By Steve Newton
I did my first interview with Ozzy Osbourne back in June of 1982, when he was touring behind his Diary of a Madman LP.
Just a few months earlier he’d lost his guitar player, the legendary Randy Rhoads, in a bizarre plane crash.
At one point in the conversation I asked Ozzy if “Crazy Train”, the hit single from his previous album, Blizzard of Oz, was an autobiographical tune.
“No, I think we all feel that,” replied Ozzy. “I mean, sometimes when you have a busy day and the phone never stops ringing you think, ‘Jeez, when is it all gonna stop?’ It’s not just a personal song; it’s for everybody. There’s a different meaning for everything on that song. It’s what effects people and what effected me at the time.
“At the time of writing that,” added Ozzy, “there was only me and Randy, and we were trying to get players and everything was flying at us. There was just one thing after another, you know, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, I’m going crazy’. You just think that you’re going off the rails on a crazy train.”
(Ozzy didn’t bother to mention that, as was revealed years later, his former bassist Bob Daisley had actually written most of the lyrics to “Crazy Train” and his other early-80s hits.)
To hear the audio of my interviews with former Ozzy bandmates like Tony Iommi, Rudy Sarzo, Jake E. Lee, Tommy Aldridge, and Zakk Wylde subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with rockers since 1982.