Few guitarists have shaped heavy music as profoundly as Tony Iommi. His unmistakable riffs laid the foundation for metal, influencing generations of players who followed. Among them is Tom Morello, known for his work in Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave. In a conversation with Guitar Player, Morello credited Iommi and another legendary guitarist as the architects of his own riff-writing style.
“I’m a riff writer. And Ground Zero for riff writing is Jimmy Page and Tony Iommi. They’re the two pillars, and they’re a big part of how I built my sound. ‘Iron Man’ was one of the first riffs I learned on guitar, and Tony Iommi has another two or three hundred of the greatest electric guitar riffs of all time in his catalog.”
The brilliance of Iommi’s songwriting, according to Morello, lies in its simplicity: “The big lesson you can draw from the music of Black Sabbath as a musician is: Don’t be afraid to be simple and awesome.”
He recalled a moment when a guitar instructor dismissed ‘Sweet Leaf’ as too easy to play—missing the entire point of what makes a riff truly great.
“I remember taking a guitar lesson to learn ‘Sweet Leaf’, and the guitar instructor was a bit snobby — like sort of scoffing about how easy it was. I was thinking, ‘That doesn’t seem to be the criteria for greatness. That’s a f***ing song that rocks me like I’ve never been rocked before.’ Who cares if it has four notes or 40,000 notes in it? It’s great!”
Morello emphasized that, regardless of their technical difficulty, Iommi’s riffs carry a power that no one else can replicate. A big part of that magic, he pointed out, comes from the chemistry between Iommi and his bandmates.
“For sure. As everyone famously knows, in that industrial accident, he cut off the tips of two of his fingers. He literally is an Iron Man! His fingers are not human. That certainly has something to do with it all. And then every one of those great Tony Iommi riffs is made great by that rhythm section of Geezer Butler and Bill Ward. That’s really what elevates those riffs from being not just great riffs but Black Sabbath riffs.”
For Morello, and countless others, Iommi’s playing isn’t just about technicality—it’s about impact. A riff doesn’t have to be complicated to be legendary. It just has to hit with the kind of force that Black Sabbath mastered, and no one has done it better than Iommi.
