One thing people tend to know about Geezer is that he did have a drinking problem for a while. It was said that when he drank, he got violent and wanted to kill. He was actually fired for drinking on the job once.
When Geezer first started working, it was as a trainee accountant at the age of 15. He was fired from the job because he kept turning up to work intoxicated. He found this job to be so deadening and boring he relied on alcohol and uppers to keep him going through the day. In an interview on The Eddie Trunk Podcast, Butler stated "I left school when I was 15, and I apprenticed to be an accountant for three years. And I was absolutely awful at it. I hated it. I hated going to work from 9 until 5 every day. I just couldn't do it."
Eventually, the position got to be so bad that he took extended lunchtimes in nearby bars, getting "smashed out me brains just to go to work...So I used to go to the pub until 3 in the afternoon, then turn up at the office at 4 in the afternoon...and take black bombers to get me through." Not shockingly, the job didn't last long. "Eventually, the guy who ran the factory, the office called me into his office and said 'Butler, you're fired.'"
What some might consider a loss, others consider a gain as this gave him more of a chance to focus on music. He became a founding member of Black Sabbath at the age of 19 in 1968. "It was the only time that we never got ripped off! It's true. I used to get the £20 a night that we used to get and spend it on petrol. And then, if we had any money left, we'd go down to the chip shop."
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