The Legend of Tony!!!

Frank Anthony was born on 19th February 1948 in Birmingham, England. A son of Italian immigrant family, Frank started playing guitar when he was a teenager. As money didn't flow easily for an immigrant family, Frank had to work in a sheet metal factory as a teenager. He also had a night job playing guitar in a pub band.

One day, when he was 17 years old, Frank came home early from factory as he decided to quit his job there and devote more time to his guitar practice. His mother didn’t like it. She asked him to go back and at least complete the shift. Frank went back. Tiered and de-motivated with the sheet cutting factory, he accidently let the cutting blade run through his figure and the tip of his middle and ring fingers of his right hand got chopped off. He was a lefty, but a lefty has to press the guitar strings to the fret board with right hand. Frank was devastated. He couldn’t see it possible, so he quit playing guitar. He had to, fingers don’t grow back. They are gone if they are gone.

Frank’s manager in the factory was aware of Frank’s night job and his enthusiasm for playing guitar. The manager gave Frank a gift. A record of Django Reinhardt. Django Reinhardt was a European Jazz artist who also lost two of his figures in a fire accident and still was able to play guitar. Reinhardt became an inspiration for Frank. He picked up guitar again. Frank strung his guitars with extra-light strings (using banjo strings, which were a lighter gauge than even the lightest guitar-strings of the time) and wore plastic covers over the two damaged fingers. He fashioned the latter himself, by melting plastic liquid-soap bottles into a ball and then using a soldering iron to make holes into this ball, putting his fingers in while the plastic was still soft enough to be shaped. He then trimmed and sanded away the excess plastic to leave him with two thimbles, which he then covered with leather, to provide better grip on the strings. Subsequent he got custom-made tips.

Frank Anthony or Frank Anthony Iommi is better known as Tony Iommi. Tony Iommi is considered as one of the greatest guitarist of all time. Tony was the guitarist of Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull. While playing for Black Sabbath, Iommi detuned his guitar from E to C# (3 half-steps down), in order to ease the tension on his fingers. As a result, Sabbath was among the first bands to detune and resulted in the technique being a mainstay of heavy metal music. The first two Black Sabbath albums are actually in E tuning, however, as Iommi didn't start tuning down to C# until 1971's Master of Reality. According to Allmusic, "Iommi is one of only two guitarists (the other being Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page) who can take full credit for pioneering the mammoth riffs of heavy metal." In 2003, Iommi was ranked 86th in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and, in 2004, number one on Guitar World's "100 Greatest Metal Guitarists of All Time".

Tony wouldn’t have probably been able to come up with power chords (these chords are considered as base of heavy metal music) had he not lost his fingers. His weakness became his strength. Had Tony not picked up his guitar, the head banging world would have been deprived of the monstrosity of Paranoid and NIB or may be even heavy metal.