Black Sabbath's career with his Stratocaster and had even recorded "Wicked World," from their self-titled 1969 album, using the guitar. However, a happy accident changed the course of history. The Stratocaster's pickups broke down, and Iommi's backup guitar, an SG recently acquired in a dodgy car park swap, was put into action. Afterward, Iommi never looked back.

“The SG for me was comfortable,” he says. “I liked the shape, the weight, and eventually a ton of people started using it, because everybody would want a Les Paul in the early days, that was always the best.”

By 1970, he had a Custom Shop model, complete with a trio of humbuckers and a Maestro Vibrola bridge. The guitar made an appearance on Sabbath's Top of the Pops performance that year, but it was stolen soon afterward while Iommi was at a hotel.

Speaking at Gibson's press event, Iommi also attributed his pivot away from the Les Paul to a common complaint: “It was too heavy.” The SG, on the other hand, has been “perfect for me,” he said.

All those twists of fate — the accident, the changes they forced on his guitar playing, and his switch to the SG — played a role in Black Sabbath's sound and its impact on heavy metal.

But there was another key element: a modded Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster. The pedal — the same model used by Brian May and Rory Gallagher — had been tweaked by a friend of Sabbath drummer Bill Ward to make it produce even more sustain.

“Other guitarists would say, ‘You can’t put that in front of the amplifier, you’re gonna overload it.’ And I would say, ‘I know — that’s what I want it to do!’” he joked in 2017. “That’s the sound you hear on the early Sabbath albums that everyone loves.”

However, like his Custom Shop SG, the Rangemaster was also on borrowed time as part of Iommi's rig.

“I hired a guy to rebuild all my amps, and believe it or not, he found it in my trunk and threw it away,” he exclaims. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Since no one knew what modifications were made to it, which has ultimately given the box far more sustain, a key part of his guitar tone was lost forever.

Tony Iommi has spoken publicly for the first time since Ozzy Osbourne’s passing, and said he believes the singer was committed to putting everything he had left into Black Sabbath’s final show, even if it would be the death of him.

Osbourne died a little more than two weeks after the Back to the Beginning concert. The blockbuster show was arranged as a final send-off for both Black Sabbath, who performed with original drummer Bill Ward for the first time in nearly 20 years, and Ozzy Osbourne, the solo artist. Playing to a sold-out Villa Park in their hometown of Birmingham, coupled with livestream ticket sales, raised $190 million for charity.

Much of the buildup to the show was dominated by question marks hanging over the heads of Ozzy, Ward, and their ailing health. Ozzy hadn't performed at his Rock Hall induction last November and remained seated on a throne throughout. He later said he would only be “doing little bits and pieces” in Birmingham.

“The worrying thing for me is the unknown,” Iommi had said. “We don't know what's going to happen.”

Yet, Iommi says that despite having the odds stacked against him, the vocalist did everything in his power to ensure the show went ahead with him front and center.

“I think he must have had something in his head that said, ‘Well, this is gonna be it, the last thing I’m ever gonna do,’” he tells U.K. broadcaster ITV. “Whether he thought he was gonna die or what, I don’t know. But he really wanted to do it; he was determined to do it. And fair dues, he’d done it.”

“I think he really just held out to do that show. I really feel — me and Geezer were talking about it — that we think he held out to do it, and just after that, he’s done it and said goodbye to the fans. And that was the end of it.”

Iommi also revealed that the band had done as much as they could to limit his involvement in rehearsals to avoid taking too much out of the 76-year-old, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2019.

“He’s not looked well through the rehearsals. We didn’t want him there every day, because it’s too much. He just wouldn’t be able to stand it,” he details. “So they’d bring him in and he’d sit down and sing a few songs, and then we’d talk about some rubbish old times or whatever, have a laugh, and then he’d go.

“The gig was for him, really, and for us, to say goodbye. It was the end of the band, and to have Bill drum with us as well after all these years. I can’t believe it’s 20 years, to be honest.”

Ozzy may have gotten his final wish of saying goodbye to his fans the proper way, especially considering that Sabbath’s 2016-17 The End tour happened without Ward, and that his farewell No More Tours II run was ultimately axed amid ongoing health concerns. But Iommi could sense that he wanted to give me than he was able to.

“I think he was moved and frustrated as well, ’cause he wanted to stand up. You could see he was trying to get up. But it meant everything to him. This is what we built up for, for that big ending where he could see all the people and we could all see all the people, and close it in that way.

“[After the show], he came around before he was leaving on a wheelchair that brought him in to say goodbye and have a little chat,” he adds. “And he seemed all right. He enjoyed it. And he said, ‘Oh, it went all right, didn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it did.’”

Just a few days ago, Ozzy had texted the guitarist saying he was feeling extreme fatigue. But the guitarist didn’t see his death coming.

“It was a shock for us,” he says. “When I heard yesterday, it couldn’t sink in. I thought, It can’t be. I only had a text from him the day before. It just seemed unreal, surreal. In the night, I started thinking about it: God, am I dreaming all this? We didn’t expect him to go that quickly.”

Tributes to the singer have continued to pour in from around the world, with Slash guitarist Frank Sidoris sharing a letter he received from the metal icon after his failed audition in 2017.

“[The letter] proves that he was truly everything that you would hope he was as a person,” he says. “It was an honor to be in his welcoming presence and feel his genuine warmth in person.”

As he proved once more at Back to the Beginning, where he performed a double shift by shredding with Ozzy and Pantera, Zakk Wylde is a versatile musician with a deep-rooted appreciation of the classics.

Having already shared his personal riff rundown with Guitar Player, Zakk Wylde sat down with Metal Hammer to discuss the greatest songs ever written, and locked in on a collection of riffs that underpin the history of rock guitar.

His first pick goes right back to the start of most players’ electric guitar journey.

“I think all us rock and metal guys have to learn ‘Smoke on the Water,’” he begins, believing that mastering its double-stop shifts is a rite of passage. “As soon as you hear that riff, it's just like Wow! The simplicity and power is just amazing.”

(I’m sure this writer wasn’t alone in first learning it the easy way — all on the low E string — but Simon McBride, who replaced Steve Morse in Deep Purple in 2022, says many guitarists are actually playing the song wrong.)

For Wylde, the riff also shows why guitarists should put songwriting, rather than outright showboating, first.

“For me, it was Sabbath first, and then I found Zeppelin and Deep Purple,” he says of his earliest rock discoveries. “And aside from the great musicianship of all three bands, they have great songs, they have iconic riffs.”

Another undeniable classic is one he has played countless times in front of an unfathomable amount of people since becoming Ozzy's foil in 1987: Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

“You can play these riffs on one string — that's how iconic and classic they are,” he explains. “The great thing about Ozzy's singing is that, if the riff is powerful, he'll sing along with it.”

Discussing the origins of the riff with Guitar Player, Tony Iommi said the idea came from Bill Ward’s kick drum.

“I was in a rehearsal room, and Bill started playing this boom, boom, boom,” he recalled. “To the guitarist, the pounding sounded ominous. “In my head, I could hear it as a monster.”

The fact that Ozzy lifts the guitar melody for the vocals is inspired, not lazy. It showcases one of his greatest strengths as a songwriter.

“From all the years of me playing with Oz, whether it was ‘Miracle Man,’ ‘Crazy Babies,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘No More Tears’ or ‘Mama I'm Coming Home,’ it would always be the first thing that came to his head,” he explains. “Very rarely did he go, ‘I've gotta come up with something better.’

“It's mindblowing; he really is the king of melody. Maybe it's because of his love of the Beatles; because Oz wouldn't know if it's major or minor — he'd just like the sound of it.”

The guitarist also believes “Jimmy Page could have quit right after ‘Rain Song’: That’s lights out, game over right there with the tuning and composition.”

He adds that Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” was “a big deal when I learned it,” praising its chord-based composition rather than turning to the iconic guitarist's more fretboard-burning creations.

The quintet of Zakk-approved tunes is rounded out by AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” a riff that had a much younger version of the guitarist stumped when he first tried to master it.

“I was able to play the chords, but I couldn't play to lick,” he reveals. Eventually he can't the hang of it. “You’ve gotta do a little by day by day: put another brick on the empire. Then I could play along to the record like, ‘Oh my god, this sounds amazing.’”

In related news, Wylde has recalled his audition for Ozzy's band, what surprised him about other candidates, and the strange gear quirks that the singer had when it came to writing riffs for him

He could have added another sterling name to his already-stacked resume, but says a Guns N' Roses audition lost him his place in Ozzy's band and sidelined his career.

Last year, he dished out his hacks for more creative guitar playing, and it’s a trick that has been the foundation of his career.

Jake E. Lee’s appearance at Back to the Beginning over this past weekend didn’t go entirely to plan, but he isn’t bothered about that. The spot rounded out a powerful full-circle moment for a guitarist who had an uphill battle to be fit for the show. He was simply “thrilled” to be part of.

Lee had huge shoes to fill when he became Ozzy’s second full-time guitarist in 1983, following the untimely death of Randy Rhoads, with Bernie Tormé and Brad Gillis populating the interim. And it was a job made even more daunting, considering he had to handle some of Tony Iommi’s most iconic riffs to boot.

While Rudy Sarzo says Rhoads was “too creative” to play songs like “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” verbatim, Lee was happy to tow the party line. He wanted to honor the “evil” tonality of the original parts.

“He bends so it’s not quite in pitch. It just made it sound so much better,” he tells Guitar World of Iommi’s innovative playing style. “There are things like that that I found challenging.

“Where did he come up with all those riffs? It’s not human. It’s unfathomable!

“I joined in the middle of the Speak of the Devil tour. Half of the set was Black Sabbath, and half was the stuff with Randy, so I just tried to get as close as I could,” he adds.

“One of my favorite Ozzy stories was from that tour,” Lee then says. “We were doing ‘War Pigs.’ It’s the first verse and Ozzy looks at me and mouths, ‘What are the words?’ I knew the words, but he stumped me. I didn’t want to say the wrong words, so I just said, ‘I don’t know…’

“So he started singing ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm!’

“It worked perfectly! It was like, ‘Old MacDonald haaaad a faaarm, he had some pigs with an oink oink here, and an oink oink therrrrrre.’”

Lee says he grew up a “snob” who initially felt rock music was “stupid.” Then Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” turned his head, and from there Iommi’s influence was everything.

“It was huge,” he says. “I saved up my money to where I could finally buy a [Gibson] SG, and that was because of him. I wanted to sound like him. Tone-wise, to this day, Tony Iommi is my greatest inspiration.

“Every time I’m trying to set my stuff up to get the sound right, I play ‘War Pigs.’ If I can sound anything close to what he sounded like on that, I’m going with it.”

After two albums by Ozzy Osbourne’s side, a stint that saw him pen setlist staples like “Bark At The Moon”, and “Shot in the Dark”, Lee was let go in 1987.

When the guitarist was shot multiple times last year, it was revealed that he and Ozzy hadn’t spoken for 37 years. That made Tom Morello’s insistence on Lee playing a starring role at Back to the Beginning all the more poignant. But preparing for the show wasn’t easy.

Lee says he planned to perform “Bark at the Moon” at the show, but the task was made difficult due to arthritis in his left hand and damage to his left arm from the shooting. Instead, flanked by an all-star cast, he tackled “The Ultimate Sin” and — perhaps too close for comfort — “Shot in the Dark”.

The first tune saw him team up with Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, Nuno Bettencourt, ex-Megadeth bass player David Ellefson, Mike Bordin, and Adam Wakeman, while Disturbed's David Draiman fronted the latter. The slower, more forgiving tracks still gave him plenty of opportunity to stamp his authority all over the songs.

For a guitarist blighted by injuries, the chance to help his biggest guitar hero, and cross paths with Ozzy for the first time in nearly four decades, proved too alluring to retire from. The fact that he even made it at all is something of a miracle; the fact that he played two songs on the night before 45,000 screaming fans and millions more via a live stream makes for a lesson in perseverance. To echo Morello's sentiment, the show wouldn't have been the same without him.

Black Sabbath’s blockbuster final show, Back to the Beginning, is only a day away, with half the metal world descending on England’s second-largest city ahead of the event. However, Zakk Wylde, who is set to play a starring role in the event, isn’t fully convinced this is really the end.

For one thing, Sabbath (minus drummer Bill Ward) had supposedly written their final chapter in 2017, with a tour called The End.

For another, Ozzy initially retired in 1992 with the No More Tours road show, only to change his mind. He tried again in 2018 with No More Tours II, but never finished due to his health issues and the COVID pandemic.

The band members' habit of changing their minds makes Wylde hopeful that Back to the Beginning won't be the end of things.

In fact, Wylde, who joined Ozzy’s band in 1987, believes the success of Saturday’s festivities may whet appetites for more.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, he says, “I’m sure the promoters are going to go, ‘Wow, that was pretty amazing. Let’s do another world tour right now.’”

If that were to happen, Wylde has an idea how the band could move forward. Fans may recall that when Ozzy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a second time, in 2024, he sat on a gothic-as-hell throne to accommodate his mobility issues. That, Wylde says, could provide the solution that allows future shows.

“If Oz sounds great [and] if he wants to continue carrying on singing on a throne, we’ll just make the throne so it goes out over the audience,” Wylde says. “It shoots fire and water and dragons come out of it. And we’ll make the throne part of the show. It’d be amazing.

“Why not?” he adds. “I really think it would be great. If they do this Sabbath thing and it sounds amazing, and the only difference is Oz is just sitting down, why not? You know every promoter’s just got their fingers crossed on this one.”

Interestingly, bassist Geezer Butler's thoughts align with Wylde’s thinking, and he isn’t ruling out future shows.

“Every time I think or say it’s over, things like this show come along,” he reasons. “Someone will probably have our DNA and resurrect us in the distant future… Who knows?”

In related news, Tony Iommi says preparations for the show have gone well, but he notes that everyone is on edge about the event.

"We're all nervous really,” he told BBC Midlands Today. "People are coming from all over the world and I just can't absorb it.

"I wouldn't say it's been easy. It's been tough, because none of us are getting younger and to stand there for a couple of hours is tiring.”

Maybe everyone can have a throne?

When the original Black Sabbath reunite to perform their final live gig on July 5 in Birmingham, England, a lot of guitar history will be onstage with them. As the band’s founding guitarist, Tony Iommi forged the sound of heavy metal more than 50 years ago, setting in motion an entire genre full of downtuned doomy riffs.

But creating that signature sound was a process of trial and error that began when the left-handed guitarist lost the tips of his fretting hand’s middle and ring fingers in a factory accident. Inspired by Django Reinhardt, who continued playing after losing his ring and little finger in a fire, Iommi soldiered on, making prosthetic fingertips from a plastic bottle of Fairy dish detergent, then gluing leather onto the plastic to help it grab the strings.

The tips have to be re-created on a regular basis. And as he told Guitar Player in his cover feature for our January 2010 issue, not just any leather will do.

“The leather I use is from a jacket I bought in Toronto 35 years ago, which was old when I got it,” he explained. “I’ve been cutting little pieces from it all these years because it is just the right type of leather for the thimbles. I’ve tried newer leather and it doesn’t work because it grips the strings too much.

“I put little pieces on the tips of the thimbles, and then rub the surfaces down on a mirror or something so that the leather bonds in, and I also rub the edges down so that they don’t catch on my other fingers.

“It would probably be a classic now if I hadn’t cut it up,” he said with a laugh.

“But yeah, it’s been a useful jacket, and I’m going to have to find another one at some point.”

While the leather-covered thimbles were themselves instrumental to Iommi’s sound, he initially made a number of mods to his Fender Stratocaster to simplify playing, then carried them over to his Gibson SG when he switched electric guitar models.

“I began experimenting while I was still playing my Strat. I used to have it in bits constantly, with the neck off, and was always doing something to it. It was all a matter of trial and error to find ways to make it more comfortable for me to play given my limitations,” he said.

“I had the frets taken down, I had polyurethane put on the fretboard so that the thimbles wouldn’t catch on the frets and rip the leather, and I used really light-gauge strings. I even put scalloped fretboards on a few guitars, but I wound up changing them back because I couldn’t keep the guitars in tune.”

He also bypassed the bridge pickup’s tone control. “I had it wired straight through from just the volume control. The tone control on the neck pickup was still connected. The reason I bypassed the other tone control was that I used to keep knocking the thing off with my hand, so I just had it wired on and said, ‘That’s my sound and that’s it.’

“I’m pretty basic in that way — I don’t use a lot of gadgetry and whatnot. Some people put a million pedals out there and create the sound like that, but I like to create it from the guitar tone.”

But there is one pedal that was a key ingredient of that early Sabbath sound: a modified Dallas Rangemaster Treble Booster. The pedal is the same one preferred by Rory Gallagher, who in turn inspired Brian May to make it part of his signature sound.

