Geezer Butler on the Black Sabbath song Ozzy Osbourne doesn’t get “enough credit for”
If you were to introduce someone to Black Sabbath‘s music for the very first time, it’s hard to look past ‘Paranoid’ as the opening song of choice.
The mere fact that ‘The Prince of Darkness’ himself regarded it as his personal anthem tells you all you need to know about its embodiment of Black Sabbath’s spirit. It’s the sound of the band firing on all cylinders, laying down the foundations for heavy metal as they did it, but oddly, it wasn’t the song that endeared me to the band in the way it did my friends.
Sure, I heard it and loved it, just like the rest, but it was a full-blooded rock song I played in conjunction with a host of others, sent to me via compilations from older brothers and friends, who revelled in my newfound love for classic rock. However, when the onslaught of recommendations quietened down and the dust began to settle, I found another song that showed me the real door into the Sabbath world.
It probably shouldn’t have, given its sonic difference from the rest, but it created a world from which I never wanted to leave, and so, in the spirit of designing my own captivity, I stayed within the thick walls of the musical outfit for months after.
Slowing the pace after ‘Paranoid’, on their album of the same title, was ‘Planet Caravan’, a masterful melody that showed the psychedelic side of this full-throttle rock band. The pitter-patter of the rhythm section, combined with the mellow atmosphere of Tommy Iommi’s guitar, meant that for a brief three-minute period, the heavy world of Black Sabbath was thrust underwater.
In the midst of that freedive, Ozzy Osbourne’s voice rises up from the deep below, where a completely different element of his vocal style is showcased, and it was in this subdued tone that bass player Geezer Butler believed the frontman showed his true greatness, on a song he doesn’t get enough respect for.
He explained, “We’d literally be jamming away, and he’d be jamming as well, singing along to everything. And he was just, I mean, I don’t think he gets enough credit for what a talent he had, like, for just coming out with these incredible vocal lines, just out of the air, you know, and it was almost always what he’d first come up with.”
Iommi supported Butler’s point and explained, “He was quite good at coming up with melodies, and I found, certainly with him, he was good at coming up with ballads as well. Good melodies for a ballad”.
It’s an oversight culture that is deliberately placed on Ozzy, wherein his role as the class clown of music history renders him somewhat immune to emotional praise. There’s almost an unwillingness to accept that our beloved ‘Prince of Darkness’ can step away from the chaos and deliver something as tender and psychedelic as ‘Planet Caravan’, but for those truly in the know, it was an expected turn of genius from the frontman who persistently labelled The Beatles as his one true love, making them proud on this track.
