Former Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward has had a pretty rough go of it in the past year, what with being kicked out of the band and essentially being forced to acknowledge they had moved on without him. Now Ward took the time to speak to DCHeavyMetal.com about how he feels about the band and what could possibly happen in the future, and I feel bad for the guy. He seems so nice and even mentions he's still friends with the entire band! Well, everyone except Ozzy who he doesn't seem all too fond of… for good reason as well. Remember when Ozzy called Ward "too fat to be a part of the reunion"? I'd imagine that kind of hurt never goes away, especially when you were a big part of the band.
You can read Ward's entire statement below. Long as it may be, it's definitely worth a read.
"So aside from me now having to do a lot of work to gain my health and my strength back, you know, and I'd be the first to admit it if I can't cut it physically as a drummer, then my answer would be no. I would not be prepared to play with Sabbath, you know. I would never, ever, ever allude to being able to play with Sabbath if my health wasn't absolutely smack on. And my health right now is not bad, but it's not good enough to certainly play in any band, never mind Black Sabbath. I have to get a lot stronger than where I am. I lost a lot of weight. I've got to gain all my muscle back. I lost all my muscle. And I'm doing some stick practice, but if I was in a good position where I felt strong enough, I can overcome the hits that I took, the verbal hits, I can overcome all that stuff. I can overcome, you know, just the shutdown and the way that I felt and everything else. I can overcome all of those things. All of the things that were like at the time just like, 'What the hell?' I can certainly recover from all that stuff, actually. I can do it pretty good. You know, in fact, I've recovered from most of it as I'm speaking to you this morning. I'll always have an open mind to playing with Black Sabbath. I love the band. I miss them terribly. And so my answer would be leaning towards if something could be worked out. Something that I could live with and I'm talking politically now, contractually. And not the kind of things that I've done in the past. I'm talking about the very core of what I talked about in my big statement of February 2012. If we can come to some terms, and we're all OK with each other, and the most important thing for me is being able to know that I can play drums the way that I want to be. Otherwise I wouldn't even enter into any kind of conversation with them if I knew that I wasn't back on the mark. Then I would be moving forward. I think that a lot of fans have suffered horribly through these undertakings of the last couple of years, and I fully, fully blame the inconsiderateness of just a few people who created, and I won't talk about who, but a few people who created such a huge wasteland of real, real pain when everyone was just so excited to see the original band with an original record. And I'd already stated my boundaries quite early in all this. It didn't come overnight. It wasn't a shock. You know, it wasn't something that suddenly happened. We'd been negotiating for over 15 months. Things like that, so… But I have to be careful in overstating, because there's still a political agenda attached to this. So I've definitely got an open mind. I miss playing with Terry, Geezer, just horribly. I absolutely miss him to death. And I miss playing with Tony just… every day. I mean every single day I — it just blows me away, man. And obviously I miss Ozzy. I've had to… With Ozzy, I… I've lost a friend, as far as I'm concerned. A man that I dearly loved, and I still dearly love, but I've had to really now readjust just how much I'm going to trust and love him. He fired back on some pretty mean stuff in the press, so… And I've gone OK. Like with any of us, when we get hurt, we're going to pull back our love and our considerations for another human being when they kick out at you and you know. So that's been a big loss."
