Into the Void
From Birth to Black Sabbath—And Beyond
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A rollicking, effusive, and candid memoir by the heavy metal musician and founding member of Black Sabbath, covering his years as the band’s bassist and main lyricist through his later-career projects, and detailing how one of rock’s most influential bands formed and prevailed.
With over 70 million records sold, Black Sabbath, dubbed by Rolling Stone “the Beatles of heavy metal,” helped create the genre itself, with their distinctive heavy riffs, tuned down guitars, and apocalyptic lyrics. Bassist and primary lyricist Geezer Butler played a gigantic part in the band’s renown, from suggesting the band name to using his fascination with horror, religion, and the occult to compose the lyrics and build the foundation of heavy metal as we know it.
In Into the Void, Butler tells his side of the story, from the band’s beginnings as a scrappy blues quartet in Birmingham through the struggles leading to the many well-documented lineup changes while touring around London’s gritty clubs (Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, and The Who makes notable appearances!), and the band’s important later years. He writes honestly of his childhood in a working-class family of seven in Luftwaffe-battered Birmingham, his almost-life as an accountant, and how his disillusionment with organized religion and class systems would spawn the lyrics and artistic themes that would resonate so powerfully with fans around the world.
Into the Void reveals the softer side of the heavy metal legend and the formation of one of rock’s most exciting bands, while holding nothing back. Like Geezer’s bass lines, it is both original, dramatic, and forever surprising.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Black Sabbath bassist Butler recounts his unlikely route from hardscrabble childhood to international rock fame in this intermittently revealing and frequently off-putting debut memoir. Born in 1949 Aston, England, to hardworking Irish Catholic parents in a household too poor to afford toilet paper, Butler was drawn to music early on. He built a guitar from a carpentry kit and began playing it around age 10, nurturing dreams of becoming a professional musician. He teamed up with friend Roger Hope to form the band Rare Breed in 1967; singer Ozzy Osbourne joined a few months later. In 1968, Osbourne and Butler left Rare Breed and joined drummer Bill Ward and guitarist Tommy Iommi to form Black Sabbath. Butler traces the band's ups and downs, including struggles to get booked and their fallout with a cheating manager, and recalls Osbourne's habit of depositing his waste wherever he felt like it. While the wealth of behind-the-scenes detail may prove tantalizing to some, others will be turned off by the author's creepier anecdotes (at age six, he dug up a buried pet dog to cut it open and look for its soul) and hyperbole ("Sabbath must be the most successful bunch of outsiders in music history"). This is best suited for diehard fans.