Black Sabbath was formed in Birmingham, England back in 1968 and in 1970 they finally had the chance to release their groundbreaking self-titled debut album. Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne were not aware at the time but they created what would later be called Heavy Metal music. Besides being the band’s bassist, Geezer Butler was also their main lyricist during the first Ozzy era.
In 1977, when the band had already released most of their most sucessful albums, they fired Geezer for two weeks. In an interview with Joann Butler (Transcribed by Ultimate Guitar), the musician recalled what happened.
Geezer Butler recalls when he was briefly fired by Black Sabbath
“I have no idea (why they fired me) because everybody was totally out of their brains all the time. 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.”
“I think that just 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 anymore.’ And I was actually relieved because we were under so much pressure at the time.”
He continued:
“Probably the best two weeks that I’ve had for years [chuckles], because I could just relax and not think about the business, or getting albums together, or anything like that. And then, about two or three weeks later, Bill calls me up and says, ‘Where are you?'”
“I said, ‘What do you mean, where am I?’ He said, ‘We’re here, rehearsing!’ I said, ‘I thought I was fired.’ He said, ‘What do you mean, fired!?’ I said, ‘You told me I was fired from the band!’ [laughs] He said, ‘Oh, yeah, forgot about that.’ So, I went down to rehearsal, nobody said anything about it, just carried on as normal,” Geezer Butler said.
Butler was a member of Black Sabbath from 1968 until 1984. He then returned in 1987, 1990 to 1994 and remained a member of the group from 1997 on. Besides recording a few solo albums, he also played with Ozzy and in the Sabbath spin-off band Heaven & Hell, which also had Tony Iommi, Vinny Appice and Ronnie James Dio.