In an in-depth interview in the brand new issue of Classic Rock, Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler recalls meeting Ozzy Osbourne for the first time when Geezer was a member of pre-Sabbath band, Rare Breed.
“When he first came round to our house, one of my brothers answered the knock at the door,” Geezer tells Classic Rock’s Paul Rees. “My brother came into the front room and told me, ‘There’s something for you at the door.’ When I asked him what he meant by ‘something’, he said, ‘You’ll see.’
“I opened the door and there was Ozzy. He had a haircut that was only a bit longer than a skinhead. He was wearing his dad’s toolmaker’s work gown. He’d a chimney sweeps brush over his shoulder, no shoes on his feet, but he was holding one shoe on a dog lead. It was pissing down with rain, too. I just burst out laughing at him.”
Geezer soon discovered that Ozzy had a unique party trick: he could defecate at will. He witnessed this when Ozzy played his very first gig as a member of Rare Breed at Aston University in Birmingham.
“We were so bad, the bloke who’d booked the night refused to pay us,” Geezer recalls. “He may have eventually given us a couple of quid, but as we were leaving, we saw his Jag was parked outside the front door. Ozzy climbed up onto it and did a great big turd on the bonnet, at will, and then we scarpered.”
Read more at Louder Sound.
Geezer Butler's new autobiography, Into The Void: From Birth To Black Sabbath - And Beyond. was released last month in North America via HarperCollins imprint, Dey Street Books.
Book description: A rollicking, effusive, and candid memoir by the heavy metal musician and founding member of Black Sabbath, covering his years as the band’s bassist and main lyricist through his later-career projects, and detailing how one of rock’s most influential bands formed and prevailed.
With over 70 million records sold, Black Sabbath, dubbed by Rolling Stone “the Beatles of heavy metal,” helped create the genre itself, with their distinctive heavy riffs, tuned down guitars, and apocalyptic lyrics. Bassist and primary lyricist Geezer Butler played a gigantic part in the band’s renown, from suggesting the band name to using his fascination with horror, religion, and the occult to compose the lyrics and build the foundation of heavy metal as we know it.
In Into the Void, Butler tells his side of the story, from the band’s beginnings as a scrappy blues quartet in Birmingham through the struggles leading to the many well-documented lineup changes while touring around London’s gritty clubs (Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and The Who makes notable appearances!), and the band’s important later years. He writes honestly of his childhood in a working-class family of seven in Luftwaffe-battered Birmingham, his almost-life as an accountant, and how his disillusionment with organized religion and class systems would spawn the lyrics and artistic themes that would resonate so powerfully with fans around the world.
Into the Void reveals the softer side of the heavy metal legend and the formation of one of rock’s most exciting bands, while holding nothing back. Like Geezer’s bass lines, it is both original, dramatic, and forever surprising.
(Geezer Butler photo - Ross Halfin)
