The murder plot that terrified Tony Iommi
Is there anyone in rock music tougher than Tony Iommi? What would other guitarists do if they lost the tips of their guitar-playing fingers? Probably quit. Not Tony. Hardly phased by the incident, he made two plastic tips for playing the guitar, loosened his strings so he could still bend them, and invented a whole new genre of music.
That’s not the only tough thing about Iommi, either. Some of the music he wrote with Black Sabbath is the heaviest and most hard-hitting music ever created. Take a song like ‘War Pigs’; it is a riff-heavy distortion-laden masterpiece and one of the most definitive anti-war songs ever made. Iommi could also drink most other rock stars under the table. Nothing scared Tony Iommi… or did it?
Sabbath were always branded as a satanic band. While a lot of the devout misplaced their judgement, calling tracks like ‘Stairway To Heaven’ demonic, chastising The Beatles and generally finding issues with the most anti-satanic artists out there, Black Sabbath was pretty hellish. As such, they found themselves on the receiving end of religious criticism a fair bit.
Some of this was the result of misunderstanding. For instance, ‘Paranoid’ is a song all about having mental health problems, ‘The Wizard’ is allegedly about a drug dealer and ‘War Pigs’ is against violence; however, because of their affiliation with horror movies, demons and the eccentricity of Ozzy Osbourne, many called them spawn of the devil.
For some, this meant shunning Black Sabbath and telling their kids they couldn’t listen to them. For others, they took matters a step too far, deciding that the world would be a better place without the blasphemy spouting devil worshippers. It was one of these people who attempted to kill Tony Iommi one night in Los Angeles.
“Many years ago,” he recounted in an interview, “Here actually, in Los Angeles at the Hollywood Bowl, we were playing, and it was the time of the religious sector bout, you know, and somebody decides to turn up to the gig.”
Iommi and the band hadn’t received any warning about a potential threat, but the attacker made their intention clear upon visiting their dressing room. While the door may have been locked, they left a message. “There was a cross on the dressing room door in red. I thought, ‘God, here we go’.”
Thinking it was the impulsive rambling of a god-loving passerby, Iommi and co headed to the stage door. “I never thought anything of it. Then I got on stage, and about the third or fourth song, my amplifier started playing up, and I got pissed off. I turned around and kicked it over and walked off.”
In his anger, Iommi was oblivious to his surroundings and didn’t notice the man who started following him. “There’s a guy behind me with a dagger who was about come and stab the nearest one, and I was the nearest one, and I haven’t seen him,” he said, “So, I’m still walking off, pissed off, moaning and groaning and I heard this big bang behind me where they’d all jumped on him.”
After being taken to safety, Iommi was filled in on what the man’s intentions were as he surmised his perpetrator’s mental state. “It turns out the guy had slit his hand and put the cross on the door in blood. He was a bit of a loon, you know?”
