Geezer Butler is getting ready to roll out his new autobiography, Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath and Beyond, so the legendary Black Sabbath bassist is tapping into his reflective side. In a new interview with Metal Edge, Butler got remarkably candid about the highs and lows in Sabbath's wide-ranging discography, revealing what he feels is "easily the worst" record they ever made, and also selecting his personal highlight from the band's impenetrable early years.
In the late 1970s, Sabbath's sound moved in a much more melodic, experimental direction compared to the pioneering albums they made earlier in the decade, and when the interviewer asked Butler how he feels about those later albums that Sabbath released just before Ozzy Osbourne departed the band, he didn't mince words about the decline in quality.
"Definitely not in the same way I view the earlier records," Butler said of how he views the late-1970s era. "And I will say that Never Say Die! is easily the worst album we did. The reason for that is we tried to manage ourselves and produce the record ourselves. We wanted to do it on our own, but in truth, not one of us had a single clue about what to do. By that point, we were spending more time with lawyers and in court rather than being in the studio writing. It was just too much pressure on us, and the writing suffered."
Interestingly, Butler takes some of the blame for Sabbath's unpopular sonic pivot on records like Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die!. At the same time the band was facing money troubles, the four members found themselves at a creative impasse where Butler and guitarist Tony Iommi wanted to expand their sound in new directions, while Osbourne wanted to continue refining the heavy-metal sound they were already known for.
"The thing is, we were trying to progress too much musically," Butler told Metal Edge. "We completely lost the plot, I think. We stopped doing the things that made Sabbath what it was and began going from more melodic stuff, which was a mistake looking back. Ozzy always wanted to still sound like the old version of Sabbath, while Tony and I wanted to expand musically. Looking back, Ozzy was probably right because our expansion caused us to lose what Sabbath was supposed to be about."
While Butler had plenty to say about where Sabbath went wrong during that time period, he also looks back fondly on the high points of their career, specifically their first four records when they had an "urgency" to keep the creative momentum going and write great songs. Out of those albums, the one that most stands out to Butler all these years later is Paranoid, their second record.
"It was a totally complete album," Butler said. "It wasn't forced, and the chemistry between the four of us was so fluid. I remember getting together to do that record, and we wrote literally everything immediately. Each song came together so easily and had such fire. And each time we would go into rehearsal, we'd come out with a completed song. I think that's why that album is special, because of how naturally things came together. It was the most organic record that Sabbath — in any era — ever made. It was completely natural, as it should have been."
