Motley Crue's Nikki Sixx had a mate who was a brilliant guitar player. Nikki asked him to teach him how to play, the mate said allright on the grounds that he gets a guitar. Nikki breaks into a guitar shop and grabs the first thing he sees. He brings it to his mate to begin lessons, and his mate said 'You stupid bastard, that's a bass.'
From the book "Black Sabbath: Never Say Die 1979-1997".
The manufacture of the live Black Sabbath album, culled from taped shows in Texas at San Antonio, Dallas along with Seattle, Washington, would soon spill into farce. The stories that made the British press conjured up a Keystone Cops display of professional ineptitude. Various factions were accused of surreptitiously pushing up levels on their instrument or vocal, only to have them reduced and other desk knobs raised, creeping back into the studio to get their desired personal levels up again, and so on and so forth. What made the stories doubly worse was the veracity of them.
“I’m afraid so”, admits Geoff Nicholls sheepishly. “The stories that got into the press were pretty accurate. It didn’t do much for our credibility, but it was all true.” Iommi, Butler and Nicholls would convene during the day with engineer Lee DiCarlo. What they didn’t know, for a long time, was that Messrs. Dio and Appice were conducting a night shift of their very own. Setting their fader levels in the evening, Iommi and colleagues would be perplexed to find they had all changed come the morning. It was almost as if a mischievous gang of leprechauns had been in and run riot on the mixing desk every night.
Any of your particular favourites?
