Geezer Butler’s strange raid of a German farmyard: “I used to go and raid the turnips”
Black Sabbath were not just a rock band, but they were a band who perfectly represented their surroundings.
Joel McIver, a Black Sabbath specialist who has written plenty of books about the band, put it best: “You cannot separate the environment of Black Sabbath from the music that they made. 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.”
The band were able to capture the sound of post-war Britain and display it in a way that highlighted the contradicting sense of hopelessness and determination that existed. Geezer Butler was a huge part of achieving that sound, not just because of the famous rhythm section that he contributed towards within Sabbath, but because of the gut-wrenching lyrics he wrote.
Classic tracks, which so openly acknowledged feelings that others have struggled to articulate, like mental health issues and the helplessness that comes with war, were highlighted perfectly on tracks such as ‘Paranoid’ and ‘War Pigs’. Butler has always been completely unwavering in his honesty and his views that a boy from depraved Birmingham lies at the heart of everything he does.
“You didn’t have [a lot]. I don’t think I saw an orange until 1965, for instance,” he said when discussing his upbringing, “And a lot of the bands from England at the time were all working class or lower middle class, and everybody was on rations, [especially] the working-class people. There was no heating or anything like that in your house. No indoor toilet, no bathroom, no hot water, hardly any electricity outlets. So it was quite a tough upbringing, really.”
He grew up on rations as the country was still licking its wounds from World War II. It needed to rebuild the economy and restock the country, which meant that people had to watch what they were eating for years. The lack of meat meant that Butler was raised on a meatless diet, which led to him becoming a dedicated vegetarian for his entire life.
“I didn’t leave home until I was 19, so all I ever knew was what my mom made for me, and it was like vegetarian stuff,” he explained, “So I didn’t know any different, and it was just the thought of eating dead animals that made me just… I just couldn’t understand why people would eat dead animals or dead fish or anything like that.”
This was all well and good when Butler was living at home, but when Sabbath became popular and he started living life on the road while touring with the band, finding vegetarian food was incredibly tricky. You have to keep in mind that this was in the ’60s and ’70s, when vegetarian food wasn’t quite as popular as it is now, and things were at their worst when Black Sabbath found themselves in Germany, and there was nothing for him to sink his teeth into, where, as a last resort, he raided a pig farm.
“I had to eat the pig food,” he said when discussing the fateful night, “We stayed at this one place, and there was a pig farm next to it, and I used to go and raid the turnips they used to eat”, and so while Butler might have been living like a rockstar, he certainly wasn’t eating like one.
