Geezer Butler Enjoyed Being Briefly Fired by Black Sabbath

Geezer Butler said he’d enjoyed the two-week period of being fired from Black Sabbath in 1977.

The incident took place when the band members were at the height of distraction, mired in drug use and suspicious of their management.

Frontman Ozzy Osbourne had recently quit, only to return almost immediately. In a recent interview with LifeMinute (video below), Butler recalled what happened when his turn came.

“Everybody was totally out of their brains all the time,” he said. “We’d sold millions and millions of albums and sold out thousands of gigs around the world. We still hardly had any money to show for it, and we’d sort of realized that we were being ripped off by the management.”

He continued: “I think people just wanted a scapegoat for the whole thing – it just happened to be me at the time. Bill Ward came to the house and said, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re fired.’ ‘Oh, thanks very much. Why?’ ‘You don’t seem into it any more.’”

Black Sabbath Forgot They’d Fired Geezer Butler

Butler admitted: “I was actually relieved because we were under so much pressure at the time. [It was] probably the best two weeks that I’d had for years! I could just relax and not think about the business, or getting albums together, or anything like that.”

For better or worse, the moment wasn’t to last. “About two or three weeks later, Bill calls me up and says, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘We’re here, rehearsing!.’

“I said, ‘I thought I was fired… You told me I was fired from the band!’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah – forgot about that.’

So I went down to rehearsal, nobody said anything about it, [and we] just carried on as normal.”

Listen to Geezer Butler’s Interview