Into the void From birth to Black Sabbath--and beyond

Black Sabbath bassist Butler recounts his unlikely route from hardscrabble childhood to international rock fame in this intermittently revealing and frequently off-putting debut memoir. Born in 1949 Aston, England, to hardworking Irish Catholic parents in a household too poor to afford toilet paper, Butler was drawn to music early on. He built a guitar from a carpentry kit and began playing it around age 10, nurturing dreams of becoming a professional musician. He teamed up with friend Roger Hope to form the band Rare Breed in 1967; singer Ozzy Osbourne joined a few months later. In 1968, Osbourne and Butler left Rare Breed and joined drummer Bill Ward and guitarist Tommy Iommi to form Black Sabbath. Butler traces the band's ups and downs, including struggles to get booked and their fallout with a cheating manager, and recalls Osbourne's habit of depositing his waste wherever he felt like it. While the wealth of behind-the-scenes detail may prove tantalizing to some, others will be turned off by the author's creepier anecdotes (at age six, he dug up a buried pet dog to cut it open and look for its soul) and hyperbole ("Sabbath must be the most successful bunch of outsiders in music history"). This is best suited for diehard fans. (June)

The Black Sabbath bassist chronicles his life and career. Resolutely working-class, dirt-poor, and downright dirty, the four members of Black Sabbath were an unlikely success. It's not often that a bassist is called on to offer an opinion, Paul McCartney notwithstanding, but Butler acquits himself well in this memoir--and he did, after all, write most of Sabbath's lyrics. The trajectory is unsurprising: Seeing the Beatles, another working-class bunch, set the world on fire, they were royally ripped off by management. Drugs and alcohol did the rest of the damage, so that the millions they made turned into hundreds until finally an honest bloke came along and helped sort them out. Butler isn't afraid to laugh at himself or his mates. "Tony [Iommi] was the year above Ozzy at school and allegedly bullied him--he always said that Ozzy had the kind of face you wanted to punch," he writes. "Ozzy never stopped being the kid from the year below Tony, and Tony never stopped being the band leader. As is common with lots of groups of mates, once that hierarchy was established, it never disappeared." The author also offers a few what-if moments, such as the fact that Sabbath almost didn't happen because Ian Anderson was trying to lure Iommi to join Jethro Tull, a band that pointed the way to success: "We had to treat it like a nine-to-five job…and we had to start writing our own songs. Covers would no longer do." Butler, apparently mild-mannered, is less tender toward other erstwhile band mates, especially Ronnie James Dio, and is downright scathing in his assessment of Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The author's opening is particularly apropos: "It's a minor miracle all four of the original lineup survived beyond the 1970s, let alone that we're all still here." Sabbath fans will enjoy Butler's long stroll down Memory Lane, though not his never-again epitaph for the band. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.