by Tristan Andrews
Iommi was the lead guitarist of Black Sabbath. He held the band together with various musicians and vocalists for over 30 years. He slacked the tempo of blues rock down and created heavy metal riffs that are only challenged by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. Iommi did a brief stint with the rock-blues-folk band Jethro Tull in 1968, before the band Earth became Black Sabbath.
Rolling Stone queued Iommi in at number 86 in their "100 Greatest Guitarist of All Time" list in 2003; Guitar World placed him at number 1 in their list of "100 Greatest Metal Guitarists of All Time" in 2004.
A tragic accident that happened while Iommi worked in a metal shop caused him to invent an unorthodox method of playing guitar. He sliced off the tips of his ring and middle fingers of his right hand. Like Django Reinhardt before him, the accident occurred while he was a teenager and he didn't give up playing guitar, but overcame the accident and created something new.
He created plastic caps for his injured fingers and used light gauge strings on his guitar. He used alternate tuning to forge his heavy metal sound. Iommi tuned to open tunings that make a complete chord as open strings are strummed. This ploy helped him invent a characteristic style of playing.
He created a sound very different from the music that influenced him to play guitar, such as Hank Marvin and the Shadows. When 1967 rolled around, he had already performed with sundry blues-rock bands. That is when along with three old school mates, he started the band Earth.
Because of the new style of music that Iommi was creating, the group Earth changed their name to Black Sabbath, which they lifted from a flick starring Boris Karloff, one of film's masters of horror. This flick was airing in a theater near their rehearsal room. Iommi took the lead in inventing a musical style that inverted the dominant sound of the hippie era.
The group's style included Stygian subjects like war, death, and other horrors in a brooding manner. With this heavy sound Iommi and the band created the signature heavy metal sound that filled the mind of its listeners with a creepy theater of thoughts. Basically, the band pioneered away from the other hard rock sounds of the time like Jimi Hendrix and Big Brother and the Holding Company and flew into new territory on the ingenious riffs Iommi created.
Tristan Andrews is a freelance author who writes about Black Sabbath for http://www.theblacksabbath.com
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