(Excerpt from Guitarworld.com to read the full interview click here)
Tony Iommi truly is the iron man of rock. After a hand injury that would have halted most guitarists in their tracks, he battled a constant “you can’t do that” from parents, record companies and guitar builders, survived a revolving door of bandmates (since 1968 he’s been Black Sabbath’s only constant member), and even beat cancer.
To honour his astounding career, Gibson has recreated his heavily modified SG Special, the ‘Monkey’ guitar. Here, Tony weaves the tale of this instrument into the story of a career that, without such dogged determination, might never have happened…
First of all, tell us about the monkey sticker. Does it have a particular significance?
“Well, I had this jacket that I bought from Take 6 in London. I just barely afforded it and I wore it all the time. I wanted to make it a bit different for on stage, so I started putting metal stars and things on it. Then I found these monkeys and I thought, ‘I’ll put a couple of them on, and I’ll put one on the guitar as well.’ So I put one on the guitar and it became known as the ‘Monkey’ guitar.”
I’d played in a band with Bill Ward before. We’d joined this blues band up in Carlisle. Then when Bill and myself got together with Oz and Geez, it was a weird combination.
"When we first got together we’d just learn 12-bar songs, and on the first gig we did, I didn’t even know what they were going to wear. Geezer came in in this long hippie dress. I’ve got my leather jacket on. Ozzy came with a shirt and a tap round his neck. I thought, ‘Bloody hell!’ We were a right odd bunch. But it brought us together and it just worked.”
"All these things were experiments to make things work for me. Like the first fret. Because I was using light strings, everything had to be worked differently. It had to be right from the off, because I was already struggling.”
So the fact that you had to do all these modifications because of the injury to your fingers, created a sound that might otherwise never have happened…
“I think so. And I experimented all the time. I’d always hear, ‘You can’t do that.’ Constantly. ‘Oh no, you can’t do that. 24-fret guitar, you can’t do that. It wouldn’t be harmonically right.’ ‘I’m using light-gauge strings.’ ‘You can’t do that.’ I can, I’ve done it.
