![]() ![]() We said, “It’s terrible.” So when Live at Last came out, we were really pissed off, because it was right at the time when the band with Ronnie was hitting its peak, and he had been accepted, and then he puts out a live album of the original lineup, just to throw a spanner in the works. It was recorded four or five years earlier. ![]() Why did things go wrong?īutler: Our old manager, Patrick Meehan, had put out Live at Last with the original lineup. He and drummer Vinny Appice left the group in 1982 to start Dio. And his voice is incredible anyway.īlack Sabbath’s initial period with Ronnie lasted only a few years. We went to Barry Gibb’s house, and we just stayed there for however long it was.īutler: I think definitely it probably wouldn’t have worked with anybody apart from Ronnie because of how enthusiastic he was and how he got into the music straight away. We were too much in the middle of it all, and we just wanted to get away, and get on with what we’re doing, so that’s when we went to Miami. ![]() Iommi: We decided we had to move from L.A. “You’re not going to start from scratch.” So we just went along with it.Īfter you decided to carry on, how did you find your focus? And it was basically, “It’s got to be a Sabbath album.” They’d put the money in they’d built this name up. Once you started working with Ronnie, how did you know you wanted to continue as Black Sabbath and not with a new name?īutler: Warner Brothers had already paid for the house and rehearsals, and everything like that. So I think Bill definitely liked to be the businessperson in the band, so he took it upon himself to tell Ozzy. I asked Tony and Ozzy about it, and they said they didn’t know what I was on about. He says, “We’ve had a meeting with the rest of the guys, and you’re fired.” “Oh, thanks.” And then he left. When I was back in England, he came round to the house one day. In fact, before Ozzy, he told me that I was fired. The three of us were going to talk to Ozzy together, and Bill decided to do it by himself.īutler: Bill likes to be the business one in the band. He didn’t tell any of us he was doing it. How did drummer Bill Ward come to be the one who asked Ozzy to leave? When Ronnie came in, we just wanted a fresh start. I used to have to go to the record company, and they’d say, “How’s the album coming?” “Great, great.” We hadn’t done anything. He sang a vocal on “Children of the Sea,” but that was the only full version we had of something from us. Iommi: We rented a house in Bel-Air originally to write an album with Ozz, and of course that didn’t happen because it just wasn’t working. How far along with writing were you when Ronnie came into the band? When he started working with us, he was so enthusiastic, compared with the way Ozzy was at the time. I’d heard only a couple of Rainbow songs. Geezer Butler: I didn’t know anything about him. He’s always had a real strong, powerful voice. Obviously, you’d say, “I wonder what Ritchie’s band’s like.” I liked the album, and of course, I loved Ronnie’s voice, not thinking for a minute we’d ever end up together. Tony Iommi: I’d heard Ronnie when Ritchie put out the first Rainbow album. How familiar were you with Ronnie James Dio before you worked with him? “So just hearing them for the first time as an outsider would hear them, I was just blown away with them. “I heard ‘Heaven and Hell’ and ‘Die Young,’ and I thought they were absolutely incredible,” he says now. “I told the guys, ‘It’s not the music or anything like that - I’m still into it - but I’ve just got to go and sort myself out.'” He got his life back in order in just a few months and decided he wanted back in, so he rejoined the band in Los Angeles and listened in awe to a handful of songs his bandmates had worked up with Dio. “I had loads of problems with my divorce, and I had to go back to England,” he recalls. But Butler soon realized he couldn’t stay committed to the band at that time. The group had recently split with founding vocalist Ozzy Osbourne and begun working in earnest with a new vocalist, Ronnie James Dio. It wasn’t until Black Sabbath started work on their ninth album, Heaven and Hell, in 1979 that bassist Geezer Butler was able to get an objective perspective on his band’s capabilities. ![]()
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