As if having Geezer Butler on the KQ Morning Show wasn’t enough, getting to talk with him one on one was a monumental moment for me as a Black Sabbath fan. I thank Geezer for allowing me to dive a little deeper into the music that means so much to me. Enjoy and be sure to check out his new memoir, “Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath and Beyond.”

Recording an audiobook:

“It was kind of nerve-racking. I had to keep going. You make one mistake on a word and you have to go through the whole thing again. I was like talking for what, eight hours a day, which I’m not used to doing. So yeah, it was quite hard going.“

Writing music as a form of therapy:

“It was the only way that I could get my feelings out without sitting down with a therapist. It was like the ideal thing for me and I was lucky enough to be able to put the feelings I was going through into words, and lucky enough to have somebody like Ozzy that could interpret them the way he did; the way he sang them.“

The song that explains it all:

“I think, mainly Paranoid. It got those lyrics out and I only had a few minutes to do it. I think we had two hours left in the studio before they threw us out. So Tony came up with the music, Ozzy came up with the melody, and then I quickly wrote down the lyrics. It just got out what I was feeling that particular day. It was just cathartic to get that out of me.”

Black Sabbath was fate:

“The whole band seemed like it was put together by fate because, you know, we lived literally two streets away from each other and Tony and Ozzy had been to the same school together. We used to see each other around all the time and none of us knew that we’d come together as a band. None of us knew that we were musically inclined until we actually got together.”

Dreaming big:

“Well, we all had dreams, you know. We all thought we could make it someday, but we didn’t think it would last or that we would make it so big. I don’t think we really believed in it until like the mid-seventies, after we’d established ourselves. Like with the fifth album, we always thought, you know, this album’s not gonna do anything and then we gotta go back to get a proper job and that kind of thing. But the albums kept selling and we kept getting bigger and bigger and the tours just kept selling out. And so it wasn’t until like maybe the mid-seventies that we really believed in what we were; that it was working.”

The critics:

“Yeah, the critics hated us from day one. I think we made them look outdated, especially in England. A lot of the English press just couldn’t understand Sabbath’s music whatsoever. And, and it was great, you know, when the fans made them look redundant.“

The fans:

“I just did a bookshop in London and had a great turnout. It’s good to actually talk to the people that were buying the book. It’s great that people are still interested in stuff in your book. Me and Matt Sorum, Steve Stevens and Franky Perez formed a band called Deadland Ritual, just before the pandemic and we did some shows around the country. I was helping this animal charity by signing these t-shirts, and this guy came up to me and he had a little vile of his dad’s ashes around his neck and he said that his dad was like massive Sabbath fan that he loved Sabbath until his dying day. He brought this vial of his ashes for me to sign and it was sad but, really, I don’t know. Yeah, really intense.”

Love for animals:

“Gloria helped get fur banned in California, helped to close down the pet shops that were selling puppies, helped to close down loads of puppy mills across America, and she does a lot of fundraising for the Humane Society, PETA and places like that.”

The Writ:

“Yeah, that was Ozzy’s lyrics and I listened to him. He sang them to me and I said you don’t need me to rewrite anything, it’s perfect the way it is. And he was really pleased that I liked his lyrics. Everybody always automatically thinks that I write the lyrics in the band and then Ozzy came up with these lyrics and said, what do you think of these? And I said, that’s great. You know, you really don’t need me to add anything or rewrite anything. It sums up what we were, what the band was going through perfectly.”

Evil Woman – The Minneapolis connection:

“Well, before that, the local manager that everybody had in Birmingham was trying to make us do pop songs and he was managing this band called Locomotive, who’d just have a hit single in England called ‘Rudy In Love.’ And their keyboard is used to write their songs. So the manager got him to write us a couple of songs and they were terrible. They were like, really bad pop songs, and then this guy that we eventually signed a record deal with said, I’ve got a song for you and it was the song by Crow and it, you know, it’s much more the kind of thing that we liked. So we recorded that.”

Tuning down to C#:

“It was a natural progression because Tony’s fingers were bothering him and he couldn’t get lighter gauge guitar strings back then until like, I think 1972 or 71 or something like that. So he came up with these strings that he could tune down to help his fingers because the ends of his fingers had been cut off and he had to play with these thimbles that he made himself. He tuned down so that it helped him bend the notes much easier. And so I tuned down my base to complement his tuning. That’s the way the heavy sound came along.”

Chewing gum during the opening song:

“It became a habit, so much a superstition of mine that I had to do it every time. I felt naked unless I had chewing gum for the first song. Just one of those silly superstitions that I had.“