ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 16, 1996 TAG: 9602160074
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: PHILADELPHIA
SOURCE: KIRA L. BILLIK ASSOCIATED PRESS
Geezer Butler's in a weird situation. After years of dissatisfaction over the deterioration of Black Sabbath, the groundbreaking heavy metal band he started with singer Ozzy Osbourne, the bassist-lyricist left it for good to put together his own group.
He recruited singer Burton Bell, ex-Osbourne drummer Deen Castronovo, and guitarist Pedro Howse, and took two weeks to bash out his first solo album, ``Plastic Planet.''
But Bell is already in a band - Fear Factory - which is building up its own steam behind its album, ``Demanufacture.'' So Butler's left to basically start over.
``It's becoming blatantly obvious to me now that I will have to get a new singer, which is a terrible shame, because Burt was brilliant for it,'' Butler said in an interview at a Philadelphia hotel. ``But he's going to be on the road with Fear Factory for most of this year.''
Geezer Butler, who was born Terry Butler, spoke before a gig with Osbourne, with whom he's been touring; he's also been playing shows with his band on the side, and the reception has been good.
``We've had so many offers to go out on tour that I just can't say no to them anymore. .. I love playing live now that we've been doing a few gigs - I want to do it properly now. It's gone past the hobby stage, and I really want to go out and tour it,'' he said.
``Plastic Planet'' is propelled by furiously bottom-heavy guitar-bass riffs and Bell's versatile vocals; he can do everything from death-metal roar to crooning melody.
It's unabashedly heavy, reveling in the pure thunder of Butler's metal roots. Exasperated by Sabbath's gradual bent toward a lighter style, Butler desperately wanted to make his record the opposite.
``I just always wanted to do what I can do best, which is heavy stuff,'' he said. ``I did it just to do it, without even thinking that eventually we'd be going on tour and might have to sell some - I forgot about all that.''
Butler rants about street violence (``Drive Boy, Shooting''), the degradation of society (``Plastic Planet''), and the disadvantaged (``The Invisible'').
``You hear all these things - you've gotta vote for this, and you've gotta vote for that - and then you vote and nothing happens,'' he said. ``It's just so frustrating.''
One of his favorite subjects is the increasingly high-tech nature of society. ``Catatonic Eclipse,'' based on a longer story Butler wrote, is a fantastical tale of a computer whiz who wants to know who God is. He learns that God IS the computer, so he programs himself into the computer to be part of God.
The sarcastic ``X13'' deals with Generation Xers who'd rather be ``face to interface, lost in cyberspace'' than make actual human contact.
``My kids [he has two] come in from school with their notebooks, [they sit] with their laptops doing their homework - it's just part of their life,'' he said. ``To me, it's so alien and so weird, but I suppose it fascinates me.''
The lyrics of ``House of Clouds'' have been around for a decade; Butler says they came out of a particularly chaotic period.
``Me world had just collapsed around me,'' he said. ``Me father died. Me son was born with really bad heart defects - they had originally given him three hours to live. We rushed him to Children's Hospital [in Boston], and they had this new experimental operation. We just said, `Do it,' and it worked.
``I was boozing a lot, and I was just totally losing touch with reality. I think because I'd been on the road up until then about 15 years without a break, everything just hit me.''
Writing lyrics proved a priceless outlet.
``It's the only thing that I know how to do,'' he said. ``I'll pray to God, and I'll write lyrics when I'm in a bad situation. For some reason, it helps.''
Butler is a youthful 46, all in black with a shoulder-length fall of light brown hair and a mustache only touched with gray. When he grins, years fall away. He speaks in a melodic British lilt.
Butler goes after his former bandmates, particularly guitarist Tony Iommi, in the song ``Giving Up the Ghost.''
Sabbath, he said, has ``become more of a legend than a living thing.'' He also teased his former bandmates about the satanic image they've cultivated.
``I found a lot of the writing that I was doing in the band wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to come out,'' he said. ``That whole comfortable feeling we used to have writing stuff together had gone.''
But putting together his own album helped Butler regain the joy of being in a band.
``It just felt great, because I was in charge of the whole thing,'' he said. ``It was up to me to put everything together and it was all down to me what direction it was going to take.
``Ozzy had always said to me there's nothing like doing your own album. It's the greatest feeling on earth, whether it sells one or one million. ... It's just a feeling that I never thought that I could get back again. It gave me all the confidence back that I was lacking, and the realization that it could be done after all.''
LENGTH: Medium: 97 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Heavy-metal bass player Geezer Butler has found lifeby CNBafter Black Sabbath. He's just recorded his first solo album,
"Plastic Planet." color.