Iommi added the pedal to his rig in the late 1960s while performing with Sabbath drummer Bill Ward in the band Rare Breed.

“I had one in the late ’60s, and while I was playing in a band with Bill Ward this guy who played in another band with Bill said to me, ‘I can make that sound better for you,’ so I let him take it and when he brought it back it had a lot more sustain. I used it on all the early Sabbath stuff, right up until Heaven and Hell.”

As Iommi explained to Guitar World’s former editor-in-chief Brad Tolinski in 2017, the modifications gave the pedal more gain, allowing Iommi to push his Laney amp into overdrive.

“Other guitarists would say, ‘You can’t put that in front of the amplifier, you’re gonna overload it.’ And I would say, ‘I know — that’s what I want it to do!’ And that’s the sound you hear on the early Sabbath albums that everyone loves.”

In addition, Iommi told Guitar Player, “I ran the modified Treble Booster into the bass input of my Laney amp and it created my sound. Without it, the early Laneys were underpowered.”

But all that extra gain could be difficult to control.

“The Treble Booster was noisy, though, and caused a lot of problems, particularly in the early days when we were touring in the U.S.,” Iommi explained.

“For example, we played at an ice hockey rink in Philadelphia called the Spectrum, and all the machines that kept the ice frozen affected the Treble Booster so I got this horrendous buzzing sound. We did actually cancel some gigs because of the noise, because I couldn’t get my sound without using the Rangemaster.”

But in 1979, Iommi’s Rangemaster — the key to his tone on classic cuts like “Iron Man” and “Paranoid” — suddenly disappeared.

“I hired a guy to rebuild all my amps and believe it or not he found it in my trunk and threw it away! I couldn’t believe it,” Iommi said.

Unfortunately, no one had ever bothered to see what modifications had been made to the pedal.

“And since I didn’t know which components had been changed, I’ve never been able to reproduce it.”

If there’s one other pedal that was essential to the early Sabbath sound, it’s the Tycobrahe Parapedal wah.

“We used to use Tycobrahe sound gear and at one point they made a small number of these pedals and gave me a few of them,” Iommi explained. “Hendrix or somebody like that had one, so I tried one and liked it.

“In those days it was hard to get a pedal that could take a lot of power and not be too noisy, and that one worked well, so I just stuck with it. Soon they went out of production and now they are hard to find, so although I’ve still got the old ones, now I use the Chicago Iron Parachute Wah, which is an exact copy.

“Why do I like them? I just like the character of them I suppose. But I still like to try different stuff.”

As Black Sabbath prepare to take the stage one last time, Iommi has admitted this final act in the group’s history is giving him a mix of feelings.

“Excitement mixed with fear” is how he describes it. While the event — dubbed Back to the Beginning — is expected to be a massive celebration of Sabbath’s legacy, Iommi says the unpredictability makes him nervous.

Unlike the band’s typical tours, which involved extensive rehearsals and a tightly controlled environment, this one-off event is full of moving parts, from a star-studded lineup to technical demands and the uncertain physical condition of frontman Ozzy Osbourne, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2020.

“The worrying thing for me is the unknown,” he tells Music Week. “We don't know what's going to happen.

“You're used to Ozzy running around, but he certainly won't be doing that for this show,” Iommi says. “I don't know if he's going to be standing or sitting on a throne or what.”

Back to the Beginning will be available as a global livestream.

Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne may have drawn a line in the sand when insisting that Back to the Beginning will be Black Sabbath's final ever show, but bass player Geezer Butler isn't towing the party line.

The Tom Morello–curated event, which brings together a litany of heavy metal greats across generations, from Metallica to Pantera, and Gojira, is the band’s second bow. The End tour wrapped in February 2017 in their hometown of Birmingham, U.K., but over the intervening years, multiple members expressed their desire to resurrect the group in some capacity.

After years of speculation, Back to the Beginning reunites the band’s classic lineup of Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, who was absent from their 2012 reunion, for the first time in 19 years.

Iommi, who has voiced his concerns about the ailing health of both Ozzy and Butler in the build-up to the show, has told MOJO, “I won’t be doing it again.” That comes in sharp contrast to his bass player’s comments.

Speaking in the same interview, Butler says he’s “given up talking about the end of Sabbath,” because, as history has already proved, the end has never been that.

“Every time I think or say it’s over, things like this show come along,” he reasons. “Someone will probably have our DNA and resurrect us in the distant future… Who knows?”

Ozzy is forced to play a limited role on the night due to his declining health. In February, he revealed that he would only be doing “bits and pieces” with a host of big-name vocalists set to fill his shoes for certain songs. Sammy Hagar has already confirmed which song he’ll be singing.

Indeed, health issues are a major talking point as the show draws ever closer. Jake E. Lee is set to feature in Ozzy’s solo set, coming as his final show in that guise too, after being forced to cancel his No More Tours II dates. Lee’s appearance comes 38 years after being dismissed from the Prince of Darkness’ band, but he may not be physically able to play his preferred song.

Despite Ozzy's penchant for retiring and un-retiring, the singer, in a separate MOJO interview, insists this is the end. Even if Butler thinks otherwise.

“After this show, I’m going home, closing the door, and will look back upon the great career I’ve had,” he insists. “But I’m done, done, done! You gotta know when to call it quits.”

Whether or not Back to the Beginning is Sabbath's swan song, Morello wants the show to be one for the history books.

“The idea of the show,” he tells Guitar Player. “Is to curate the greatest day in the history of heavy metal for the greatest band in the history of heavy metal.”

“Metal is the music that made me love music,” he adds. “It was the metal posters on my walls and the metal riffs that I learned first that made me love playing guitar and want to be a musician. It’s a debt that I owe.”

Iommi will be bringing down the curtain on a career that changed the course of heavy music forever, but one that saw him fighting with Black Sabbath's (1970) producer to keep their heavy sound.

The record may have also sounded very different if not for a “dodgy” car park guitar swap that saw him ditch the Fender Strat for his now fabled Gibson SG.

The end of the classic Black Sabbath lineup was difficult for all involved. Left without a band, Ozzy Osbourne had to build a new career from the ground up. As for Tony Iommi and the rest of Sabbath, they were left rudderless as they searched for another singer to lead them into a new era.

Ozzy found his answer in of Randy Rhoads , a young, talented guitarist he hired after bassist Bob Daisley had a premonition he’d lead the group to greatness.

Sabbath, meanwhile, turned to five-foot-four powerhouse vocalist Ronnie James Dio, who had just been fired from Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow and was down on his luck. After a serendipitous meetup at L.A.'s Rainbow bar brought them together, Iommi and Dio forged an instant musical connection when, at their first jam session, they wrote "Children of the Sea," one of the key tracks from 1980's Heaven and Hell , Black Sabbath's first album without Osbourne.

Though the task of winning over the Ozzy faithful fanbase wasn't going to be easy, Dio's vocal talents helped launch Sabbath to their highest chart position since 1975's Sabotage, outdone only by the monster catalog albums Paranoid and Master of Reality.

Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who was Iommi’s best man when he married Susan Snowden in 1973, was one of those many fans impressed by what Dio brought to the band. However, his habit of straight-talking caused him to put his foot in his mouth when he intended to flatter Dio. It was left to Iommi to prevent the diminutive Dio from tearing into the much larger Bonham.

“Yeah, there was some kind of a word,” Iommi admitted when asked about the kerfuffle while being interviewed by Bill Burr in 2011. “John came to the gig when we played at Hammersmith in London. And we were going to go out after the show to a bar.”

According to a Black Sabbath fan site, the band played four consecutive nights at London's Hammersmith Odeon between May 7 and 10, 1980, with Girlschool in tow. It's not clear which night Bonham attended, but it was in the English capitol that his remarks were taken in the wrong light.

“John's drinking on the side of the stage, drinking Guinness,” Iommi says, coloring the scene. “We came offstage, and as we walked past John, John said to me, ‘Oh, man, he's got a great voice for a midget.’ And, of course, Ronnie heard that, and he didn't really like that.

“He actually meant, 'What a little body, and he's got a big voice!'” the guitarist explains, interpreting Bonham’s poorly dressed pleasantries. “But the way he said it…

"Of course, Ronnie popped up and… I won't repeat what he said. They were gonna fight.”

Suddenly, Iommi found himself at the center of the ruckus and astutely defused the situation by telling the pair to “just get along.” Eloquently put. Tragically, Bonham would pass just months later, on September 25, 1980, the victim of too much drink.

Black Sabbath are set for one last hurrah at Villa Park next month, as the Tom Morello-curated Back to the Beginning farewell gig finally comes around.

However, Iommi has voiced his concerns over the health of Ozzy and Geezer Butler ahead of the show.

As Black Sabbath prepares to take the stage one last time, founding members Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler are confronting a mix of anticipation, uncertainty and fear. The band’s farewell performance — set for July 5 at Birmingham’s Villa Park — marks the final chapter in the career of the pioneering metal group, and the emotional weight of that moment is not lost on its legendary guitarist and bassist.

“Excitement mixed with fear” is how Iommi describes his current state of mind. While the event — dubbed Back to the Beginning — is expected to be a massive celebration of Sabbath’s legacy, Iommi admits that the unpredictability of the night is what's keeping him up at night.

“The worrying thing for me is the unknown,” he tells Music Week. “We don't know what's going to happen.”

Unlike the band’s typical tours, which involved extensive rehearsals and a tightly controlled environment, this one-off event is full of moving parts, from a star-studded lineup to technical demands and the uncertain physical condition of frontman Ozzy Osbourne, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2020.

“Normally, when we'd tour, we'd rehearse and run through the thing for a while, and it's just us,” Iommi says. “But with this event, there are so many other moving parts.”

Adding to the pressure is the fact that this will be the first time the classic Sabbath lineup — Osbourne, Iommi, Butler and drummer Bill Ward — has performed together since 2005. While fans are eager to see the reunion, Iommi is keenly aware of the stakes.

“This would be a big, monumental thing if it all comes good,” he says.

The guitarist is also candid about the limitations they’re working with, particularly Ozzy’s health, which will prevent him from performing a full set. “You're used to Ozzy running around, but he certainly won't be doing that for this show,” Iommi says. “I don't know if he's going to be standing or sitting on a throne or what.”

Whatever happens, the event will serve a good cause, as all profits from the concert will be donated to Cure Parkinson's, Birmingham Children's Hospital, and Acorn Children's Hospice.

And while fans may still cling to the hope of another tour or surprise show, Iommi is unequivocal: “It’s absolutely the end,” he says. “This show has come up because of the situation [with Osbourne’s illness] and because it’s a charity thing. But there’s no way we could go out and do a tour.”

But the gravity of the final performance is perhaps felt most acutely by bassist Geezer Butler, who has admitted to having nightmares in the lead-up to the show. “I’m already having palpitations,” he confessed to The Guardian this past May. “In fact, I had a nightmare last night. I dreamed everything went wrong onstage and we all turned to dust.”

For Butler, the fear is rooted in the desire to leave the right final impression. “It’s important that we leave a great impression, since it’s the final time that people will experience us live. So it has to be great on the night.”

Despite the anxiety, the band remains committed to giving fans one final, unforgettable Sabbath experience. The Back to the Beginning concert will also feature a roster of metal’s biggest names — including Metallica, Tool, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, and more—paying tribute to the godfathers of the genre.

Musical direction will be handled by Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello — who has revealed his role in getting Black Sabbath back together for one final time — with special appearances from Ozzy guitarist Zakk Wylde, Billy Corgan, Fred Durst, and others.

For Iommi and Butler, however, the spectacle takes a back seat to a deeper emotional truth: this final performance is not just an ending — it’s a leap into the unknown, with all the fear that comes with it.

Both men have been with Black Sabbath from before the beginning, when the quartet was known as Earth. Following Iommi’s brief stint with Jethro Tull, the quartet regrouped as Black Sabbath.

Iommi would make one more change: After an early attempt at using a Fender Stratocaster, he began a career-long relationship with the Gibson SG, resulting in the distinctive electric guitar tone that — together with Butler’s bass — defined Black Sabbath’s sound through its years with classic tracks like “Iron Man,” “Paranoid” and “War Pigs.”

Back to the Beginning will be available as a global livestream.

What does it take to play guitar for Jethro Tull? It’s a fair question, so we asked the man in charge—who’s out front with a flute and, sometimes, one of his rare, vintage Martin acoustic guitars—one Mr. Ian Anderson.

And he gave it to us straight. First up, the 77-year-old tells Guitar Player, “I don’t think I would want to have a guitar player whose sole interest and influence was Black, American folk music.”

That checks out, given that this is the same fella who penned “Aqualung” and “Locomotive Breath,” which saw him handle the bulk of the rock tune’s guitar duties with a Les Paul But early Tull recordings—specifically the ones with Mick Abrahams, who went on to form the blues-laden Blodwyn Pig—were, well, bluesy, though Anderson notoriously clashed with Abrahams over that sound.

“You might call it the blues,” Anderson says. “But to me, it’s cultural misappropriation.”

As for what that means in layperson's terms, Anderson says: “I am not Black. I am not of the cultural background or experience of a Black American. I love to listen, and still do today, occasionally listen to some of the great Black American blues artists that I grew up with as a teenager; it was an opening of the door for me.”

History dictates that Anderson saw to it that Abrahams made his way out of Tull, leading to Tony Iommi’s brief pre-Sabbath stead. That didn’t work either, but soon, Martin Barre came along, and his open-minded approach did. “Musically speaking,” Anderson says. “I used the blues to open doors into the music business and to be able to get an audience… and a record deal.”

“I never felt that’s what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “So, the guitar influence in Jethro Tull went toward European classical music, and obviously, English, Scottish, and Irish folk music. That’s the way I saw the band from 1969 onward.”

Anderson feels so strongly about the anti-blues guitar approach inherent in Tull’s prog-rock soup that he goes as far as to say that “for Jethro Tull to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is missing the point, really, because that’s the celebration of all the great music in America. I don’t feel we’re really that way. Not much of what we’ve done is influenced by American music.”

Post-Abrahams fallout, and after Iommi skipped out on him to form Black Sabbath and essentially found heavy metal music, and despite the fact that Martin Barre was nothing short of an iconic tone hound of the highest order, Anderson has kept a lowkey stranglehold on Tull’s guitar-related actives in the modern day, which includes keeping a watchful eye over Florian Opahle, Joe Parrish, and now, Jack Clark.

Asked if he goes as far as to tell his guitarists, such as current Tull six-stringer Jack Clark, what to play, and when, Anderson shrugs: “Well, they’re not writing the songs. They’re coming up with parts and some improvised solos based on what I outline to them.”

That kinda, sorta sounds like Anderson tells his guitarists what to play, but he says it’s not that simple. “The outline might be a starting point for their approach,” he says. “As a record producer, I have to draw from something that is cohesive and works with the song.”

He explains: “So, I will give them, in varying degrees, some input to help them along the way. Maybe I’ll show them something in rehearsal, or they’ll send me a demo as an email attachment, and I listen to what they’re thinking, and we fine-tune it to get the right result.”

That sounds a little murky if not altogether controlling, but Anderson insists that “95% of what Jack does straight away is usable, and the right thing.” He adds, "It’s usually the right thing for the record and the way that I think it should be.”

Still, given Anderson's level of oversight within the Jethro Tull universe and the depth of his songsmith, one wonders why Anderson doesn’t play most of the guitars himself. But as it turns out, on the band’s latest record, 2025’s Curious Ruminant, Anderon put down his flute (at times) and picked up his trusty six-string.

“The guitar is obviously a very important instrument in the band,” he says. “Alongside the instrument I’m most well-known for, which is the flute! That interaction between the very, perhaps, shrill, bird-like quality of the flute and more sonorous, full-on chordal guitar stuff is the starting point for how people see our songs.”

Speaking on the matter of his own playing, Anderson reveals: “I would probably describe our music as ‘acoustic music,” which is nearly always me. Whether it’s Thick as a Brick or this new album, if it’s an acoustic guitar, it’s me playing it.”

But don’t expect Anderson to try to imitate Martin Barre or replace Jack Clark anytime soon. “I think of myself as a guitar player,” he says. “But I’m not a soloist. I’m not an upfront, flashy player. I am there when I need to play a part, sometimes, in an acoustic context.”

“It’s just me and the guitar,” he says. “Though sometimes, it’s me, my guitar, and the rest of the band being well-behaved and not too noisy. [laughs] That’s the way it works. And the guitar I tend to play is quite an old guitar: a C.F. Martin from around 1880. It’s a small-bodied, nylon-string guitar. I take a lot of pleasure in having an instrument that’s that old and letting it have a voice in something that’s from the new millennium.”

