“I was so embarrassed”: The one Black Sabbath song Tony Iommi couldn’t play properly
It’s practically a curse for any artist to struggle with getting the sounds in their head onto tape. The whole point is to enhance the song in whatever way you know how, and when there’s a wall between you and the music, it can be absolute torture trying to compensate for it in the studio. While Tony Iommi usually didn’t have to cower to anyone when crafting his signature doomy riffs, he admitted that there were some stumbling blocks along the road in Black Sabbath.
When listening to the first handful of Sabbath albums, most of the attraction came from what Iommi was playing. While the band were initially like any other blues act that was making a slightly heavier flavour of rock and roll, hearing Iommi make demented riffs on his Gibson SG sounded like he was pulling a monster out of the depths of hell.
Despite the first three Sabbath records being a crash course in what heavy metal was going to be, there was no sense in them going down that road if they were going to get the same songs over and over again. Master of Reality at least showed them a different avenue that they could work in, but there was a lot more for them to explore once they started breaking out the acoustics and adding more instruments into the mix.
While they weren’t exactly in Beatles territory where they switched things up on every song, Vol. 4 at least saw them willing to change their ways a little bit. ‘Changes’ may have been a bit too far over the line for fans who wanted to hear the menacing riffs, but there were also pieces later on in their career where the keyboard worked fine, like Rick Wakeman playing those demented scalar patterns in ‘Sabbra Cadabra.’
So if the piano sounded good, why not a harp? Although it seemed like the furthest thing from a guitar on a Sabbath record, Iommi had started to get used to plucking out little melodies on the harp when he hit on the riff for ‘Supertzar.’ All of the building blocks were there to make a great song, but the minute that he got into the studio with professionals, he knew that he was never going to do the song justice.
“I had a harp, and I couldn’t play the harp, but I could play a couple of notes on it. “
tony iommi
According to Iommi, he only spent time showing the harpist the part before giving up, saying, “I had a harp, and I couldn’t play the harp, but I could play a couple of notes on it. So I put this riff down and thought, ‘I’ll try that harp on this.’ We got this harp player from the philharmonic, and she asked, ‘Well, what would you like me to play?’ And I said. ‘I’m playing this [mimics rudimentary harp playing]’ I was so embarrassed. So I said, ‘Just play what you think will go with it.’”
But leave it to Iommi to actually make a harp work in the context of a heavy metal song. The entire premise of the harp sounds like it’s trying to mimic the heavenly sounds of angels, but in Sabbath’s hands, they practically sound like the first few sounds heard before the demons start emerging from the underworld, especially when Iommi kicks into his signature guitar lick.
Even though ‘Supertzar’ is far from the greatest song that the Ozzy Osbourne era ever spit out, it only shows how versatile they could be on their own. Iommi could have easily transposed whatever he heard onto the guitar, but after working among true professionals, he knew that he could take anything he could think of and make it sound ominous.
