Goodbye Lament – Iommi

In a kind of bizarro universe version of Them Crooked Vultures, Dave was the vocalist for a collaboration between *Gulps* Brian May from Queen and Tony from… Inventing Heavy Metal… I’ll just let this paragraph be for a sec…

It’s well known that May and Iommi are mates. Their paths have of course crossed on many an occasion and DG does like to get in the room with all the big names, but even still. This is headline worthy stuff. And it’s a little known record in some circles of serious rock fans.

What ultimately did for this track not becoming a staple of every headbangers collection was it’s core purpose. These three titan’s of Heavy were brought together for a track on Tony’s self titled Slashalike (shaslik?) album back in 2000.

Different guests would fill in vocals, drums and bass while Tony cleared out his riff drawer. It was an all star affair. Serj from SOAD, Phil from Pantera, Pete from Type O, Ian from The Cult, Skin from Skunk Anansie. All very metal indeed. There’s even a track featuring Bill Ward and Ozzy. Just a GZR away from a full Sabbath OG reunion.

As worthy a tome as the Iommi record did make, it did virtually no business.

One contributing factor here was that (believe it or not) Sabbath were not fashionable in the rock world in the millennium year. Rock was in a weird place and Ozzy hadn’t yet begun rehabilitating the bands image with reality TV. There was a generation of fans who thought these dinosaurs of old metal were slow boring and unable to do two records in a row with the same vocalist.

They kind of had a point too. Black Sabbath’s reunion tour in 1997-98 fell apart before NYE Y2K and Ozzy was back doing solo stuff by 2001.

The last 4 Sabbath records had featured Tony Martin or Ronnie James Dio switching places in an on-off (pull yourselves together) arrangement which made live shows patchy. They had to stop being Sabbath when Ozzy and Sharon got the lawyers involved and Dio and the rest of the band became Heaven And Hell for a while.

All this damaged Iommi’s rep with the older fans and younger ones just didn’t care (they had Fred Durst and Papa Roach). There hadn’t been a classic song during many of these incarnations. The same could not be said for Grohl. He’d turn up and play drums for Puff Daddy and it’d be a massive hit. He’d joke about with Jack Black or produce Killing Joke and it all sounded vital and great.

So Goodbye Lament then. It’s a track given a bit of a profile by being picked for the soundtrack to the dire sequel to The Blair Witch Project. Blair Witch 2 didn’t deserve this low grinding mood hoover of a stoner jam. It was a terrible movie. Brian May’s contribution is to play at out Iommi’ing (it’s a word*) Iommi. Dave plays drums and provides vocals. Bass comes from some guy who was in Alan Parsons Project. It’s quite the hypnogroove. The track would have worked on One By One.

To quote Frank N Furter then… “one from the vaults”

*it’s not a word

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