Tony Iommi has been reflecting on the final Black Sabbath album, 13, and has described the experience of recording it as “awkward”.
The 2013 record was produced by Rick Rubin and featured three of the original line up – Bill Ward wasn’t a part of it due to a breakdown in negotiations over his contract. And according to the guitarist, Rubin wasn’t exactly great at communicating with the other two members.
Speaking to Planet Rock’s Ian Dunter, Iommi recalled. “On our last Sabbath album we did with Rick Rubin, we didn’t have time to absorb what we’d done. Because Rick wouldn’t talk to the others. He talked to me and I’d have to tell them. I don’t know what happened there.”
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One incident stands out, he says: “We were in Los Angeles, and I came back for the weekend off. Rick phoned me on the Friday and said, ‘Oh, could you come up with a song like Planet Caravan to record on Monday?’ I went, ‘What?!’ (He said) ‘You come up with a song. (I went), ‘Blimey!’
“So, I worked on this idea, and he said, ‘We can record it Monday.’ But nobody else (in the band) knew. So, we got in there Monday, and Rick said, ‘We’re going to put this song down’. Geezer went, ‘What song?!’ [Rubin said], ‘Well, Tony’s done a song here. We’re going to put that down.’ Geezer: ‘I don’t even know what it is. I don’t know what the key is.’
“And that’s sort of what happened, and we ended up putting it down. But it was it was such an awkward situation.”
Although 13 did the business sales-wise – it was a Number One in both the US and UK – none of the band seem to have particularly happy memories of it. In a 2022 interview, Ozzy Osbourne said: “I didn’t really get a charge from the album. Although Rick Rubin is a good friend of mine, I wasn’t really… I was just singing. It was like stepping back in time, but it wasn’t a glorious period. Though Geezer did a lot of lyric writing for me, which he’s very, very good at. It wasn’t an earth-shattering experience for me.”
And Geezer Butler was hardly singing its praises either, when he spoke to Sirius XM in 2022: It was a weird experience, especially with being told to forget that you’re a heavy metal band.”
It seems that is exactly what Rubin told the group when they started recording. “He played us our very first album, and he said, ‘Cast your mind back to then when there was no such thing as heavy metal or anything like that, and pretend it’s the follow-up album to that,’ which is a ridiculous thing to think.”
