The Black Sabbath album Geezer Butler called a “disaster”
When we talk about rock bands from the 1960s and ‘70s, their stories usually consist of two things: a rise to fame and the subsequent downfall that accompanies that rise to fame. Black Sabbath are no exception to this, as while the band skyrocketed to stardom with their first two albums, Black Sabbath and Paranoid, the subsequent benefits that come with being in a famous rock band took their toll on the band.
Black Sabbath faced a number of issues following the success of their first couple of albums. The first came from a completely creative standpoint, as people had resonated with those albums because of how raw and emotive they sounded, so the band had to work out how to try continuously nail that raw sound while also giving fans something new. This was an impossible balance to strike, and while some records had success, such as Master of Reality, few of them managed to reach the bar that was set by those early albums.
The second issue that the band had was the fact that they were often distracted by a lot of the benefits that came with being rock stars, most notably: sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It created friction within the band and changed people’s attitudes towards work. Before they were famous, rock ‘n’ roll was escapism; it provided a brief moment away from their factory lives and the struggles that came with growing up in post-war Britain, but now it was different.
The minute you’re in a sun trap in California with more coke than you can snort and a deadline on a new album, how are you ever going to capture the same tenacity that you had on your debut? Again, this isn’t me saying that Sabbath never released anything good following those early records, but it became hard for them to grow and still tap into that iconic Sabbath sound.
The issues in the band continued to escalate to the point that the original line-up had to change. Ozzy Osbourne was kicked out as his drug habit reached the point that it was seriously impeding the band’s work, and the search started for them to get a new singer. In lieu of Osbourne, they worked with a number of different people, but none have been considered quite as legendary as Ronnie James Dio.
While there has never been a “bad” Black Sabbath singer, the debate over who was the best to front the band usually boils down to Dio and Osbourne; however, the other band members wouldn’t have guessed Dio would have become such a legend when they first worked with him. His initial period in Sabbath only lasted a couple of years, as their creative ideologies clashed almost immediately, which was likely due to the pressure they felt to deliver something powerful. These clashes meant that it wasn’t long before Dio had packed up his microphone and left to move on to other things.
Those clashes are best reflected in the band’s album Live Evil, which was a Sabbath album that flaunted having Dio on vocals. The record came out and was a complete disaster, as there were so many different creative inputs working on it. Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler would work on the album during the day, and Dio would go into the studio secretly at night and change everything they had done.
“By the time we came to mix it, me and Tony would go in in the daytime and fix bits, and make sure everything was working,” recalled Butler, “And then apparently Ronnie would go in after that and change it to what he thought it was going to sound like. And me and Tony go in the next day and go, ‘What the hell’s going on? It didn’t sound anything like it did yesterday’. And the engineer eventually said that Ronnie kept coming in and changing everything.”
This perfectly highlights the creative differences that stopped the band and Dio from gelling the first time around. When they worked together again in the near future, things ran a lot smoother, but that first album was a real tumultuous period for the band. Or, as Geezer Butler puts it, “It turned out to be a disaster”.
