Black Sabbath
With Sabbath Mach II back at the wheel, Decibel rides shotgun on the highway to Heaven and Hell
“If we’d written this album with Ozzy, we’d still
be working on the first track.” Geezer Butler laughs when he says this, but he’s not actually joking. Sitting in a sterile meeting room at Rhino Records in Burbank, Black Sabbath’s legendary bassist and lyricist knows of what he speaks: When Butler and fellow metal gurus Tony Iommi and Bill Ward attempted to record new Sabbath material with Osbourne back in 2001 after the Drab Four’s triumphant Reunion cycle, the future television celebrity couldn’t be bothered.
“We wrote about six songs, but the keyboard player, Geoff Nicholls, came up with the vocal melodies because Ozzy wasn’t really interested,” Butler reveals. “I didn’t like the stuff that was coming out at all. I wanted it to be more like classic Sabbath, like the first three albums. No strings, no ballads, nothing like that. But Ozzy wanted it to be more like an Ozzy album, so we didn’t agree on what it should be straight away.”
Butler laughs again, but again, he’s not even slightly kidding: “Rick Rubin wanted to produce it until he heard what we did.”
Enter Ronnie James Dio. Ronnie James-ah. In late 2006, Butler and Iommi hook up with Ozzy’s early ’80s replacement and Mob Rules/Dehumanizer/longtime Dio skin-beater Vinny Appice to record three new songs for Sabbath’s The Dio Years compilation. Which in turn spawns a one-month tour under the Heaven and Hell moniker, culminating in a live album and concert video recorded at Radio City Music Hall. The punters and promoters just cannot get enough at this point, not with “Neon Knights” and “Mob Rules” and “Children of the Sea” still ringing in their ears like the goddamn national anthem, so the Metal Masters tour is quickly assembled. For three weeks in August 2008, Priest, Motörhead and Testament fill the arena-void before the hot live Dio action commences. It’s like 1981 all over again, except for the Testament part. Which brings us to The Devil You Know, the new album from Heaven and Hell, the band formerly known as Black Sabbath. But the details here are perhaps best left unspoken, if not to protect the innocent, then most certainly to avoid slagging the guilty. Suffice it to say: When we tell our old cross-country comrade-in-arms, Classic Rock and Metal Hammer scribe Ken “Sleazegrinder” McIntyre, that The Devil You Know is considerably less than satisfying, he immediately points out the irrefutable: “Fuck it,” he says. “They’ve done enough for rock ‘n’ roll already.”
To read the entire article, purchase this issue from our online store.