Black Sabbath legend Tony Iommi remembered how he continued playing guitar after losing the tips of his right index and middle finger on his last day of work in a sheet metal factory way back when he was 17 years old, saying during a Musicians Institute event (transcribed by UG):
“I went to the next stage of trying to find light strings. Of course, there were no light strings in them days, they were all quite heavy really.
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“And if you had normal fingers it’s fine, but when you’re like this it’s painful. So I had to make a setup of my own and I bought some banjo strings.
“I used at first banjo strings because they were light, and then I dropped the gauge down so that it’ll make basically a light gauge set. That’s what I did, I used that for years.
“And then I went to string companies saying, ‘Can you make me some light gauge strings?’ And they were, ‘Light gauge strings? You can’t do that.’ I said, ‘You can! I’ve got them, I use them!’ And they said ‘No, they’ll never sell. They’ll never do any good.’ Really peculiar, isn’t it?
“And I found this company in Wales called Picato and they said, ‘We’ll make them for you.’ So they made me my own sets of these light gauge strings. And I used them for years.
“Of course, other companies then started doing light gauge strings. It’s ironic, you have to prove everything before everybody accepts and have a go at it.”
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Tony also revealed he originally wanted to play drums, saying:
“I originally wanted to play drums but I couldn’t have a set of drums. Because, for a start, our house was about half the size of this stage and I’d never been able to have a set of drums. And I couldn’t afford any anyway.
“So I had a guitar and I really took to the guitar and enjoyed it. The Shadows were a band that I would try and listen to as much as I could, because I loved the sound, I loved the style of playing. And being instrumental it allowed me to be able to learn these instrumental tunes. Not very good, but I used to have a go.”
Tony also remembered his very first gig, saying:
“The first gig I ever had was me with a drummer and a piano player. They were about 30 years older than me, it was in a pub and I wasn’t old enough to even be in a pub.
“They asked me to play with them. ‘Oh my god, I’ve never done it before, I don’t know what to do.’ And that was my first experience of playing in front of people.
“And then I just practiced and practiced and practiced. And then I got together with this band, they were called The Rockin’ Chevrolets. And it was really funny because they were all into suits and all this stuff, the gold lamé suits – very over the top really.
“It was great because we could go and do shows, but it was all pubs. And again, I wasn’t properly old enough to be playing in these pubs. But it was good, it was great experience for me to be able to play with other people.”
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Asked if the band played a “mix of covers and originals,” Iommi replied:
“Originals? Not in them days. It was all covers. It was rock ‘n’ roll stuff. I think after that… I can’t remember what I did after that. But eventually I ended up in a band towards Scotland.
“I joined this band and the drummer at that time was about to leave so I thought, ‘Oh, great!’ So I got Bill [Ward] in the band. Actually, before that I was in a band with Bill called The Rest. And they were quite good.
“And, again, we used to do a lot of pubs and clubs and stuff. And then when I left them I went to Cumberland to join this other band. And that’s when I got Bill in and we were with them for a year and we really built up a great following.
“The sound and everything came about because we didn’t want another guitar player – we didn’t want a rhythm guitar player. A lot of people had keyboard players and we didn’t want a keyboard player. We wanted just bass, guitar, drums, and vocals. And we wanted to make the sound as big as we could.
“So I used to experiment a lot with trying different things to make a bigger sound. We played closer together, he played the same sort of thing as me and bended the strings a bit – make it fatter. It went on from that to tuning down and using thicker strings. And just trying different ideas to create a different sound. I think it worked.”
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Asked on how people reacted to his downtuning at first, Tony replied:
“I don’t think it did in them days because most people didn’t play in tune anyway. [Laughs] And there weren’t sort of things as strobes and all that sort of business in them days, it was just like – you tune up. But what do you tune to? I don’t know… So it was like the tuning fork and ‘Bing!’
“I think it caught on later when people realized that we did tune down. Much later, when you got bands like Soundgarden, and Metallica, and all these other bands that were influenced by [that].”