The one artist Geezer Butler called the biggest rock “legend”
When Geezer Butler got the ball rolling with Black Sabbath, he probably wasn’t thinking about becoming the biggest rock and roll band on the face of the Earth.
There was hardly anyone who cared about them in the early days, so when they made songs that were designed to be scary, it was either going to become legendary or fall flat on its face by the time they got started. It helped to have a frontman like Ozzy Osbourne out front, but Butler knew that nothing could ever compare to the true legends that he had heard growing up.
Then again, Butler was far from one-note when putting together music for Sabbath. It seems like anyone who writes tunes like ‘Wicked World’ and their namesake track would be listening to some of the most macabre music anyone has ever heard, but it wasn’t hard to find artists like Bob Dylan finding their way onto Butler’s turntable in between the biggest hard rock artists of the day like Cream and Led Zeppelin.
Hell, there was even a bit of classical music thrown in there for good measure. Let’s not forget that the entire reason why their introductory track sounded so menacing was because it took inspiration from Gustav Holst’s ‘Mars: Bringer of War’ transposed to the guitar. But when it came to the raw performance aspect of playing, Butler knew that few people could compare to what the odd rock and rollers were doing.
After all, some of the biggest songs in the band’s catalogue seemed to borrow from the same blues formula that Zeppelin had inherited from everyone from Chuck Berry to Little Richard, but when it comes to introducing the world to rock and roll, it’s hard to ignore Elvis Presley. Even if he didn’t play most of his old material and got to his musical peak thanks to black artists, no one had the same moves that he did whenever he performed.
He clearly was born to be a star, and when looking at what a frontman was supposed to be, it’s hard to think of anyone making the same kind of impact that he had in the glory days of rock and roll. Even though Butler was more interested in what bands like The Beatles would be doing a few years later, there was no way that he could look at the history of rock and roll and not put Presley at the very top of his list.
Compared to every other rock band, Butler felt Presley was the ultimate icon of rock, saying, “Elvis is the legend. I mean, my brothers loved Elvis, and so I’ve been listening to Elvis since 1957 when he first came out. Apart from the Beatles, there is nobody bigger than Elvis. To see him live, it’s like, here’s four kids from Aston and Birmingham coming over and getting to see him perform.”
Although Sabbath were nowhere near the same level as Presley was in his prime or anything, it’s hard not to think Osbourne being that same flagship artist for metal in the early days of the genre. He might not have embraced the label, but in the same way that people look at Presley as the go-to legend of rock and roll, so too do people label ‘The Prince of Darkness’ as the almighty pioneer of everything that came afterwards.
While some of that praise should be meant for all of Sabbath, Butler seemed content not to get to the same level that Presley reached. He was more than happy to sit at the back of the stage, write his lyrics, and murder his basslines, because no matter how hard he played, he wasn’t going to have the dance moves nor the suave demeanour to compete with anything Presley did.
