The strange Black Sabbath song Geezer Butler called “totally jazz”
Just about the only thing the members of Black Sabbath could agree on during the sessions for their eighth studio album, Never Say Die!, was that nobody was enjoying themselves. It was the winter of 1978, ten years into the band’s career, and a combination of all the usual issues—drug addiction, creative differences, studio problems, threats of quitting—was bringing the whole project to a breaking point.
Ozzy Osbourne was said to have point-blank refused to sing on a couple of the tracks, and as a surprise to no one, he would soon leave the band for a solo career. Critics and fans seemed to pick up on all this chaos when Never Say Die! was finally released, as the record was met with broad derision. More than 40 years later, though, some of these songs are surprising more as intriguing experiments rather than disappointing misfires.
For example, the track ‘Air Dance’, featuring a lead keyboard line from Deep Purple’s Don Airey, was downright disturbing to some Sabbath loyalists in 1978. Had the dark lords of metal dared to tip their toes into the murky waters of jazz? Well, yes, they had. But according to bassist Geezer Butler, that wasn’t such a dramatic left turn from the sort of varied songwriting they’d always done.
“Our albums, we’d go from really heavy stuff to jazz,” he told Songfacts in 2024. “‘Air Dance,’ for instance – that’s totally jazz. The very first songs we wrote, [drummer] Bill Ward was really influenced by Buddy Rich, so he had this swing feel to his drumming. We didn’t want to be restricted to any one particular sound, so we used to love experimenting when we had the time to do it.”
The time to do it, apparently, was a doomed wintertime recording session in Toronto, Canada, in a low-rent studio that Tony Iommi had booked and quickly came to regret. With Ozzy disappearing and reappearing like the shifting winds off Lake Ontario, the rest of the guys used some of their time to take some swings they might not have on earlier, admittedly more cohesive Sabbath records. It was partly to kill the hours and partly a subtle nod to the fact that the stakes had been lowered.
“Never Say Die! was a patch-up kind of an album,” Butler told Guitar World. “People didn’t realise that it was sort of tongue-in-cheek, the ‘never say die’ thing. Because we knew that was it; we just knew it was never going to happen again. We did this 10th-anniversary tour with Van Halen in 1978, and everybody’s going, ‘Here’s to another 10 years!’ And I’m going, (rolls eyes) ‘Yeah, sure!'”
“We were just a fucking bunch of guys drowning in the fucking ocean,” Ozzy clarified in an interview with Spin in 2013. “We weren’t getting along with each other and we were all fucked-up with drugs and alcohol. And I got fired. It was just a bad thing. You try to lift your head up above water, but eventually the tide sucks you under.”
Or, like the fighter pilots pictured on the cover art of Never Say Die!, you can crash-land into the water and hope for the best. In 1978, Black Sabbath fans weren’t exactly ready and willing to accept what that sort of desperation sounded like, but from the safe distance of over four decades later, it feels a bit more noble that a band, stretched to its absolute limits, was still willing to try some interesting things, rather than phoning in half a dozen re-approximations of ‘War Pigs’.
Then again, Geezer Butler also later admitted that Never Say Die! was, nonetheless, the worst album Black Sabbath ever made. So perhaps a revisionist assessment can only go so far.
