Geezer Butler

Geezer Butler

Shortly after joining Black Sabbath, Geezer Butler switched from rhythm guitar to bass and divined his own freewheeling style. Since he’d never played the sort of four-on-the-floor bass that defined Sixties rock, he came to the instrument with a guitarist’s sensibility, adding harmonies and ornate filigrees to guitarist Tony Iommi’s parts. The secret to Black Sabbath’s impact is how Butler and Iommi stacked their instruments for a big, walloping sound. On “War Pigs,” Butler played a bluesy lead underneath Iommi’s drawn-out riffs, and by the middle of the song when Iommi solos, Butler plays his own jazzy, Jack Bruce–inspired fingerpicked solo whenever the guitarist holds a note. There’s also a sense of liberation in the way he plays, as on 1981’s “Slipping Away,” when he traded playful solos with Iommi, and on his own swampy, wah-wah–inflected solo “Bassically,” which leads off “N.I.B.” — a guitar trick he adopted long before other bassists. But despite his obvious skill, Butler has always downplayed his ability. “Because I was a rhythm guitarist, I’d fill in gaps left by the lead guitarist,” he once said. “I continued that with bass: being the rhythm player. I never rated myself as a bass player; I just played what I thought was necessary for each song.”

Rolling Stone