“Totally different”: Geezer Butler on the Black Sabbath song that never gets enough love
Black Sabbath is one of the most famous bands on the planet. Their unique approach to music created the doom-laden style that accompanies all forms of heavy metal today. Two main contributing factors were Tony Iommi’s guitar playing and Geezer Butler’s mimicking bass.
“You cannot separate the environment of Black Sabbath from the music that they made,” said Joel McIver, a Black Sabbath biographer, “If you were a lad back then in this environment, your future was 45 years on a factory assembly line. That’s literally the truth. That’s what so many people faced.”
Disaster struck Tony Iommi when he was working in a steel factory. Following an accident on an assembly line, he had the tips of his fingers severed, and they couldn’t be reattached. It likely wouldn’t have been seen as a positive at the time, as Iommi likely thought his guitar-playing days were over, but after making some tweaks, he could play the guitar in a unique sounding way.
“I’d play loads of chords, and I’d have to play fifths because I couldn’t play fourths because of my fingers,” he explained, “That helped me develop my style of playing, bending the strings and hitting the open string at the same time just to make the sound wilder.” Iommi would also tune down his guitar to make it easier for him to bend the strings.
On top of that, Geezer Butler wasn’t familiar with playing the bass. As such, rather than come up with unique and pretty-sounding basslines, he would completely mimic what Iommi was playing. This gave the songs a lot of depth and added to the doomy sound that made Black Sabbath stand out so much.
Both of these factors dominated people’s interest in the band. While the drums were also important, it was the guitar sections of Black Sabbath that fans were really interested in. As such, songs that championed the drums were often overlooked. There is one track where Butler loved the drums a lot, but it was never picked up much by Black Sabbath fans. He ended up calling the song underrated as a result.
“Maybe ‘Hand Of Doom’,” he said when discussing Sabbath’s overlooked tracks, “I like Bill’s whole drum track on it. It’s totally different to what anybody else was doing. The lyrics were about soldiers coming back from the Vietnam War. That’s what inspired me to write those lyrics.”
The interesting drums and protesting lyrics were critical components for a good Black Sabbath song; however, it has not managed to cement itself as a fan favourite because the elements of Black Sabbath songs that stand out aren’t as present on the track. In the grand scheme of the album Paranoid, it doesn’t stand out too much. That being said, the song is well worth a listen and deserves more credit than it receives.
