NEW YORK -- Guitarist Tony Iommi sits in a midtown hotel room, reflecting on Black Sabbath's 30-year history. Next to him is singer Ozzy Osbourne. Years ago, both vowed never to share the same stage again.
Black Sabbath is the band that pioneered heavy metal music with its amplified dirges brimming with cryptic lyrics and bone-crushing riffs. During the early 1970s, the band's exploits became synonymous with the hard-rock lifestyle of all-night parties, groupies and exhausting tour schedules.On the band's first American tour, Iommi and Osbourne knocked down a hotel wall in Virginia.
"We were angry guys," Osbourne explains. "And we just thought, 'Hey, let's just scare everybody."'
Now Osbourne and Iommi are ready for Black Sabbath's North American tour to promote a new record that is appropriately titled "Reunion" (Epic Records).
The tour, which will play at the Delta Center on Thursday, Jan. 14, is the first to feature the original lineup since Osbourne left the band in 1978. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at Smith'sTix outlets or by phone. Call 1-800-888-8499 or in Salt Lake City at 467-8499.
"I always felt that the original Black Sabbath was unresolved," says Osbourne, his eyes hidden by tinted eyeglasses. "We just kind of flicked it away."
If a recent in-store signing for the new album is any indication, the reunion tour will attract as much attention as the band's first American tour nearly 30 years ago. The line of Black Sabbath fans stretched a block long at a record store in Times Square.
"We got our success from the people," Osbourne says. "Everyone said we wouldn't last five minutes, said we couldn't play, couldn't sing, couldn't write songs. Lo and behold, 30 years later, we're more popular than ever."
"Reunion" features heavy metal classics "Iron Man" and "Paranoid." The songs were performed by Iommi, Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward before an adoring audience in the band's hometown of Birmingham, England. The live material is complemented by two new studio tracks, "Psycho Man" and "Selling My Soul."
The band's name was snatched from a 1963 horror film starring Boris Karloff.
"The whole image was built up based on the name Black Sabbath," Iommi says.
Black Sabbath has a host of aberrant admirers, including famous murderers.
Osbourne recalls a police photograph that showed his lyrics etched on a wall inside the apartment of serial killer David Berkowitz.
Then there was a man in California who erected a tombstone in his back yard as a tribute to Osbourne. He sent the singer a videotaped invitation to be buried in the shrine.
"The guy's a stalker," Osbourne says.
Mounting egos led to Osbourne's departure in 1978. While Iommi continued to record and tour as Black Sabbath, succeeding lineups never commanded the attention of the original.
"We've all been around long enough in different lineups, but when we get back in this one, there's no comparison," Iommi says.
Black Sabbath was among this year's nominees for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was the band's second nomination.
When asked about Black Sabbath's musical legacy, Osbourne shrugs, "Don't ask me what that means because I'm clueless about that. There was no mystique about it."