Tony Iommi has been shedding more light on what a difficult fit Rick Rubin was as producer for the final Black Sabbath album, 2013’s 13.
Asked by the Los Angeles Times what he learned from Rubin, Iommi quipped, “I learned not to use a producer again.”
Elaborating on this, he said: “It was strange because Rick wasn’t there most of the time. He’d be there for a certain recording, then he’d disappear. I’d written a lot of the stuff, and then we’d play it, and he’d go, ‘I don’t like that bit, I don’t like that part,’ and then disappear.”
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As Iommi has mentioned in other interviews, Rubin, for some reason, didn’t choose to communicate with Ozzy Osbourne or Geezer Butler during the recording – everything went through him.
“One Friday he phoned me up. He wanted me to relate what he’d said to the others,” Iommi remembers. “He said, ‘Could you write a song over the weekend that’s like Planet Caravan, so we can record it on Monday?’ I went, ‘What?!!’ But it happens that I did do it.” The guitarist came up with Zeitgeist.
Iommi also spoke about the Back To The Beginning gig, which, as well as being Ozzy Osbourne’s final show, was Bill Ward’s first performance with Sabbath for over 20 years.
“I stood at the back because Bill wanted me to stand by him. We hadn’t played live with Bill for 20 years, so Bill said, ‘Would you stand by me, if I forget anything or miss anything?’ I don’t know what I could have done, but I did do that.”
This, of course, meant that the guitarist couldn’t see Ozzy, meaning that the final Black Sabbath show left the guitarist with an odd feeling.
“It was a very strange experience,” he says of the event as a whole. “It’s great for all the other bands who came to the show and supported Sabbath. That was fantastic, and they were all really nice and no egos. It was a great setup, and I was really proud of everybody coming along to be involved in it and tip their hat towards us. It was lovely, of course, for the fans.”
