Tony Iommi Is Having An Amazing Day

It's been three weeks since the release of Lita Ford's autobiography, in which she alleges that her former boyfriend, Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi, enjoyed using her as a punching bag to come down from all that crazy-ass coke he was doing back in the day. The ensuing silence has been deafening. But hey, it's all cool, right? I mean, even though he beat the shit out of her a number of times, that all went down in the past, so it's almost like it didn't happen, right? The fact that she seems to have withheld these disclosures for a book deal has only fueled accusations of sensationalism and profiteering. Hell, even Lita herself has backpedaled the force of her revelations, going so far as to call her feral, drugged-out assailant a "superhero." The metal community continues to shuffle their feet and look away from this hellaciously uncomfortable truth about our beloved riff lord — not that he's human like the rest of us, but that for quite some time, he was a really, really bad one. Nearly all of the metal news outlets continue to cut him a free pass, refusing to examine these grim allegations, presumably because they happened so far in the past that we can all assume that hey, if Lita's cool with it, then no harm, no foul. And hey, it's Tony from Black Sabbath! The poor guy's dealing with cancer! Cut him a break!Bullshit. Where's Tony's response? Where's his contrition? Hell, where's his fucking publicist and their bland, carefully-crafted, one-paragraph acknowledgement that Lita's a swell girl and that she and Tony are entirely cool with each other and can you nosey media folks please just leave this story alone and respect everybody's privacy? That whitewashed pile of recycled pulp he laughingly calls an autobiography neatly avoids the whole mess, casting Lita aside as a woman scorned after he filched members of her band for his own. Regardless of whether it happened twenty or so years ago, there's no getting around the fact that Tony Iommi, purely due to his stature, has escaped virtually all consequences for beating up one of his girlfriends.Look, Tony is clearly nothing at all like the man he was at the time he and Lita were an item. Quite the opposite, today he's a very humble, gracious and yes, courageous guy who has undoubtedly inspired others both through his musical gifts as well as through his very public battles with cancer. And can you imagine if we all had to go public with some of our worst deeds? Holy shit, the streets would be empty for months. But this is a missed opportunity by the media. While I'm disappointed that Tony hasn't responded to Lita's allegations in any public or meaningful fashion, I'm more concerned with the jaw-dropping hypocrisy of the heavy metal news corps, who have all the information they need to raise this as a very serious issue — a discussion that would offer nothing but upside in the way of elevating awareness regarding both domestic abuse and drug abuse. I get that rockstars behaving badly is nothing new and I understand that for the parties involved, the whole collective affair appears to be water under the bridge. But here we are, throwing log after log onto Phil Anselmo's funeral pyre, gleefully chronicling every step of his precipitous decline, even as he summons the integrity to face his consequences head-on. Down have canceled all of their European dates this summer, as Phil continues to apologise, to accept responsibility for his thuggish and dim-witted behaviour at Dimebash and to pay a very heavy emotional and financial price for his actions. Meanwhile the metal community's collective response to the revelation that one of its most beloved figures has committed some very serious wrongs, seems to be along these lines: