Ozzy Osbourne was the beating heart of heavy metal. Period, full stop. Every single person who plays or listens to this music frankly owes him – unpayable debt, unshakeable gratitude, undying affection. He was 76 years old, and timeless. No performer anywhere ever loved his fans more, or connected with them more deeply, or they with him. It must be a measure of that metric the degree to which the cavalcade of heartfelt thanks, condolences, and remembrances, from friends and fans alike, that, since word first spread of his passing Tuesday, has issued forth from all corners of the internet and only slightly greater news ecosphere like a raging river overtaking a beaver dam, has consistently moved me, at times damned near wrecked me, and, in the end, almost literally forced my notoriously reticent hand to add something to the conversation. That already tenuous distinction between “friends” of Ozzy and “fans” of Ozzy seems altogether less meaningful than with any other musician of comparable stature and influence I can think of. There are vanishingly few musicians of comparable stature and influence anywhere to begin with, alive or dead, at least in the metal realm. Beyond that, no other public figure I’ve encountered has so inspired such utter and unadorned adoration in the masses he served. He was an oddball superhero everyman, that rare painfully relatable superstar, forever pulling people he’d never met up out of the crowd and onto the figurative pedestal to rock alongside him. He invited us in. We followed in droves.
Other accounts paint a significantly less flattering, necessarily more complicated portrait of the man than I’ve allowed in my introduction, of course, and while I’m sure we’ll get to some if not quite all of the significant noise pollution kicked up during Ozzy’s almost 60-year career as both troubadour and hellraiser in due time, we won’t linger there. If that’s what you’re expecting, you’ll be better served by one of the surely thousands of A.I.-ded and abetted “highlights for kids” capsule obituaries floating around the ‘net just now. I can’t ascribe motivations to these various writers and editors any more than I can reliably identify all or even a majority of them as human – except to say that if some of the drivel I’ve been reading was indeed artificial in nature, whatever “intelligence” employed therein was probably culled exclusively from gossip sites or message boards – but this is an appreciation, not a lowlight reel, and certainly not clickbait, and fixating on the negative and/or controversial when there are other, better shades to be admired in equal measure does Ozzy a disservice. Not that Osbourne himself would probably care. In a world where public figures can sometimes seem to be all aura, distant and impenetrable, Ozzy was, instead, all warts, or, at the very least, “warts and all”. He was either an extremely active or grudgingly recovering alcoholic and drug addict for the vast majority of his life, and the abuse he inflicted upon himself left scars that would never truly heal, let alone fade.
But then there was the music. Depending on who you talked to, Ozzy was a rock and roll trailblazer, or a court jester, a flamboyant showman, a drug-addled attention-seeker, an unparalleled performer, arranger, and sneaky great musician, a notorious, unrepentant menace to society, a loving mentor and dear friend at the studio console, kitchen counter, or next barstool, a doddering but doting husband and soccer dad, a cautionary tale, or, more likely, a tall tale second to none, Odds are he would’ve drunk Paul Bunyan under a very large table, then scurried off to the next whistle-stop adventure with a hearty laugh and a wicked gleam in his eye. It’s safe to say that Ozzy was many things to many, many critics, but for what it’s worth, he was never, ever any one thing. And so, with so many disparate personal accounts from which to choose, should we be foolhardy enough to try, it’s lucky for us there was always the music.
Black Sabbath, the beloved, universally acknowledged pioneer of the alchemic mixture of distorted guitar, aggressive musicianship, and thematic darkness that, as a nascent genre evolving to worldwide influence, would come to be known as “heavy metal”, formed in 1968 from the ashes of more traditional local electric blues bands haunting the working-class English hamlet of Birmingham, and was born into a chaotic landscape that would’ve ironically been well served by a strategic dose of monolithic musical anarchy to its jugular. The so-called hippie movement, steeped in Utopian intentions and unironic good feeling, powered by well-meaning protest music that overran the Billboard charts yet proved insufficient in the face of encroaching, unblinking reality – government overreach, the escalating Vietnam conflict and stateside struggle for civil rights – had seen its “Summer of Love” go up in flames with the Altamont shooting, and suffered through an extended hangover of soul searching ennui. On February 12, 1970, heavy metal music simply didn’t exist as an art form; the next day, Black Sabbath’s earth-shaking, self-titled debut released in the United Kingdom, and everything changed. Each time the needle dropped on the eerie, alien drone of its dirgelike title track was a revelation to listeners who might’ve been established artists reckoning with a suddenly upended world order, or fans who would internalize that revolutionary sound and follow it for the rest of their lives, whether as a musician who could channel and carry that flame as inspiration around the world, a fan who held it ever dearer with each new listen or concert, or both.
