It didn’t take long for Tony Iommi to choose between his then-new group Black Sabbath and prog legends Jethro Tull. His brief and unhappy stint in place of guitarist Mick Abrahams lasted only two weeks.
“Ian Anderson asked me if I would be interested in joining them,” Iommi told Noise11. “I talked to our guys, and said: ‘What do you think I should do?’ They said: ‘You should go for it.’ And I said, ‘Oh, thanks! So, what does that mean, then?'”
Iommi was in the Jethro Tull lineup just long enough to appear in a floppy, decidedly un-metal white hat during a December 1968 concert film sponsored by the Rolling Stones. But Rock and Roll Circus remained unreleased for decades.
Tull wasn’t the only special guest. “Doing the movie with them was good because I met everybody, you know, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, the Who, everybody who was anybody at that time was in the film – and the Stones, of course,” Iommi told Gibson TV.
Still, “I didn’t feel quite comfortable with it,” Iommi told Noise11. “Even when I went down to the rehearsal with them, I took [longtime Black Sabbath bassist] Geezer [Butler] with me. I said to him afterward: ‘I don’t feel happy with this.’ It just felt weird. I said [to Butler]: ‘Let’s get the band back together.'”
His independent streak played a role, too. “I wanted to work myself, really,” Iommi told Ultimate Guitar. “I remember going to see their manager and he says, ‘You’re really lucky to be in this position.’ And I went, ‘Well, I’m lucky because they want me. It’s not because it’s luck.'”
Despite playing guitar with Jethro Tull for such a short amount of time, Iommi said he came away with a key early lesson.
“I learned quite a lot from [Anderson], I must say,” Iommi told Guitar World. “I learned that you have got to work at it. You have to rehearse.”
Things went differently when he returned to Black Sabbath, which was then known by its early name Earth. “I made sure everybody was up early in the morning and rehearsing,” Iommi added. “I used to go and pick them up. … I said to them, ‘This is how we have got to do it because this is how Jethro Tull did it.'”
Iommi told Noise11 that the Rock and Roll Circus film was “great fun,” calling the lengthy delay for its release “ridiculous. I kept asking [former Rolling Stones bassist] Bill Wyman, every time I’d see him: ‘You got a copy of that show yet?’ He said he’d get me one, and he never did. Eventually, of course, it came out – and I got a copy.”
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wow, that clip is weird. they actually sound like Captain Beefheart.