Listen to the Geezer Butler interview

By Marc D. Allan

Rolling Stone magazine once wrote: “Black Sabbath is making it big this year, and no one knows why.” That was in the early 1970s, when Sabbath was the scourge of critics and the delight of the world’s headbangers.

Twenty years later, bassist Geezer Butler says, revisionists have rewritten Black Sabbath’s history.

“It seems the whole Black Sabbath thing has been born again,” he says by telephone from London, calling to promote the band’s show Friday at the State Fairgrounds. “The people who used to slag us in the ’70s are now saying we’re the greatest heavy-metal band of all time and that we invented it.

“What the kids like”

“In the end, it doesn’t mean anything to us. It doesn’t put money in the band to be critically acclaimed. We’ve never even thought about critics; it’s what the kids like and the people that follow us. That’s our loyalty.”

Butler finds that loyalty has seeped into his system; that’s why he’s back with Black Sabbath and why the band reunited after more than five years apart. The current lineup is singer Ronnie James Dio, guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Vinny Appice and Butler.

Butler quit the band in 1985 for a solo career. But after a year off doing nothing and an additional period spent trying to find members for his new band, he gave up.

Invitation from Ozzy

“With people like Ozzy (Osbourne, the band’s original singer) and Ronnie and even guitarists like Tony, they get the idea of what you’re trying to do,” he says. “Whereas with these other people coming in, I always had to explain absolutely everything to them. They just didn’t have the spirit, if you know what I mean. I was tying myself in knots in the end.”

Then Osbourne invited Butler on his No Rest for the Wicked tour. That lasted 13 months and made him long for Black Sabbath.

“That was one thing I realized when I was touring with Ozzy,” Butler says. “The Ozzy solo stuff, when I used to play that on stage, it was just another song to me.

“But when we’d do the old Sabbath stuff, something would happen. I used to feel really magical inside, and I really started missing it then. It used to be great to do the old Sabbath stuff with Ozzy singing. That’s what made me miss Tony as well.”

When the tour ended, Butler agreed to play on Osbourne’s next solo album. But Butler found himself dissatisfied with being only a player and not a songwriter, so he quit and went back to Iommi.

In the meantime, Butler also renewed contact with Dio, who had been in Black Sabbath for a short time in the early ’80s.

They began writing songs for what would become the Dehumanizer album. Soon after, the producers of the movie Wayne’s World asked the band for a song. They offered Time Machine.

“We looked at the script, what there was of it, and that sort of fit more than the other stuff we had written at that time,” Butler says.

The song wound up in the movie, although “you have to have stereophonic ears to hear it.” “It’s when he’s driving in his car and the Terminator guy stops him, if you remember that part,” Butler says. “You can just about hear it in the background.”

It’s on the soundtrack

More important to Black Sabbath, Time Machine was included on the Wayne’s World soundtrack album, which sold about 2 million copies. That let people know the band had re- formed. On this tour, Black Sabbath is playing songs from all periods of its existence _ “four from the Ozzy era, six from Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules and five from the new stuff.”

Butler says he still enjoys playing heavy metal, even though he’s been doing it for more than 20 years. “You have to have a sense of humor about the whole thing,” he says. “Sometimes I think of me, being a 43-year-old bloke, up on stage jumping about. That’s a laugh to me sometimes. So you can’t take it too seriously.”