Tony Iommi details the moment he was almost killed on tour: “He was about to stab me”
Not many people go into the music industry thinking they will be risking their lives. Sure, there might be some times when their body gets put through the wringer while on tour, but if all that they ever experience is a little bit of fatigue or massive jetlag going from one city to the next, that’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world. If you get on the bad side of the fans, though, you can end up like Tony Iommi and come close to ending up in critical condition backstage.
Then again, Black Sabbath were no strangers to a bit of violence turning up wherever they went. Before they had even decided to make the heaviest metal ever created, the band had already started to think about making something heavier because of their upbringing in Birmingham, which may as well have been the inverse of what was happening in San Francisco, where everyone was talking about coming together.
Even when looking back at their first handful of songs, some of their best moments sprang from their run-ins with people. ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ had famously come from the band being mocked by skinheads in their hometown, so this was their optimal way of getting back at them without having it come to fisticuffs.
If there was any real darkness behind the Sabbath, it had more to do with their reputation for the occult. While none of the band was practising members or anything, everyone assumed that they had something to do with the dark side of spirituality, especially considering the lyrics to their namesake track and how Geezer Butler wanted to write the original version of ‘War Pigs’ to be about the Satanic version of Christmas.
The band may have only been making those songs to stir people up; people were treating it deadly seriously. After all, The Beatles had already come under fire whenever they said something slightly out of turn when it came to Christianity, and since Iommi had the gall to wear a crucifix necklace onstage and play demented riffs, it didn’t take long for some lunatics to start turning against the supposed rock and roll demon.
Despite Ozzy Osbourne being the unhinged madman behind the microphone, Iommi remembered coming close to death as he was coming offstage, saying, “We were playing the Hollywood Bowl. We arrived and on the dressing room door was a red cross. As I’m walking off this guy comes behind me with a dagger, and he was about to stab me. He got past security and I just heard this big scuffle on the floor. That’s how close I came to being stabbed.”
Usually, an attempted assassination is the darkest that a band could ever get, but that was merely a footnote for Sabbath. By the time they created Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, their decision to work in the confines of an ancient castle led to every one of them being scared off the premises from what they presumed to be a ghost haunting the grounds as they tried to work.
No band should have to endure this kind of behaviour, but it was practically a walk in the park by the time Iommi hit the big time. It’s not anyone’s first choice for how they wanted their career to go, but considering how much darkness exists between Iommi’s fingers today, perhaps those dark chapters helped him in some respects.
