He Told Tony Iommi “Your Grip Is All Wrong” — Then Ozzy Osbourne Told Him Who He Was Talking To D

September 14th, 2017. At a small guitar workshop called Kessler Guitar Works on Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank, Los Angeles, a 26-year-old guitar tech was about to say the most expensive sentence of his life. The man standing on the other side of the counter was 69 years old, dressed head to toe in black, his hair down to his shoulders, and he was missing the tips of two fingers on his right hand.

In a moment, the young tech would look at that hand, completely misread what he saw, and tell the man he was holding his guitar wrong. But, the man in front of him was Tony Iommi, the guitarist of Black Sabbath, the man who invented the sound of the music we call heavy metal. And in exactly 21 minutes, the door of that shop would open, and a Birmingham accent unlike any other on Earth would come through it.

But for now, it was only half past 3:00, and nobody in that shop knew who anybody was. Colton Reiser been behind that counter for 3 years. He was a graduate of the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, and his diploma hung framed on the wall behind him. Colton was not a bad tech. On the contrary, he was said to have one of the best hands in the city for fret leveling, and he knew it perfectly well himself.

But, there was one rule he carried along with his trade, and he had believed it without question since his very first day. There is one correct technique, and only one, and most of what people call style is really just a mistake. The shop was narrow, and the air inside smelled of sawdust, nitrocellulose lacquer, and hot solder. Spools of wire, clamps, and fret wire in numbered gauges hung on the walls.

A small radio in the back room was playing an old blues record nobody was listening to. Behind the counter, a few steps back from Colton, stood the shop’s 64-year-old owner, Warren Kessler, who had done little that day beyond polishing the lenses of his glasses. At the front of the shop, next to the window, there was an old leather couch and a customer was sitting on it waiting.

The old man had been there since half past three. A hard guitar case rested across his knees, his hands were clasped on top of it, and every so often he glanced at the door as if he were waiting for someone. Three people had walked past him and not one of them had looked at him twice. At 3:40 the bell above the door rang and a woman came in with her son, still wearing her hospital housekeeping uniform.

Teresa Delgado had come straight here from her shift and in the hands of 13-year-old Micah was a second-hand Squire they had bought for $220 after saving for 3 months. The ring finger on the boy’s left hand wouldn’t bend at the last joint. It had been caught in a door when he was three and ever since then that finger had always lagged a little behind.

“We’d like to have it set up.” his mother said, lowering her voice. “And I wanted to ask, is there anything that can be done for his hand?” Colton took the guitar, played a few chords, looked at the boy’s hand, and spoke without ever raising his voice. And that was perhaps the part that hurt the most. “Let’s be realistic, Mom.

If that finger doesn’t bend, he’ll never play a clean barre chord. Let him keep it as a hobby, that’s fine, but if you’re expecting anything beyond that, I wouldn’t.” Micah looked first at his guitar, then at his own hand, then lowered his head. And in that moment something inside him quietly closed.

And right then, the old man sitting on the couch in the corner lifted his head and took the case off his knees. 52 years earlier, on the other side of the Atlantic, there was a sheet metal factory in the Aston district of Birmingham and on a summer day in 1965, a 17-year-old boy was working his last shift there.

The following week he was leaving for Germany with a band and that morning he hadn’t even wanted to go in, but his mother had made him. Just before the shift ended, he reached in to straighten a piece of sheet metal under the guillotine press. The press came down, and when he pulled his hand back, the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand had stayed underneath it.

The boy was left-handed, which meant the hand he fretted with was the exact hand that had been injured, and the doctor at the hospital told him to go find himself another trade. He sat at home for weeks, and then one day the foreman from the factory knocked on his door with a record in his hand. It was Django Reinhardt, who had two fingers on his left hand paralyzed in a fire, and had still become one of the greatest guitarists who ever lived.

