GEEZER BUTLER - Ohm Is Where The Hard Is
by Martin Popoff

As you read this, bobbing and throbbing bass wizard Geezer Butler will be in rehearsals for a big Black Sabbath tour, one that will perch the band at the top of Ozzfest but also take them beyond into regular dates, hopefully with a longer, more adventurous set list. Butler however, has a third solo album called Ohmwork, creeping out right about now, and all told, it's a snap back to the raw, spontaneous vibe of his first one, Plastic Planet, this, after the layered approach taken on rekkid #2, Black Science.

It's all to help make the songs come alive on stage, sez Butler. "Oh yeah, I mean, the reason that we picked these ten tracks is that they sounded best in rehearsals. We had about six others that we rehearsed that didn't really... that needed more work on them than when we played them live in rehearsal. Because there was a lot of keyboards on the stuff originally. So we wanted to specifically record an album that we could easily go and play those whole ten tracks live and they'd sound exactly the same."

What Geezer is talking about, is getting out with Sabbath cohort Tony Iommi, after the Sabbath dates, and touring Ohmwork with Iommi, who has his own solo album, Fused, to bring to the Sabbath masses. From the GZR back catalogue, Geezer has indicated he would probably play 'Drive Boy, Shooting' and 'Detective 27', but this time around no Sabbath, although he had trotted out 'N.I.B.' on past GZR dates. "I'd like to, yeah," says Butler of the package possibility. "We were thinking about maybe the end of this year or early next year. The Sabbath tour has been extended now, so I'm not sure what's going on."

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