Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi recently sat together with Ultimate Guitar, to discuss their old guitar-playing habits, and how they behaved towards each other with Ronnie James Dio throughout the song-creating process.
Iommi said:
“We’d come off and I would say to Ronnie – and not just for the sake of it – ‘Oh, you sounded great!’ And he said the same. We would all encourage each other, and that was a major part of it, to push each other.”
Tonny also mentioned that Dio would comment on his guitar-playing and he would change his style in accordingly:
“Ronnie, he’d sort of say, ‘Play a longer solo. Play this.’ It was good to hear that instead of, ‘Oh, don’t play a solo!’ It was good to be encouraged that way, and we would do that with each other.”
The guitarist continued about his dynamics with the frontman , and how it influenced their song-creating process:
“It was really good with Ron. It would encourage us to try different things, which was really good, and we would be able to do that. We would actually be able to pull songs out of the hat and do them. Ronnie was capable of doing all that catalogue, and that was a great thing. And we could fiddle around with them and put a bit of another song in, teasers coming in and out, a bit of thought into the stage set. And Ronnie was always involved in it and it was really a good band, a tight band. We got really tight.”
You can listen to their performance together ‘Heaven and Hell’ below