Our Mashup today comes from Wax Audio, who’ve been churning out quality mashups for well over a decade now.

I’ll admit, I’m usually partial to mashups that take very different genres and somehow make them work together as one. But I don’t turn my nose up at a good, quality classic rock mashup, especially one as well executed as today’s reworking of Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”. The mix-down of the two songs is pretty close to perfect.

A couple of pertinent classic rock factoids:

Both “Whole Lotta Love” and “War Pigs” were from their respective band’s second album release. They were also both the first track on the albums.

There are a couple of things to watch for when it shows Tommy Iommi playing guitar. I wouldn’t swear by it but it looks like he’s playing a right-handed guitar upside down and left handed. Many early lefty guitar gods did this because left-handed guitars weren’t that easy to come by. A lot of people like Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan got their first guitars at a young age. The guitars were for righties so they just turned it around. By the time they could afford to get their own lefty guitar they’d already learned to play it that way.

Also, Tommy Iommi has fake fingertips on his right hand. When he was seventeen he decided to quit his job in a sheet metal factory. On his VERY LAST DAY at the job he got in a machining accident that chopped of the tips of his middle and ring fingers. He was sure his guitar days were over but, eventually, he began playing again using home-made “thimbles”. According to Iommi, since he couldn’t press the strings the same way he could before the accident, he tuned down the strings so they’d be easier to press. This, according to Tommy and multiple other sources, created the “heavier, gloomier sound” that became a staple of Black Sabbath and, in turn, influencing the heavy metal genre as a whole.

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