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.
