Playing through pain: the “burden” that almost ended Tony Iommi’s career before it began
Before Tony Iommi’s career had even begun, it was threatened. Back when he was just a teenager in Birmingham, spending his days earning some pennies and his nights messing around with schoolmates, he’d barely even thought about making music when suddenly he was burdened with the realisation that he might not be able to make it anyway.
February 19, 1977. Iommi was a 17-year-old working in a sheet metal factory. After completing school, he’d been pretty aimless. Unsure exactly what he wanted to do, he’d jump around different hobbies, like judo and karate, as well as different odd jobs. First, he was a plumber, then he worked in a factory that made rings, then he briefly worked in a music shop but was fired after being accused of stealing. During this time, the only thing that really stuck was his new love of guitar but even still, it wasn’t all that much of a serious thing in his mind.
In February 1977, he found himself at this new factory, but, in his grand tradition, he was about to move on to something else. “I’d be on a line, and they’d pass stuff down to me, and I’d weld it, and then it’d go on to somewhere else,” Iommi told Ryan J Downey, painting the monotonous scene. But on his last day working there, he was put on a different station. “One day, the person that would be sending me the thing to weld never turned up, so they put me on this giant, huge press — a guillotine-type press,” he said. You know where this is going…
“I don’t know what happened. I must have pushed my hand in. Bang!” Iommi described. It was a grizzly moment, “It came down. It just took the ends off [my fingers]. I actually pulled them off. As I pulled my hand back, it sort of pulled them off. It was left with two stalks, the bone was sticking out the top of the finger.”
And that was that, he thought. Tony Iommi had lost his fingertips; any blossoming dreams of being a rockstar were over. “I went to the hospital, and they cut the bones off, and then they said, ‘You might as well forget playing.’ God, I was just so upset,” he recalled. Anyone would expect the same though. How can a guitarist play without his fingertips? How could he ever press down on the most basic chords, let along master more technical stuff? It seemed to be not just a burden but an accident that would utterly end his career before it had even begun.
But Iommi is made of tougher stuff. “I wouldn’t accept that there wasn’t some way around it, that I wouldn’t be able to play,” he said as his teenage self resolved that this would stop him.
While the factory had hurt him, it was also the factory that healed him as the foreman from the job paid him a visit and played him a recording of jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. “My friend said, ‘Listen to this guy play’, and I went, ‘No way! Listening to someone play the guitar is the very last thing I want to do right now!’ But he kept insisting,” Iommi recalled. Moving through the motions of annoyance, grief and sadness as he listened to the music, yearning to make it, his friend then revealed the punchline; “You know, the guy’s only playing with two fingers on his fretboard hand because of an injury he sustained in a terrible fire.”
With the motivation and now the inspiration, Iommi had the fight he needed to turn the burden into a blessing. He got back to work, figuring out how best to adapt his playing to the injury, reworking his guitar and relearning how to play around these constraints. When he pulled it off, the rest was history as he joined the league of great players working beyond injuries.
But still, it’s never an easy thing. “I would have liked to have not chopped the ends of my fingers off. It became a burden,” Iommi said, adding, “It’s just something I’ve had to learn to live with. It affects your playing style; you can’t feel the strings, and there are certain chords I can’t play.”
