BLACK SABBATH guitarist Tony Iommi discussed his 2000 debut solo album “Iommi,” revealing during the MI Conversation Series that EMINEM was one of the musicians who applied for a guest spot.
As you may or may not know, the record is packed with guest appearances, including Brian May, Dave Grohl, Phil Anselmo, John Tempesta, Henry Rollins, Matt Cameron, Serj Tankian, Billy Corgan, Ian Astbury, Peter Steele, Ozzy Osbourne, Bill Ward, Billy Idol, Ben Shepherd and more.
Anyhow, Tony said (as transcribed by Ultimate-Guitar.com):
“The idea of that [album featuring a bunch of special guests] came up well before we actually did it. The original idea was to do an album with Robert Plant and the people more from my generation. And that fizzled out because of all the different things.
“And when it came up again to do it with different vocalists and different musicians I thought it was great to be able to play with younger musicians and just see how everybody else would treat it. And I enjoyed doing that, it was good to play with different people and different drummers and different bass players and different singers.
“Again, it was a bit embarrassing as well sometimes. Bob Marlette was producing and we had a few people that applied to do it and one of them was Eminem. And I hadn’t got the faintest idea who Eminem was, to be honest.
“They said, ‘This guy Eminem wants to do a track.’ ‘Eminem? Who’s that?’ That’s what happens when you get old. [Laughs] And Kid Rock as well. But I didn’t know these people. And Kid Rock came down and done a bit. And we had a few other people which we never used.
“But the ones I wanted to use were more in the vein of what I was doing. Dave Grohl was great, he’d done a great version. And he was so enthusiastic, he said ‘I wanna play drums as well.’ I said ‘Well, we’ve already got a drummer.’ ‘Yeah, but I want to play drums!’ Blimey…
“We got Matt Cameron on the drums. I said, ‘We gotta take him off and put you on there.’ So that’s basically what we did. Matt did play on a lot of the others.
“It was interesting doing this stuff. Same with Billy Corgan. We were doing it in LA and I’d never really met him and he came down. The next thing we’re writing this track in the studio. We wanted to do it with a lot of different tempo changes. So we did, and it worked good.”
