Geezer Butler joined Jack Sabbath on stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland, on Saturday 3 October, and played War Pigs. Jack Sabbath is the Black Sabbath tribute act fronted by Jack Black, and the show was part of Tom Morello's Power To The People festival.
The band around Black is largely inherited. Roman Morello, Tom Morello's son, plays guitar. Revel Ian, son of the Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian, plays bass. The drummer is Yoyoka Soma, the Japanese teenager, and Hugo Weiss plays keyboards. They opened a three song set with Ozzy Osbourne's Mr. Crowley, then Sabbath's The Wizard, and Butler came up for the third.
Black and Roman Morello had played Mr. Crowley together before, in October 2023, at the hundredth birthday celebrations for Tom Morello's mother Mary. Black also sang it in a pre-taped video at last year's Back To The Beginning event, the one that closed Sabbath's story in Birmingham.
Butler has played very little since. Of the four men who made the first Black Sabbath record, two are gone, and a festival in Maryland with a comedian's tribute band is not where anyone would have looked for the bass line of War Pigs in October. It is still the man who wrote it.