Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler has looked back on one of the biggest turning points of the band’s career — the arrival of Ronnie James Dio and the album that proved the doubters wrong.
Appearing on the latest episode of the “100 Songs That Define Heavy Metal” podcast, hosted by Metal Blade Records CEO Brian Slagel, Butler once again spoke about how happy he was to hand off the lyric-writing to Dio when the singer came aboard in 1979. As he explained, the change came as a relief after a frustrating stretch with founding vocalist Ozzy Osbourne.
He said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth):
“ I was just so relieved because the final album with [original Sabbath singer] Ozzy [Osbourne] in the ’70s, the Never Say Die! album, it was like pulling teeth trying to to get Ozzy to sing the lyrics. And I used to write lyrics for him, and he wouldn’t even read them. He just totally dismissed them before he’d even read them. On that final album, [Sabbath drummer] Bill Ward had to sing one of the songs’ cause Ozzy, he just left. He wasn’t interested in singing on them. One of the songs had to become instrumental because Ozzy refused to sing on it. It was around that time we either broke up or had to do something drastic and get a different singer in, and that’s what happened.”
Working with Dio, by contrast, opened up a whole new way of collaborating. Butler noted that the singer’s musicianship let him communicate his ideas directly to guitarist Tony Iommi:
“It was great because even down to the… Ozzy couldn’t play any instruments, but Ronnie, to be able to express some of the choruses and things, he’d come up with a guitar and play it to Tony [Iommi], sort of, ‘This is how I see the chorus.’ And he’d play the chords, so we all knew what to do.”
The results spoke for themselves. The 1980 album Heaven And Hell relaunched Black Sabbath for a new era, with its nearly seven-minute title track becoming an unlikely radio favorite. Butler admitted the band never assumed it would land that way, especially with so many people expecting them to fail:
“The whole thing surprised us, ’cause we believed in it, but getting everybody else to believe in it is another thing. You can think you’ve written the greatest song on earth, and then nobody else will think that way. But it was lucky ’cause the people liked it as much as we did. And, yeah, it was accepted. People were just, like, going, ‘Well, Sabbath are finished. Let’s hear what this terrible album’s gonna be like,’ and then getting completely surprised.”
The Heaven And Hell era marked a creative rebirth for the group after its split with Osbourne. The title track, with music largely from Iommi and lyrics written entirely by Dio, has since become a cornerstone of the band’s catalog. Both Dio, who died in 2010, and Osbourne, who passed in 2025, remain towering figures in the Black Sabbath story, two very different frontmen whose eras continue to define one of heavy metal’s founding bands.
