Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath—And Beyond

by Geezer Butler

Being in Black Sabbath felt like being an actor in a soap opera. It’s a minor miracle all four of the original lineup survived beyond the 1970s, let alone that we’re all still here. Along the way, we consumed enough booze and drugs to sink a battleship. Music writers spent decades trying to tear us down. There were so many lineup changes I sometimes didn’t know what band I was supposed to be in.

We brought the house down everywhere from Lichfield, Staffordshire, to Auckland, New Zealand, but occasionally descended into Spinal Tap levels of farce.

You might be thinking, Blimey, I thought Geezer was meant to be the sensible one in Black Sabbath. How could a working-class kid from Birmingham have a vision that he was destined to be a rock star, when rock stars didn’t even exist in the 1950s? Well, that’s exactly what I saw. And not just the once.

didn’t have tons of mates, but I wasn’t shy. That came later, after years of touring with Sabbath and craving privacy.

Geezer has a reputation for being the shyest member of Black Sabbath. In interviews he is usually very quiet and soft-spoken.

Even now I seldom swear, despite spending thousands of days in the company of Ozzy Osbourne.

Geezer has a reputation for rarely swearing and being the softest spoken member of Black Sabbath. This is relative of course - Geezer could act like a very different person when drunk or coked out.

All religion is inherited brainwashing, in my opinion. Every religion is portrayed as the “one true faith,” even though each religion’s doctrine was made up by some bloke who just didn’t want to follow the previous one.

Glad to hear Geezer is non-religious. His views on fate and the supernatural clearly show that he is not an atheist, though.

Whatever the subject matter, I never went a day without reading something. But at Holte, we studied Shakespeare, Homer and poetry. I became good at English composition, because my imagination, which had always been vivid, was working overtime.

I love that Geezer was always a big reader. No wonder he went on to become a such a good lyricist.

That guitar was a brand-new Rosetti semi-acoustic and cost £8, which was a lot of money back then—probably about two weeks’ wages for Jimmy. And that act of kindness changed the course of my life. After that day, all I wanted to do was listen to music and

the rest of the quote: "...and play my guitar. It took me to worlds far beyond my dreary working-class existence, and it made me feel that I could be whatever I wanted to be, wherever I wanted to be. Suddenly, life made sense."

play my guitar. It took me to worlds far beyond my dreary working-class existence, and it made me feel that I could be whatever I wanted to be, wherever I wanted to be. Suddenly, life made sense.

Miraculously, I passed the English exam, but failed all the other subjects, despite attending every lesson. Maybe I was destined to be the lyricist in a band.

That was the night I learned that Ozzy could defecate at will. As we were loading our gear back into the van, Ozzy pulled down his pants, crouched on the bonnet of the promoter’s Jaguar and left one of his trademark calling cards.

On future American tours, he’d shit in hotel ice machines, so that anyone who fancied a Scotch on the rocks might get it with a twist.

Back then, people didn’t talk about mental health. If you felt down, you just got on with it. It’s certainly not something I could have discussed with my bandmates, or anyone else for that matter. People just thought I was naturally moody, end of story.

Geezer has struggled with depression for most of his life. It did much to inspire his lyrics.

I stopped self-harming after I cut myself so badly I wouldn’t stop bleeding.

Terrifying. Geezer was a cutter starting in adolescence, long before this was a widely known behavior for "self medicating" for depression and anxiety.

Writing was my godsend, my treatment, my way of digging myself out of a depressive hole. That’s not an outlet a lot of working-class kids had. But because I’d been exposed to books from an early age, this method came naturally. I’d write lots of poems to expel negative feelings. Though I didn’t show them to anybody—they contained the kind of stuff you’d hesitate to tell even a psychiatrist—they became the seeds for the lyrics that would come to define my career.

This is a great quote. Really makes me love Geezer.

“Iron Man” was based on Jesus Christ, the notion that he was a hero one minute and persecuted the next. But instead of forgiving his persecutors, in our song “Iron Man” seeks revenge. I’ve seen so many different interpretations of that song, few of them accurate.

But having such good stuff flown in by mobsters on a private jet doesn’t come cheap: that record cost $70,000

the rest of the quote: "...to make—and the cocaine bill was $75,000."

to make—and the cocaine bill was $75,000.

