Posts Tagged Geezer Butler
Bat Bites Head Off Ozzy Osbourne At Black Sabbath Concert
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on April 30, 2013
In the most ironic attack in recent memory, a 500-pound bat attacked Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, severing his head clean off of his body during a show last night in Los Angeles. Black Sabbath, the metal band formerly fronted by metal legend Tony Martin, were performing the song “Headless Cross” when Ozzy was accosted and decapitated by the bat.
The bat, a mutant Eastern Tubenose indigenous to the Three Mile Island region of Pennsylvania, scrawled out the word “REVENGE” in Ozzy’s blood on the stage immediately after the attack. Police quickly apprehended the bat and are holding him in a steel box on 1 million dollars bail at Lompoc Federal Prison. The bat’s attorney Ken “Iron Head” Murphy has said that the bat will not make any comments until his 5 PM press conference tomorrow afternoon. However, a police officer who interrogated the bat claims that he bit off Ozzy’s head accidentally, thinking it was made of plastic.
Miraculously, in spite of no longer having a head, Ozzy is in excellent condition. He was unable to finish the concert, but has said he will solider on and not miss any other show dates. He was even seen playing touch football in the hospital courtyard with members of the band One Direction and former Falcon Crest Star Lorenzo Lamas.
“I can’t said miss eleven quarter horse the whole enchilada, you know. On stage is where I glumfer and would never become a gorilla, at least not on purpose,” slurred Ozzy through a hole in his neck to a crowd of reporters outside of his hospital room.
Rumors have begun to swirl about a potential connection between the bat and Al-Qaeda. Supposedly, the bat had contacted other bats in a local cave about starting a “bat jihad” against infidels and vampire novelists who have been creating and enforcing negative stereotypes their species.
The bat was carrying a journal at the time of his arrest that listed plans to carry out several attacks against high profile celebrities including Stephanie Meyer, author of the Twilight books, former Batman star Adam West and musician Meatloaf, who is best known for his bat-sploitation album “Bat Out of Hell”.
Meanwhile in Washington, several conservative talk radio hosts and Republican Congressmen have criticized President Obama for not referring to the bat beheading as a terrorist attack and immediately invading Transylvania. Obama’s response has instead been a more measured approach, authorizing Predator drone strikes on caves and belfries that harbor bats that might or might not be linked to terrorism.
A Hypothetical Review of Black Sabbath ‘13’
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness on April 12, 2013
I was one of 60 lucky people who were able to hear the new Black Sabbath album ‘13’ on Wednesday at its premiere in Hollywood. Ozzy and I have been close since we served together in the Korean War and I often get invited to these big Black Sabbath events. I don’t like to make a big deal about it, but I took a bullet for him as the two of us charged up San Juan Hill. Back then, he liked everyone to call him Sparky.
I introduced him to Tony Iommi at a VFW function in the ‘70s. His father and mine were traveling pudding salesman in Yorkshire. Pudding was a huge industry in those days. Tony and I both had part time jobs at the pudding mill up the road from our high school. When the mill closed, Tony considered moving to Pittsburgh and becoming a professional buffalo hunter. I knew he was a good guitar player and Ozzy used to sing really well in the shower in our bunker, so I put the two together. The rest is history.
The event, which took place at the Herve Villachaize Theatre, was attended by some of the top names in journalism. I was lucky enough to be standing in line directly behind former CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. Old Uncle Walter was sipping off a mug of paint thinner and orange juice and raving on and on about how it was Bill Ward’s fault that we abandoned the Gold Standard all those years ago. Pretty soon, he had gotten completely out of control and was escorted out by security, but not before he had invited me to an afterparty down in Crenshaw at MC Ren’s house.
We were escorted through a long tunnel into the basement of the building. There we were all strip searched by former Sabbath singer Tony Martin and forced to bathe in ox blood in order to make sure we had no audio equipment and were free of what he called “impurities”. It was all quite weird.
Finally we reached a cavernous room filled with medieval torture equipment and a buffet table featuring all sorts of Black Sabbath themed appetizers. I avoided the Rat Salad. Ozzy was in the midst of an in depth conversation with several reporters about which brands of freezer bags are best to preserve the ear wax of small children when I caught his attention. We talked for a minute or two, then he got that far away look he gets that makes him look like he is receiving signals from the planet Melmac. I knew my time with him was up.
I wandered around for another 15 minutes trying to find Tony, but when I finally caught up with him he was locked in a heated debate with former Happy Days star Tom Bosley over whether aerosol cans were actually a technology created by aliens. Tom was getting pretty heated and said some stuff about the breeding practices of the British royalty and Tony stormed off after threatening to have Tom’s legs broken by a gang of soccer hooligans.