The boy listened to the record twice, then went into the kitchen and melted down a washing up liquid bottle, molded himself two fingertips out of that plastic, and covered them with leather he cut from an old jacket. But he couldn’t feel the strings through those artificial tips. The leather told him nothing, not the pressure, not the warmth, not where the string ended.

So he bought the lightest strings he could find, tuned the guitar down so the strings wouldn’t fight back, and learned to play most of his chords with two fingers instead of four. The lower the tuning went, the heavier the sound became, the thicker, the darker, and 10 years later that darkened sound became the name of an entire genre of music.

So the famous heaviness of the thing we call heavy metal, and that famous way of gripping the neck, were in fact nothing but a factory accident. But in that workshop in Burbank that afternoon, there was not one single person who knew it. At 10 to 4, Warren Kessler called over to the man in the corner, and the old man got to his feet. He walked the six steps from the couch to the counter without hurrying, set the case down on top of it, and unclasped the latches. Out came an old Gibson SG.

The finish on the body was worn through in places, and there were 50 years of fingerprints between the frets. “There’s a buzz on the fourth fret.” the man said in a calm voice, in a soft English accent. “They knocked it about on the plane. That’s all I need sorted.” Colton picked up the guitar, and within the first second, a look came over his face.

The look a repairman gets the moment he decides something is wrong. Colton plucked the strings with his finger, then took out his tuner and looked at the screen. “This guitar is tuned almost a step and a half down.” he said, “and the strings are far lighter than they should be. These are practically banjo strings.

” The old man said nothing, just nodded slightly. With that smooth confidence he had in his own experience, Colton made a diagnosis, and he shared that diagnosis out loud. “Look, sir, it’s perfectly normal for hand strength to go at your age. That’s why people thin out their strings and drop the tuning.

I know that, but when you do it, you lose the guitar’s tone. Let me put these back to a normal gauge and bring it to standard tuning, and you’ll have a completely different instrument in your hands.” The old man looked first at the guitar, then at Colton. “I’ll leave it as it is, thank you.” he said, “This guitar is exactly the way it’s meant to be.

” Colton smiled that professional patient smile and handed the guitar back to him. “Would you hold it for just a second? I want to show you something.” The man took the guitar, set his right hand on the neck, and in that instant, in the light of the bench lamp, the small leather caps on the tips of two of his fingers became visible.

Colton looked at them, but didn’t understand what they were. He took them for some kind of fingertip protector and slotted the last piece of his diagnosis into place. “There.” Colton said, looking at the man’s hand. “Your grip is all wrong. Your thumb should sit behind the neck. You’re wrapping it over the top, and you’re only using two fingers.

The other two aren’t doing anything at all. There’s no way you can play a clean chord like that. The three or four customers in the shop had stopped talking and turned toward the counter. Micah was standing next to his mother and couldn’t take his eyes off the old man’s hand. From the back, Warren Kessler stepped forward, opened his mouth to say something, then stayed exactly where he was and said nothing at all.

Because in that very second, he had remembered where he had seen that hand before. The old man didn’t get angry. There was no fury on his face and no wounded pride, only a very familiar, very tired patience. “I’ve been playing like this for 52 years, son.” he said quietly. Colton nodded with complete confidence. “That’s exactly the problem, sir.

52 years of a habit. Let me show you the right way in 5 minutes and you’ll thank me for the rest of your life.” And at the very moment he reached for the guitar, the bell above the door rang. The heat from outside poured into the shop, and from behind them came a thick, hoarse Birmingham accent unlike any other on Earth. “Tony, sorry I’m late.

Sharon wouldn’t get off the phone.” Then the voice stopped dead. Because the man standing in the doorway had seen what was happening at that counter. The man standing in the doorway was 68 years old. He was wearing a black T-shirt and a black jacket. His round, dark-tinted glasses had slid down to the tip of his nose.

