Photo: WireImage
Black Sabbath went through some major turbulence during their ascension to fame, including Ozzy Osbourne quitting only to immediately return and Geezer Butler getting fired only for his bandmates to forget they gave him the boot. In a new interview, the bassist admitted he was "relieved" when he briefly got canned in 1977.
“Everybody was totally out of their brains all the time,” the bassist recalled. “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 people just wanted a scapegoat for the whole thing – it just happened to be me at the time," Butler continued. "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.’”
But instead of being upset, he was happy for the time away from the band. “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,” Butler confessed. Unfortunately for him, the vacation didn't last long because his bandmates forgot they had fired him!
“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!’" he explained. “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.”
In 1979, Black Sabbath fired Osbourne for good. In another recent interview, Butler spoke about the "heartbreaking" decision but stood by it, saying he still believes it was best for everyone.