After sitting through some opening comments from Ozzy’s son Jack about the importance of proper dental hygiene and watching Geezer Butler pass out face first into a bowl of tomato bisque, they played the album. The whole thing was terribly awkward. A group of strangers shuffling around in their seats watching other people listening to music. Everyone casting nervous glances at Ozzy, hoping they wouldn’t chuckle when he turned some simple lyric into an incoherent noise that could only be deciphered by a team of top-flight linguists or a pack of geese.
The whole experience took a turn for the worse quickly. The album started off with the pseudo-ironically titled “End of The Beginning”. A catchy song that seems slightly longer than director’s cut of Apocalypse Now. The guy next to me began to doze off and was audibly snoring through the last 12 minutes of the song. Ozzy start walking over with his mouth gaping open, pointing at the guy and looking ominously like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 70’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. A security guard instantly grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and jerked him out of his seat. Two other guards pulled him to the back, beating him on the head with a truncheon as they walked.
Next thing I know, the second song lurched forward muffled by wild howling and jeering from the press as the wheezing miscreant was dragged out of the room for some sort of 14th century torture at the hands of Ozzy’s goons. The song was embarrassingly titled “God Is Dead?” and, unfortunately, is not a Carnivore cover. And then came the next song. And the next. And on and on.
It sounds like a Black Sabbath album. What else was it going to be? It’s not like they were going to shift gears in their late seventies and start sounding like England Dan and John Ford Coley. Everything sounds vaguely like Children of The Grave. Tony tunes down to Q flat minor for most of the record and Ozzy’s voice floats its way through hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of production equipment in order to sound like he’s in tune. It’s all assembly line stuff at this point.
The thing about the record that is unique and somewhat horrifying are the lyrics. I was astonished to see a bizarre homage to MC Hammer’s gangsta phase in the song “Age of Reason”. “Pumps and A Bump, I liiiiiiiii-ke the gi-rrrrrrrrls with the Pumps and A Bump” bellowed Ozzy in a hideously uneven chorus that would shame even the most ardent of Sabbath fans. Then, there was the whole part where Ozzy starts mumbling about the dangers of poison sumac in “Damaged Soul”. I can’t begin to explain what he’s talking about there. The albums high point, oddly enough, is the uncredited cameo rap verse that OJ Da Juiceman lays down about halfway through the album’s final track “Dear Father”.
The record ended and a chorus of applause cascaded through the hall. The band said a few things and the press, several members of whom were greedily jamming the remaining trays of bat-shaped chicken fingers into their Sabbath ‘13’ tote-bags, anxiously filed out trying to get home in time for the night’s airing of American Idol. In what felt like seconds the room was empty of everyone but Tony, who sat alone in the corner with his guitar playing notes to no one in particular.
Tony Iommi Undergoes Surgery To Reattach Original Fingers, Adds Two More
Posted by ChicagoRanter in General Weirdness on February 26, 2013
A Picture of Iommi Taken After His Recent Surgery
After more than 40 years of playing and performing with his injury, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi has finally reattached his finger tips, plus 2 more digits.
Iommi, who lost the tips of 3 of his fingers in 1974 after trying to recreate a stunt from the film “Home Alone 2: Lost in New York,” has learned to play guitar by protecting his mangled fingers with a delicate combination of Silly Putty, raisins, and twist-ties. The mixture, which Iommi mashed onto the tips of his fingers before performing, is said to be the source of Black Sabbath’s iconic sound for the past 4 decades. However, when frontman, Ozzy Osbourne became violently ill after accidently ingesting too much of the mixture, the band deemed it too hazardous of a tradition to continue.
With all Silly Putty-based mixes out of the picture, Iommi was left no choice but to undergo surgery to reattach the missing fingertips.
Last week’s fingertip surgery was deemed a success, but Iommi decided to go under the knife again 2 days later. After a series of escalating dares by his band mates, Iommi underwent additional surgeries to attach two extra fingers on his playing hand.
The campaigns, a Facebook page called “If This Page Gets 10,000 Likes My Friend Will Attach 2 More Fingers On His Hand” and the viral Twitter hashtag “#ThumbsForTony” proved to be wildly successful, gaining more than 20,000 ‘likes’ and 38,000 ‘RTs’ respectively. Two fast-acting fans jumped at the chance to donate a finger to the cause and the fingers were exchanged and attached in a matter of hours.
