By Steve Newton
Just heard the sad news, that less than three weeks after his big farewell concert with Black Sabbath, heavy-metal legend Ozzy Osbourne has passed away at the age of 76.
A statement from the Osbourne family reads:
“It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.”
Much will be written about Ozzy’s lengthy career and all his accomplishments in the coming days and weeks, but I just want to spend a little time here talking about how his music affected me personally over the years.
I was 13 years old when Black Sabbath released its second album, 1970’s Paranoid, and I bought it and played the crap out of it on an ancient stereo in my parent’s basement. I distinctly remember the exhilarating rush I got from the title track, the band’s first hit single, driven by guitarist Tony Iommi’s amazing riffs.
The monster riff on “Iron Man” blew me away as well, obviously. I also recall that I wore out one of my folks’ plush velvet armchairs with drumsticks banging along to drummer Bill Ward’s fierce skinbashing on “War Pigs”.
Two years later Sabbath released Vol. 4, and again I was blown away by Iommi’s killer riffs. I was particularly taken by the last track on Side A, “Supernaut”, which I still feel is the best song the band ever released. Decades later I would interview Iommi and he would tell me that I wasn’t the only big fan of that tune.
“You know who did like that?” offered Iommi back in 2007, “Frank Zappa. That was one of his favourite tracks. He always said, ‘Aw, I love that riff.’ In fact, I used to play it for him when he’d come down, you know.”
Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler was credited for writing all the lyrics back then, but Ozzy’s vocals were perfectly suited to the ominous music. There was something slightly sinister and demented about his tone and timbre. No wonder parents were concerned.
After Ozzy got kicked out of Sabbath in 1979 and replaced by Ronnie James Dio, his solo career took off thanks in huge part to the talents of another brilliant guitarist, Randy Rhoads. I was lucky enough to see Ozzy’s new band in July of 1981 when it played Vancouver’s Kerrisdale Arena with Motörhead opening up.
Rhoads stole the show with his stunning fretwork, but when I did my first interview with Ozzy less than a year later he’d already been tragically killed in a freak plane crash at the age of 25.
“Randy and I were just beginning to get things going real good,” Ozzy told me in June of ’82, “I don’t think the music world really fully appreciated the fact of Randy’s talent. He was incredible, he could do anything.”
Rhoads’ unreal guitar talent had an awful lot to do with the success of Ozzy’s solo career, as proven by killer tracks like “Crazy Train”, “Flying High Again”, and “Over the Mountain”.
But Ozzy also had a knack for making headlines with his outrageous onstage antics. Back in ’82 I asked him what all the fuss was about him biting a bat’s head.
“Yeah, that happened,” he replied. “Somebody threw a live bat on stage, and I thought it was one of those fake things, you know. But I bit it, and it was real. I went to have rabies shots, but I didn’t actually contract the disease.”
Two years later I did my second interview with Ozzy Osbourne when he was touring behind his Bark at the Moon album, which featured yet another in a string of incredible guitarists, Jake E. Lee.
By this time Ozzy’s sensationalist antics really had him living up to his “Prince of Darkness” moniker, so at one point I asked him about the ultimate effect his music and concerts might have on the impressionable teenage fans that worshipped him.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like anybody who plays rock and roll. If you like it you buy it, if you don’t you don’t. I don’t go out there to be a champion for satanists or anything; I just go out there to give them my version of my music. And if they like it, great. And if they don’t, then I’ll try until they do like it.
“I mean, people get this impression that I’m some sort of f***ing warlock that wants to go around changing people into satanists. Those aren’t my intentions at all.”
Ozzy released 10 more studio albums after Bark at the Moon, most of them featuring yet another primo picker, Zakk Wylde, who I interviewed for the first time in 1994.
“Randy Rhoads is a fuckin’ legend,” Wylde raved, “and if he hadn’t passed away, he would have gone on to such ridiculous guitar-playing, ’cause he just got better and better with each record. And Jake was awesome, too; I mean Jake had his own thing altogether. And then if you go back to Tony Iommi—genius riffs! I mean you’ve got him and Jimmy Page, you know what I mean?”
By the time Zakk Wylde took over on guitar for Ozzy, my interest in heavy-metal was starting to fade somewhat as I got heavily into blues and instrumental rock. But I’ll always remember Ozzy fondly for his deathless work with Black Sabbath and the wicked records he made with Randy Rhoads.
And I feel very fortunate to have interviewed him a couple of times in those wild and crazy ’80s.
May he rest in peace.
To hear the full audio of my 1984 interview with Ozzy Osbourne–and my interviews with former bandmates Jake E. Lee, Tommy Aldridge, Rudy Sarzo, Tony Iommi, and Zakk Wylde–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 500 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with the legends of rock since 1982.
Rest in peace Ozzy