The guitarist Tony Iommi was blown away by: “I’d never heard anything like it”
Most guitarists who play heavy metal are still playing in the walls that Tony Iommi built. Although he may not have had the easiest route to becoming a rock god, turning himself into the greatest riff lords of all time came from his ability to make the blues scale sound so damn demented whenever he performed with Black Sabbath. Whereas everyone was trying to copy what Iommi was doing in the early days of metal, Iommi said that the first new kid on the block that he took notice of was Eddie Van Halen.
But when you listen to Sabbath and Van Halen back to back, there’s not much overlap. Sure, there is the occasional riff that might be similar in a few places, but was anyone going to confuse the supposed Satanic metal band with the group that was all about making a 24-hour party whenever they started playing?
Van Halen were always their own unique beast, and when they emerged in 1978, Sabbath were recovering from a low point. The camaraderie between Ozzy Osbourne and the rest of the band had flown out the window, and making albums like Technical Ecstasy felt like they were being forced into the same room rather than making a record that came from their soul.
When they got out on the road and had Van Halen open their shows, though, Iommi was amazed to see what Eddie was doing on the fretboard. Compared to the other guitar heroes who relied on the blues in their playing, Eddie’s right hand tapping on the fretboard made noises that sounded like an alien being beamed down from space half the time.
Iommi fell under Eddie’s spell right along with the rest of the world when hearing songs like ‘Eruption’ for the first time, telling SPIN, “They came on their first World Tour with Sabbath. They were all itching, all ready to go. I really liked him. I’d never heard anything like it, the way he played, I was, ‘Wow, this is really different.’ We got to know each other; they were out with us for, I think, eight months.”
Despite becoming fast friends, Iommi was wary of when they were getting a little too cheeky with their Sabbath worship. Throughout some of their sets, Iommi thought that Eddie’s riffs in between songs took a little bit more than Sabbath than he realised, especially when he started to incorporate those same licks into his albums, like the instrumental break in the middle of Women and Children First.
But it’s not like Eddie was looking to make a one-to-one copy of Sabbath tunes. After all, having Sammy Hagar or David Lee Roth out front meant that it would always be a completely different band, so when a song like ‘Panama’ or ‘Dreams’ came on the radio, it was bound to be a much different animal than Osbourne singing hymns of doom.
Throughout the rest of his life, Eddie was always close with Iommi, usually bonding over their love of bluesy rock and roll or probably relating to how much of a lunatic both of their respective singers could be at the worst of times. In a scene that’s usually flooded with one guitarist trying to one-up the other, Eddie and Iommi seemed to give off the impression of old friends rather than rivals.