Jethro Tull are the undisputable prog-rock titans. Led by vocalist, flutist and sometimes acoustic guitar player Ian Anderson, Tull has reeled off albums, like 1971’s Aqualung, 1972’s A Passion Play and 1987's Crest of a Knave, that defined a generation of nerdy music lovers.

Over that time, Tull has been defined by a host of guitar players that includes Mick Abrahams, Tony Iommi, Martin Barre, Florian Opahle, Joe Parrish and Jack Clark. Their six-string talents have proven over the group's nearly 60 years that, while Tull is certainly flute-forward, it is a guitar band — and often an electric guitar band — through and through.

Great as those players are, though, make no mistake — it’s Anderson who’s steering the six-stringed ship.

“I remember sitting in the studio with Martin Barre, recording solos for the Crest of a Knave album,” Anderson tells Guitar Player. “He would come up with ideas, and I would say, ‘Well, that’s great… maybe take that, and then in the next eight bars, maybe try something like this…’ and he would respond to that. We would, hopefully, within an hour or two, get all those guitar parts done.”

While Anderson and Abrahams clashed over the direction of the band, he says the dynamic with Barre and most players who came afterward was about “working together and trying different things.”

But when push comes to shove, as the man with the vision, Anderson has the final say...

“Sometimes,” he corrects.

“I hear something that’s not right, and I stop the tape,. rather than let someone waste time and energy by carrying on. It’s better to stop and say, ‘Oh, can we just go back on that?” he explains.

“Then, we wind back five seconds and drop in again. It saves time overall. And I like to save as much time as possible in the recording studio. I don’t keep anything I don’t think is good enough.”

And when it comes to guitars, Anderson’s ear is particularly acute.

“I recognize it immediately when I hear it,” he says. “Whether it’s me recording or one of the guys, I prefer to say, ‘Stop. Let’s go back on that and repair the damage. I don’t have a lot of outtakes. It’s called ‘destructive recording.’ As soon as I press the red button again, it’s gone forever and in comes whatever I’m replacing it with.”

Here, Anderson offers his thoughts about the half dozen guitarists who have passed through Tull.

Mick Abrahams

Founding guitarist Mick Abrahams left the group after the release of their 1968 debut, This Was. He went on to form his own more authentic blues group, Blodwyn Pig.

"The blues were certainly there in the case of Mick Abrahams. That was his background. He was very much blues and rock and roll—and very much American music. I love to listen to American music and still do today — not just the blues but some other music, too. But I don’t want to imitate it.

"The players in the band now have a degree of flexibility and independence, but they have guidelines to work to. So if someone’s doing something that I feel is really not working or not right for the record, then I will hopefully politely convey that to them before they expend too much energy going down that approach.

"And that’s always been the case, really, working with all the guitar players after Mick."

Tony Iommi

Best known as a founding member of Black Sabbath, Iommi spent little time in Tull, filling in for Abrahams when the band was recruited to perform on the Rolling Stones' Rock & Roll Circus event in December 1968. He left soon after and returned to his band Earth, which went on to greatness as Black Sabbath.

“Tony came down to play with us for a little while to see if there was a special musical relationship that we might develop. And Tony, who was and is a great player, is still one whose initial work came from blues and was developed by Black Sabbath as a whole into the beginnings of what became heavy metal.

"So he took the blues and did something new with it, because, really, heavy metal was new. And I think that Tony was a great player, but he wasn’t right for Jethro Tull for a variety of reasons.”

Martin Barre

Martin Barre joined Tull in late 1968, following Iommi's departure, and remained with them through 2003, making him the guitarist who has spent the most time in the group. For part of that time he played a refinished Gibson Les Paul that turned out to be a counterfeit. Barre has said he felt Tull took a "big risk" hiring him, given that he had no blues guitar experience. But Anderson could already see a different path ahead and thought Barre was the right choice.

“The good and interesting thing about Martin’s playing was that he was aware of the blues, but he wasn’t a blues player. He could play a bit in that style, but he was mainly interested in a broader background of music, as was I. So he fitted much better into the songs that I was writing for our second album, Stand Up, in 1969.

“He was a much more broad-based musician with a lot of interest in different styles of music. Oddly, Martin was never really into folk music, so that, for him, was maybe a bit more of a challenge to try and get interested in some of the songs that I was writing.

“That music had a lot more in the way of influence from English, Irish and Scottish folk music, which didn’t come naturally for Martin. But, you know, being a musician of skill and ability, as he was, he quickly would learn to find a way to play a solid part in those songs.”

Florian Opahle

German guitarist Florian Opahale performed with Ian Anderson from 2003 to 2019 and with the reformed Jethro Tull from 2017 to 2019.

"Florian began studying acoustic classical guitar, and he knew about the blues and rock music, too. But classical music played quite a part in the music that appealed to Floridan."

Joe Parrish & Jack Clark

When Opahle left the band at the end of 2019 to focus on production work and family, Joe Parrish stepped in. He was succeeded by Jack Clark, who joined in 2024.

"Like Florian, Joe and Jack have an interest in classical music. They're very interested in the crossover between folk music and rock music and the crossover between classical music and rock music. So, I suppose they fit right in because that’s their musical upbringing.

"I mean, for guys in their 20s, they had amassed a lot of musical knowledge and musical skills based on what we would call 'hard folk rock,' rather than gentle or acoustic folk rock.

"But, you know, they were very easy to integrate into the band, as was Florian. So, these are the guys who are the focus of the guitar part of the band these days, though I play acoustic guitars and write songs using guitar. But they play their parts in the music, but in the music writing, rather than the finished recordings.

"Even with a guitar player like Jack — who started working with us occasionally in 2022 and then took over full-time in February of last year — he feels already like a very established part of the band, even though he's technically the third guitar player in five years or six years."

Unbeknownst to the public, for the past year, Tom Morello had been working closely behind the scenes with Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne on something big. That big ol’ something manifested as an announcement that shook the heavy metal world in early February 2025: Ozzy, who had been in ill health, was hitting the stage for one last time in hometown, Birmingham, England, with the original lineup of Black Sabbath and a ton of his friends, collaborators, and devotees.

The idea is simple: one final show. But the event, which takes place in Birmingham, England, on July 5, 2025, is a massive tribute to all things Ozzy and the original Sabbath. The slate of artists who will perform includes Morello, Metallica, Alice in Chains, Anthrax, Lzzy Hale, Wolfgang Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses.

More importantly, the show will see Osbourne reunited with Geezer Butler, Bill Ward and Tony Iommi for the first time in ages.

“The idea,” Morello tells Guitar Player. “Is to curate the greatest day in the history of heavy metal for the greatest band in the history of heavy metal.”

This isn’t unfamiliar territory for the Rage Against the Machine co-founder, who names himself a “super fan” when it comes to metal—and who has championed old-school bands like Iron Maiden, Kiss, Rush and Sabbath with vigor. “Metal is the music that made me love music,” Morello says.

“It was the metal posters on my walls and the metal riffs that I learned first that made me love playing guitar and want to be a musician,” he adds. “It’s a debt that I owe. Having the good fortune of being able to use my talents of persuasion and as a curator to push forward and honor the genre that has meant so much to me is an honor.”

Beyond the cast of characters, which he humorously calls “12 of the greatest Black Sabbath cover bands in history,” Morello is tight-lipped on what fans might expect come July 5. But he does reveal that the bands “throughout the day are going to be paying tribute to Sabbath,” and adds “this is a once in-forever show.

“To be able to do it with all four members of Black Sabbath alive and well and headlining the show, it’s going to be… Well, the goal is clearly stated: to make it the greatest day in the history of heavy metal.”

As the director of the final Ozzy and Sabbath event, how did this get started?

Well, over a year ago, Ozzy and Sharon came to me and said, “There’s going to be one last, big Sabbath bash. Would you help put it together, curate the music and figure it out?” As a huge fan of Black Sabbath and the Osbourne catalog, I was honored to be asked to do that.

Over the course of the months, we’ve been assembling lists of bands and musicians to invite and what songs might be represented on that day. It’s really coming to a head.

Do you remember when you first discovered Sabbath?

I was not a fan at first. I was just terrified of them. Someone brought Sabbath Bloody Sabbath to school one day, and I remember just looking at the cover and going, “Wait — there’s a band that chose that for their album art? And the name of the band is Black Sabbath?” It was a whole ’nother level.

When did you become a fan?

The Paranoid record was my introduction to the band and the incredible riffs and vibe. It was unlike anything that had ever been.

Can we even measure Sabbath’s impact on heavy metal?

The DNA of that band and genre is everywhere. Certainly, it’s in those bands from the ‘90s like Alice in Chains, Tool, Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Rage Against the Machine. In all those bands, there’s at least one guy that loves Black Sabbath — and it shows.

For you in particular, how has Black Sabbath shaped your music?

I’m a riff writer. And Ground Zero for riff writing is Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi. They’re the two pillars, and they’re a big part of how I built my sound. “Iron Man” was one of the first riffs I learned on guitar, and Tony Iommi has another two or three hundred of the greatest electric guitar riffs of all time in his catalog. The big lesson you can draw from the music of Black Sabbath as a musician is: Don’t be afraid to be simple and awesome.

Do you remember when you first realized that?

I remember taking a guitar lesson to learn “Sweet Leaf,” and the guitar instructor was a bit snobby — like sort of scoffing about how easy it was. I was thinking, That doesn’t seem to be the criteria for greatness. That’s a fucking song that rocks me like I’ve never been rocked before. Who cares if it has four notes or 40,000 notes in it? It’s great!

It made me see music is a different way than other people, which was helped by bands like Black Sabbath. And that’s one of the things that I’ve certainly integrated into my own music and riffs through the years.

As “easy” as those riffs may be, if you try to play them, you’ll never sound like Tony Iommi.

For sure. As everyone famously knows, in that industrial accident, he cut off the tips of two of his fingers. He literally is an Iron Man! His fingers are not human. That certainly has something to do with it all. And then every one of those great Tony Iommi riffs is made great by that rhythm section of Geezer Butler and Bill Ward. That’s really what elevates those riffs from being not just great riffs but Black Sabbath riffs.

Can you name your favorite original lineup riff?

Looking at some of the stuff we have going on the show, “N.I.B.” is totally classic. And there’s “Into the Void,” “Children of the Grave”… there’s so many great riffs. I mean, in “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” two-thirds of the way through the song might be the heaviest riff that anybody has ever riffed on! Those are a few off the top of my head, but it’s an embarrassment of riches.

Is Sabbath’s original lineup the be-all-end-all for you, or do you get into the Dio era too?

I love the Dio era. I think those are great records. Dio has been celebrated in other ways and at other times, but this show is about the fearsome foursome — you know, the original four. It’s just amazing that we were able to get them together for one more go around.

An original lineup reunion is a long time coming—and something that didn’t happen on Sabbath’s final tour. What does it mean to you to not only witness but be a part of organizing it?

It’s such an incredible honor. I can’t remember what year it was, but on the last tour with Bill Ward, they were playing a couple of nights at the L.A. Forum. I thought that I was just going to go down, pay my respects. Since the bad was getting older, my expectation was to go and just see Black Sabbath one more time.

But they were so fucking awesome that I went back the next day! [laughs] I had heavy metal whiplash in my neck for the next month after those two days! So the fact that Bill is playing? Every band has its dramas through the years, you know? So for people to be able to look each other in the eye and enjoy a tremendous thing they’ve created, it’s pretty special.

It's pretty cool that you’ve Jake E. Lee participating, too.

Yes! Jake E. Lee is going to be there, too, dude! It’s historic on a lot of levels for someone who is a big fan of the Ozzy records. We’re celebrating Black Sabbath, but it’s Ozzy Osbourne’s final show, too. It is, in some ways, also a tribute to the great Randy Rhoads, who was on a poster on my wall when I was practicing eight hours a day.

That was the musician’s musician. Like, I take the job of curating this day very, very seriously. Not just to honor the living members of Black Sabbath but also Randy Rhoads, who is so important to me personally, and to the genre. To have that be a part of the day, too, is pretty special.

Have you talked with the various acts, and with Ozzy about what songs you all might perform, let alone what the original four will perform?

We’ve talked a lot about it… and I’m not going to tell you anything about it. [laughs] We’re gonna let it be very exciting! I will say this as a bit of a tease: We’ve got Sabbath playing. We’ve got Ozzy playing. And then, I think there are 12 of the greatest Black Sabbath cover bands in history on the bill, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, etc.

Those are all very different bands, and yet they’re all paying tribute to Sabbath. What’s the common thread that makes all this possible?

Without Sabbath, there is no heavy metal. All of us owe a debt not just to the brilliance of their music but to bringing it into the world — the thing that became the music and the community of heavy metal. That is something that sustained me as a young person and is very, very meaningful to working-class and middle-class people around the world.

That sound could only have come from Birmingham, England. It, in some ways, drove a stake through the heart of the flower power generation of the ’60s. You could not imagine music like that just two years before that. And now it’s in the DNA of thousands and thousands of bands that those of us that are playing at the show and are in, and that millions have enjoyed.

In February 1970, Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath changed the future of heavy music when they released their self-titled debut album. Armed with a 1965 Gibson SG Special and a slow, ominous take on the blues, Iommi brought a new flavor of guitar-driven music to the masses.

As Guitar Player's former music editor Jesse Gress once explained “Iommi recontextualized the same blues-based licks and riffs everyone else was playing at the time into a much darker and heavier oeuvre that soon became Sabbath’s calling card.”

But, as bassist Geezer Butler says, they weren’t straying from their blues roots.

“To me, we were always just a really heavy blues band,” he explains. “That’s all we were — an out-and-out 12-bar blues band. We just took these blues roots and made them heavier, because we were into Hendrix and Cream, who were the heaviest bands around at that time. We wanted to be heavier than everybody else!”

It was that quest that led them down a more extreme sonic path.

Black Sabbath opens with a dark and dreary riff that outlines the tritone, or devil’s interval, so called for its dissonance and ability to unsettle listeners. It adds a flattened fifth — a blue note — to a G octave, which is a standard blues move. But in this context, it takes on a whole other feeling.

“When I first played the riff to ‘Black Sabbath,' that set the standard for the rest of the album,” Iommi says. “When you heard those doomy guitar notes behind Ozzy, the hairs on your arms prickled. We knew it was good and different.”

The band recorded live, tracking the entire album in a day. But while the production was fast, it wasn't easy to convinced producer Rodger Bain of the importance of Geezer Butler's bass tone.

“The biggest problem we’ve had is explaining to the people who recorded us how we have our sound set up,” Iommi explains. “My guitar and Geezer’s bass have to very much agree with each other, to make the wall of sound.

“All of them just see a bass as a bass; clean and neat. But Geezer’s sound is more crunchy, more raw, and he sustains stuff and bends notes the same as the guitar, to make it fatter. Some of them would try to get him to take the distortion away, and it would be like ‘Fucking leave it! It’s a part of our sound!’”

Undoubtedly, Iommi needed Butler's low-end assistance due to the accident he suffered aged 17 while working in a metal shop. It cost him the guitarist the tips of the middle and ring fingers on his fretting hand. He was encouraged to continue to play after he heard about Django Reinhardt’s handicap after an accident burned the fourth and fifth fingers of his fretthing hand, forcing him to rethink his approach to guitar. .

As you might expect, creating music so different from what was standard at the time didn't make Black Sabbath an instant success, not even in Birmingham, England, the band's hometown.

“Birmingham didn’t want to know us," Iommi toldThe Telegraph in 2023. "We got slammed by the press. In America, they called us Satanists. Nobody understood what we were doing, because it was so different.

“When we started, there was no template for heavy metal,” he adds. “We didn’t even call it that. We liked blues, jazz, dramatic horror movie scores, even a bit of classical, [Gustav] Holst’s ‘Mars’, when it gets really dum-diddly-dum, I love all of that.”

As the band progressed, Iommi continued to push the heavy metal template to new reaches. On "Iron Man," the Sabbath song Iommi says he relates to the most, he dove deeper into the band’s horror-film pastiche, painting gruesome pictures from the sounds that came out of his Laney amps.

“I was in a rehearsal room and Bill started playing this boom, boom, boom,” he remembers. “I just saw this thing in my mind of someone creeping up on you, and it just sounded like the riff.”

A year later, on Master of Reality, he downtuned his guitar to C#, F#, B, E, G#, C#, which gives ‘Into The Void’ its guttural punch. That directly inspired Eddie Van Halen , and set the ball rolling for the current metal trend of downtuning and using extended-range guitars.

