Free Iron Man by Tony Iommi Page A

it was such a long song you had to capture it in one take, or else we’d run out of time. After the first one, Rodger said: ‘Okay, that’s it.’
    â€˜Well, I wanted to try something else . . .’
    â€˜That’s it!’

    â€˜Can we do it just once more? I think I can get it better.’
    Eventually Rodger said: ‘Okay, we’ll do another one.’
    So we had another crack at it and that was it: take it or leave it.
    That whole album was done exactly like that: play like you play at a gig. You play it once, you don’t have ten goes at it. As we played it in the studio then, ‘Warning’ was fifteen minutes or something ridiculous. Rodger and the engineer edited it down to about ten minutes. They cut a big section and plucked out a couple of smaller pieces in places I wouldn’t have edited. I was upset because I felt it originally had a more natural flow, but you have to have a certain length for a vinyl album and maybe a fifteen-minute piece was too much.
    The funny thing is, after we put a song like that down on record it became the version we would play from then onwards. It gets accepted like that. So forty years later we’re still reproducing on stage what we happened to do in the studio on that particular day. When we recorded ‘Electric Funeral’, for instance, Bill would play it differently every bloody time. He didn’t know how many times to come in, and in certain parts he plays three instead of four and we kept the three. And to this day we still play it that way.
    A lot of people think ‘N.I.B.’ stands for Nativity In Black, whatever that means. It’s a typically American thing; they always have to go: ‘Oh, it’s gotta be something satanic!’
    We called Bill ‘Smelly’ and we also called him ‘Nib’, because with his beard his face looked like a pen nib. It just sounded humorous to us and when it came to the title of the track we said: ‘What shall we call it?’
    â€˜Uh . . . Nib?’
    It was just a joke.
    I loved my white Fender Stratocaster, because I’d worked on it so much. I had it in bits and put it all back together again, I potted the pickups, filed the frets down on it and basically did everything to try and make it easier for me to play on. One fateful day I
bought a Gibson SG as a backup guitar. Two guitars: it was getting a bit flash, really! In the studio, right after recording the first track of the day, ‘Wicked World’, the bloody pickup went on the Fender. I thought, oh God, I’m going to have to use the SG, which I never really played! I recorded the album with it and that was it, I just stuck to it. I actually swapped the Strat for a saxophone. I can’t believe I did that now. That was a classic guitar and it really had a different sound from the regular Strats because of all the work I did to it. Years later, Geezer saw it in the window of a second-hand shop and went back to buy it for me. But it had been sold and I’ve never seen it again.
    It was a right-handed Gibson SG that I played upside down. Then I met this guy who said: ‘I’ve got a friend who is right-handed, and he plays a left-handed guitar upside down.’
    I said: ‘You’re kidding!’
    I met this guy, we swapped guitars and we were both happy. The Gibson SG had single-coil pickups which, because I used a treble booster, caused a horrendous racket: ‘Shghghghghghghggg!!!’
    I then potted and encased the pickups and later on I put in different ones altogether. I was fiddling about with the guitar again, doing the stuff I had done to the Strat. That SG was very dear to me, but I don’t have it any more. It’s been put out to pasture at the Hard Rock Café. But the deal is, if I ever want it back, I can get it back.
    We didn’t have the time to get involved with the final mix of the album, because we were off to tour Europe. There really