The Black Sabbath member Tony Iommi called irreplaceable: “Very important”
Every group is worth more than the sum of its parts. Aerosmith would never have worked without having Steven Tyler playing off of Joe Perry, and chances are if Axl Rose carried on as ‘The Rose Experience’ after Slash and Duff McKagan, Guns N’ Roses would never have retained their longstanding fanbase for so long. But for all of the massive lineup changes that had come and gone in Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi remembered that nothing could get in the way of what Geezer Butler could do.
Then again, most people only know Sabbath more for the riffs and whatever madman they happened to have onstage at any given time. Whether it was Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie James Dio, or some of the later years with singers like Tony Martin or Glenn Hughes, most artists would have to have been doing something really special to suddenly make the bass seem like a booming presence.
And looking at how Butler played, it’s not like he was necessarily Jimi Hendrix when it came to his licks. The bass was absolutely thundering when locking in with Bill Ward, but even Butler admitted that he would occasionally double whatever Iommi was doing on guitar in tracks like Iron Man.
It’s not always flashy, but rock has never been about flashiness. It’s about how it contributes to the song, and with two guitars rounding out that sound, the riffs went from sounding like they were being played from the depths of Hell. And since Butler and Ward both had a healthy respect for jazz, never before had someone heard a swing groove that sounded that demonic.
Butler should also be credited for inadvertently giving Sabbath their first true anthem. Sure, ‘Wicked World’ came first, but after trying to play along to Gustav Holst’s Planet Suite and holding on to that tritone interval, Butler and Iommi crafted a story about a man finding out that he is being given orders from an antichrist.
Whenever someone like that comes into view, you need to hold onto them for as long as you can, with Iommi telling MusicRadar, “Geezer is irreplaceable… very important, because he would follow me and know what I was going to play. I never had any doubt at all that Geezer would play the right thing. Those kinds of players don’t exist so much.”
Except Iommi did leave Butler behind for a while, and it’s not like it didn’t show. While Dio replacing Osbourne felt like trading in a vintage car for a jet engine, suddenly not hearing his signature basslines on records like The Seventh Star meant that everyone else had to do some heavy lifting trying to fill out the sound.
Because being in Sabbath is about more than just playing the same riff together and making it sound as evil as possible. That kind of dark energy is woven into one’s soul, and whenever Butler plays bass to this day, it still sounds like the same person who wrote those hymns of doom.