With their doom-laden take on electric blues, Black Sabbath turned the world of heavy music upside down when they released their debut album 55 years ago, in February 1970. A 1964 Gibson SG propelled Tony Iommi’s instantly recognizable guitar sound, but if it weren’t for a bad pickup and a risky gear swap, the band’s change-making album might have sounded very different.

Iommi had a few misfortunes to thank for his title as the inventor of heavy metal. He’d lost the ends of several fingers on his fretting hand in an industrial accident when he was 17, requiring that he devise leather thimbles to cover his damaged finger tips. .

He then had a brief, unsuccessful run in Jethro Tull, after which Iommi returned to Sabbath with a fresh drive and greater work ethic. But as the band went in to record their debut album, Iommi found his Fender Stratocaster — which he can be seen as he plays with Tull on the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus — was having some issues. It was especially bad luck because, as Iommi tells Gibson TV, he'd worked hard to make the guitar suitable for his damaged digits.

“I worked on it myself to try and get it right for me to play, because I couldn't just pick up a guitar like you'd be able to pick up and play,” he tells his interviewer, Judas Priest’s Richie Faulkner. “I couldn't use heavy strings anymore. I had to change everything — change the fretting and lower the strings — because I was using the thimbles. i couldn't feel the strings."

His backup guitar was a right-handed Gibson SG that the left-handed guitarist had strung upside down. As luck would have it he was able to swap it for a proper left-handed model shortly before recording began.

“I heard of this bloke that had a left-handed guitar, and he was right-handed, and he played that upside down,” Iommi says. “Really peculiar! So I got in touch with him, and I arranged to meet him in a car park.

"It was a bit dodgy,” he adds. “He might have nicked it!”

Although Iommi intended the SG to be nothing more than a backup guitar, it quickly became his main guitar when the Strat developed a problem with one of its pickups.

“I recorded 'Wicked World' with the Strat, and then the pickup went,” he recalls. “So, I thought, I've got to use the other guitar. It was the first time I'd ever really played it, and I thought, Here I am, doing an album on a guitar I've never played before!”

Yet, something about the SG won him over. “I never went back after that. I’ve stuck with the SG ever since.”

Asked why the Strat was abandoned rather than repaired, Iommi says, "as far as I knew, it was buggered. In those days, you couldn't just go and buy a pickup. I could have taken the front pickup out and put it in, but I never thought of that."

Besides, he says, “as soon as I started using the SG, and that was on the album, that was it. I swapped my Strat for a sax. I had this mad idea of trying to play the sax, which I drove everybody up the wall with.

Iommi is set for one last Black Sabbath show this summer, having recently spoken to Guitar Player about why “Iron Man” is the Sabbath song he relates to the most.

It's impossible to overstate Tony Iommi’s influence on heavy metal. Since Black Sabbath made its recording debut in 1970, the left-handed six-stringer has defined the genre's dark and ominous sounds with his low-tuned 1964 Gibson SG Special electric guitar and sinister riffs.

Iommi will be rejoining the original Black Sabbath lineup — alongside Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward — on July 5 for the quartet’s first concert in 20 years and, reportedly, last-ever performance together. As fans look forward to one last blowout show from the heavy metal OGs, it’s a good time to remind ourselves of Iommi’s contributions to guitar and, in particular, one of his most compelling early tracks: Paranoid's "Iron Man."

From his low, C# standard tuning (C# F# B E G# C#) to his embrace of the flatted fifth — a.k.a. the devil's interval — and root-plus-five power chords, Iommi wrote the rules for heavy-metal guitar playing (and broke a few standard guitar rules along the way). In doing so, he devised some of the best — and most menacing — riffs in early heavy-metal history.

“Iron Man” man certainly ranks among the best of them, and it's one of the songs Iommi considers quintessential Black Sabbath.

“I always relate to [the song] ‘Black Sabbath’ and ‘Iron Man,'" he says. "A lot of people say ‘Paranoid,’ but the song was written as a filler for the album — it was never intended on being anything else."

"Iron Man"'s plodding first half is built on a jagged power-chord riff that connotes impending danger and chaos. As Iommi explained to Songfacts’ Greg Prato, the riff is one he simply plucked from the air, with inspiration from drummer Bill Ward.

“I was in a rehearsal room, and Bill started playing this boom, boom, boom,” Iommi revealed in 2021. To the guitarist, the pounding sounded ominous. “In my head, I could hear it as a monster.”

As Ward drummed, Iommi drew an immense groan from his open low E string, like the creaking doors of an old mausoleum, by bending it behind the nut. From there, it was one quick jump to the song’s signature riff.

"Most of the riffs I've done I've come up with on the spot, and that was one of them,” Iommi said. “It just came up. It went with the drum, what Bill was playing. I just saw this thing in my mind of someone creeping up on you, and it just sounded like the riff.”

While many heavy-metal acts have tried to conjure up that sort of magic for themselves, Iommi explains that Black Sabbath weren’t thinking about achieving greatness or attempting to influence anyone when they started out.

“It's hard to believe it happened, because you never think of that,” he told Guitar Player in 2013. “You're just playing something that you like. You certainly don't think, Oh, this is going to last forever, and this is going to be voted the best riff of all time. But to see it now and to hear it — it’s fantastic. What better thing could be said about your music than that?”

“Iron Man” is perhaps the best example of Iommi’s desire to create music imbued with outsized drama. The influence was, remarkably, classical music. “I think it was the dramatics of it all,” he told GP. “! used to listen to the old classical stuff, with the dynamics in the music, and I wanted that sort of dynamics in what we were doing—something that was really dramatic and big.

“And that's what I tried to achieve guitar-wise. I wanted to make this big, powerful thing come over you — like what happens when you go and see a horror film. I wanted to create a huge sound that was really horrific in some ways, if you know what I mean.”

Of course, none of Black Sabbath's songs would have come to pass had Iommi's last-minute invitation to join Jethro Tull in 1968 panned out. He was playing in Earth with his future Black Sabbath bandmates the future folk-proggers hired him as a last-minute replacement for guitarist Mick Abrahams, who had just left the band. His run with the band was short, but used what he learned to make the newly renamed Black Sabbath a stronger outfit. "When I came back from Tull, I came back with a new attitude altogether," he said. "They taught me that to get on, you got to work for it."

Black Sabbath certainly did. And while many would say without hesitation that Black Sabbath established the template for heavy metal — and in Iommi’s case, the importance of the power chord within the genre — the guitarist says the group was only following its heart.

“It's hard to talk about yourself that way and say, ‘Oh yeah, we did this and we did that,’ because you're just doing it for you at the time and hoping people like it. But it's been proven over the years with people coming up saying we've changed their life with our playing, and we helped other bands develop something. I think it's made a big impact on music. I don't think the music would be like it is today without us—without bragging about that.”

Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward will reunite for one final performance as Black Sabbath. Headlined Back to the Beginning, the all-day concert will feature some of the biggest acts in metal — including Metallica, Slayer and Pantera — when it’s held on July 5 at Villa Park, in Birmingham, England, the band’s home town.

This will be the first performance by the original Black Sabbath members in 20 years.

“It’s my time to go Back to the Beginning….time for me to give back to the place where I was born,” Ozzy Osbourne says. “How blessed am I to do it with the help of people whom I love. Birmingham is the true home of metal. Birmingham Forever.”

Osbourne will perform a short set of his own prior to joining his former bandmates for what will reportedly be Black Sabbath’s last-ever show.

“This will be the greatest heavy metal show ever,” promises music director Tom Morello, who has assembled an all-star lineup for the event. Scheduled performers include Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Gojira, Halestorm, Alice in Chains, Lamb of God, Anthrax and Mastodon.

The all-day event will also feature a supergroup of musicians. Artists announced so far include Billy Corgan, Duff McKagan & Slash, Jake E Lee, KK Downing, Lzzy Hale, Rudy Sarzo, Sammy Hagar, Scott Ian, Wolfgang Van Halen and Zakk Wylde, among several others.

The expansive lineup demonstrates Black Sabbath’s far-reaching influence since they formed in Birmingham in 1968 and went on to become one of most successful metal bands of all time.

Among the guests are three players who came to prominence performing with Ozzy Osbourne in his solo years: bass guitar player Rudy Sarzo and electric guitar players Zakk Wylde and Jake E. Lee, who has been recovering from being shot while walking his dog in Las Vegas last October.

As for Wylde, he has spoken many times of Black Sabbath’s impact on his life as a guitarist, giving special credit to “Lord Tony Iommi,” “All of us that are working in this field of music, this guy has actually employed all of us,” Wylde told Revolver in 2023 as he made a point about Iommi’s iconic riffs, which are a hallmark of Black Sabbath’s music. “That’s how massive his impact is.”

In particular, Wylde has pointed to Iommi's use of C# tuning and riffs that can be played on two strings as vital elements to his own riffage.

More performers for Back to the Beginning will be announced in the coming days.

Tickets go on sale at 10 am GMT on Friday, February 14, LiveNation.co.uk.

All profits will go to the following charities: Cure Parkinson’s, Birmingham Children’s Hospital and Acorn Children’s Hospice, a Children’s Hospice supported by Aston Villa.

It’s rarely brought up today, but before he forged the sound of heavy metal on his Gibson SG, Tony Iommi had a short spell in Jethro Tull.

Iommi was performing with Earth – a precursor to Black Sabbath that included Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward — when he was asked to join Ian Anderson’s troupe in 1968 as a last-minute replacement for guitarist Mick Abrahams, who had just left the band.

His brief stint saw him appear with the band in The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, a live concert extravaganza featuring the Stones, the Who, the Dirty Mac — a supergroup consisting of John Lennon, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards (on bass) and Jimi Hendrix Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell — plus Jethro Tull.

“That was a strange meeting,” Iommi tells Guitar World. “We did a gig with Jethro Tull and it was the night Mick Abrahams was either fired or left — I don’t know what happened there. I saw them passing notes to each other onstage and thought it was weird. After the show, they asked if I’d be interested in joining, which was really surprising.”

Iommi had secured the gig after a highly competitive audition, for which he traveled 100-plus miles from Birmingham to London.

“I walked in and saw all these musicians waiting in line and thought, Oh no, forget it,” the guitarist says. “But one of the crew saw me and told me to go and sit in a cafe across the road.”

Iommi was the last in line and aced his audition. When Anderson invited him to join following the Stones' gig, Iommi asked his Earth mates what they thought.

“On the way home in the van, I said to the other guys, 'Tull asked if I wanted to join them,’ and they all told me to go for it.”

The guitarist, who has recently begun toying with amp modelers as he continues to work on a brand new solo album, said his short tenure in the band taught him valuable lessons that he would later apply to Black Sabbath.

“It certainly was a good experience for me, because I learned a lot about how they worked and how Ian Anderson would run the band," he says.

“They would rehearse at a strict time every morning, at nine o’clock or whatever it was, and then break for lunch. It was a bit like going to work, really. In Black Sabbath, we never did that. We’d get together whenever — probably after midday. Those early morning starts were a bit of a shock. It was good to learn about how other people work.”

Iommi learned one key lesson from it all: “If you want a career in music, you’ve got to take it seriously," he says. "That’s what I spoke to my guys about.

“After a couple of things with Tull, including The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, I left and said to the Sabbath guys, ‘Let’s get back together — but we’ve got to work at it and put everything we’ve got into it.’ They agreed.”

Fortunately, Iommi's stint in the band has been preserved in the Rock and Roll Circus film, directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg (who would go on to direct the Beatles' Let It Be documentary, which in turn provided the footage for Peter Jackson's celebrated 2021 film The Beatles: Get Back). The Circus was supposed to be shown on the BBC, but the Stones, unhappy with their performance, held it back.

Jethro Tull would later take “a big risk” in bringing Martin Barre into the band as they turned away from their blues-rock roots and onto more progressive pastures.

Ian Anderson has also spoken about the first and only time he played a Gibson Les Paul during the recording of Locomotive Breath. “Sometimes,” he says, “in order to get the job done, you have to do it yourself.”

Over the last five years, we’ve all seen Gibson transform into the forward-thinking, history-conscious brand it is today. Central to that change has been fellow music lover and “guitar nerd” Cesar Gueikian who joined the firm in 2018.

An accomplished guitarist, Cesar has performed and recorded with a host of notables including Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and Rob Trujillo, Dave Mustaine, Richie Faulkner, Jared James Nichols, Mana and more. All in all, he is a passionate musician with a love of songwriting who really understands and appreciates the artists working in today’s guitar world.

Along with his world-class business acumen, Cesar’s passion for music has helped shape the successful Gibson we see today. In addition to playing a key role in revamping the company’s strategy, just some of his achievements include creating Gibson Media, launching Gibson TV, and securing partnerships with an impressive list of Gibson artists.

“I have had the opportunity to work closely with Cesar as we have rebuilt Gibson over the past five years,” said Chairman of Gibson Brands, Nat Zilkha. “He has established a remarkable track record at Gibson, shaping our product, our marketing, our artist relationships, and many of our important growth initiatives.

But the praise doesn’t end there; a plethora of Gibson artists has stepped forward to weigh in on the man Slash described as “one of, if not the smartest, most passionate Gibson guitar enthusiasts I've ever met.”

Tony Iommi commented on how Cesar helped reverse Gibson’s ailing status. “I can’t believe how Cesar has transformed Gibson from a brand on its way down and out to the success it is today,” said the Black Sabbath guitarist. “He went out of his way to meet with musicians and take note of what we were saying, gathering a great team around him. It’s now a company I’m proud to be associated with.”

Kirk Hammett kept it short and sweet: “I’m going to quote what a wise man once said to me: do epic shit, bro!”

Meanwhile, Cesar himself had this to say: “I am honored and humbled to take on the permanent CEO role! Gibson is a passion project for me. Our board of directors, chaired by Nat Zilkha, has been incredibly supportive over the last five years, giving me an opportunity to merge my biggest passion, which is not just music and guitars, but Gibson guitars with my business background, and I don’t take this for granted.”

Further support came from Lzzy Hale (“Cesar operates on a level of passion that is otherworldly”); Dave Mustaine (“I can’t think of a better, more passionate, intelligent person, to be at the helm of [the] Gibson empire”); Emily Wolfe (“Cesar has a knack for innovation in the gear world”); and many more artists besides.

Cesar’s colleague Mark Agnesi also sang his praises, adding, “I can’t think of a better leader to take Gibson forward into the next chapter,” as did Mat Koehler who said, "Cesar becoming Gibson's CEO means everything to my team and I, and we couldn't be more excited about the future with him at the helm.”

With more back-slapping than a warehouse full of Maestro Echoplexes, it’s fair to say the general feeling is that Gibson has been, and will continue to be, in good hands for the foreseeable future.

Congratulations, Cesar! Here’s to another five years.

When Eddie Van Halen called Tony Iommi the master of riffs, he wasn’t just whistling “Dixie.”

Master riffmeister Iommi’s back story, rise to legendary status, and his influence on the New Wave of Heavy Metal have been well documented in the annals of modern guitar lore.

But everything might have turned out differently if Iommi had not been so driven to play.

After losing the tips of his right-hand middle and ring fingers in a metal shop accident at 17, which was especially devastating considering it was his fretting hand, Iommi’s strong will and devotion to his craft led him to develop the thimble-like prosthetics he still wears today.

Philosophically inspired to continue playing by Django Reinhardt, and musically smitten by Blues Breakers-era Eric Clapton, Iommi recontextualized the same blues-based licks and riffs everyone else was playing at the time into a much darker and heavier oeuvre that soon became Sabbath’s calling card. 

Like a keeper of the flame, Iommi has defined the heart and soul of the band, from the original ’70s Ozzy Osbourne-fronted lineup, to its later reincarnations with the late, great Ronnie James Dio as both Black Sabbath and Heaven & Hell (as well as honorable mentions for Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes), with killer riffs and a larger-than-life sound.

Essential listening includes at least the first five Sabbath albums (Black Sabbath and Paranoid [both 1970], Master of Reality [1971], Black Sabbath Vol. 4 [1972], and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath [1973]), a selection of ’80s and ’90s sides, including Heaven and Hell (1980) and Black Sabbath: The Dio Years (1998), Iommi’s two solo albums (Iommi [2000] and Fused [2005]), and Heaven and Hell’s The Devil You Know (2009).

Want to follow in the fretprints of the Godfather of Heavy Metal? First, you’ve gotta...

1. BREAK AWAY FROM THE PACK

While many of his early contemporaries routinely plugged their Stratocasters and Les Pauls into Marshall stacks and Fender combos, Tony Iommi has always been somewhat of a renegade when it comes to gear. (Of course, as a left-handed player, Iommi’s guitar options were understandably fewer.) 

He entered Black Sabbath with a good- Strat-gone bad, prompting a switch to a now iconic 1965 Gibson SG Special just in time to record the band’s entire first album, except for “Wicked World,” which features the Strat. 

