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Geezer Butler has retired. After more than half a century of defining and redefining “heavy” with his bands Black Sabbath, Heaven and Hell, and Deadland Ritual, as well as his own solo projects, the bassist, lyricist, and songwriter now lives a much quieter existence. “I don’t want to do anything anymore,” he jokes with Rolling Stone while discussing his just-released memoir, Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath and Beyond.
Butler came to his decision before the pandemic while on the road with the supergroup Deadland Ritual. “I didn’t realize how hard starting from scratch is, especially when you’re used to your own plane and staying at the Four Seasons and the Ritz Carlton … and then you’re back in little clubs and getting on a bus together,” he says. “It just didn’t suit me.” Other than working on one-off projects — he recently sent a song to former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum — and special gigs like the Taylor Hawkins tribute, his touring days are over. He’s also ruling out any new activity with Black Sabbath. “I don’t think Ozzy’s up for it anyway,” he says.
Mostly, Butler has been spending his time working on Into the Void, an account of his entire life, from a threadbare youth in war-torn post-WWII Birmingham, England (his first bass had only two strings), to the many triumphs and travails of Black Sabbath. “My dad wasn’t really OK with my music career until I actually showed him the first album, that we’d done something,” Butler tells Rolling Stone. “He thought I was just throwing away the chance of a lifetime because I was the only one out of the family that had got an office job. He just thought I was throwing all that away for some pipe dream. And when I finally came home with an album to show him, that’s when he started to understand.”
In the book, Butler — who wrote most of the lyrics for the original lineup of Sabbath, which also featured singer Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, and drummer Bill Ward — breaks down how the group embraced the primordial aesthetics of heavy metal, shares insights on the songs’ lyrics (“Iron Man” is actually about Jesus Christ taking revenge), and tracks the many blowups and reconciliations through the group’s myriad lineups.
Looking back on his life now, Butler feels lucky. “We’ve gone through so many ups and downs, finally, we came out of it all reasonably healthy and happy,” he says. (He’s especially sure of his opinion of things, he says, since he wrote the book twice. His publisher rejected the first version of the book because it was in all capital letters and in a format other than MS Word, so he had to resubmit it. “I don’t usually write in capital letters,” he says. “I just thought it’d be easy for them. So I had to do it all again in proper lowercase.”)
Will Osbourne, Iommi, or Ward be upset with anything they read in the book? “Probably, yeah,” Butler says. “But it’s things that were happening at the time, and we’ve all grown up and got through it all since then.”
One of the more fascinating entries in the book is Butler’s account of the group’s final reunion, which started with the original four Sabbath members holding a press conference in 2011. It had been a year since Ronnie James Dio had died, and Osbourne and Iommi had recently settled a lawsuit over the Black Sabbath name. (Butler had sold his share of the band name to Iommi in 1984 and has since gotten over any regrets. “I still get a quarter of everything, so it doesn’t matter financially,” he says. “It’s just that I can never go out on the road and call myself Black Sabbath.”) The reunion came after Butler and Iommi had been touring under the name Heaven and Hell with Dio. “[After Ronnie died], me and Tony were thinking, let’s get somebody else, another singer, maybe do something with Rob Halford and do an album,” Butler says. “And then Sharon [Osbourne] called us up and says, ‘Well, what about getting the original band back together?’”
But the reunion came with speedbumps: Over the next two years, Butler left and returned, Ward felt slighted and backed out, and Iommi underwent treatment for lymphoma. They nevertheless managed to record 13 with drummer Brad Wilk — the album eventually topped the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic — and tour intermittently through 2017 when they played the last date of a farewell tour they called The End.
Butler had hoped for a full reunion with Ward, but it wasn’t in the cards. “Ozzy and Tony didn’t think he could do it physically,” the bassist says. “And so the alternative was if he could come along and do maybe three or four songs and then do the rest with a different drummer. But Bill says, ‘No, it’s either the whole thing or nothing.’ And I totally understood and respected that.” Here’s how Black Sabbath started their final chapter, as Butler wrote in Into the Void.
Beginning of the End – “Ploughing On”
In November 2011, the four original members of Sabbath held a press conference at the Whisky a Go Go and announced we were getting back together to record our first studio album since 1978, followed by a world tour. We’d been discussing it since Ronnie’s death and thought it would be a good way of wrapping the whole Sabbath story up, before walking into the sunset.