What no-one told us was that Clearwell Castle was haunted.

I remember Tony walking into the studio and saying, “Well, I have got one thing,” before launching into the riff for “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.” It was a glorious moment. Relief washed over me because that riff—one of the best I’d ever heard—meant we had a present and a future. We weren’t done yet—Sabbath would live!

While I’m on the subject of Tony’s uncanny ability to conjure a monster riff, I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves as a guitarist. I recently saw one of those “best rock guitarists of all time” lists and Tony was down in the thirties. Meanwhile, Eddie Van Halen wasn’t in the top ten and Keith Richards was at number two. Whoever wrote that list needs their head testing.

know how great Tony is, because I had a ringside seat for almost fifty years. We’d be jamming away and he’d be coming up with riffs left, right and centre. And I defy anyone to name three better rock riffs than “Iron Man,” “Supernaut” and “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.”

Bonham was nice and friendly when he was sober, and actually quite shy. But he could be obnoxious when he’d had too much to drink, a classic Mr. Hyde. Much like me.

We all hated going into the studio and dealing with all those lawyers, but it hit Ozzy hardest. That’s why the song “The Writ,” which Ozzy wrote the lyrics for, is dripping with resentment. He put it better than I could have done: “You bought and sold me with your lying words . . . All of the promises that never came true, you’re gonna get what is coming to you . . .”

We were one of the first metal bands to play in Japan, and it was a weird experience. We went on in the early evening, and the fans were all dressed in suits and ties

When it comes down to it, I’m an introvert in a world of show-offs,

Mob Rules was probably our best-sounding album, along with Heaven and Hell, and our producer Martin Birch has to take credit for that.

As an outsider looking in, the reasons for bands splitting up can seem incredibly trivial and childish. But you spend so much time with each other that the least little thing ends up upsetting you. Having started a tour as great friends, three weeks in, you can start to be sick of the sight of each other.

We hobbled on, until it came to mixing our next album, Live Evil, in LA (we didn’t know that Miles Davis had released an album with the same name a decade earlier; it just seemed like the perfect title).

With Bill out of the picture, I had to give Ronnie the bad news that he was out. That was a sad moment, because away from the business of the band, Ronnie was a decent guy. And with him in the band, we’d recorded a couple of great records and got back on top. But things couldn’t go on like they were.

I’m told Live Evil sounds terrible, but I’ve never even listened to it. That’s how much I hated mixing it. On top of that, a month before we released it, Ozzy put out a live album consisting entirely of Sabbath songs. That wasn’t a very nice thing to do, and it was obvious that Sharon or Don had engineered the whole thing to piss us off.

Gillan was responsible for most of the lyrics, and I wasn’t a big fan of a couple of them. “Zero the Hero” and “Born Again” were fine, but I thought “Digital Bitch” and “Keep It Warm,” which was about Gillan’s girlfriend, would have worked in Deep Purple, but Sabbath weren’t that kind of band.

I think Geezer is being generous here. The lyrics in Born Again (1983) are mostly terrible, absolutely sinking into Spinal Tap-level stupidity. It is a very heavy record, though. Ian Gillan complains that the mix is muddy thanks to Geezer's involvement in the post-production process, but I consider the heaviness to be one of Born Again's saving graces. I sometimes fantasize about keeping the music and replacing the vocals/lyrics.

I think my only lyrical contribution to that album was the title “Disturbing the Priest,” which was about the priest who lived next door and kept complaining about the noise.

Referring to the album Born Again.

It’s got some good songs on it—the title track, “Trashed,” “Disturbing the Priest,” “Zero the Hero.” I deliver some nice bass effects, Tony has some monster riffs and Ian’s singing is great. It just goes to show: If the songs are good enough, you can get away with iffy production.

Things had been getting a bit Spinal Tap for a while before Tony started trying to squeeze two-minute guitar solos into ninety seconds.

While Spinal Tap had plenty of comedy album covers, including Intravenus de Milo, Shark Sandwich and Smell the Glove, the artwork for Born Again, a red devil baby with claws, horns and fangs, was just as cringeworthy. Rumour has it that the designer deliberately came up with a terrible album cover, because he was also designing stuff for Ozzy.

