Iron Man (7 page)

Because I felt so out of place in London and I really felt bad about leaving Earth, I took Geezer down with me for moral support. He would sit at the back of the room, and they were fine with that. John put us up in his flat and took us to the rehearsals. They started at nine o'clock in the morning sharp. I had never heard of nine o'clock in the morning with our band, none of us had. With Earth we would just straggle in whenever we felt like it. But with Tull it was: ‘Gotta be there, on time!'

The first day we got there maybe ten minutes late and I could hear Ian Anderson screaming at John: ‘Nine o'clock, I said!'

I thought, bloody hell, this is a bit serious. I hadn't even plugged in and already the tension was palpable. At twelve o'clock sharp it was: lunch. I just sat down with Ian at a table. The others were at another table whispering to me: ‘No!'

I thought, what's the matter with them?

They went: ‘You don't sit with Ian. You sit with us.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘He likes to sit by himself. And we sit together.'

I thought, bloody hell, that's a weird set-up. This is supposed to be a band!

That night Ian Anderson took me to see Free play at the Marquee. He introduced me to everybody as his new guitar player, so I thought, this is wonderful. I felt like a pop star. From being a nobody from Birmingham to people at the Marquee taking an interest – it seemed great. We watched Free for a bit and left early. Rehearsal again the next morning, nine o'clock. And don't be late!

But it just didn't feel good. The thing that put the nail in the coffin for me was a meeting with the band's manager. He said: ‘You'll get £25 a week and you are really lucky to have this position.'

That pissed me off. I said: ‘What do you mean I'm really lucky? They want me because they like what I play, not because of luck!'

After that I thought: I want to be a part of a band that's going to make it all together, not be put in a band where they've already made it and I'm ‘lucky to be in there'. I went back to the rehearsal room and said to Ian: ‘Can I have a word with you?'

We went outside and I said: ‘I don't feel comfortable about this whole thing.'

He said: ‘What's wrong?'

‘I'm not happy with the situation. And I don't feel right about being “lucky” to be in a band and all this sort of stuff.'

Ian was great, I can't fault him at all; he was very nice about the whole thing. He said: ‘Look, if you are definitely sure you want to leave . . .'

‘Well, I am.'

‘We're in trouble now, because we're doing this film,
The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
, and we don't have a guitar player. Would you do that at least?'

I felt bad walking out on them, so I said: ‘Yes, I'll do that.'

And that was it. As soon as I came out of that last rehearsal I said to Geezer: ‘Let's get the band back together.'

He said: ‘Are you sure about leaving Tull? You ought to give it time.' He was pushing me, but then he said: ‘I'm glad you're not doing it.'

I said: ‘Let's make a proper go of it. Do what they're doing: rehearse in the morning, really get down to it.'

He agreed. So we phoned the others from London and made a plan to get back together.

I still had to do this
Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus
. The opening of the whole thing was in the Dorchester Hotel. There was me with the same buckskin jacket again. I wore it for the film as well. The Stones had all their gear set up on the floor of a ballroom. The Who were there and Taj Mahal and all the people who were in the movie, but I didn't know a soul and felt like a spare dinner. Marianne Faithfull must have sensed that; she came over and went: ‘You'll be all right, I'll talk to you.'

And so she did, she was great.

The Stones started playing but within a minute or so they stopped. They started arguing and had the biggest row. The whole room went quiet. Brian Jones and Keith Richards were screaming at each other: ‘You are fucking out of tune, you fucking . . .'

Because he was with Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger came over to us, saying: ‘They can't even fucking tune their fucking guitars.'

It was a sure sign of troubles to come.

The next day we filmed in a big warehouse somewhere. They had a stage set up and something that looked like a circus ring. They wanted people to dress up in silly hats and circus stuff, which seemed ridiculous to me. Even Eric Clapton said: ‘I feel fucking silly wearing this stupid thing.'

