Tony Iommi

Such demonic and insane riffs as "Iron Man", "Paranoid", "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" could only come from one person, Tony Iommi. Anthony Frank Iommi was born February 19th, 1948 in  Handsworth, Birmingham, United Kingdom. As a boy young Tony wanted to play the drums but was unable to due to the noise. So instead, he decided to play the Guitar. But in an industrial accident at the age of 17 on his last day of work in a sheet metal factory, he lost the tips of the middle and ring finger of his right hand. It almost caused him to quit playing the guitar, but he decided to keep playing.

Iommi played with a few bands during his career, But in 1969 his current band Earth, Renamed themselves to Black Sabbath, and thus, a legacy was born. Due to his accident when he was 17, he had to detune his guitar from an E to a D# (a semitone down), and from 1971's "Master of Reality" album, had detuned it further to C# (a minor third down), in order to ease the tension on his fingers. Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler did the same to match Iommi. Sabbath were among the first bands to detune, and the technique became a mainstay of heavy metal music. Iommi combined blues-like guitar solos and dark, minor-key riffing with a revolutionary high-gain, heavily distorted tone with his use of a modified treble-boosting effect-pedal and a Gibson SG, as well as plugging his guitar into his amp's bass input. By the mid-1970s, incessant drug usage, managerial problems and constant touring had taken its toll on the band and Ozzy Osbourne was fired in 1979 by Iommi. Osbourne was replaced with Ronnie James Dio, the former vocalist for Rainbow.

Since the hiatus of Black Sabbath in 1997 Iommi has worked with numerous and even his own solo project and on 11/11/11 all of the original members of Black Sabbath made a statement saying that they'd be going into the studio and recording a new album. "13"is currently one of the most anticipated albums yet and it still has no release date.

In early 2012, Iommi was diagnosed with early stages of lymphoma. But later that year, it was announced that he was in remission.