“I wouldn’t be able to do it”: why Tony Iommi was sure he couldn’t match Eddie Van Halen
Anyone who has ever tried to play heavy metal music is only standing in the halls that Black Sabbath built. They would be the first to tell you that they were nothing more than a hard rock band, but listening to any Tony Iommi riff for more than two seconds will tell you that they were the blueprint for anyone trying to make something a bit heavier than what most thought. Iommi may have gone down like a metal warlord every single time he played live, but even he had to admit defeat when his contemporaries were playing something he couldn’t.
That’s before getting into the fact that he was already at a disadvantage. Anyone who loses the tips of two of their fingers would normally kiss their days of playing goodbye, but Iommi’s decision to use thimbles to play the guitar was the whole reason why his style got heavier, usually easing up the tension on the strings to give him that dark tone.
But even if Sabbath was the blueprint for metal, they were far from the first to come up with the idea. ‘Paranoid’ may as well have been them aping the same bluesy grit that Led Zeppelin did in their prime, and even if someone wanted something technical, they could probably find something better out of Ritchie Blackmore twisting guitar inside out with Deep Purple.
Iommi did have his fans, and one California transplant named Eddie Van Halen couldn’t get enough of Black Sabbath in his early years. Despite Sabbath eventually taking the band out on tour, Van Halen was already taking the crux of their idols and beefing them up a bit more, almost like they were making the world’s greatest party music that happened to feature a guitar tone developed in hell.
Any band might normally appreciate people like Eddie for carrying on his tradition, but Iommi was almost intimidated at first. He may have got on with the young guitarist fine, but Eddie’s knowledge of Sabbath’s best albums bested Iommi’s in some respects, usually being able to rattle off every song off of Master of Reality without breaking a sweat and recreating ‘Into the Void’ perfectly.
Even though Iommi had a tremendous amount of respect for Eddie learning his licks, he knew that he was playing a losing game trying to get anywhere close to Van Halen’s technique, saying, “[Eddie] said, ‘I’ve been playing [‘Into the Void’] like this all these years. And, of course, I showed him how to play it. I didn’t ask him how he played any of his. Because I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
Granted, asking how Eddie played any of his licks would probably be enough for a college-level course for any guitarist. Even if someone has all the dexterity under their belts, it’s almost impossible trying to get the strange tapping technique that he created on ‘Mean Street’ or the DJ scratching noise that he came up with to create ‘Atomic Punk’.
But even if Iommi could never best Eddie on guitar in any respect, that didn’t really matter. Each of them had carved out their own personality beyond anything that their contemporaries could have imagined, and even if they went in different directions, songs like ‘Into the Void’ were forever a part of Eddie’s musical DNA.