They gave me this bloody clarinet and we all had to come out pretending to play as we were going around the ring. Clapton, The Who and John Lennon – everybody had to go around this
thing. After we all did that I don't know how many times to get it right, people started chatting and it got a bit more comfortable.

We were all eagerly awaiting the much anticipated jam with Clapton, Lennon, Mitch Mitchell, and Keith Richards playing bass. I said to Ian Anderson: ‘I'm really looking forward to seeing Clapton play.'

They started jamming on this instrumental thing, bloody Yoko sitting at John's feet, and they weren't good at all. So Ian said: ‘What do you think of your hero now then!?'

We shared a dressing room with The Who, so that was my first time meeting them. They were nice enough and when they started to play they were really good. I was completely surprised when I heard Pete Townshend playing lead, because you never normally heard him do that very much and he played great.

Not everybody played for real; we did ‘Song For Jeffrey'. Ian Anderson got this hat and he said: ‘Try that on.'

I said: ‘It looks all right', but I felt pretty embarrassed and kept my head down while I was playing so people couldn't see me.

It was ages before that ever came out. I bumped into Bill Wyman two or three times and he said: ‘Oh yeah, I'll get you a copy of that for you.'

He never did, so I never saw it until years later and it was horrible. It's so out of date. But it's a classic now; half the people who were in that show are dead. There's John Lennon, Keith Moon, Brian Jones and Mitch Mitchell . . . it's a Rock 'n' Roll Circus, all right.

After I came back from London I said to the rest of the band: ‘If we're going to do this, we're going to do it seriously and really work at it, starting with rehearsals at nine o'clock in the morning. Sharp!'

We booked a place in the Newtown Community Centre in Aston, across the road from a cinema, and started a whole new regime. I'd pick everybody up to make sure that we got there on time. Geezer didn't live that far away, so he'd walk down. Occasionally he'd be a little bit late, but on average we were there at a sensible hour to start work. And that's when we began writing our own songs. ‘Wicked World' and ‘Black Sabbath' were the first two that were written during those rehearsals. We knew we had something; you could feel it, the hairs stood up on your arms, it just felt so different. We didn't know what it was, but we liked it. I just came up with this riff for ‘Black Sabbath'. I played ‘dom-dom-dommm'. And it was like: that's it! We built the song from there. As soon as I played that first riff we went: ‘Oh God, that's really great. But what is it? I don't know!'

Just a simple thing but it had a mood. Only later did I learn that I had used what they call the Devil's interval, a chord progression that was so dark that in the Middle Ages playing it was forbidden by the Church. I had no idea; it was just something that I had felt inside. It was almost like it had been forced out of me, these things were coming up just like that. Then everybody started putting bits to it and afterwards we thought it was amazing. Really strange, but good. We were all shocked, but we knew that we had something there.

Geezer was going to be an accountant. That's why he had the job of sorting all the money out every time we had a gig. He was the clever one, so it was him that came up with the lyrics as well. I certainly wouldn't be able to sit down and write stuff and Bill would be on it for twenty years to write one line. Ozzy would come up with the vocal melody line. He'd just sing what came into his head and so it might very well have been that he sang: ‘What is this that stands before me' at the time. Geezer would then use that and put the rest of the lyrics in. So both of them really would come up with stuff.

Back then we did a lot of dope. One night we were at this club, in the middle of nowhere. Ozzy and Geezer saw somebody leaping around outside, being silly. To them it was like an elf or something. I fear it must have been the drugs, but that's where I think ‘The Wizard' came from, another one of those early songs. They simply put what they saw into lyrics.Those first songs are often described as scary. I liked horror films and so did Geezer. We used to go to the cinema across the street from our rehearsal place to see them, so maybe it was something that subconsciously directed us to that sort of thing. I know there is a Boris Karloff movie called
Black Sabbath
, but we never saw it at that time. Geezer came up with the name Black Sabbath and it just sounded like a good one to use.

We always thought there was something there that led us into
this music that we were playing. I played that ‘Black Sabbath' riff straight off, dang-dáng-dang, and that was it. It just came up, as a lot of my riffs have. It was like somebody was there, saying: ‘Play that!'

