Iron Man (27 page)

By then Ronnie did come over a little more . . . I suppose, bossy. The way he conducted himself, the way he talked, it might have given that impression to the outside world, but he usually didn't mean anything by it. Ronnie was just very outspoken. On the
other hand Geezer and myself hated to be confronted with stuff. We have always been that way, trying not to offend each other, or anybody else. That backfired in the long run, because we wouldn't say what we felt straight away. Instead we talked about it at first, and then it looked like we talked behind somebody's back, which in turn caused all sorts of problems. Of course we wouldn't respond to those immediately either, because we'd talk about it first, which in turn would cause some more problems, that we, of course, wouldn't . . . Well, you know what I mean. It would ultimately lead to something that couldn't be solved any more, no matter how much everybody did or didn't talk about it.

Be that as it may, the recording of
Mob Rules
went smoothly. ‘Turn Up The Night' was a fast song and a good way to start the album. Working with Ronnie, somehow the faster ones came easier than before. Another stand-out track was ‘The Sign Of The Southern Cross'. We wanted a real power track on the album, just like ‘Heaven And Hell' was on the previous one, and that was it: another huge, long song.

The album was released 4 November 1981. When we originally looked at the cover with a picture by Greg Hildebrandt we said: ‘Wow, we really like this.'

The only thing we took out was the faces in the masks of the figures. There was a little controversy about some stains on the floor in the picture. According to some people it spelled out ‘Ozzy'. Somebody mentioned it to us and we went: ‘What?'

It was total rubbish. I never noticed anything and still wouldn't know where to find it.

Although I seem to remember that most reviews of
Mob Rules
were positive, some critics wrote: ‘It's just
Heaven and Hell
part two.'

You can't please everybody.

‘It's just a continuation of what you have done before.'

‘Well, yeah, it's the band!'

‘I know, but it sounds like a continuation from your previous album.'

‘Yeah, it is. It's the next album!'

Or if it's not, then they're going: ‘Oh, it doesn't sound anything like the last album.'

‘No, it's a different album!'

What are you supposed to do?

The Mob Rules tour started in November 1981 in Canada, followed by the States. Then we went back home for four dates at the Hammersmith Odeon starting on New Year's Eve. We used lots of pyro with fire and bombs, and we had this bloke working for us who dealt with all that stuff. Before the shows we rehearsed in London in a big room behind an Irish pub. At the time there were a lot of IRA bombings in the city. Our pyro guy decided to test a bomb in the rehearsal room. It exploded and everybody left the Irish pub in a panic. It was chaos, absolute chaos. One of our guys was in the pub and he said: ‘I couldn't believe it, everybody just shot out. Left all the drinks and everything, whoosh, gone!'

Those bombs were really loud. They must have thought, hell, somebody is trying to blow us up! Mad, it was.

My good friend Brian May came down to see me while we were rehearsing. I said to him: ‘Bring your guitar down and we'll have a little bash.'

He did and when we finished our set me and Brian just carried on playing. We were jamming away and meanwhile the crew gradually removed all the gear. We turned around and there was just
one of my speaker cabinets and his amp, and we went: ‘Fucking hell, everything has gone!'

We were totally oblivious to it, because we were enjoying ourselves so much. The pyro guy could've set one of his bombs off and Brian and me wouldn't have noticed!

We played the Hammersmith and the same pyro guy put his bombs underneath the stage. He tested one of them, it went bang and it blew a two-foot-wide hole in the floor on my side. If I'd been there, I would have been blown up. Christ, it was dangerous. The guy was becoming a liability, so in the end we told him: ‘You're fired!'

No pun intended.

A couple of months later we were doing a show in Madison Square Garden. The guy who worked for me doing all my amps had built these big thick pipes. He maintained that he could put the pyro in these and it would give a real thud. He showed us and it really did. He then put them under the stage at Madison Square Garden and he set them off during ‘War Pigs'. On the first note: ‘Daa . . .' it was: ‘Bang!'