As you’ve probably guessed, the reunion didn’t go as planned. It all seemed to be working when we gathered at Ozzy’s house to record some demos. But then there was a big row about the Sabbath name, all over again. I was under the impression that since the original members were back together, writing and recording a new album, the name would revert to all four of us, whatever had happened between Tony and Ozzy a couple of years earlier. But when the name was discussed, it became clear that Tony and Ozzy had no intention of sharing the Sabbath name with me or Bill. I felt cheated, so I left the band again. They got someone in to replace me, but a couple of weeks later I got a call from Tony, begging me to come back. In the end, I got my lawyers on the case and they managed to sort everything out. I was assured that despite not part-owning the Sabbath name, everything would be split equally, and the band wouldn’t be able to tour as Sabbath without my approval, if needed.
As writing was in process at Ozzy’s house, he made the observation that Tony had lost too much weight, and that he should get checked out. When Tony got back to England, he was diagnosed with a form of lymphoma.
If I’d been diagnosed with cancer, I’d have cancelled everything and stayed at home for the rest of my life. But Tony’s not like that. When me and Ozzy flew to England to resume writing, Tony would have chemotherapy in the morning and come straight home to his studio, where we’d put some ideas together.
We’d say to him, “Tony, have a couple of weeks off.” And I did take time off, including watching [Birmingham soccer team] Aston Villa play a preseason friendly against the Portland Timbers in Oregon. Me and Tom Hanks, a fellow Villan, introduced the teams before kickoff. But while I was away having fun with [my wife] Gloria, Tony was at home, getting on with work. He was tired and nauseous, his hair was falling out, but he was determined to plough on, just like he did when he lost the tips of his fingers.
While Tony was just about up to writing and playing his guitar in the studio, he certainly wasn’t able to tour. We did a one-off gig headlining the Download Festival in England, prior to a warmup in Birmingham. The reunion tour was put on ice, and instead we went out as Ozzy and Friends, the friends including Zakk Wylde, [multi-instrumentalist] Adam Wakeman, [drummer] Tommy Clufetos and Slash.
When Bill first came back, I thought he was doing great. His timing was off a few times, but that’s Bill. However, when me and Gloria got back from a holiday in Hawaii, we were told he’d been fired. Bill put out a statement saying he’d been given an “unsignable” contract and wouldn’t be putting pen to paper until he was shown “dignity and respect.”
I don’t know the ins and outs, because contracts and the like were always sorted out between our lawyers. However, I suspect Bill was given an “unsignable” contract because Sharon didn’t think he was up to a world tour. In fact, I know that Ozzy and Tony didn’t think he was physically able, because of a shoulder problem and heart condition. Like the Godfather in reverse, maybe they made Bill an offer he couldn’t accept.
We suggested to Bill that he come on tour and do a few songs a show, but Bill, proud bloke that he is, insisted it was all or nothing. I was upset that what should have been a triumphant return for the original lineup had turned into a bit of a soap opera — and ended up making it worse. While Bill was churning out public statements, Sharon was giving me her side of the story, including that Bill had refused to play a charity gig at Birmingham’s O2 Academy. Stupidly, I then put out a statement on the internet, including a line about Bill wanting money for said charity gig. I regret doing that, because I’d ended up doing the band’s dirty work. Worse, I’d betrayed Bill’s friendship by not believing his side of the story, which was that he’d actually agreed to do the charity gig for free.
Tony was back for the Birmingham gig, which was effectively a warmup for the Download Festival in Donington Park a few weeks later. And while there were a few thousand people in the audience, it was really a chance to iron out any wrinkles. That was one of the best gigs we’d ever done. Everyone was on fine form, including Tommy Clufetos, who was a very different drummer to Bill, much more direct, like [Dio-era drummer] Vinny Appice.
It’s always dark and stormy at Donington, and that year was no different. The wind and rain were so bad on the opening day that they had to cancel some of the acts. The weather had calmed down by Sunday, although it was freezing by the time we took to the stage. Thankfully, something like 100,000 fans had stuck around, and we were bang on it from the first note.
There are always nerves on big occasions like that. When you’re at a festival, you can hardly sneak in in the afternoon and do a sound check in front of everyone. So when you walk out on the night, you’re hoping everyone behind the scenes has done their job properly. Then when you start playing, you’re looking at the monitor guy, telling him to turn things up or down. Only when the levels are sorted can you relax and get on with what you’re there to do.
Once you’re all in the groove, and you’re making 100,000 people go mental, there’s no greater feeling—apart from Villa winning the cup (or anything!). That was what we were born to do, and the consensus was that we were on vintage form that night. The show kicked off with a video montage of our best riffs, before we tore into our early classics, starting with “Black Sabbath” and finishing with “Paranoid.” What the fans wanted, we gave them in spades. After all that drama, it turned out there was plenty of life in the old dogs yet.
Excerpted from Into the Void byGeezerButler. Copyright © 2023 by Terence Butler. Reprinted by permission of Dey Street, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