Something or somebody was providing ideas and guidance from some other dimension, like an invisible fifth band member . . .

When we played near Carlisle at the Toe Bar, they always put us up in a caravan. In winter it was so cold we burned the furniture to keep warm. One day we turned up at this gig in Manchester and there was a guy on the door wearing a suit and a bow tie. We thought, this is weird for a blues club. He said: ‘Oh, you're Earth, come in.'

In we went and he said: ‘I really like your new single.'

‘Oh, thanks!'

We didn't have a single out at the time, but we took no notice, got all the gear in and set up. Then we saw all these people coming in in bow ties, suits and ballroom dresses and we realised they had booked the wrong band. We soon found out that there was another Earth, and that was a pop band. The manager caught on to us but said: ‘You might as well go on and play.'

We played one song and everybody out there, all expecting to dance, was going: ‘What is this crap!'

They pulled us off. Then the manager wouldn't pay us, so we nicked the tea urn, we took the rug out of the back of the dressing room, we took knives and forks, we took whatever we could. And we said to each other: ‘That's it, we're never going through
this again. We need to come up with a name that nobody else has.'

Jim Simpson came up with Fred Carno's Army. Fucking hell, it was getting worse! Fred Carno was some old-time music hall impresario who had worked with Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. Ozzy's idea was Jimmy Underpass and the Six Way Combo. So much for that. Geezer came up with Black Sabbath and it just sounded like a good name to use.

Jim Simpson got us our first gigs in Europe. The very first trip over there, we picked up Ozzy and he showed up with just a shirt on a hanger. We said to him: ‘We're going away, you know.'

‘I know.'

‘We're going to be away for a few weeks.'

‘I know.'

He only had one shirt and one pair of jeans, and that was it.

On our way over there we decided to change our name. Or maybe it was in one of the first clubs we played, the famous Star Club in Hamburg. It held 400 or 500 people. Because they had us back a few times we were able to build a following and we ended up holding the attendance record there, after The Beatles.

It was after the Jethro Tull thing and inspired by Ian Anderson that I had bought a flute and tried to play it on stage. We were smoking dope there a lot and I was pretty pie-eyed. I held the flute way too low so I was just blowing air into the microphone. Ozzy went backstage and grabbed this great big mirror, brought it out to the stage and put it in front of me. He tapped me on the shoulder and I went: ‘Ooohh!!'

Another high point came when Ozzy found this tin of purple paint and he painted his face with it. There was a big ladder behind the stage and he climbed to the top of it until his head was over the curtains and all you could see was this purple head popping up over the backdrop. Crazy stuff like that helped us maintain whatever sanity we had.

We did a couple of European tours in those early days. The first one took us to Hamburg, Denmark and Sweden, and following tours also saw us travel to Switzerland, where we played in St Gallen for six weeks. We played there for maybe three people, four or five spots a day. All we'd get would be a glass of milk and a sausage. No money: we were poverty-stricken. Geezer was a vegetarian, but he had to eat the sausages because we didn't have any money to buy him any other food. We all stayed in this one room above this cafe across the road from where we played. If you weren't in on time they'd lock you out. One night me and Ozzy went off with these two girls and stayed with them. Geezer came back from somewhere and couldn't get in, so Bill tied sheets together, trying to pull Geezer up. As they were doing this the police came by. It took quite some explaining in two different languages to sort that one out.

We then moved on to Zurich. When we arrived there the place was packed. This band was up there playing away, looking happy and they even had champagne. We thought, this is marvellous, we'll have some! Little did we know they had been there for six weeks and it was their last night. All these people were there seeing them off, so it was a big party night. As soon as we started the place was dead. We went, wait a minute, what happened? Where's all the people? They had this one nutter coming in every day. He'd stand on his head, all his money would fall out of his pocket, he'd pick it up again and leave. And there was this old hooker sitting at the corner by the bar and that was it.