There were silver rings on his fingers, and his walk was a little heavy. His hands trembled faintly, but only someone looking closely would have noticed. He came through the small crowd without looking at anyone and went straight to the counter. The two customers he passed didn’t even turn their heads. He stopped in front of the counter and looked first at the guitar in his friend’s lap, then at Colton’s hand, still hanging there in midair.

“What’s going on here?” he said. Tony Iommi turned to his friend and a faint smile appeared on his face. This young man has taught me something very valuable. He said. Turns out I’ve been holding the guitar wrong for 52 years and he was just about to show me the right way in 5 minutes. Ozzy said nothing.

He only pushed his glasses back up his nose and looked at Colton. Colton still hadn’t worked out what was happening. I don’t mean to offend anyone, sir. He said, never once dropping his professional tone. But a wrong grip is a wrong grip no matter how old a person is. Ozzy stayed quiet for a while, then asked.

What do you look at to tell whether a man can play or not? Colton shrugged. His hands. Ozzy nodded. And did you actually look at this man’s hand? While that question hung in the air, a young woman standing a few steps back from the counter lifted her phone. She looked at the screen, then at the man who had just walked in, then at the screen again. Oh my god.

She said in a whisper. But in that silence everyone heard her. That’s Ozzy Osbourne. Every head in the shop turned to the same place at the same time and in everyone’s mind the same equation began to form. If the man in the doorway was Ozzy Osbourne and the first thing he did on walking in was call the man at the counter Tony, the one who finished the equation was Warren Kessler.

Colton, that man is Tony Iommi. He said, his voice shaking slightly. I watched him play at the Long Beach Arena in 1975 when I was 22. The year after that I read the story of that hand in a magazine. Then he turned to his apprentice and lowered his voice. You just told the man who invented the sound of heavy metal that he’s holding his guitar wrong.

Colton didn’t look at the man. He couldn’t. He fixed his eyes on a scratch in the wood of the counter and kept them there. Inside his head the last 10 minutes were rewinding. He had said the tuning was wrong, the strings were wrong, the hand was wrong, and he had offered to fix all of it in 5 minutes. The rule he had never once doubted since the day he started his trade had collapsed in front of the worst possible person.

Ozzy finally spoke, and his voice wasn’t raised at all. “Easy, son. I’m not going to eat you.” Ozzy leaned against the counter and for a while said nothing. “I grew up in Aston.” he said at last. “Same streets as this man, in the shadow of the same factories. When I was 16, I walked into a shop, and before I’d even reached a shelf, they hit the alarm.

That man looked at me and made up his mind in 10 seconds.” He paused for a moment and looked at Colton over the top of his glasses. “You did the same thing today. But the two of us are used to it. Really used to it. We’ve been getting that same look for 50 years.” Then he lifted his head and let his eyes travel around the shop, and they caught on the boy standing by the window.

A 13-year-old boy, a second-hand guitar in his hands, unable to take his eyes off Tony’s right hand. “Who’s that boy?” Ozzy asked. Tony Iommi hadn’t said a single word up to that point. Now he spoke, and his voice was very calm. “They were here just before you came in.” he said. “His mother asked whether anything could be done for the boy’s hand, and this young man told her nothing would ever come of the guitar, that the boy should keep it as a hobby.

” Ozzy looked at the boy for a moment, then turned to Colton. And for the first time, his voice rose. “A 13-year-old boy. You held his hand once and decided how far his life could go.” Colton tried to say something, but Ozzy raised his hand. “There were two people in this shop today who got put down for exactly the same reason.

One of them is 69, and he’s used to it. The other one is 13, and he isn’t.” Tony didn’t wait for an answer. He sat down on the stool beside the counter, took the guitar into his lap, and turned to Warren. Can we get this into an amp? Warren handed him the cable of the small amp in the corner. Tony plugged in, rolled the tone back, and began to play.

But what he played was not what anyone in that room expected. It wasn’t a heavy riff. It was fast, light, almost cheerful. A swinging, spinning gypsy jazz line that sounded as if it had just come off the record a foreman had carried to his door 52 years earlier. His fingers moved back and forth across the strings with a startling lightness, and the look on Colton’s face slowly began to come apart.

