Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler recently guested on NPR's Bullseye With Jesse Thorn to promote his new autobiography, Into The Void: From Birth To Black Sabbath - And Beyond. During the chat he discussed battling depression at a time when it wasn't widely recognized or accepted as a medical illness.
Butler: "When I did get depression, people used to think I was moody and miserable, and they'd be going, 'Well, what's the matter with you? What's happened to you?' And nothing bad had happened. So they were saying, 'You've got all the money you want, you've got your house, you've got your cars and everything. What's wrong with you? Cheer up.' And they couldn't understand that it's nothing like that. You can have everything you can possibly want in the world, but when you get into those dark, depressing days, nothing matters. All you think about is, like, 'So I'll just end it or what.' And luckily I used to come out of it."
"I just wish people could have understood that I wasn't miserable at the time. If you're a rock star or whatever, if you're in a band, you're supposed to be this happy person and you're up all the time and everything is available to you, and you can do this, you can do that. You're not supposed to get depressed if you're a rock star and all that kind of thing. It was just hard coming to terms with it and admitting that's where it was. It was just the occasional thing; I wasn't depressed all the time or anything like that. It's just that when I'd get into those black holes, I just couldn't get out of it, and it wasn't until it was diagnosed that I finally found a way out of it."
Butler's new autobiography, Into The Void: From Birth To Black Sabbath - And Beyond was released on June 6 in North America via HarperCollins imprint, Dey Street Books.
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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.
(Photo - Ross Halfin)