With few exceptions, this guitar paired with a Laney 100-watt stack (chosen for the company’s affiliation with Iommi’s home town of Birmingham), was the main instrumental voice of early Sabbath, bolstered only by two equally off-the-beaten-path effects: a Dallas Range Master Treble Booster and a Tycobrahe Parapedal wah. (Fact: Iommi’s oldest go-to acoustic guitar was a Gibson J-45.) 

In 1975, Iommi added the guitar with which he has become most associated to his arsenal. Custom-built by John Diggens and affectionately known as “Jaydee,” “Number 1,” and “The Old Boy,” this battle scarred SG-style ax sports a mahogany body and 24-fret neck (plus a zero fret), cross fret markers, a Jaydee special bridge pickup, and a John Birch-style Magnum XP pickup (also made by Diggens) in the neck position, and encapsulated everything Iommi was looking for in a guitar. 

2. MAKE SINISTER SOUNDS

Arguably the first band to embrace los diablos en musica, or the dreaded, church-banned b5 interval (It’s just three whole-steps and the center point of the 12-tone chromatic scale, folks. Honest.), Black Sabbath wasted no time putting this dissonant “devil’s interval” to work. 

“Black Sabbath,” the opening cut from the band’s 1970 self-titled debut commences with a thunderstorm that lulls us into the ultimate b5 riff.

3. GET (A LITTLE) JAZZY

The first time I heard Sabbath’s music was when a local band called Rockhouse covered “Wicked World” (from Black Sabbath) ca. 1970-71, leading me to believe that Black Sabbath was more of a bluesy British jazz-rock outfit in the vein of John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Blodwyn Pig, and the Keef Hartley Band rather than the forefathers of heavy metal! 

4. MAKE IT BIGGER

Though he began tuning down a whole-step much earlier for Sabbath’s live shows (their first two albums are in standard tuning), Iommi later dropped his tuning an additional half-step beginning on Master of Reality. 

With this C#, F#, B, E, G#, C# configuration, songs like “Into the Void” reached new depths of heaviness, inspiring the likes of Eddie Van Halen. 

For whatever reason, by the time Sabbath recorded Heaven and Hell with the late Ronnie James Dio, Iommi and company were back to tuning down only a half-step, but with heavy-as-hell riffs.

5. BECOME ONE WITH YOUR BASS PLAYER

One of the keys to Iommi’s heaviosity is his tightness with bass player Geezer Butler. While many shy away from unison bass-and-guitar figures for fear of redundancy, both Sabbath and Heaven and Hell embraced the concept in dozens of songs. 

The intros to Heaven and Hell’s “Atom and Evil” and “Fear," both from The Devil You Know, are prime examples of the power of octave reinforcement. Both riffs create a sinister vibe via the inclusion of the “other devil’s interval” (I just made that up), the b2/b9 located a half step, or minor second, above the root, with the former utilizing root+5 power-chord diads, and the latter relying on single notes. 

6. DO IT WITH DIADS

Perhaps the most important factor in Iommi’s massive sound is his use of two-note diads in the form of root+5 power chords, and his insistence on playing them on the bottom two strings whenever possible for maximum girth. 

So, does playing every power chord on the bottom two strings really make a difference? You’ll have to agree that this guy has definitely been on to something for the past 50-plus years. 

Thanks for sharing, Tony Iommi!

It's pretty simple really: Whatever style of music you play if your rhythm stinks, you stink. And deserving or not, guitarists have a reputation for having less-than-perfect time.

But it’s not as if perfect meter makes you a perfect rhythm player. There’s something else. Something elusive. A swing, a feel, or a groove – you know it when you hear it, or feel it. Each player on this list has “it,” regardless of genre, and if there’s one lesson all of these players espouse it’s never take rhythm for granted. Ever.

Deciding who made the list was not easy, however. In fact, at times it seemed downright impossible. What was eventually agreed upon was that the players included had to have a visceral impact on the music via their rhythm chops. Good riffs alone weren’t enough. An artist’s influence was also factored in, as many players on this list single-handedly changed the course of music with their guitar and a groove.

As this list proves, rhythm guitar encompasses a multitude of musical disciplines. There isn’t one “right” way to play rhythm, but there is one truism: If it feels good, it is good.

50. Chuck Berry

Chuck Berry changed the rhythmic landscape of popular music forever. And his unique sense of groove and pocket is much deeper than it may seem upon first listen, as sideman extraordinaire and all around badass player Rick Vito pointed out in GP: “On many of his tunes, such as ‘Carol,’ ‘Little Queenie,’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ you’ll find Chuck playing a rhythm that is a cross between an eighth-note downstroke shuffle and a straight eighth-note rock feel. But he changed the accents of the shuffle so that it mixed those two feels and made the groove jump and swing more.” 

In the end, the boundless energy and utter timelessness of Berry’s music speaks for itself. As does the fact that without him there would be no Beatles, no Stones, and maybe no rock and roll. 

Hail! Hail! Rock and roll!

49. Lindsey Buckingham

“I want to make the big picture as interesting as possible,” says Buckingham, who has merged pop songcraft and stellar guitar like few ever have. In fact, Buckingham strives for making everything he plays absolutely essential to the tune. His unbelievably inventive rhythm approach combines a wickedly precise right hand, propulsive fingerstyle figures that are informed by banjo rolls, and an attention to groove detail that can’t be denied. 

His ability to make multiple, and different, rhythm guitar parts work seamlessly in a tune (like on all of Rumours), is as classy as classy gets. 

LB is an incredible stylist whose sense of time was honed on Chet Atkins and Merle Travis – i.e. never lazy.

48. Maybelle Carter

To call Carter’s patented “Carter Scratch” rhythm guitar is selling it short – her style not only provided melody, harmony, and rhythm to the music of the Carter Family, it also laid the blueprint for all of country and folk music to come.

“I love Mother Maybelle’s playing,” Marty Stuart told GP. “I thought she had the most beautiful touch I have ever heard.” 

Equipped with her Gibson L-5, Carter would fill out the tunes by putting a melody on the bass strings with her thumb while alternating the chords on the treble strings with her index finger. 

Simple, yet beautifully effective.

47. Catfish Collins

As a member of the J.B.s, backing up James Brown, Collins’ work is featured on the classics “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine” and “Soul Power,” among many others. Also dig the killin’ instrumentals “The Grunt,” and “These Are the J.B.s.” 

Collins was with the Godfather of Soul for less than a year, eventually joining his brother Bootsy on Funkadelic’s 1972 album America Eats Its Young. He eventually played on a slew of Parliament albums (that’s Collins on the righteous funk anthem, “Flash Light.”) too. 

Sadly, Collins passed away in 2010, but he left a hell of a funky legacy with his classic, greasy take on funk guitar.

46. Steve Cropper

“A lot of people have asked me why I didn’t solo more,” said Steve Cropper in 1994. “All I could ever say was that, when I solo, I miss my rhythm too much.” 

Perhaps the ultimate team player, Cropper’s rhythm method displays a funkiness that transcends simple sixteenth-note chord chanks or overtly syncopated figures. Instead, Cropper’s weapon of choice is a sensei-like sense of when to strike with the perfect chord voicing, lick, or, well, nothing. 

“Otis Redding was a big influence on me,” said Cropper. “He made me think and play a lot more simply, so that different notes would really count dynamically – find a hole and plant something in there that means something.”

45. Bo Diddley

The only player on the list who actually has a rhythm named after him, Diddley – unlike a lot of guitarists – never worked as a sideman. “I always had my own group, he said. “I never played sideman for nobody.” 

With some of the funkiest tones known to man, Diddley relied on his mutated rumba, often chucking chord changes altogether and putting all of his chips down on the groove. Classic sides such as “I’m a Man” and “Hey Bo Diddley” sound as fresh now as the day they were cut. 

Tell me now, who do you love?

44. Lonnie Donegan

Many players on this list were instigators of a revolution, but it would be tough to find an artist who was on the ground floor of a bigger uprising than Donegan, as he inspired an entire generation of British kids to pick up a guitar and pound away on three chords. 

Arguably rhythm guitar playing in its purest form, Donegan popularized skiffle – a hopped up mixture of swing jazz, blues, and folk with a driving acoustic guitar serving as the engine to make it go. 

It’s not hard to imagine teenagers such as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and Pete Townshend completely losing their minds upon hearing Donegan’s “Rock Island Line” for the very first time.

43. Cornell Dupree

“I’ll push my groove button and groove,” said the late, great Dupree, who passed away in 2011. Dupree played with more people than he could even remember – from Streisand to Ringo and Midler to Miles – but he’s most famous for his work with Aretha Franklin (Live at the Fillmore, and Amazing Grace are particularly savory), Donny Hathaway’s Live, and Dupree’s personal fave, King Curtis’ Live at the Fillmore West. 

Dupree’s signature rhythmic style was supple, exhibiting equal parts gritty funkiness and understated elegance. His ethos was “less is more.” 

If you have something to say, say it, and if you don’t, stay out of the way.

42. The Edge

Harmonic, rhythmic, and textural, The Edge is a triple threat of rhythm guitar goodness. On U2’s earlier records, such as Boy and War, he blew minds with his chimey echoes and efficient chord voicings, which packed an Ali-sized punch when combined with his huge sense of pocket and clockwork right hand. 

As the years wore on, his playing still exhibited the same elements, but on an even grander scale with The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree. 

As the ’90s dawned, The Edge began hammering out distorted slabs of aggro power chording and getting funkier. “Rock and roll started out as dance music, but somewhere along the way it lost its hips,” he told GP in 2000. “The emergence of hiphop and dance culture upped the ante in the rhythm department – and there’s no going back. 

"Listeners aren’t going to accept lazy rhythms anymore.”

41. Don Everly

When Keith Richards name checks you as having a profound influence on his rhythm style, well, you’re pretty damn influential. 

The Everly Brothers’ breathtaking harmonies soared over a bed of ingenious guitar playing that was based around Don’s clever intros and driving rhythms. “I tried to make my guitar sound like a drum – a rock and roll instrument for rhythm and rhythm fills,” he said. 

Another arrow in the Everly quiver was open tunings. “I couldn’t figure out why Bo Diddley sounded the way he did,” said Everly. “Chet Atkins told me he thought he may be in open tuning, and he was right. So I began using open tunings like G, and that made us sound like three guitars instead of two.”

40. The Funk Brothers

Robert White, Eddie Willis, and Joe Messina were the main 6-string components of Motown’s house band in the label’s heyday from the late ’50s to the early ’70s. An incredible string of hits – “My Girl,” “My Cherie Amour,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Let’s Get it On,” to name but a few – weren’t just the product of amazing songwriters, they were also due to the arrangements the three guitarists played, and the care they took in crafting their parts. 

The group would meticulously work out their voicings, dividing the neck up to avoid muddying the arrangements. “Everybody knew his given job,” explains White. “Mine was rhythm, Eddie would play a bluesy fill, and Joe would usually read something or play backbeats.” 

Says Willis, “Joe was ‘king of the backbeats.’ Pianist/bandleader Earl Van Dyke swears that he never heard Messina miss a backbeat during his entire Motown career!”

39. João Gilberto

Gilberto is one of, if not the architect of bossa nova. Dig into any of the legendary guitarist/eccentric’s titles, especially his seminal late-’50s and early-’60s recordings, and you’ll find wonderfully understated rhythm playing that, even at its most subdued, undulates with a sexy, swaying groove. 

The tricky syncopations of Gilberto’s vocal melodies and his fingerpicked rhythms are a marvel, as he makes it all sound so completely effortless.

38. Freddie Green

“If you pruned the tree of jazz, Freddie Green would be the only person left,” says Jim Hall. “If you listen to one guitarist, study the way he plays rhythm with Count Basie.” 

Green was a master of making the guitar sink in the rhythm section. His use of two- and three-note voicings exclusively let the harmonically dense horn arrangements speak, yet allowed Green to add to the already formidable swing with his trademark fourto- the-bar rhythmic pulse. 

Green also chose to play unamplified. “It blends better with the bass and piano,” he told GP. Much of Green’s classic Basie work was done with Epiphone Emperor, Stromberg Master 400, and Gretsch Eldorado models.

37. Jim Hall

Hall’s playing has always rendered labels meaningless. His groundbreaking work with Bill Evans, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ben Webster shows his modern approach to harmony and sympathetic ear for playing in a group. 

“I learned from Jimmy Giuffre," he said, "who has a very compositional approach to performing jazz – that a group should be in an evolving state like a mobile, with each player acting and reacting as the music is taking shape.” 

To find new chord voicings, Hall turned readers on to this pearl in ’83: “Sometimes I’ll take two voices and either take them through a tune like “Body and Soul,” or play them against a pedal tone, like open A for instance. You can get some interesting things if you try to get the notes going in different directions.”

36. Richie Havens

His impassioned performance at Woodstock alone would be enough to ensure Havens’ place in the rhythm guitar Hall of Fame. And although the late guitarist had a very successful career since the day he opened the 1969 festival, Havens’ performance there did give the world its first “peak” at a guy with a moving, all-in, passionate acoustic rhythm guitar style. 

“I play so hard that I used to go through a guitar every year-anda- half,” he told GP. “To me, playing guitar is just part of getting the song across – it’s not really about being a great guitar player. 

"I don’t even know what I’m doing. I’m filling in the spaces I have to in order to be able to sing a song the way I really feel it.”

35. Jimi Hendrix

A school unto itself, Hendrix’s rhythm playing in many ways feels like an even deeper ocean than his astounding soloing. 

From “The Wind Cries Mary” and “May This Be Love” from Are You Experienced to his beautiful rhythm work on “Little Wing, “Castles Made of Sand,” and “Bold as Love” from Axis: Bold as Love, Hendrix rolled his Curtis Mayfield-inspired chordal movement and tasty flourishes into a style all his own. 

The culmination of that style comes on Electric Ladyland’s title track, which finds Hendrix expounding even further on the sultry double-stop slides and bubbling trills that connect the spacey, at times ambiguous, but always beautiful chord sequence.

34. James Hetfield

Metallica are one of the most influential metal bands ever, and Hetfield’s sound is the hugest part of that, which is really saying something. 

From the beginning with Kill Em’ All, Hetfield’s right-hand precision, speed, and power would set a standard that all aspiring metal rhythm guys would struggle to match. 

“Maybe it’s the German in me,” says Hetfield, “but I always want the rhythms to be precise. It’s hard to escape. It’s how I play.” 

The other thing that Hetfield popularized was the way to get the maximum heaviness out of riffs. “Downpicking is the key!” he exclaims. “It’s tighter sounding and a lot chunkier.” 

Who are we to argue?

33. Chrissie Hynde

With a punk rock attack and a melodic songwriting streak a mile wide, Hynde not only provides the emotional heft behind her tunes, she relishes the role of rhythm guitarist as ringleader. 

“I’m not a great player, but I make sure I surround myself with great players who’ll do their best work when they’re with me,” she explains. “I’ve got the vision, and all I can do is lead my band to glory. I’m the scrappy punk element,” she continues. 

“Sometimes if the playing gets too good, it can lack a certain something. You could hand a guitar to 50 players and the guy who started playing three months ago might play ‘Louie Louie’ better than Eric Clapton!”

32. Tony Iommi

The architect of all things heavy, Iommi fired the shot heard ’round the world with one simple, evil, and impossibly slow riff – “Black Sabbath,” from the band’s earth-shaking eponymous debut. 

From there it was one classic after another (“War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” Sweet Leaf,” “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” etc.) on which Iommi continued to deliver on the promise he made on that first Sabbath record. 

But as the band evolved post-Ozzy, Iommi’s rhythm playing and songwriting evolved as well. The lead off track from Heaven and Hell, “Neon Knights,” served to put the world on notice that Iommi was much more than a sludgy doomsday riff machine – he was ready to put some speed behind his riffs. 

The title track to Mob Rules is also a killer, as is “The Sign of the Southern Cross,” where Iommi’s use of space makes his entry riffs extra punishing.

31. Danny Kortchmar

“It’s much easier to play a screamer solo over a heavy groove than it is to make that groove,” insists Kortchmar, who, aside from being an accomplished soloist, songwriter, and producer, was a rhythm specialist. 

Kootch found his way onto records by a who’s-who of heavy hitters including James Taylor, Carole King, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Don Henley, and Bonnie Raitt. 

Back in 1983, Kortchmar wrote a story in GP, In Defense of Rhythm Guitar. “A good rhythm guitarist will inspire people in the band to play better,” he said. “We can’t have a world full of guys playing screaming solos – there have to be guys who can play songs, who can play rhythm guitar.” 