If ancient myth posits Helen, whose incomparable beauty sparked war between the jealous leaders of Greece and Troy, as the “face that launched a thousand ships”, modern legend could identify Black Sabbath – the band, album, and song – as the sound that built and mobilized a musical armada soon to blanket the world. There is a direct or indirect throughline from Black Sabbath’s immortal initial trio of albums – 1970’s Paranoid upped the debut’s ante to an absurd degree, while 1971’s Master of Reality stoked the bonfire with classic after classic – to every artist that would ever identify its own music as metal. From generation to generation, the legions of fans those artists and Sabbath as their wellspring shared may have dipped in number, but only slightly. All it takes the unsuspecting prospect to course correct is a moment’s curiosity. The breadth of Sabbath’s reach is practically unparalleled in popular music. The band was a juggernaut from its first note to its most recent, ever formidable, scary or intoxicating depending on the listener. No less arresting or notable in Sabbath’s sonic architecture than the harrowing, two-ton riffs of legendary guitarist Tony Iommi or dextrous, practically jazzy underpinning of world class rhythm section Terry “Geezer” Butler and Bill Ward were the alternately growling, piercing, and soaring vocal contributions of then 19-year-old frontman John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne, who, even among a gang of equals, quickly found himself the center of attention. Whether on stage or on record, Ozzy was a riveting presence, not merely magnetic but unpredictable, just possibly unstable, and, above all, unbound.
Though his time in Black Sabbath was more than sufficient to render him a rock legend, as a chemically altered inveterate troublemaker, Ozzy’s days there were seemingly always numbered. Sabbath as an entity would long outlive Ozzy’s usefulness, ousting him as unreliable after eight albums of varying quality but inarguable impact, though never quite escape his ghost, cycling through vocalists and lineups supporting Iommi that would almost always be seen as second rate in retrospect, until finally reuniting the original quartet for a nineteenth and final studio album in 2013. In the interim, a directionless Osbourne fell in love with his headstrong new manager, Sharon Arden, and, together, they crafted one of the singular second acts in modern music history. It is here, as a child of the 1980s, that Ozzy first appeared on my radar, and I was predictably nonplussed. Ozzy’s solo career was cast in somehow even more overtly theatrical terms than his time in Sabbath, leaning hard into the innate connection between the sound of heavy metal, which he had already such a hand in crafting, the look of classic horror cinema – particularly the blood-dribbling vampires and werewolves of England’s venerable Hammer Studios – and lyrical content that dabbled just enough in occult ideology and general darkness to seem scandalous to unwashed masses like me. Albums like 1984’s The Ultimate Sin and the 1987 live Tribute to fallen friend and collaborator Randy Rhoads proved a heady introduction, but the truth is that when Ozzy shouted “All aboard!” before Randy slammed into the immortal lead guitar riff of “Crazy Train”, it felt just as much an invocation as an invitation.
