Parenting & Family Quote by Geezer Butler

Geezer Butler’s line works because it’s a joke that doubles as a mission statement for heavy metal’s myth-making. Calling Ozzy Osbourne “the craziest person I’ve ever met” is expected bandmate banter; elevating that claim by adding “Son of Sam is a close second” is the punch that snaps it into dark comedy. The exaggeration is so wildly disproportionate that it signals intent: don’t read this as a factual comparison, read it as an image of Ozzy’s legend swallowing the room.

The subtext is affectionate PR in the language of transgression. Butler isn’t diagnosing Ozzy; he’s polishing the brand of the band that helped define “dangerous” as a selling point. By invoking David Berkowitz (the Son of Sam killer), he borrows the cultural charge of true crime to make Ozzy’s chaos feel cartoonishly extreme, then defuses it with the wink of “close second.” It’s a reminder that rock’s “madness” is often curated: self-destruction repackaged as charisma.

Context matters because Butler is Black Sabbath’s bassist and principal lyricist, the guy often credited with the band’s darker, more socially attuned edge. Coming from him, the line reads like an insider managing the Ozzy-as-madman narrative from within the machine. It also reflects a time when celebrity interviews treated serial-killer references as edgy shorthand rather than ethical landmines. The humor lands, but it lands on a cultural fault line: the casual way entertainment borrows real violence to inflate a star’s aura, and trusts the audience to laugh along.