“That’s what I want to do”: The bassist who blew Geezer Butler away
Black Sabbath devotees will be well aware that, despite their eventual entry into the world of darkness, Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler both started out as adolescent Beatles obsessives, lining up outside one of the Fabs’ gigs in Birmingham in 1963 just hoping to get a glimpse of them.
“I had three brothers who were into Elvis and Buddy Holly,” Butler told Metal Hammer in 2019, “My sisters were into Cliff [Richard]. I didn’t have something that was my own, and then the Beatles came along. I was like, ‘Yes, thank you!’”
In Butler’s case, though, there was no direct line between watching Paul McCartney’s bass work and envisioning his own future as one of the masters of the craft. Butler’s Beatle hero, in fact, was John Lennon, and his early forays into music, pre-Sabbath, usually involved playing rhythm guitar in the Lennon style. The real inflexion point in Geezer’s career came from a different influence, a band he heard for the first time at 17.
’l always remember going to the club; I’d seen Cream twice before, but I’d only taken notice of Eric Clapton,” Butler recalled to Ultimate Classic Rock in 2023, “The third time I saw them, I was standing in front of Jack Bruce, and I was just mesmerised at what he was doing. I realised why they didn’t need a rhythm guitarist because he was doing the bass parts and filling in what you’d play on rhythm, and it was just amazing to watch. That was it. I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do’.”
Describing Bruce’s playing style as the “foundation” for his own methodology, Butler has essentially credited the innovative Cream bassist with helping him to care about the bass as a dynamic instrument, something he’d never done previously. In early rock and roll, including a lot of the Merseybeat bands, the bass was considered just a practical arm of the rhythm section, with no room for improvisation or colouring outside the lines.
Jack Bruce, despite getting routinely overshadowed by Clapton in terms of technical fireworks, was also keeping up with Slowhand and constructing Cream’s distinctive sound as an equal partner. “I mean, not only was he an incredible bass player, but he was the main singer as well,” Butler said of him, “which is even more mesmerising”.
Bruce was an important pioneer when it came to introducing more elements of jazz-inflected bass playing into rock, citing Charles Mingus as an influence and utilising a lot of string-bending and distortion, at a time when most bassists thought their job was to keep a low profile.
Bruce died in 2014 at the age of 71, inspiring Butler to mention him in the acknowledgements of his own memoir, Into the Void, a decade later.
“I’d met him a couple of times, and I was just too in awe of him, to be honest,” Butler told Ultimate Classic Rock, “It’s like meeting Jesus or something [laughs]. You meet your hero, and I was tongue-tied. But I just love what Jack did on bass.”
