The band that taught Black Sabbath’s Geezer Butler how to play bass
It’s impossible to understate the importance of Geezer Butler to the genre of heavy metal. The Black Sabbath bassist had the good fortune of perhaps being the first true metal bassist, but just because he was first in line doesn’t mean his playing wasn’t revolutionary. Whether it’s the galloping style of Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris or the dark rumbling of Type O Negative’s Peter Steele, just about every heavy four-string player owes a debt to Butler.
“I distinctly remember trying to play along to Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ – at first I just could not get it,” Harris recalled in the book Run to the Hills. ‘I threw the guitar on my bed and walked out in a huff, but the next day I came back, picked it up and played it all the way through note-for-note! Once I got going, I started getting into bass-lines with a bit more subtlety to them…”.
So who did Butler look up to during his years learning the instrument? As it turned out, Butler was a fan of his contemporaries, including the melodic low-end that Paul McCartney was adding to The Beatles’ music at the end of their career. However, he was a guitarist at the time, so he mainly focused on John Lennon’s playing.
“Paul McCartney’s bass playing is unique. I learned some of his basslines and they’re so emotional, especially on the song ‘Something’,” Butler told Bass Player Magazine. “And that’s just one of his songs – ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ has a great rock ’n’ roll bassline as well. I’m a Beatles fanatic: It’s great that a band who were so popular were such great musicians as well.
“I appreciated all of them, even though I was a rhythm guitarist at the time and mental about John Lennon,” he added. “Their musicianship often gets overlooked, or it did at that time, anyway.”
“I didn’t really know anything about bass until I went to see Cream. I knew about Eric Clapton’s guitar playing because I’d followed him since he was in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, but Jack Bruce’s bass playing was a complete surprise,” Butler revealed. “I was a guitarist at the time, so I’d never thought about bass – and Jack completely floored me.”
“I’d never seen anyone use bass as a sort of semi-lead instrument, while at the same time being perfectly linked to the drums and the guitar,” Butler claimed. “The way he bent the notes and came down the fretboard was amazing, too. At the time he was playing a Fender VI, which I’d never seen before – they were terrible! I couldn’t even play one note on them, let alone the way he used to play them.”
