Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler is collating his solo output for release as a four CD box set, Manipulations Of The Mind – The Complete Collection.
The set will be released via BMG on July 30: a single disc compilation, The Very Best Of Geezer Butler, will be released by BMG on the same day.
Manipulations Of The Mind will feature the albums Plastic Planet (1995), Black Science (1997), and Ohmwork (2005), and a bonus disc of rare and largely unreleased material, featuring demos, studio outtakes, single edits and three live tracks captured at Detroit’s Majestic Theatre in February 1996, alongside the song Beach Skeleton, only previously heard on the Japanese edition of Black Science.
While Geezer himself admits that none of albums set the world on fire, he’s rightly proud of them. “I’m always writing, it’s one of my hobbies,” he told Classic Rock in 2016. “And because Sabbath weren’t writing at the time, I had all this stuff to get out of my system. I'm proud of them. They sounded raw and pissed off.”
Plastic Planet was originally released under the name g/z/r and featured Fear Factory’s Burton C. Bell on vocals.
“I was listening to Fear Factory at the time and liked what Burton was doing – heavy vocals but with melodic choruses when required,” says Geezer. “So, I asked him if he’d be interested in singing on the album, and he agreed. Importantly, he was great to work with, and had a similar sense of humour to Pedro [Howse, g/z/r guitarist] and me. And didn’t sound anything like Ozzy or Ronnie Dio, which was important to me.”
Black Science, released under the name Geezer, featured unknown singer Clark Brown, and was well received by media and fans alike.
“I wasn’t looking for plaudits,” Gezzer says today. “Again, it was a great fun time, writing about personal things, and doing music I loved making with Pedro and Clark in a relaxed atmosphere, without any pressure. Much fun was had.”
Ohmwork, released by GZR, was Geezer‘s final solo album, the bassist having returned full-time to the reunited Black Sabbath.
Butler is currently writing his autobiography.
“I started out because when my parents died, I always wished I’d asked them a lot more things than I knew about,” the bassist told the Cleveland.com website. “I don’t really know much about my mum and dad, ’cause they were always just there. So, I started writing a memoir for my grandkids to read, and that’s been fun going through stuff — old times and growing up in Birmingham, and all that. I’m right in the middle of doing that at the moment.”