Whereas Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge set ended up being too small, our Stonehenge set was too big, because the tour manager wrote down the measurements in feet and it was made in metres. When it was delivered, the stones were three times as big as they were meant to be, almost as tall as the real ones.

Years later, we did a photo shoot with Spinal Tap and asked them if they’d based those scenes on us, but they said it was just coincidence. I find that difficult to believe. Not only did they have that Stonehenge section, but they also had combustible drummers, and we’d been setting fire to Bill for years. People often ask if I’ve seen the film This Is Spinal Tap. I always reply, “Seen it? I lived it.”

I know Iron Maiden hated that film, thought it was an affront, but it’s one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen, because it’s so accurate.

Gillan could never remember the lyrics, but instead of using a monitor, he’d write them down on paper and tape them to the stage floor. When the dry ice wafted on, Gillan was almost on his hands and knees, trying to read the lyrics and failing miserably. To make things worse, he sounded like a robot, because his voice was on the blink.

because Warner Bros. refused to release it as a Tony Iommi solo project, it was billed as “Black Sabbath featuring Tony Iommi”—even though he was the only original Black Sabbath member in the band. If any Sabbath fans hadn’t been confused before, they certainly were now. Seventh Star was a commercial flop, as was the tour that followed. I thought the Sabbath name was being dragged through the mud.

Metallica’s Master of Puppets was a massive album in 1986, but I was more likely to be listening to soul or jazz. Later, Metallica would release “the Black Album,” a masterpiece which would see them become one of the biggest bands of all time. They took true metal into the stratosphere and restored my faith in rock music.

Iron Maiden’s management team, Rod Smallwood and Andy Taylor, were interested in hearing what I was doing, and we recorded an album’s worth of songs, one of which, “Master of Insanity” (cowritten with Jimi), would later appear on Sabbath’s Dehumanizer album.

Dehumanizer was a collaborative effort and includes the only songs with lyrics by both Ronnie and me—“Computer God” and “Master of Insanity.” “Computer God” was actually the title of a song I’d written for my own band a few years earlier. I had this idea that God was the ultimate computer, and we were all its programs. That fits in with my belief in fate, in that everything is mapped out and there’s not a lot we can do to alter the course of our lives.

I was proud of Dehumanizer—it was a far better album than Never Say Die!, that’s for sure. It had the same rawness as our early albums, which was partly a happy accident, because we didn’t have much of a budget at the time,

One of my favorite Sabbath albums.

I didn’t really worry about it not coming off. I’ve always had the attitude that if something doesn’t happen, it wasn’t meant to be. If I regretted and fretted about everything that went wrong in my life, but was beyond my control, I’d have probably topped myself years ago.

I wrote quite a lot of music for that album and I thought some of the songs were decent. But I had a big problem with it overall. The record label insisted that Cross Purposes, as it would be called, be released under the Sabbath banner, but I thought we’d been working on an Iommi/Butler project. For that reason, I don’t consider it to be a Sabbath album.

Cross Purposes is a very good hard rock album in my opinion and criminally underrated. Certainly contains Tony Martin's best singing out of all of his Black Sabbath records.

Sabbath had become too confusing for people—how many lineup changes can a fan put up with? One minute Ronnie was lead singer, then it was Ian Gillan, then it was Glenn Hughes, then it was Tony Martin, then it was Ronnie again, then Tony Martin was back in. Fans didn’t know if they were coming or going. If a band sticks with the original lineup, maybe with the occasional tweak, fans will stay loyal. But if they don’t know who is or isn’t in the band, they’re far less likely to buy the band’s latest record. My loyalty to Sabbath was being tested to its limits, so I knew exactly how they felt.

The writing of that album, The Devil You Know, was an idyllic experience, because it wasn’t forced.

I love this album. A great ending to Dio's career.

It was nerve-wracking playing my ideas—especially if they were met with total silence and a “hmmm, what else have you got?”—but the process was refreshingly democratic. It was weird at times, because some stuff I thought was really good was rejected out of hand while Ronnie would seize on other stuff I thought he wouldn’t like.