Rolling Stone interview series, Unknown Legends, features long-form conversations between senior writer Andy Greene and veteran musicians who have toured and recorded alongside icons for years, if not decades. All are renowned in the business, but some are less well known to the general public. Here, these artists tell their complete stories, giving an up-close look at life on music’s A list. The latest edition features bassist Neil Murray (Black Sabbath, Whitesnake, Gary Moore). Read an excerpt below:

Rolling Stone: How did you join Black Sabbath?

Neil Murray: "Well, it’s down to Cozy again. After Whitesnake, I played a bit with Cozy and [guitarist] Mel Galley and also in a Japanese band called Vow Wow. Cozy had joined up with Tony Iommi and they’d done the album Headless Cross for a new label. They hoped that Geezer Butler was going to go back into the band after they’d recorded that album, but he decided not to. And so they tried a few people out and then Cozy suggested me. I went along and played and it seemed to work out timing-wise.

"I was suitable in various ways for the band. But it’s a pretty difficult thing to replace somebody like Geezer Bulter, who is the Sabbath bass player in many people’s eyes, but also, to have to do some extremely complicated and, in a way, fusion-y bass playing because of what Laurence Cottle had played on the Headless Cross album before I joined. You would have to jump from doing something very intricate to something very distorted and heavy and loud as possible.

"There were certain songs where you could stretch out a bit, but a lot of it was trying to be as close to Geezer as you could. It was semi-satisfying. There’s a part of me that really enjoys playing really heavy rock onstage, which I wouldn’t necessarily sit down and listen to or play along with at home. But this is going back to the late Eighties. And if I get asked to do something like that nowadays, something very metal, I’ll often turn it down. I’m just not in that way of playing anymore."

R.S.: How did the crowds respond to Tony Martin? They’d gone from Ozzy to Dio to Ian Gillan. These are all very famous singers, and he was a relative nobody.

Murray: "It’s hard to separate it out. On the tour after I joined in 1989, a lot of the gigs had to be canceled. It was partially because we were with a record company that wasn’t doing a great deal of promotion. Sabbath weren’t a kind of known quantity at that point. People didn’t know who was in the band. There had been so many lineup changes to that point in the mid-Eighties. The people who came along probably knew, “OK, it’s not going to be Ozzy. It’s not going to be Bill Ward. It’s not going to be Geezer. But it’s still going to be Sabbath.”

"In other territories, especially Germany, they were very accepting of the band with Tony Martin. From my sort of objective point of view, Tony is technically a much better singer than Ozzy, but he doesn’t have Ozzy’s character or personality as a singer, or a personalty on the stage. And so what do you do? There aren’t many singers who can cover Dio songs. He had such an amazing voice and such a strong personality of his own.

"Ideally, you get a British guy. Tony Martin was from Birmingham. There were occasions were Tony Iommi, perhaps, took the easy way out and got guys either who he’d worked with before … In the mid-Nineties, he got me and Cozy and Tony Martin back in. Maybe he shouldn’t have. I don’t know. It didn’t really result in very great success then, either.

R.S.: Tell me about recording Tyr.

Murray: "It was an attempt to get away from all the devils and black magic kind of lyrical influences on Headless Cross to go towards the Norse mythology. But calling the album that really confused a lot of people. They didn’t even know how to pronounce it.

"By that point, it was very much Cozy and Tony’s band. I didn’t feel like an equal part, though perhaps it was a little different onstage. In the studio, it was kind of like, for me, “Come on, Neil. Play the bass parts.” “Well, I haven’t got any vocals to play to.” “That doesn’t matter. Just play what the bass part should be.”

"That’s not really how I like to do things. I play off everything that’s going on on the record. It wasn’t as satisfying as I would have liked, but it was an enjoyable band to be part of. You could tell that the lack of success, in America particularly, was really frustrating for Tony Iommi. I think the fact that we couldn’t even go back there to promote Tyr persuaded him to go, “OK, let’s get Ronnie back in, and Geezer.” It certainly worked, for a short time anyway."

R.S.: I’ve read stories about the tour you were on and it almost sounds like Spinal Tap. Shows were canceled, I saw one report that a roof started to collapse during one of the gigs. Did it ever feel like Spinal Tap?

Murray: "Not so much. People like to make a story out of that side of things. We had to cancel quite a few American gigs in 1989. In our camp, there was a lot of talk that Sharon Osbourne was behind sabotaging publicity for the shows. I heard that she got people to stick “canceled” stickers on posters for Black Sabbath when we weren’t canceled at all. It was that kind of thing.

"Roof collapsing? No. I think a few ceiling tiles might have fallen down somewhere, not causing any damage at all, just a bit of dust falling on people. That would be from Cozy’s pyrotechnics, or possibly my enormously loud sub-bass during my bass solo. I can’t remember.

"If people are huge fans of the original Sabbath, that’s the only true God to them. Anything else must be shit."

Read the extensive feature in it's entirety at RollingStone.com.