The one musician who made Geezer Butler play bass: “My biggest influence and favourite bass player”
Every musician who has ever lived, including Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler, has been influenced to pick up their instrument of choice by someone, whether this be an artist they’ve heard on the radio or a family member.
With Black Sabbath, Butler played a pivotal role in reshaping rock with the invention of heavy metal, which wasn’t even a phrase until they started making an unholy racket in the late 1960s. Naturally, as the heavy metal space was yet to exist, there was nobody from that world to make Butler feel obliged to make that music, and his influences instead came from elsewhere.
His upbringing under the grey Birmingham skies in a post-World War II world was rather ordinary before music entered his life. Like most people of his age, The Beatles were his first introduction to rock ‘n’ roll, and as soon as he got a taste for it, Butler became hungry for more. He began playing the guitar in bands when he was an early teenager, which quickly made it clear that it was where his future lied.
However, the dream to become the next George Harrison quickly closed after his tastes expanded upon seeing Cream perform. For most people in the room, it was the dexterity of Eric Clapton’s blues or Ginger Baker’s raucous drumming that appealed most. Yet, after leaving the show, Butler had a new hero in bassist Jack Bruce, which led to him ditching the six-string for the four-string.
Bruce made him understand what was possible on the bass and single-handedly persuaded him to try to learn the instrument. He watched the supergroup three times during their short time together, and according to Butler, nobody has ever played it better than Bruce.
“I hadn’t thought about playing bass until then, so fingerstyle was the only way to go for me,” Butler said about the impact of Bruce on his playing style and his decision to play the instrument.
In a separate interview, he elaborated on his musical upbringing and how Bruce transformed his life, sharing, “Yeah, and The Beatles. I had three brothers who were into Elvis and Buddy Holly. My sisters were into Cliff. I didn’t have something that was my own and then The Beatles came along. I was like, ‘Yes, thank you!’ My hero was John Lennon so I learned rhythm guitar, but then Cream came along and Jack Bruce’s style of bass playing blew me away.”
Understandably, after Bruce died in 2014, Butler was beside himself and poignantly paid tribute to the Cream founder on social media, writing, “So sad to hear of Jack Bruce passing. My biggest influence and favourite bass player. Thank you, Jack. RIP.”
Although he was no stranger to playing in bands, Black Sabbath was the first group in which he played bass. If he had never seen Cream live, then it’s likely that he’d never have felt inclined to leave his trusted six-string behind for the bass. It was the best decision he ever made, and he’ll forever be thankful for the Cream bassist guiding him to the light.
In a parallel universe, in which Cream never existed, there could have been a crippling domino effect that also robbed the world of Black Sabbath and their seismic impact. While that dreaded thought doesn’t bear even thinking about, it does reinstate how attending a single rock show can have a transformative cultural consequence.
