The musician Geezer Butler considered to be a “genius”
In the early 1970s, Black Sabbath was on the verge of rock history without even knowing it. After playing the same blues clubs that their contemporaries were playing in their native Birmingham, the sound of Tony Iommi’s guitar gave way to the sounds of heavy metal in the coming years, making one demented riff after another to offset Ozzy Osbourne’s menacing growl whenever he took to the stage. While Geezer Butler rooted everything to the ground, he singled out one of his contemporaries as a genius for his time.
When the band first got together, though, Butler was still more interested in the guitar than the bass. Taking up the four-string once Iommi settled into his groove behind the fretboard, Butler began to take influences from outside of traditional rock and roll, eventually creating the basis for the song ‘Black Sabbath’ when trying to play a piece of a classic suite from Gustav Holst.
Outside of blues and classical music, though, Butler was also heavily indebted to the world of jazz when picking up the bass. Compared to the rock-solid foundation of every single Iommi riff, the sound of tracks like ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ features a deceptive swing style akin to what the various jazz players were doing in the clubs around the same time.
Whereas most of these musicians could typically be filed into any genre, Frank Zappa was already going against the grain from the moment he started. While it would be easy to quantify what Zappa does as rock and roll per se, the music that he was able to squeeze out of The Mothers of Invention left most other rockers in the dust, touching on everything from jazz to avant-garde to genres that would take a few more years to get a proper name.
When looking back on the records at the time, Butler would single out We’re Only In It For the Money as one of his favourites. Taking a stake to the heart of the hippy generation, Zappa was looking to make something that was the antithesis of Flower Power, all while warping people’s minds as to what constituted a traditional rock song.
Discussing his time with the album with Spin, Butler would consider Zappa to be unmatched in the music world, saying, “No doubt about it, Frank Zappa was a genius–how he recorded these albums is beyond me, they seem to have recorded his brain! His lyrics were so cynical and contemptuous of [particularly] American life, both [the] older generation and [the] then current generation. They could make you laugh, question, debate, or despair of what the hell was happening in the world”.
That musical respect was a two-way street, with Zappa expressing his love for Sabbath’s music on more than one occasion. Looking at the way that both artists saw their music, though, it’s no surprise why both of them would get along so well.
While Zappa offset his eclectic musical style with humour, Sabbath firmly ended the hippy movement shortly after the 1960s ended, marking a new regime of rock music focused more on the macabre side of life. Zappa may be an acquired taste for some, but even Butler could appreciate the different sonic worlds that he created every time he sat down to write an album.