The melody didn’t end. It just changed direction. Tony slid his hand down the neck, and in an instant that lightness gave way to something else entirely. When those thick, open chords he was fretting with two fingers came out of the amp, the shop window trembled. Everyone in that room knew the riff. There are very few people on Earth who don’t. Paranoid.

Micah’s mouth fell open, and Warren took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. When the riff ended, nobody clapped because clapping felt like it would break the moment. Then one person started, and within a few seconds that little workshop was drowning in applause. Tony set the guitar down on the counter, raised his right hand, and pulled the leather caps off his two fingers one at a time.

Underneath them were two small thimbles made of melted plastic, sanded down thousands of times over 50 years. These aren’t fingertip protectors, son. He said in a calm voice. These are my fingers. I left the real ones in a factory when I was 17. Colton’s eyes locked onto those two thimbles. Today you offered to correct a habit of mine.

Tony went on. That habit never had any other option, and in the end it became the name of a genre of music. Then Tony stood up and walked straight over to Micah. He took the Squire out of the boy’s hands and looked at the strings. “These strings are too heavy for your hand.” he said.

“What’s making it hard isn’t your finger, it’s the resistance.” He asked Warren for the lightest set of strings in the shop, changed the guitar’s strings with his own hands, and dropped the tuning a whole step. Then he held the guitar out to the boy. “Now try.” Micah laid his finger across the neck, hesitated for a second, and played the chord he had never once played cleanly.

The sound rang out plain and clear through the shop, and the boy looked at his own guitar as if he was seeing it for the first time. Tony tore a page out of the notepad on the counter, wrote down the string gauges and the tuning, and added a single sentence at the bottom. “Put this in your wallet.” he told the boy.

“One day when somebody tells you your hand is wrong, take it out and read it.” Meanwhile, Ozzy had taken out his wallet and was holding a card out to “Open an account here for this boy.” he said. “Strings, setups, repairs, whatever he needs until he turns 21. Send the bill to me.” Teresa Delgado opened her mouth to object, but Ozzy waved his hand.

“Ma’am, I’ve made more than enough as a bloke who gets on a stage and screams. Let this one be on me.” Colton came out from behind the counter. “Sir, I’m so sorry.” he said to Tony, his voice cracking. “I didn’t recognize you, but whether I recognized you or not, what I said was wrong.” Tony shook his head. “Not recognizing me isn’t the problem, son.

The problem is that you looked at that boy’s hand and decided what he couldn’t do. Looking at a man’s hand and telling him what he’ll never manage is the easiest job in the world. The hard part is being curious about what that hand can do.” Colton nodded, then turned to Micah and his mother, and apologized without trying to explain a single thing for the first time in his life.

Ozzy turned to his friend, who was closing the guitar case, and shrugged with that famous crooked smile. 10 minutes later, the two old men were sitting by the window of a small diner two blocks away. There were two cups of tea in front of them. Seven months earlier, in February in Birmingham, they had played the final concert of a 49-year journey together, and ever since that day both of them had been wandering through the same strange emptiness.

“You know,” Ozzy said, looking down into his cup, “back at Birchfield Road I was terrified of you. You were the school bully, and if I saw you coming down the corridor I’d walk the other way.” Tony laughed. “You’ve been telling me that for 40 years.” Ozzy looked up. “Because I still can’t believe it.

In the end I spent a lifetime on the same stage as that man.” What was learned in that little workshop in Burbank that day had nothing to do with technique. Looking at a limitation and saying nothing will come of this is the easiest job in the world. Anyone can do it, and it requires no knowledge at all.

The hard part is being able to see that the limitation might be the most original thing about a person. If Tony Iommi had never lost those two fingers, nobody can say what the sound we call heavy metal today would have sounded like. Because sometimes what sets a person apart from everyone else is not what they have, but what they lost.