As a pro’s pro, Kortchmar also dropped some science on how to get your feel together: “The interplay between people is what makes music, and that’s something you can’t practice at home. You have to get out in the world and do it.”

30. Alex Lifeson

“I’ve tried to develop a style that combines broad arpeggios and suspended chords,” explained Lifeson. “They’ve been my two main target areas. Suspensions have been my trick for many years to make a trio sound big.” 

Not very often are you treated to a body of rhythm work like Lifeson’s, from classic riff rock (“Working Man”) through heavy prog (“Xanadu”) onto the textural ’80s and ’90s, deftly riding the heavier sonic zeitgeist all the way to the present. 

Along the way, Lifeson has also incorporated more feels into his vernacular as well, including reggae (Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures) and funk (Roll the Bones). 

Lifeson has done it all, and never at the expense of his own personal voice.

29. Tony Maiden

During their heyday in the ’70s, Rufus ruled the funk roost. And although lead vocalist Chaka Khan got most of the cheese, Maiden was in the engine room corralling jazzy changes into seemingly simple funky guitar parts that outlined the tunes perfectly, without ever taking your ear away from the vocal. 

In fact, Maiden enhanced everything around him. His playing throughout the classic “Sweet Thing” is dead sexy from the start, with an intro that is a textbook example of sultry sophisti-funk guitar.

28. Bob Marley

Music doesn’t get much more rhythmic than Marley’s, and any guitarist with a genuine interest in adding the reggae flavor to their palette would be well served to study what Marley and his cohorts Peter Tosh, Junior Marvin, and Early “Chinna” Smith committed to wax. 

Always restrained, never stiff sounding, and every upbeat skank the perfect note length (a skill really worth honing for all styles of rhythm guitar), Marley’s oeuvre is a lesson in rhythmic meditation.

27. Johnny Marr

Is there a guitarist more influential in Brit pop? 

Marr’s work with the Smiths showed the way for countless pop guitarists in the ’80s, ’90s, and beyond as he wrangled jangle and extended clean-toned arpeggios with a steadily grooving right-hand that would be equally at home in a dance band. 

Marr is also a master of using multiple guitars to create one big propulsive behemoth, with every part, lick, and chime accounted for. “I’ve always believed that any instrumentalist is basically just an accompanist to the singer and the words,” he said. “That’s borne out of being a fan of records before I was a fan of guitar players – I’m interested in melody, lyrics, and the overall song. 

"I don’t like to waste notes, not even one.”

26. Curtis Mayfield

Mayfield is one of a handful of players on this list who basically invented a style. His ultra-lyrical comping connects chord changes in wonderfully inventive ways, with slippery double-stops and octaves and fleeting hammer-ons, while never overshadowing the bigger musical message. 

“Because I play with my fingers and play a chord along with the melody, my style suggests two guitars and the little melodic movements are just part of it,” Mayfield told GP. 

Mayfield, who played exclusively in open F# tuning, was also a master of sublime wah, using it to accentuate parts and add textures.

25. Al McKay

One of the most visible purveyors of Jimmy Nolen-style funk guitar, McKay bolstered Earth, Wind & Fire’s sound throughout the ’70s on hits such as “Shining Star,” “Sing a Song,” and “Saturday Night.” 

The lefty sports an uncanny knack for seamlessly intertwining funky, palm-muted single-note lines and finger-tight chordal work (the intro to “September,” being one example which was cut with a Telecaster sporting a neckposition humbucker), all the while navigating the tune’s changes and staying out of the way of the dense horn, string, and vocal arrangements.

24. Tom Morello

“When it comes to riffage, I’m all about the 1st and 3rd fingers and the 3rd and 5th frets – the same two strings on the same dots.” That’s how Morello describes his slabs of powerful pentatonic plundering on all of Rage Against the Machine’s classic sides. 

Morello’s mojo lies in the fact that he doesn’t use a ton of distortion, and he doesn’t tune down to silly extremes. His means to an end is a relentless dedication to the downbeat – the one. 

“In all the music that’s richly satisfying to me,” says Morello, “the ones are huge and unrelenting. It’s not really a rule, but you’d be a fool to stray from it. 

"It’s good enough for James Brown!”

23. Leo Nocentelli

Aside from Jimmy Nolen, arguably no guitarist has had as big effect on funk guitar as Nocentelli. A master of staccato, single-note funk, and stinging, brash chords, Nocentelli deftly bobs and weaves in and around the Meters’ impossibly funky grooves. 

It’s no wonder the likes of Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney, and the Rolling Stones (who had the Meters open up for them on their 1975 tour) were huge fans of New Orleans’ funkiest export. 

Armed with a Fender Starcaster (although he did cut the group’s most popular tune, “Cissy Strut,” with a Gibson ES-175), Nocentelli has a funky sixth sense for knowing when to tightly double a bass line or when to latch onto (or dance around) the drummer’s syncopated hi-hat pattern. 

Aside from the Meters’ classic tracks, Nocentelli and the Meters can also be heard on Patti LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade” and Robert Palmer’s Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley.

22. Jimmy Nolen

The Godfather of funk guitar. Beginning with a single sixteenth-note break on James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” Nolen defined the funk guitar style, both rhythmically and harmonically, with simple two- and three-note chord voicings. 

“I started developing that when I played with Johnny Otis back in the ’50s,” said Nolen, who used a Gibson ES-175 and a Gibson Switchmaster on his first recordings with Brown, before moving to a Les Paul Recording and a Japanese- made Fresher Straighter Strat copy. 

“See, we used to play with so many different drummers – some were good but some were lazy. So I used to just try and play and keep my rhythm going as much like a drum as I could.” 

For more of Nolen’s pioneering style, dig “Cold Sweat,” “There Was a Time,” “Give It Up or Turn It Loose,” and “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.” 

Thanks Jimmy!

21. Jimmy Page

As much as he is remembered for being a heavy riff architect, much of Page’s rhythmic identity is based in ’50s rock and roll from influences such as Scotty Moore, James Burton, and Cliff Gallup. He also rolled a major wild card into his style, the whirling feel of Les Paul. 

When you throw all of that in with a hefty acoustic jones stoned on British Isles folk, an uncanny ear for modal tunings, and a good dose of riff thuggery (Johnny Ramone worshipped Page’s “Communication Breakdown” assault), you end up with one of the electric guitar’s most defining voices.

20. Joe Pass

An amazing solo guitarist and accompanist, Pass exhibited musical sophistication and sensitivity that are yet to be paralleled, including connecting the melodic dots with remarkable voice leading and walking bass lines. 

Pass’s four duet albums with Ella Fitzgerald are must haves (Take Love Easy, Fitzgerald and Pass…Again, Speak Love, and Easy Living), as are his series of Virtuoso recordings. 

“The best way to get the jazz feel,” says Pass, “is to play along with records or a group. It’s something you have to learn to inherently feel.”

19. Les Paul

Danny Gatton is one of the few guitarists that actually tried to cop Paul’s chops, and Jeff Beck did a full-scale tribute to the Great Man at the Iridium in New York City in 2010 – but nearly every guitarist from George Barnes to Jimmy Page acknowledges a debt of some sort to Paul. 

His mastery of jazz harmony and dizzying melody lines notwithstanding, Paul’s echo-enhanced, Django-influenced rhythmic foundations on unstoppable pop juggernauts such as “How High the Moon” and “Tiger Rag” shaped the course of commercial music for nearly a decade, and provided the template for slapback styles from rockabilly to country to surf and beyond.

18. Joe Perry

Although Perry’s classic work with Aerosmith operated squarely in the blues/rock vein, he never sounded clichéd or staid. With healthy dollops of Jimmy Page’s single-note funkiness, as well as some dirty Keith Richards chordal attitude, Perry rolled his influences into an inventive, grooving style that transcends simple classification. 

Perry’s willingness to mix in filthy tones only enhanced his funk factor (“Get It Up” from Draw the Line is just nasty), and his use of 6-string bass on “Back in the Saddle” and “Draw the Line” showed that he was always willing to think outside the blues box. 

“Your sense of groove has a lot to do with the guys you’re playing with,” Perry told GP. “If they’re really holding it down, you can float on top of it and drive the groove.”

17. Prince

“A lot of cats don’t work on their rhythm enough,” said Prince to GP in 2004. “And if you don’t have rhythm, you might as well take up needlepoint or something.” 

One listen to any of Prince’s tracks, from 1979’s Prince to 2016's Hit n Run Phase Two and it’s clear that the dude’s knitting skills probably sucked. 

“I’m always trying to work the bass notes when I’m playing funk rhythms,” he says, “the same way Freddie Stone from Sly and the Family Stone used to do it.” 

Prince’s rhythm style may be based on classic funk conventions, but his clever juxtaposition of tones and effects, as well as his undeniable rock rhythm chops, are a big reason why he’s such a heavy hitter.

16. Johnny Ramone

“I always wanted the guitar to sound like energy coming out of the amplifier,” said Ramone in ’85. “Not even like music or chords. I just wanted that energy.” 

Mission accomplished, Johnny. 

With his Mosrite plugged into a Marshall stack and a sledgehammer right-hand attack, Ramone wrote the book on punk guitar. “I was influenced by the New York Dolls, T. Rex, and Slade, but I can’t play any of their songs,” he said. “I can only play Ramones songs and the few covers that we do. 

"I just like to play punk rock, and that’s it – real loud rock and roll – no slow songs or soft songs.”

15. Jerry Reed

Being a hotshot session guy and an accomplished songwriter doesn’t hurt when it comes to having an evolved rhythm style. 

Reed’s rhythm guitar approach encompassed Atkins and stanky backwoods funk – the intro to “Guitar Man” being an excellent example of the former, and “Amos Moses” a superb specimen of the latter.

His playing on “Good Night, Irene” (from ’73’s Hot A’ Mighty) is a textbook example of a rhythm performance that acts as a solo, an accompaniment, and a hook as he flaunts hybrid picking chops mixed with hip chord grips and bends that would be comical if they weren’t so killer.

14. Django Reinhardt

If you can tear your ear away from his dazzling soloing long enough, you realize that Reinhardt’s rhythm chops are just as impressive. 

Scary. 

His relentless swing utilizes the ultra-percussive “la pompe” strumming technique which makes the drummerless ensemble swing with a steamroller intensity, pushing the soloist to greater improvisational heights. 

Pull out your metronome, get a chart for “Minor Swing,” and get crackin’. Then, work your way up to the much quicker “Limehouse Blues.” 

You may not aspire to play Gypsy jazz, but working on these tunes is a blast and a guaranteed groove enhancer.

13. Tony Rice

Long ago, Rice was considered the heir apparent to his late mentor, Clarence White. It didn’t take long, however, for Rice to forge his own identity, due in large part to the fact that he started to bring very nontraditional harmony to bluegrass music. 

Counting George Benson, Wes Montgomery, and Joni Mitchell as influences, Rice’s concept of time (he credits Dave Brubek’s “Take Five” for turning him onto odd time signatures) and colorful chord palette (he often cites Jerry Reed as having an influence on some of his dense, close-interval chords), coupled with his uncanny variations on simple rhythm patterns, have made him the bluegrass guitarist for a generation.

12. Keith Richards

Rock and roll’s high priest of groove, Richards’ lifetime of work with the Rolling Stones stands as a sonic monument to the hip-shaking power of rhythm guitar. 

His use of open-G tuning on nearly everything he’s done since the late ’60s spawned a style and sound that is still being imitated. “With open tunings, you can get a drone going so you have the effect of two chords playing against each other,” he told GP. “It’s a big sound.” 

Richards’ other contribution to the rock rhythm lexicon is the way he views the interplay between two guitars. “Rather than going for the separation of guitars, we try to get them to start to sound at a point where it doesn’t matter which guitar is doing what,” he explains. 

“They leap and weave through each other, so it becomes unimportant whether you’re listening to the rhythm or the lead because in actual effect, as a guitarist, you’re in the other player’s head, and he’s in yours.”

11. Nile Rodgers

“I really developed my style while playing jazz standards like ‘So What’ with my guitar teacher in a club,” says Rodgers. “He was comping in the traditional way, and I thought, ‘What am I going to do? He’s got it covered.’ So I tried to fill in the holes, swinging it like a drummer, and the whole club went ‘Whew! That is funky!’” 

The rest is history as Rodgers went on to cut some of the most groovin’ guitar playing known to man with Chic. 

His signature funkiness on “Le Freak” and “Good Times” have frustrated many a weekend warrior, as the riffs seem so simple, but getting them to sound and feel as good as Rodgers does, well, that’s the trick now, isn’t it?

10. Rudolf Schenker

“When something is in the pocket, it drives me,” says Schenker. “It gives me an outstanding power, like I’m surfing on a wave. When the groove isn’t right, I feel lost a little bit. It’s very hard work and it’s somehow not fun anymore.” 

Suffice to say, the groove is important to Schenker, who – aside from possessing one of the best combinations of savage tone and feel in the history of metal – has written some of the most timeless riffs as well. 

“I don’t care about the technical stuff,” he says. “What’s important to me is the attitude, the drive, and the feeling.”

9. Earl Slick/Carlos Alomar

“David Bowie’s Station to Station was the first time Carlos and I really zeroed in on how we should play together,” says Slick. “We mixed my rock thing in with Carlos’ funk thing and I think we came up with a pretty unique guitar combination – two guys who don’t play anything alike making it work.” 

Indeed. Slick and Alomar provided Bowie some legitimate funk and attitude during his Thin White Duke phase, creating chattering rhythmic figures (Alomar) and snarling chord bursts (Slick). 

Dig “Golden Years” and “Stay” from Station to Station for proof, and if that doesn’t convince you, listen to “Fame” from Young Americans. Oh my.

8. Steve Stevens

“I think of songs as environments, or little movies,” said Stevens in 1989. “And that usually dictates the sound I go for and the playing approach I take.” With Billy Idol in the ’80s, Stevens packed a cornucopia of rhythmic goodness into three-minute pop tunes better than anyone. His use of textures, noise, and good old-fashioned groove proved to be an unbeatable combination. 

“My playing reflects more of the English R&B sound,” says Stevens, distancing himself from ’80s texturalists such as Andy Summers and The Edge. “We’re similar to an extent, but I do it in Day-Glo! I play with a much more distorted sound.” 

As for his killer time and ability to hit the right chord at exactly the right time, Stevens says it’s simple: “Have a singer who will beat the piss out of you if you don’t stay in the pocket – that’s how I learned. 

"Billy Idol made me realize that technique is there as a secret weapon. If the guitar is full-on all the time, that’s pretty damn boring.”

7. Andy Summers

Sonically, Summers is possibly the most influential player on this list. His frothy chorus and dubapproved delays became irreplaceable cogs in the Police’s machine. But dig deeper and you find Summers’ grasp of reggae feels, as well as his propensity to extend chords (giving even the simplest progression, a modern makeover), were also a huge part of his sound. 

“I used to be in bands with keyboard players where we had to always watch out for what the other guy was doing harmonically, because there would be conflict,” he explains. 

“I didn’t have that restriction in the Police, so I could stretch chords out and make my rhythm parts more orchestral.”

6. Pete Townshend

To call Townshend’s rhythmic contributions to rock guitar “huge” doesn’t even begin to describe the influence he has had. Yet, it’s not as if he inspired a legion of Townshend sound-alikes. His style – which boasts an incredible right-hand strumming technique – has remained intensely singular and attached to the tunes that embody it. 

Townshend possess the ninja-like skill of knowing when one big chord will not only do the job, it’s big enough to be the hook (see “Won’t Get Fooled Again”). Those are some onions, my friend. 

More than anyone, Townshend has also shown how high an art form rhythm guitar can become in a rock and roll band.

5. Eddie Van Halen

Although his solos were fodder for nearly every guitarist growing up in the late ’70s/early ’80s, Van Halen’s rhythm work never got quite as much attention, which is a damn shame because there’s gold in them there riffs! 

You had your vicious metal chuggers (“Romeo Delight,” Light Up the Sky,” “D.O.A.”), some pretty stuff (the woefully underrated “Secrets”), and the weird (“Sinners Swing,” “House of Pain”). 

VH’s rhythm work was oftentimes just as gonzo as his solos, frequently exhibiting the same careening racecar vibe, and he didn’t necessarily come from a certain “school” of rhythm guitar. 

Like his soloing, his rhythm playing was intensely personal (the intro to “5150” is a textbook example of this) and seemingly easy to grasp on the surface, but once you dive in, you find there’s a lot to digest.

4. Jimmie Vaughan

Although he could certainly solo with the best of the blues cats, Vaughan’s calling card in the shred-heavy ’80s was as a blues rhythm specialist. 

