“I’M NOT SURE I know the difference between heavy rock and heavy metal, but it is good to be known as inventors of heavy metal rather than followers,” says Terence Michael Joseph “Geezer” Butler, the original bass player and primary lyricist for the almighty Black Sabbath.
Butler is somewhat modest over email, but Black Sabbath’s influence on heavy metal, doom metal, black metal, and EVERY metal, really, is as immeasurable as outer space—they’re essentially the Beatles of all things heavy. Throughout their career, metal’s “Fab Four” gave music fans a paintbrush with endless colors to choose from and zero boundaries.
Butler, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and Bill Ward showed rock ’n’ roll enthusiasts the other side of the peace and love coin at a time when nobody wanted to look at it. Black Sabbath is solely responsible for injecting the darkness, the coarse edge, and the true heavy into rock ’n’ roll—an effort that, in turn, spawned metal. If anyone, even your own grandmother, tells you Led Zeppelin had a hand in it, you can tell them to fuck right off!