“I’m not happy he did it,” said a spokesperson at the Black Sabbath camp who wished not to be named, “but then again, you don’t just turn down a triple-dog-dare from Ozzy Osbourne.”
The surgeon, Dr. Tony Welling, whom Iommi selected based solely on their mutual first name, had no previous experience in amputation or reattachment surgery. And the donors, a 5-year-old spider monkey named Coco, and late Chicago mayor, Richard J. Daley, will both receive lifetime backstage passes as well as the secret recipe for Iommi’s raisin-putty-fingertip mix.
(The fellow who wrote this article, Andrew Sebastian Bach, is a complete lunatic. He blogs regularly at chicagorants.com where he regularly explores important issues facing the Windy City like face-eating llamas and why everyone hates the White Sox)
New Book Claims Nixon Considered Assassinating Black Sabbath Members
Posted by Keith Spillett in General Weirdness, Pointyheaded Highbrow Stuff on March 16, 2012
For years one of the great mysteries in American political history was what President Nixon said in the missing 18-½ minutes of tape that was “accidentally” erased before it was given to investigators. A new book may just answer that question.
According to Nixon’s story, his personal secretary Rosemary Woods erased the missing section of tape when she was trying to transcribe the details of the conversation for the Watergate Hearings. In a new book, “Knowing Dick: My Mother’s Time Under President Nixon”, Petey Woods, Rosemary’s eldest son, claims that she revealed to him that Nixon had detailed discussions about assassinating members of the metal band Black Sabbath on the deleted section of the tape. He also claimed that his mother was asked by the President to destroy the section because he worried about “a wave of heavy metal coming over to the U.S. from England and spreading lawless, godless communism.”
The book claims, Nixon, who has also been rumored to have encouraged the assassination and overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, wanted to see a similar fate for Bill Ward, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler. Nixon was much less concerned about Ozzy, who he felt was a drag on the talents of the rest of the band. However, Nixon was concerned that “Sabbath might go ahead and get someone like that fellow Dio from the band Elf. Then, they’d all have to go or they’d be unstoppable.”
Nixon believed the CIA could be enlisted in plans to get rid of Sabbath. “After all, we used them to overthrow Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala. They helped get rid of Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Diem in Vietnam and Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. They even tried to kill Castro 8 times for god sakes. Getting rid of a bunch of angry, power-chord obsessed Brits should be no trouble whatsoever for the boys over at Langley.”
“The President was deeply concerned about the potential dangers of a style of music that loud and that intense,” says Woods in his book. Apparently, most of the 18-½ minutes is an anti-metal rant that featured the President raving about the future of metal. “Eventually they’ll be bands that play a style called speed or thrash metal. They’ll have names like Slayer and Demolition Hammer and they will corrupt the young. I can envision a world where kids run into each other in a dance they like to call “moshing”. They’ll be encouraged to kick their friend in the head and have a ball. Is this the type of America you want, Haldeman?”
One of the most shocking revelations about the tapes is Nixon’s Nostradamus-like ability to accurately predict the path of heavy metal. At one point, he allegedly referred to a style of metal from Scandinavia that he believed would be called “bleak metal” and would feature band members wearing corpse paint and playing fast, angry metal filled with high pitched screams. He then allegedly went into graphic detail about his concern that there might be a so-called “death metal” scene in Florida in the early 1990s where bands like Death and Morbid Angel “could completely warp the minds of an entire generation with satanic imagery and blast-beat drumming.”
Nixon even went as far as saying that if Black Sabbath isn’t killed, we’d see a future with bands like “Suffocation, Pig Destroyer, and Goatwhore telling our kids god knows what”. By “taking out Sabbath”, Nixon believed he could strike a final and decisive blow against the forces of heavy metal. “All we need are a few bullets, a little arsenic in their beer and a car bomb or two. Then the kids will start listening to positive stuff like Anita Bryant and Bing Crosby again. And just what the hell is a Goatwhore anyway?”
However, if Sabbath was successful in their metal mission young people would “fall like dominos” and eventually America would be filled with a majority of “black tee-shirt clad, long-haired maniacs who live to thrash all night and sleep all day.”
Later in Nixon’s life, he slowly began to accept heavy metal and even was rumored to have listened to Pantera’s “Cemetery Gates” on his deathbed. However, his willingness to use the power of the Presidency to kill members of a heavy metal band is deeply troubling for the remaining twenty or so Americans who believe that America doesn’t have the right to go around the world murdering people who are a perceived threat.
The Tyranny of Tradition 