“When I started out playing guitar, all I wanted to do was play that Jimmy Reed groove – it just feels real good,” Vaughan told GP. “Then I made it my business to figure out the guitar interplay between Reed and his co-guitarist Eddie Taylor. I tell you what, it sounds real easy when you first hear it, but listen closely. The way they lock and form that deep groove is not easy. It’s a whole other thing.” 

The same could be said for Vaughan’s rhythm work, as he makes it seem so easy – the sign of a true master.

3. Alex Weir

As part of the Brothers Johnson and Talking Heads, Weir was the ultimate funky ringer. This was especially true in Talking Heads, as evidenced by the epic concert film, Stop Making Sense. 

Working over a Music Man Sabre, Weir’s contributions to the Heads’ collective funk cannot be underestimated. “This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)” and his impossibly dope comping on “Burning Down the House” are as infectious as they are musical, and his guitar interplay with David Byrne on “Big Business/I Zimbra” is a clinic in relentless sixteenthnote funk. 

Damn!

2. The Wrecking Crew

This loose-knit collective of musicians played on a plethora of ’60s and early-’70s hits by everyone from the Carpenters to the Beach Boys to Simon & Garfunkel to the Monkees – the list goes on and on. And everybody knows you don’t get huge, timeless hits with lousy rhythm guitar work, right? 

The roster of guitarists in the Wrecking Crew goes from giants of jazz such as Barney Kessel and Howard Roberts to studio rats Tommy Tedesco and Carol Kaye to arranger/guitarists such as Al Casey and Billy Strange – all master sight-readers with impeccable feel. 

Cats such as Glen Campbell, Louie Shelton, Jerry Cole, and Mike Deasy (among others) could be counted on to deliver the snazzy new rock and roll rhythms of the day – noise that guys like Kessel and Tedesco hated – but they loved the paychecks!

1. Malcolm Young

Has anyone personified the role of a rhythm guitarist in a rock band better than Malcolm Young? 

No, they haven’t. 

In AC/DC, not only did he play some of the most swaggering, swinging, balls-to-the-wall rock and roll guitar ever, he did it with zero solos. Young knew exactly what his role was as a rhythm guitarist in a rock and roll band, and he thrived in it. 

“Learning an instrument has to be natural,” he said. “If you stop to think about playing, the feeling just goes.” Feel was always behind what Young did. Without it, he would be just a dude strumming chords. 

“It probably has something to do with the attitude I put into it. I don’t think what I do is hard, really. If it doesn’t swing, it doesn’t mean a thing. That’s about it.”

I find it hard to imagine 1972 was 50 years ago.

This is in large part due to the fact that I was born on June 5th of that monumental leap year. What? You didn’t know 1972 is the longest year by the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) standard? With the added day, plus two seconds, the six-string purveyors of the day took full advantage of the extra time on both electric guitars and acoustic guitars.

As this new decade was still revving its engines, rock and roll was expanding in 1972. With the guitar at the forefront, there was glam rock, shock rock, prog rock, southern rock and even jazz rock. What’s more, there was the further development of soft rock and heavy metal alongside the burgeoning reggae and country rock genres.

Also on the rise was a reverence for the album format. Thanks to my older brother Louis and his well-fortified stereo system, our Jersey Shore home was consistently shaking at the rafters with all the rock 1972 had to offer. I soaked it all in from my very beginnings.

All things considered, it’s safe to say I was born into this collection of essential guitar moments from 1972.

Let There Be Rock

By the second year of the tumultuous 1970s, the world of rock had expanded into subsets that celebrated everything from platform shoes and glitter to fake blood and guillotines, and even included electrified southern-fried country and blues.

This trifecta of disparate approaches garnered a worthy collection of guitar moments, starting with David Bowie’s fab The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. 

Bowie’s brilliance is matched by the prodigious playing of guitarist Mick Ronson.

Ex. 1 shows something similar to Ronson’s opening salvo in “Ziggy Stardust,” where open chords and arpeggiation patterns combine to make the prototypical glam-rock arena riff.

Shifting to the dark side, Ex. 2 takes its cue from the title track of Alice Cooper’s School’s Out, highlighting the vibe of the incendiary E Dorian riff played by shock-rock stalwarts Glen Buxton and Michael Bruce.

Completing the trio is an iteration of the Am riff of “One Way Out” (Ex. 3), from the Allman Brothers Band’s quintessential southern rock album Eat a Peach, courtesy of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts.

All three original tunes are as celebrated today as they were in 1972, from arenas to local watering holes.

Opening Lines

The ’70s was the decade of Detroit Iron, when nearly everyone drove a hot rod. If they weren’t cranking an eight-track, they were listening to an FM rock station, which was in the beginning stages of a transformation to the album-oriented rock (AOR) format.

Nothing had you leaning over to pump up the volume faster than a great guitar intro. Elliott Randall’s opening A major pentatonic licks in the Steely Dan FM staple “Reelin’ In the Years,” from Can’t Buy a Thrill, was a top contender.

Ex. 4 is inspired by and loosely based on this classic intro solo.

Ex. 5 brings to mind the dreamy relative major and minor arpeggios and modulating bends immortalized in that track.

Another classic is the unforgettable opening of the Bowie-penned glam-rock anthem “All the Young Dudes,” recorded by Mott the Hoople.

These are just two of the many songs that reeled you in from the first notes and entertained every type of rock apostle, both young and old, as they cruised America’s highways.

Hammer of the Gods

Two of the three bands considered the creators of heavy metal released records in 1972. With Led Zeppelin between Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy, the void was filled by Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 and Deep Purple’s Machine Head.

Ex. 6 closely illustrates what Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi laid down on Vol.4’s “Snowblind,” with his signature power chording and speaker-melting gain in check.

As for Deep Purple’s Ritchie Blackmore, he was in his creative prime at the time that the group dropped its magnum opus, Machine Head. Much like Zep’s fourth outing, Machine Head featured timeless tunes that have proven their longevity to this day, including the venerable “Smoke on the Water.”

While the opening riff has ascended into a ubiquitity for rock guitarists the world over, Ritchie’s fiery solo over a power chord backdrop in the key of G minor showcases such signature Blackmore-isms as pre- (or “ghost”) bends, adjacent-string rolls and 16th-note linear flurries.

This is all on display in Ex. 7, which presents a reworking of some key licks from this solo.

Though in its infancy at the time, metal began with these pioneering bands and with albums and moments like these.

Everyone is Experienced

But 1972 wasn’t all about high-gain licks and riffs. The influence of Jimi Hendrix, who died in 1970, was felt across the guitar pantheon. Indicative of the time were a pair of low-gain opening riffs from two different worlds but in no less capable hands.

Ex. 8 is patterned after a moment from one of prog rock’s most endearing releases, Close to the Edge, where perpetual ambassador Steve Howe threw down biting Hendrix-like chordal comping ideas in the key of E minor at the top of “Siberian Khatru.”

Ex. 9 offers a taste of the kind of dynamic-duo guitar work of the Doobie Brothers’ Tom Johnston and Patrick Simmons on the endearing hit “Listen To the Music,” a moment that still motivates muscle-car drivers of yore to turn up the volume at the first hammer-on into that E/G# triad.

Groove Collective

But cleaner tones and booty-shaking grooves were also heard in 1972, thanks to the impact of a Jamaican film called The Harder They Come, which starred musician Jimmy Cliff. While the movie was released to much fanfare (on the very same day I started my journey to 50), it was the film’s soundtrack that made history, as it’s widely regarded as the world’s introduction to reggae.

Ex. 10 is inspired by the infectious opening groove heard in the Cliff classic “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” which features hallmark reggae rhythm guitar approaches with its tightly voiced top-string triads, anchored to the upbeat and treated with some staccato phrasing.

Back on the mainland, James Brown and Al Green were creating some of their most significant works. The Godfather of Soul put Hearlon “Cheese” Martin’s lock-tight precision into the limelight with “Get On the Good Foot” from the album of the same name.

An homage to Martin’s hypnotic single-note staccato phrasing is paid in Ex. 11.

Adding to the title tracks explored, the beloved gem from Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together features the sultry guitar of work of Mabon “Teenie” Hodges perfectly nested between Green’s enthralling vocal performance.

Looking at Ex. 12 reveals a remodeling of four bars from this treasured work.

Unplugged

Although the era of the chimerical Les Paul/Marshall monster had fully arrived by 1972, it didn’t quell the acoustic guitar’s substantial presence, which had solidified in the 1960s.

In fact, acoustic guitars were behind some of the most successful single releases of the year, including Paul Simon’s controversial “Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard,” America’s mesmerizing “Ventura Highway” and soft-rock troubadours Seals and Crofts’ irresistible “Summer Breeze.”

The main themes of all three songs have been reinterpreted in Examples 13–15.

Aside from Simon’s syncopated voice-led triads, the other two riffs make ample use of the acoustic guitar’s penchant for open strings.

Not to be outdone by his American counterparts, Canadian-born Neil Young released the best-selling record of the year with Harvest, which boasted the number one hit “Heart of Gold.”

A rendition of the perfectly sparse presentation of Em and D chords is found in Ex. 16.

Outro

With countless guitar moments still to gush over, it’s important to note that 1972 was also brimming with superbly constructed albums that had massive impact and further bolstered the emerging AOR radio format.

The year delivered classics that featured now-mythic guitarist pairings, including the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. (Keith Richards and Mick Taylor), Jethro Tull’s Thick As a Brick (Martin Barre and Ian Anderson), Genesis’s Foxtrot (Steve Hackett and Mike Rutherford), and the Eagles’ self-titled debut (Bernie Leadon and Glenn Frey), which helped bring country rock to prominence.

Before the year was out, Deep Purple went on to release the Made in Japan live album, and Stevie Wonder released his own pair with Music of My Mind and the seminal Talking Book.

The latter gave the world the funk-rock classic “Superstition,” which features a punchy Hohner Clavinet keyboard riff that has been appropriated by guitarists in countless cover bands.

If all these moments and genre births are any indication of the benefits to an augmented leap year, I say bring on the next one UTC.

Black Sabbath need no introduction. Suffice to say the band’s founding guitarist Tony Iommi helped lead the charge during the late ‘60s and ‘70s as hard rock forged ahead into metal. 

Taking a darker turn along the way, Iommi’s iconic riffs and signature tones are the very definition of heavy and were instrumental in laying down the foundations of the heavy metal genre.

In 1969, during the recording sessions for Black Sabbath’s eponymous 1970 debut album, a pickup in Iommi’s Fender Stratocaster failed and he immediately switched to using his 1964 Gibson SG Special. From this point on, Iommi’s “spare” electric guitar became his main ax and was ultimately used to track several Black Sabbath albums.

Dubbed “Monkey” (on account of the guitar’s cartoon monkey sticker) this instrument was modified by both Iommi and British luthier John Birch. While fitting an intonation-friendly Badass bridge was an easy mod for the guitarist, Birch took care of the more advanced jobs. These included shaving the frets down and lacquering the fingerboard, as well as fitting a custom-built neck pickup and encasing the bridge P-90 using epoxy resin in order to reduce feedback.

Following the limited run of 50 Custom Shop “Monkey” replicas last year, Gibson have just unveiled a more utilitarian version of this famous SG – the Tony Iommi SG Special. While Gibson’s new Artist range model does not include certain appointments found on the original/Custom Shop replica (such as a zero fret, John Birch pickups, and hand-aged finishing) the essential elements of a hard-rocking riff machine are all present.

Priced $2,399 (for both right- and left-handed models) the Gibson Tony Iommi SG Special is constructed using standard materials, including a mahogany body and mahogany neck with a bound rosewood fingerboard. However, a fully adjustable bridge, chrome-covered P-90s, and ‘witch hat’ knobs set it apart as akin to Tony Iommi’s heavily modified “Monkey” SG.

Visit Gibson for more information.

Check out Guitarist magazine's video from last year where Tony Iommi discusses his Custom Shop "Monkey" replica...

“[Flower power] is bollocks. The only flower I’m likely to wear is on my fucking grave," Ozzy Osbourne once remarked. Indeed, 1960s industrial Birmingham and its surrounding Black Country were a far cry from the sunny climes of San Francisco.

In 1970, there were several monumental events in the guitar world which signalled the end of the ‘peace & love’ era: Jimi Hendrix died, The Beatles split, then both Peter Green and Eric Clapton went AWOL.

And Black Sabbath happened.

No sooner had the 1960s ended, the band released their eponymous, genre-defining debut album in 1970, quickly followed by Paranoid the same year. This incendiary live performance of “War Pigs” filmed in Paris in 1970 shows the band in their prime – their loveless, apocalyptic vision of a human wasteland free of flowers and far from peace.

In the words of Peggy Seeger: “Society gets the music it deserves.”

Buy Black Sabbath here.

Last week, Black Sabbath fans around the world were treated to the unexpected surfacing of "Slapback," a previously unheard song that was written and demoed in late 1979, just after the band hired Ronnie James Dio as its new vocalist. 

Uploaded to YouTube by Gary Rees – the stepson and executor of the estate of former Black Sabbath keyboardist Geoff Nicholls, who passed away in 2017 – the song was confirmed as legitimate by the band's bassist, Geezer Butler, during Butler's subsequent appearance on SiriusXM's Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk.

As a follow-up to his interview with Butler, Trunk contacted Sabbath riff-master Tony Iommi, who revealed that he was “not happy at all” about the song's resurfacing, saying "It’s left a really bad taste in my mouth.” 

Additionally, Iommi disputed Butler's claim that the latter had played bass on the recording, saying it was actually Dio himself who took care of the low end.

"At that point, when we did that, Geoff wasn’t even involved in the band," Iommi told Trunk. "That is actually Ronnie playing bass on that, and that was just in the lounge recorded on a cassette.”

Of the song itself, Iommi said, “We had one or two things that we’d jam around on and play on and stuff, but it [wasn’t] right for the album, so we didn’t put it into shape; we didn’t record it or anything.”

Iommi's sentiment echoes that of Butler, who said of the tune, “It was just a one-off thing. We just jammed it and didn't think anything more of it. It didn't really work."

A few days ago, a 1979 recording of a song called "Slapback" – purportedly made by Black Sabbath – surfaced on YouTube. 

Uploaded by Gary Rees – the stepson and executor of the estate of former Black Sabbath keyboardist Geoff Nicholls, who passed away in 2017 – the song purportedly features Sabbath with their then-new singer, Ronnie James Dio. 

Questions, however, quickly arose about the authenticity of the recording, which led Eddie Trunk to ask Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler – during the latter's appearance on his radio show, SiriusXM's Trunk Nation with Eddie Trunk – about the song.

Butler confirmed the provenance of the recording, saying "Yeah, that was one of the songs that we did before I left.

"It's probably the reason I did leave," Butler joked. "It was just one of those songs that didn't make the grade."

Though Butler left Black Sabbath for four months in late 1979 (during which time Nicholls replaced him on bass), he added that the recording – made during the writing sessions for what would become the band's 1980 debut with Dio, Heaven and Hell – does indeed feature him on bass. 

"Yeah, that was right before I left,” he said. “It was just a one-off thing. We just jammed it and didn't think anything more of it. It didn't really work."

Heaven and Hell and its follow-up, 1981’s Mob Rules, were reissued on March 5 in remastered/expanded editions.

This interview originally appeared in the October 1974 issue of Guitar Player Magazine.

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi stands well over six-feet tall and plays like he has six fingers. Not bad, since several years ago Iommi hacked off the ends of his middle and ring fingers on his right hand (he plays left-handed), and consequently had to completely alter his playing. 

Struggling with various types of plastic tips which he placed at the ends of the fingers, he has since gone on to become one of the more stylistic players on the rock scene today.

Iommi always had an interest in music, though. His first aspiration was to be a drummer, but owing to lack of funds, he turned to a less expensive instrument. The guitar came in almost by default. 

After realizing that he couldn’t afford a kit of drums, and that an accordion just wasn’t what he wanted, he fell in with the guitar. “I got a guitar for a birthday present,” he states, “and things just went on from there: I got a better guitar and a better guitar.” 

His first substantial electric guitar was a Watkins, which ran through a small tubed Watkins amplifier. During these early years of his playing, Iommi would frequently get together with friends and jam, but nothing ever came about until he auditioned with Jethro Tull and scored the lead guitarist position. 

This was during 1968, following Mick Abrahams’ departure and preceding the band’s appearance in the Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘N’ Roll Circus. Iommi was with Tull for the filming of the show only, and immediately left the band after the project was finished.

“It just wasn’t right,” he explains, “so I left. At first, I thought the band was great, but I didn’t much go for having a leader in the band, which was Ian Anderson’s way. As we are now [in Black Sabbath] there’s no leader. Everyone does their own part. Not only that, the communication between the band wasn’t too friendly.” 

Originally, Iommi had left Sabbath to join Tull, but swiftly returned to his former band after his experience with Jethro. 

