Black Sabbath Stays True To Fans On New Tour

Last month Jon Bon Jovi apologized to fans of the band for having to play new material at the Time Warner Cable Arena. He knows. We know. Music is a business and no band can afford to fork out the bucks to tour on their own time and dime. I walked out of a Tom Petty concert because the new music and I just weren't buzzing. I laughed the entire way out. I had finally felt what radio listeners experience when the jock on the air cuts into a list of favorites and shouts, "Hey I got this new song from ________." I was there when U2 and Def Leopard busted onto the 1980's music scene. Hearing new music from them came with a benefit. Then something happened to music. Albums featured more misses than hits. The invention of the compact disc gave permission to music buffs to purchase the tunes then quickly sell it back to the record store. I'm guilty of doing it with albums. A new group on the scene was Loverboy. Maybe being from Montana got in the way. I mean we were caked constantly with Canadian acts wanting to make it big. Loverboy was just another one of those bands. The song Turn Me Loose was April Wine meeting Chillawack taking on Gino Vannelli. The greatest Classic Rock come backs of all time has a new member. Black Sabbath. Not just a new collection of Tony Iommi inspired guitar riffs but a world tour. For fans that can be scary. Musicians tend to put too much focus on the new material. Not Black Sabbath. Catch em live and you're gonna get the tracks that made em your favorite. Bassist Geezer Butler says Ozzy and company are well focused of what the band is and as supposed to be about. It was great for experimenting, but we wasted a lot of time – and money – just pissing about in the studio on the later albums.” That followed Butler’s early struggle to buy an instrument, after Cream inspired him to focus on bass. “I’d never seen anyone play bass like Jack Bruce before,” he says. “Everyone would be staring at Clapton while I’d be staring at Jack. “The main obstacle was I couldn’t afford a bass. I had a Fender Telecaster guitar at the time. I was paying it off at 50 pence a week over four years, so I couldn’t sell it until it was paid for. When I got together with Sabbath, I tuned the guitar strings down to simulate a bass. “On our first gig I borrowed a friend’s Hofner bass. It only had three strings – and that gig was the first time I’d ever played a bass. I swapped my Telecaster for a Fender Precision bass, and that was that.” While Sabbath will mainly live in the past when it comes to setlists, Butler says they’ll also squeeze in a couple of tracks from the new album. And he reflects on how recording 13 was a completely different experience from those that took place 40 years ago. “These days it’s great – you can have the equivalent of a major studio on your laptop, so you can save a lot of time and heartache by recording your ideas at home and then playing them to whoever you are working with, to get instant feedback. There is nothing to replace jamming live together, but it is great to have a reference point, to give direction.” The bassist admits writing the album was a challenge: “You have to feel extremely comfortable with each other to write and record. We have seen each other almost every day for the last two years – but we persisted, and we have done the almost impossible.”