The Black Sabbath drama has quickly become both the most entertaining and most saddening thing about metal at the moment. Just to quickly recap, Bill Ward officially announced earlier this week that he will be sitting out the Sabbath reunion. The band chose not to respond. Then, late last week news broke that the Sabbath official website cut Ward out of all their photographs. At first, we thought this was a cold move on Sabbath's part, but turns out that wasn't the case.
It was actually Bill Ward who requested he be edited out of the photographs, so as not to give fans the false impression that he was in any way involved with this reunion. Have it your way, Bill. I guess that's fine.
Saturday night rolled around and it was time for Black Sabbath's first live show together since this announcement was made. Unsurprisingly, Ozzy's drummer, Tommy Clufetos filled in for Ward, and by the looks of it, did a fine job. I scoured Youtube for some bootlegs, and here are the best quality ones I found.
A long intro followed by "Into the Void":
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImNsBUHACZE[/youtube]
"War Pigs":
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYVkNNlGgpc[/youtube]
Black Sabbath playing the first doom track ever recorded…. "Black Sabbath"!
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNqlq5lQPzQ[/youtube]
"Children of the Grave":
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZKcgqYGNEc[/youtube]
"Iron Man" (with a touching tribute by Ozzy to guitarist Tony Iommi at the beginning)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0ILgcydjnk[/youtube]
Their encore, "Paranoid":
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2RGGvCU5c4[/youtube]
Their setlist:
So far, so good! This is when the drama begins. For the first time, somebody involved with the Sabbath camp released a detailed response to Bill Ward. That somebody is bassist Geezer Butler, who posted this statement on his official website:
I feel sad to see the Sabbath reunion becoming a bit of a soap opera on the internet. It has been a very tough year for us as a band, having announced our reunion plans, only for Tony to be diagnosed with lymphoma, leaving us no choice but to postpone the proposed Sabbath tour, and then for Bill to go public on his site about an un-signable contract. None of us knew how Tony was going to respond to his intensive chemo therapy, and radiotherapy. Ozzy and myself flew to England to be with Tony, and on his “good” days, we’d meet at his home studio and put ideas together for the upcoming album, all sitting down together, no drummer involved, just 3 of us quietly putting together ideas. We thought that when we had enough songs together for a full band rehearsal, we’d move back to L.A and put the whole thing together with Bill. Unfortunately, to our surprise, Bill issued a statement on his site saying he’d been offered an un-signable contract. He hadn’t told any one of us he was having contractual problems, and frankly those things are worked out between our representatives, and never between the four of us let alone in public. We had the idea of keeping just one show in this year, hoping that Tony would be well enough for that show, and that things with Bill would be sorted. As you may expect, a one off show at Donnington Festival (Download) costs an absolute fortune to stage, involving over 50 people, transport, air fares, hotels, meals, agents, promotors, accountants, lawyers etc, so none of us, expected to make much money from it- it was a one off Sabbath show for the fans, before we go into recording the new album. Apparently, this wasn’t acceptable to Bill’s representatives, they wanted an amount that was so unrealistic that it seemed to have been a joke. So we resigned ourselves to doing Download without Bill, hoping he’d change his mind and at least make a guest appearance. We started rehearsals a few weeks ago with Tommy Cluefetos, the drummer who will be on the Ozzy and Friends Tour. Brilliant drummer and good bloke. It was decided we’d better do a warm up show, to break the ice since we haven’t played together live. The O2 Academy was available in Birmingham, where we were rehearsing, so we decided on that, and to make a donation to Help For Heroes Charity, since we’d be ironing out any glitches we may have. Then Bill put out a further statement saying he’d been ready to play the Birmingham show , but he was expected to have to do it “for free”- well, I think that’s basically how you raise money from gigs for charity – you play them “for free”.
All I am saying is that there are two sides to everything. I do hope to play with Bill again some day. For whatever reason; it wasn’t meant to be this time. Bill’s made his decision, and I have to respect that. Hopefully this painful year will be worth the wait for the new Sabbath album and end in joy and happiness for all.
Stay frosty,
Geezer
I've been saying all along there are two sides to this story, and noto to quickly jump on the Ward bandwagon, and I'm glad to see that Sabbath aren't the evil money grubbers that some people may think they are. Being the internet maven he is, you just KNEW that Bill Ward wasn't going to sit idle while finally getting a response from his ex-girlfriend former bandmate. He quickly responded with this long winded (seriously, this is getting tiring) blog:
Dear Sabbath Fans and Musicians,
I have read Geezer’s statement of May 19, 2012 titled “Heavy Heart.” Out of respect for the Birmingham gig, I wanted to wait 24 hours before releasing this statement. There are some points he brought up which I want to respond to.
1) I had indeed notified Ozzy, Tony and Geezer, well before my first public statement, that I was having contractual difficulties.
2) I came out into a public forum to be accountable to the fans primarily, and to say at a public level there’s a problem. The band members stopped talking and corresponding with me some time ago, with the exception of a nice letter from Tony on my birthday. Prior to that, Geezer and I were corresponding, but that stopped abruptly in late February after I emailed a specific question to him.
3) In my statement of May 15, I clearly stated I would play Birmingham for free. That was not a problem – charity or otherwise.
4) My Download fee was not an extravagant amount. Originally, when Download was part of a full tour, I had asked for a decent fee. More recently, as we were negotiating just Download/Birmingham and Lollapalooza, I told my attorney that I would accept the proposed small Download fee, but there were other parts of the offer that were unsatisfactory.
I will continue to be honest and respectful towards the band and our fans. I will also confront any untruths about me, and any fault finding missions aimed at me that come to my attention.
I hope the band and the fans had a good gig in Brum.
Stay safe/stay strong.
Bill Ward
At this point, I'm sort of over it. While it's not fully Sabbath without Ward, the band proved they can survive, and still sound quite amazing without him. It seems that ultimately, he is the one losing out here.
