Legendary Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler recently announced his retirement after more than 50 years in the music business, as reported by Rolling Stone.
Geezer Butler retires
While promoting his new book “Into the Void“, the musician jokingly noted his plans for the future:
“I don’t want to do anything anymore.”
Butler added that he came to this decision before the pandemic hit, when he was hitting the road with his supergroup Deadland Ritual:
“I didn’t realize how hard starting from scratch is, especially when you’re used to your own plane and staying at the Four Seasons and the Ritz Carlton… and then you’re back in little clubs and getting on a bus together. It just didn’t suit me.”
The bassist clarified that he’ll be available to do one-off shows, but he’s done with touring for good. Not only that, but he also excluded any future Black Sabbath activity:
“I don’t think Ozzy’s up for it anyway.”
Meanwhile, in a new interview with Ultimate Classic Rock, Butler, confirmed the veracity of a blues album that was intended to be the follow-up to 2013’s “13”, but was eventually aborted due to guitarist Tony Iommi’s illness at the time.
When the interviewer took notice of Butler’s claim that a blues album was planned right after the end of the “13” tour in 2014 in the latter’s biography and asked more about it, Geezer’s response was:
“No, because we didn’t know what was going to happen with Tony. He was really ill at the time. We just thought, ‘We don’t know what’s going to happen, so let’s just do the final Sabbath tour. If everybody is still alive after that, we’ll look at doing another album, but it really took it out of Tony. I just don’t know how he did it. When we were writing the ’13’ album, he was having chemotherapy and then coming back from the hospital and carrying on writing. Me and Ozzy [Osbourne] were going, ‘Tony, just have a rest!’ He just wouldn’t do it. He refused to rest. He wouldn’t let it beat him. The final tour was originally going to be 100 gigs, and we were supposed to finish in Japan, but halfway through, Tony just said: ‘I can’t do 100.’ We said, ‘Fair enough.’ We were lucky to get 80 gigs on the final tour, you know, so we all understood. That was it.
“But as far as the blues album, I think that Tony’s still doing stuff in his studio. In fact, he emailed me last week and said, ‘Do you fancy doing some bass playing?’ [Laughs] I went, ‘Maybe!’ But no, there’s nothing in concrete. If something happens, it will happen – but I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