The stage leaped and because of the concussion all the tubes went out on my amps and on Geezer's stack as well. It was just disastrous. We had only done the first note and the lot had gone. We were all right, but we had to stop.

Boom! That was it, the end, thank you and good night!

After a couple of weeks of touring the UK following the Hammersmith shows, we were supposed to go back to America in February.

Then Dad died.

He hadn't been well for some time. He had emphysema, because he'd been a heavy smoker all his life. I was back at home in England. One night I got a call from my mother. Dad had fallen out of bed. I got on the phone to his doctor and I screamed at him, telling him to get over there. I shot over there myself with
Melinda and found Dad on the floor, unconscious and breathing heavily. And then he just gave up and died.

I witnessed him die. It was horrible.

It was a difficult time. We postponed the start of the American tour, but soon I was playing away again, night after night, and travelling all over the place. Working hard . . . just like Dad had done all his life.

The Mob Rules tour went smoothly and we all got along well, although there was all this talk about Ronnie planning to do a solo album. That didn't really sit well with Geezer and me. We heard he was doing rehearsals with a solo band and we thought, what the hell is going on?

We recorded a lot of the American dates for what was to become Black Sabbath's first official live album, but the whole project turned into a bloody nightmare. We were in LA at the Record Plant again. We had this bloke called Lee De Carlo doing the engineering and the mixing for us. His sister was Yvonne De Carlo, the actress who played Lily Munster in
The Munsters
. We went ahead mixing this live album and then it started: me, Geezer and Ronnie would leave the studio and when we came back the next day it would sound different. Lee would never say anything. We would put it right, come back the next day and it would be different again! Lee eventually broke down. It was driving him mad, he was drinking more and more Scotch, and he finally said: ‘I've got to tell you, you're going away at night and then Ronnie comes in and alters everything.'

‘You're kidding!'

‘No. I don't know what to say. I'm in a terrible position here.'

‘Why didn't you tell us all this was going on?'

‘I didn't know what to do!'

Ronnie has always denied that he did this, but that's what Lee said. How true that was I don't know – it's only his word – but we believed it at that time. We hit the roof and we had a big blow-up in the studio. We stopped Ronnie coming down there and that was the end of it. Ronnie said: ‘I'm off.'

He went, and Vinny went with him. We broke up there and then.

Me and Geezer carried on and finished the record.
Live Evil
was released at the end of 1982, beginning of 1983. It did pretty well, considering everything and the fact that the band had broken up by then.

Amazingly, Ozzy put out a live album as well around the same time. Where
Live Evil
had songs from
Heaven and Hell
and
Mob Rules
, with some older Black Sabbath stuff,
Speak of the Devil
, Ozzy's album, was all re-recorded Sabbath songs with none of his solo stuff. I was unpleasantly surprised that he just did the old set. It still surprises me to this day: he goes out and does ‘Iron Man' and ‘Paranoid' all the time, even though he's got a great repertoire of all of the songs he's done on his own. I think putting out the live album like that was down to Sharon, trying to put the cat among the pigeons.

After Ronnie and Vinny left, I called up David Coverdale and Cozy Powell to see if they would be interested in joining us. Coverdale's words were: ‘Ah, bollocks, I just signed a deal with Geffen Records to do a Whitesnake album.'

Cozy was with Whitesnake as well, so that was those two taken care of.

Me and Geezer had to rethink the whole thing. We had a million tapes sent in from different singers and most of them were horrible. One of them was from Michael Bolton. I didn't know
him at the time. We had Michael come in and we had him sing ‘Heaven and Hell', ‘War Pigs' and ‘Neon Knights'. He was quite good, but he wasn't exactly what we were looking for then. We dropped a bollock there, didn't we? Michael Bolton! A little bit of a mistake.

It was hard to find somebody who was going to fit the bill, to sing the Ozzy and the Ronnie stuff. But an unlikely lad was lurking around the corner, and soon we'd be reborn . . .

