Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi explains in an animated clip made by VH1 how a gruesome machinery accident led him toward the sound that would become the foundation of heavy metal.
In the clip, Iommi describes how Birmingham was an industrial town back in the 60s, "much like today’s Detroit". While growing up he developed a huge lust for making music, playing guitar and the accordion. As a teen Iommi had a job working in a factory as a welder and when one time a band he was playing in wanted to tour Europe, he decided he'd take the rest of the day off from welding, but his mother sent him back to finish off the day.
"They put me on a huge machine, a massive thing, and I didn't know how to work it", he said. "As I was pushing the metal into the machine, it came down with such a force and bang, it just chopped my fingers. There was blood going all over the place".
A co-worker putted his fingertips in a matchbox and sent him to the hospital, but doctors told him he could never play again. "As you can assume i was extremely depressed and very down", he said. "The manager of the factory came to visit me at home... and then he told me the story about Django Reinhardt, the Belgium-born French guitarist and composer, who had also lost his fingers due to a fire accident".
Feeling inspired from the story, he drew power and created makeshift fingertips, invented light-gauge strings, dropped his tuning and explored a number of other ways that he could play the guitar. The combination of them all led to an "aggressive, raw and fat" sound that became Black Sabbath's signature style.
"Of course, losing my fingertips was devastating, but in hindsight it created something", he said. "It made me invent a new sound and a different style of playing, and a different sort of music. Really, it turned out to be a good thing off a bad thing".
The clip is referenced as being "volume one", suggesting more installments are on the way.
See the Complete History of Heavy Metal: Fingers Bloody Fingers below:
Get More: Black Sabbath, TV Shows, Full Episode Video, Reality TV Shows