His first guitar with Sabbath was a Fender Stratocaster (year unknown), which was plugged into two Marshall (4x12) cabinets powered by two 50-watt amplifiers. As the band grew in popularity they started adding more cabinets, until they were offered an attractive advertising arrangement by Laney Amplifiers in England. 

Since that time, Iommi has been using six 4x12 Laney cabinets which are fed by four 100-watt amps. They are channelled by plugging V-cords into the “normal” outputs (they have “treble” and “normal” sockets) of the four heads. For treble boost, he uses a Rangemaster unit which has been reworked (extra tubes and boosters) by the band’s roadies.

After using the Fender for several years, Iommi has changed to Gibson and now uses an old (year also unknown) SG. One major alteration has been the replacement of the pickups with specially built low-feedback units. 

Iommi thought that the standard Gibson pickups fed back uncontrollably, and – though the sound they produced was more than satisfactory – the searing screeches that accompanied that sound made the pickups impossible to use.

The new ones cut down on the feedback, but don’t totally stop the unwanted noise. Other changes include the application of polyurethane to the neck to give it a lacquer-like finish, which resists corrosion of the wood and helps prevent the frets from wearing away. 

The frets themselves have been filed down, and new metal tuning pegs (replacing the original plastic ones) have been added. Because he’s always experienced difficulty in tuning his Gibson, Iommi has had several different bridges constructed (by the same designer of the low-feedback pickups).

His current bridge raises the strings to a higher position than usual, but it has brought the open strings and twelfth fret octaves into almost perfect sympathy. The bridge’s height also prevents the lightweight strings he uses from constantly rattling against the fretboard.

“It’s sort of an experimental guitar,” Iommi says. “Everything that can be done to a guitar has been done to this one. That’s probably why I like it, because I’ve got it exactly as I want it, apart from still having trouble with tuning.”

The change from Fender to Gibson came one night when the band was playing in Germany, and one of the pickups went out on Iommi's Stratocaster. Grudgingly, he snatched the Gibson, which he kept on stage for such emergencies, and, since that time, has never returned to a Fender of any model. 

The Gibson neck and fretboard appealed to him more than the Fender, as well as the ease with which he could bend notes. He now owns several Gibsons, including an old Les Paul with three pickups (with the original SG design), a newer model SG, and a Junior, which Leslie West gave him as a present. 

Among his collection of acoustic instruments are a Gibson J-50 and an expensive Guild guitar, though he confesses that the disarray over his entire house prevents him from really knowing what he owns.

All his guitars had to be switched around to accommodate his left-handedness. Iommi now realizes that when he first started he could have probably just turned a right-hand guitar around and played it upside down. But he didn’t, and now must either buy a left-handed guitar, or alter any instrument he does purchase to fit his needs.

To add to his southpaw problem, Iommi must also contend with the amputation he suffered years ago.

“You see, I can’t use right-handed instruments now,” he points out, “because I snipped the ends of my fingers off, and on a Les Paul you’ve got to get right up to the end of the guitar on a reversed right-handed instrument to hit the strings. Not many people know about that [the accident]. 

"It happened years ago when I was doing electric welding. One day, I had to cut this sheet metal before I welded. Somebody else used to do it, but I had to do it this day because he didn’t come into work. And it was a faulty switch or something: Thhhht! I pulled it out, and it just gripped the ends and pulled them off.”

As fate would have it, the day of the accident was Iommi’s last day on the job before he was to have left for Germany with a rock outfit. Feeling completely lost he decided to give up the guitar until a friend brought him a record of Django Reinhardt. After hearing what the brilliant guitarist did with just two fingers, Iommi again took up the instrument, and slowly activated the two clipped fingers along with the two healthy ones.

“I had to start all over again,” he recalls, “which was kind of a drag. I have to wear things now because the ends are so tender. It’s helped me a little bit because now I use my little finger a lot.”

The “things” Iommi wears are like little plastic thimbles which fit over the ends of the two digits to make up for the loss in finger-length and reach. He’s tried various sorts of adapters, but hasn’t really come up with any which are totally comfortable. Frustration at times over the accident, an ill-sounding guitar, and a poor performance used to bring out violent reactions.

“I’d get annoyed and pick the guitar up and throw it and smash it,” Iommi says. But those days are over, and Iommi can look back calmly.

“At first, I don’t think people realized how hard it was to learn to play like that. It involved a lot of determination, and a lot of hard work and practice. It [the accident] happened over eight years ago, way before Sabbath or Tull. And when I joined Jethro they even said, ‘What are those things on your fingers?’ When I told them, they were quite surprised to find I could play guitar with these. 

"I’ve had to adopt a totally different way of playing because of these fingers. I mean it’s much easier when the flesh is there as it should be. Instead of, say, pulling a note, I have to sort of push it up to get a vibrato. These tips are a bit clumsy, and they slow me down and get in the way. I even have to wear leather on them to grip the strings. But it’s just something I’ll have to try and overcome.”

Iommi has also had to search for the right string, which wouldn’t clink or buzz when pushed with those fingers. By combining Ernie Ball light gauge strings for the first and second, and Piccato light gauge for the remaining strings, he’s found a set that is comfortable for both chording and solo playing. 

Strings are changed twice a week and never right before a performance. Iommi feels that leaving them on any longer causes the strings to wear out over the frets, and makes them virtually impossible to tune.

A very percussive player, Iommi hits the strings in his pick attack. He uses custom-made picks which are fashioned after normal Fender picks in shape, but which lie between the thin and medium weights in gauge. Iommi explains that Black Sabbath tunes to a D onstage (instead of the customary E piano tuning) to get more depth.

“That’s one of the reasons why I don’t like using thick-gauged strings,” he adds, “because when I bend the strings it’ll rip my bloody fingers apart. On acoustic, I like lightweight gauge strings, as well, because I can get a nice sound from them.”

Onstage, Iommi uses no pedals at the present time, not so much from a religious dislike as from a pragmatic one: He feels they do more harm than good. Because the band tours the United States so frequently, they must contend with the different systems of grounding. 

In England, their Laney amplifiers give maximum performance, but over here the different ground setup causes the stacks to hiss and growl and perform below average. Therefore, adding any sort of extra unit to the line causes extraneous buzzes. In England, Iommi uses a wah-wah and a mini guitar Moog, but found that using them in America caused a significant drop in amplifier power and sound. 

The group is now searching for an American made system that won’t plague them with those problems. In the meantime, to accommodate for the ill performance of his Laney stacks in the U.S., Iommi must set his amplifier on full volume. The “presence,” “middle,” and “treble” are also on 10 with no bass on the amp whatsoever.

The guitar volume is usually set on full because of the constant thundering chords he hammers out, and the three-way toggle switch (“rhythm,” “middle,” and “lead”) is placed on the up position for chording and in the treble spot for soloing. In the studio, Iommi uses these same settings, but only one 100-watt Laney stack. 

For a particular solo, though, occasionally he’ll use a Fender amplifier. On record, Iommi delves into effects a little more than onstage as on Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath when he used a wah-wah, a Rotosound box (which makes the guitar sound like an organ), and various other boosters and phasers.

Queen guitarist Brian May and Black Sabbath riff-master Tony Iommi have been close friends for decades, and, for almost as long, the two have said that they'd love to collaborate with one another. 

Though the two have performed onstage - most notably at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992 - and in the studio together - for the all-star Rock Aid Armenia cover of Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" - no music from the two guitar gods alone has seen the light of day, yet.

When asked in a recent interview if there was any chance of the long-rumored meeting-of-the-musical-spirits occurring though, May didn't exactly rain on the parade.

“I think there is a chance. We do more talking than anything else, but we do a lot of talking," May told Guitar World . 

"He is really my dearest friend in the business and has been for so many years. I could write books about Tony because he’s just the most [pauses]... I don’t even know how to put it into words. You know, he’s a luminous human being is Tony, with a wonderful, kind nature and an incredibly baffling sense of humor. 

“And, of course, he is the father of heavy metal. He did that. He made that happen. And it’s from his fingers and his mind. That young ex-welder, he made that happen. So, you know, he forever wears that medal, I think. He founded this stuff, heavy metal, in my opinion."

Supergroups aren't always more than the sum of their parts but come on! It's hard not to root for hearing two of the all-time-greats join forces.

Black Sabbath lead guitarist Tony Iommi stands well over six-feet tall and plays like he has six fingers. Not bad, since several years ago Tony hacked off the ends of his middle and ring fingers on his right hand (he plays left-handed), and consequently had to completely alter his playing. Struggling with various types of plastic tips which he placed at the ends of the fingers, he has since gone on to become one of the more stylistic players on the rock scene today.

Tony always had an interest in music, though. His first aspiration was to be a drummer, but owing to lack of funds, he turned to a less expensive instrument. The guitar came in almost by default. After realizing that he couldn’t afford a kit of drums, and that an accordion just wasn’t what he wanted, he fell in with the guitar. “I got a guitar for a birthday present,” he states, “and things just went on from there: I got a better guitar and a better guitar.”

His first substantial electric guitar was a Watkins, which ran through a small tubed Watkins guitar amp. During these early years of his playing, Tony would frequently get together with friends and jam, but nothing ever came about until he auditioned with Jethro Tull and scored the lead guitarist position. This was during 1969, following Mick Abrahams’ departure and preceding the band’s appearance in the Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘N’ Roll Circus. Tony was with Tull for the filming of the show only, and immediately left the band after the project was finished.

“It just wasn’t right,” he explains, “so I left. At first, I thought the band was great, but I didn’t much go for having a leader in the band, which was Ian Anderson’s way. As we are now [in Black Sabbath] there’s no leader. Everyone does their own part. Not only that, the communication between the band wasn’t too friendly.” Originally, Iommi had left Sabbath to join Tull, but swiftly returned to his former band after his experience with Jethro.

His first guitar with Sabbath was a Fender Stratocaster (year unknown), which was plugged into two Marshall (4x12) cabinets powered by two 50-watt amplifiers. As the band grew in popularity they started adding more cabinets, until they were offered an attractive advertising arrangement by Laney Amplifiers in England. Since that time, Tony has been using six 4x12 Laney cabinets which are fed by four 100-watt amps. They are channelled by plugging V-cords into the “normal” outputs (they have “treble” and “normal” sockets) of the four heads. For treble boost, he uses a Rangemaster unit which has been reworked (extra tubes and boosters) by the band’s roadies.

After using the Fender for several years, Iommi has changed to Gibson and now uses an old (year also unknown) SG. One major alteration has been the replacement of the pickups with specially built low-feedback units. Tony thought that the standard Gibson pickups fed back uncontrollably, and — though the sound they produced was more than satisfactory — the searing screeches that accompanied that sound made the pickups impossible to use.

The new ones cut down on the feedback, but don’t totally stop the unwanted noise. Other changes include the application of polyurethane to the neck to give it a lacquer-like finish, which resists corrosion of the wood and helps prevent the frets from wearing away. The frets themselves have been filed down, and new metal tuning pegs (replacing the original plastic ones) have been added. Because he’s always experienced difficulty in tuning his Gibson, Iommi has had several different bridges constructed (by the same designer of the low-feedback pickups).

His current bridge raises the strings to a higher position than usual, but it has brought the open strings and twelfth fret octaves into almost perfect sympathy. The bridge’s height also prevents the lightweight strings he uses from constantly rattling against the fretboard.

“It’s sort of an experimental guitar,” Iommi says. “Everything that can be done to a guitar has been done to this one. That’s probably why I like it, because I’ve got it exactly as I want it, apart from still having trouble with tuning.”

The change from Fender to Gibson came one night when the band was playing in Germany, and one of the pickups went out on Tony’s Stratocaster. Grudgingly, he snatched the Gibson, which he kept on stage for such emergencies, and, since that time, has never returned to a Fender of any model. The Gibson neck and fretboard appealed to him more than the Fender, as well as the ease with which he could bend notes. He now owns several Gibsons, including an old Les Paul with three pickups (with the original SG design), a newer model SG, and a Junior, which Leslie West gave him as a present. Among his collection of acoustic instruments are a Gibson J-50 and an expensive Guild guitar, though he confesses that the disarray over his entire house prevents him from really knowing what he owns.

All his guitars had to be switched around to accommodate his left-handedness. Tony now realizes that when he first started he could have probably just turned a right-hand guitar around and played it upside down. But he didn’t, and now must either buy a left-handed guitar, or alter any instrument he does purchase to fit his needs. To add to his southpaw problem, Tony must also contend with the amputation he suffered years ago.

“You see, I can’t use right-handed instruments now,” he points out, “because I snipped the ends of my fingers off, and on a Les Paul you’ve got to get right up to the end of the guitar on a reversed right-handed instrument to hit the strings. Not many people know about that [the accident]. It happened years ago when I was doing electric welding. One day, I had to cut this sheet metal before I welded. Somebody else used to do it, but I had to do it this day because he didn’t come into work. And it was a faulty switch or something: Thhhht! I pulled it out, and it just gripped the ends and pulled them off.”

As fate would have it, the day of the accident was Tony’s last day on the job before he was to have left for Germany with a rock outfit. Feeling completely lost he decided to give up the guitar until a friend brought him a record of Django Reinhardt. After hearing what the brilliant gypsy guitarist did with just two fingers, Tony again took up the instrument, and slowly activated the two clipped fingers along with the two healthy ones.

“I had to start all over again,” he recalls, “which was kind of a drag. I have to wear things now because the ends are so tender. It’s helped me a little bit because now I use my little finger a lot.”

The “things” Tony wears are like little plastic thimbles which fit over the ends of the two digits to make up for the loss in finger-length and reach. He’s tried various sorts of adapters, but hasn’t really come up with any which are totally comfortable. Frustration at times over the accident, an ill-sounding guitar, and a poor performance used to bring out violent reactions.

“I’d get annoyed and pick the guitar up and throw it and smash it,” Iommi says. But those days are over, and Iommi can look back calmly.

“At first, I don’t think people realized how hard it was to learn to play like that. It involved a lot of determination, and a lot of hard work and practice. It [the accident] happened over eight years ago, way before Sabbath or Tull. And when I joined Jethro they even said, ‘What are those things on your fingers?’ When I told them, they were quite surprised to find I could play guitar with these. I’ve had to adopt a totally different way of playing because of these fingers. I mean it’s much easier when the flesh is there as it should be. Instead of, say, pulling a note, I have to sort of push it up to get a vibrato. These tips are a bit clumsy, and they slow me down and get in the way. I even have to wear leather on them to grip the strings. But it’s just something I’ll have to try and overcome.”

Tony has also had to search for the right string, which wouldn’t clink or buzz when pushed with those fingers. By combining Ernie Ball light gauge strings for the first and second, and Piccato light gauge for the remaining strings, he’s found a set that is comfortable for both chording and solo playing. Strings are changed twice a week and never right before a performance. Iommi feels that leaving them on any longer causes the strings to wear out over the frets, and makes them virtually impossible to tune.

A very percussive player, Tony hits the strings in his pick attack. He uses custom made picks which are fashioned after normal Fender picks in shape, but which lie between the thin and medium weights in gauge. Iommi explains that Black Sabbath tunes to a D onstage (instead of the customary E piano tuning) to get more depth.

“That’s one of the reasons why I don’t like using thick-gauged strings,” he adds, “because when I bend the strings it’ll rip my bloody fingers apart. On acoustic, I like lightweight gauge strings, as well, because I can get a nice sound from them.”

On stage, Tony uses no pedals at the present time, not so much from a religious dislike as from a pragmatic one: He feels they do more harm than good. Because the band tours the United States so frequently, they must contend with the different systems of grounding. In England, their Laney amplifiers give maximum performance, but over here the different ground setup causes the stacks to hiss and growl and perform below average. Therefore, adding any sort of extra unit to the line causes extraneous buzzes. In England, Tony uses a wah-wah and a mini guitar Moog, but found that using them in America caused a significant drop in amplifier power and sound.

The group is now searching for an American made system that won’t plague them with those problems. In the meantime, to accommodate for the ill performance of his Laney stacks in the U.S., Tony must set his amplifier on full volume. The “presence,” “middle,” and “treble” are also on 10 with no bass on the amp whatsoever.

The guitar volume is usually set on full because of the constant thundering chords he hammers out, and the three-way toggle switch (“rhythm,” “middle,” and “lead”) is placed on the up position for chording and in the treble spot for soloing. In the studio, Iommi uses these same settings, but only one 100-watt Laney stack. For a particular solo, though, occasionally he’ll use a Fender amplifier. On record, Tony delves into effects a little more than on stage as on Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath when he used a wah-wah, a Rotosound box (which makes the guitar sound like an organ), and various other boosters and phasers.