By the time Ronnie and Vinny left, we switched management again to none other than Don Arden. He hadn't been interested in managing us without Ozzy, but he changed his mind, maybe also because he'd had a big blow-up with Sharon after she took off with Ozzy. And after the Sandy Pearlman disaster we welcomed Don back with open arms.

Don came up with the idea of us meeting Ian Gillan, of Deep Purple fame. He said: ‘See how you get on!'

I didn't know Ian. We arranged to meet him at lunchtime in a pub in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, called The Bear. We had a drink, then another drink, and another drink, and another drink. The pub opened and closed and opened again and closed, and we were still there. And at the end of the night we had a band together.

The next day Ian apparently didn't remember that very well, because his manager, Phil Banfield, said to him: ‘Next time you decide to put a band together, will you inform me? I just got this call from Don Arden about the band and I said: “What band?” And Don said to me: “Well, he just joined Black Sabbath!”'

There certainly was a buzz around the business. They were going mad about us teaming up. And even in the pub in
Woodstock some fans came up to us who couldn't believe they were seeing the three of us together. It was unusual, guys from two big bands getting together to start a new group.

Phil Banfield managed Ian and Don managed us (Phil would later introduce me to Ralph Baker and Ernest Chapman, who in 1988 took over my management). Back then we let Don handle it, because Phil didn't want to get involved too much with him. Phil and Ian looked at him like: ‘Don Arden, he'll cut your hands off!'

We weren't going to call the band Black Sabbath. The idea was to have a supergroup of different names in one band and call it something else. But Don thought we should carry on with the name Black Sabbath, and so we finally went: ‘Well, all right then.'

Me and Bill Ward had stayed in touch and when we put the new band together I thought, let's see what Bill is up to. We asked him to come over and he soon did. We thought it would be good for Bill to be playing, because that's what he is, a player. He was doing well at that time. He was living in LA, where he had stopped drinking. He came over to England with this guy from Alcoholics Anonymous, a sponsor, so as far as we were concerned he was getting clean.

We went to The Manor, a studio in the Oxfordshire countryside owned by Richard Branson, to record
Born Again
. Ian said to me: ‘When we record I'm going to stay outside.'

I said: ‘Outside? What do you mean?'

‘Well, I'm going to have a marquee outside the house and I'm going to stay in there.'

‘Why is that then?'

‘It would probably be better for my voice.'

‘Okay.'

I thought he was joking, but when I arrived at The Manor I saw this marquee outside and I thought, fucking hell, he's serious. Ian had put up this big, huge tent. It had a cooking area and a bedroom and whatever else.

We had all the pyro left over from the tour, so one night we put it all around the tent. After Ian had gone to bed, up it went: Boom! The whole thing just flew up in the air and he was on the ground, all bewildered, going: ‘What happened!?'

The worst of it was, he'd put his tent right next to the lake and Richard Branson had all sorts of prize three-foot-long fish in it. The concussion went all through the lake and killed some of the fish and stunned the rest, so they were all floating on the surface. Concussed carp: when Branson heard about it he was not happy at all.

While we were up at The Manor we thought that in the long run it would probably be cheaper to buy our own cars instead of hiring them for our upcoming tour, so we bought four new Fords. Bill especially was very pleased with his new wheels. One night we all went down to the pub and Ian went home to The Manor a little before us. There was a go-kart track that went around the swimming pool, and he decided to take one of the cars to race it around there. He lost control of it and, bang!, the car flipped upside down. He got out, but the car caught fire and he just left it. He got back in the house, threw the keys on the table and said he was going to bed. The next morning Bill got up and he said: ‘What happened to my car?'

We found it down the go-kart track, upside down and burned out. Bill hit the roof: ‘Who did this!'

Ian had his boat out on the Cherwell, the river that runs along the back of The Manor. Bill found out it was Ian who had flipped his car, so he got a chisel, went out to the river, smashed holes in the bottom of the boat and sank it. Then Ian came out: ‘Fucking hell, somebody's stolen my boat!'