PERHAPS not surprisingly for a member of Black Sabbath, the forthcoming memoir by Geezer Butler has prompted a little controversy. As he has looked back on his life, the 73-year-old born in Birmingham as Terence Michael Joseph Butler has been reminded of good times – great success with Black Sabbath, for whose pivotal early albums he wrote the lyrics; finding true love and the consolations of family life – but also less good ones. Geezer’s struggles with the depression that led him to write “Paranoid” in a time when doctors were often ill-informed on matters of mental health are both troubling, and startlingly contemporary.
The past is also filled with greyer areas. Black Sabbath’s commercial success in the early 1970s made them a great deal of money – but their inexperience was exploited by their management, a situation which tied them up in contractual problems, disputes over lost earnings, heavy taxation and legal wrangling for the latter half of the decade. Geezer was keen to give more than a flavour of the situation, but his publishers were understandably cautious unless he had documentary evidence to back up his claims. “There was about 50 pages from my original script which I had to scrap,” says Geezer, still sounding a bit disappointed, down the line from his American home. “I said, ‘You’ve got to take me word for it, I didn’t have a cameraman following me round.’ But if I couldn’t prove something then I had to leave it out. It left out a lot of who I am, about the band and how I grew up. Things that you can’t mention these days. Very frustrating.”
Like Ozzy Osbourne and guitarist Tony Iommi, Geezer grew up in Birmingham’s Aston district – although they didn’t know each other properly until they began playing music together semi-professionally. There is fighting, football and awful luck in the Black Sabbath tale – Tony Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in an accident on his last day working in a sheet metal factory, at age 17 – but Geezer’s telling of the story begins in a vibrant community with a strong family life at the heart of it.