It was during his first decade as a solo artist that, for better and usually worse, Ozzy’s increasingly notorious behavior offstage became just as noteworthy as his galvanizing and communal live performances. Already dubbed the “Prince of Darkness” by the alternately charmed and disgusted music press, Ozzy sometimes seemed bound and determined to live up to the moniker, probably transgressing more comprehensively behind the scenes than any rote recounting of his “greatest hits” – Hello, Alamo! That bat isn’t made of rubber? – could suggest. He was a godfather and easy avatar for the excesses of the then-burgeoning “hair metal” scene, and stories of him handily outpartying notable career hedonists like Motley Crue have long since become folklore. At a young age, such sensational incidents barely registered to me, and when, in a seeming sign of the times, Osbourne was sued in 1985 as being culpable in the tragic suicide of one of his fans, I joined him in shock and utter sadness over the pointless loss of life, and the misdirected grief that targeted him, rather than getting entangled in reckless speculation on how the kid might have gotten to such a desperate point. “Suicide Solution”, a cautionary tale written in memory of late friend and immortal original AC/DC singer Bon Scott following his death by alcohol poisoning, contained no backmasked “subliminal messages” urging particularly delicate listeners to end their own lives. It was always on its face an absurd suggestion, and Ozzy, who, again, loved his fans like no other, was crestfallen by the mere implication, to say nothing of the practical harm it unsuccessfully sought to inflict upon his career.
Though an exonerated Osbourne made little effort at the time to curb his appetites, and, indeed, maintained a complicated coexistence with his drug-enhanced past for the rest of his life, there were emerging signs that, at just north of forty years old, he was finally, tentatively entering adulthood. Following Sabbath’s incendiary opening salvo, and the bracing impact of his solo debut Blizzard of Ozz – itself a coming out party not just for Ozzy 2.0 but for dazzling guitar prodigy Rhoads – his third career renaissance manifested at a moment when I could actually bear willing witness. 1992’s No More Tears was a deadly focused and multi-layered statement of artistic purpose from a man who sometimes in interviews seemed as though his brain and tongue were engaged in a perpetual, albeit colorful, war of attrition. The more you listened to the always earnest and humble Ozzy spit stream-of-consciousness digressions punctuated by infrequent but conspicuous bouts of semi-coherent babble, the more you either threw up your hands in frustration, or, against your better judgement, understood, and grew to love him a little, then a little more. No More Tears was impossible to similarly dismiss. Powered by the squalling, sledgehammer guitar of ferocious newcomer Zakk Wylde, Ozzy’s band hadn’t sounded so mighty since the days of “Supernaut” and “Children of the Grave”, and his lyrics suggested thoughtfulness and depth of feeling heretofore uncharted. I remember once taking a drunken dare to sing the epic title track at karaoke, and, only once finished (and humbled), truly realizing quite what I’d bitten off but couldn’t possibly chew.
(Pardon the pun?)
Though he’d go on to win Grammys for his later work, lifetime achievement awards for his body of work, attain cultural ubiquity as a foul-mouthed suburban dad turned unlikely reality television star, and be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame not once but twice, the early to mid 1990s proved the zenith of my infatuation with Ozzy’s solo work, and, not coincidentally, the time when curiosity led me on that aforementioned bullet train journey from unsuspecting prospect to true believer in the power of Black Sabbath. Most metal fans undertake a similar fact-finding mission at some point in their lives. It’s practically a rite of passage. Few genres are so concerned with the importance of knowing your roots, or generous with the musical spoils that spring from having made the effort. No single father or founder is any more responsible than Ozzy for this music we all love, and night after night on extensive, exhaustive world tours, he was invariably the most enthusiastic fan in an arena filled to the brim with them. For over two decades, those same fans flocked by the thousands to Ozzfest, a traveling music festival founded by the Osbournes that put metal in (almost) all its copious, wondrous varieties clearly in the spotlight for a change. Clad in black and baking for hours under the oppressive sun, kids of all ages celebrated this truly wondrous music, the artists, and, by extension, one another. Ozzy Osbourne not only brought us together, on multiple levels, he curated one hell of a killer soundtrack for the occasion.
I attended three Ozzfests myself, once in Atlanta and another two in my adopted home of Columbus, plus a solo arena show in Knoxville, Tennessee, Ozzy wasn’t physically present at every fest, but he was always there in spirit. The small Tennessee town in which I grew up always seemed frustratingly remote and removed from the larger world when I was young, but my early, abiding love of metal helped make it, and life there, more manageable. So it is for so many of us. We all know the songs. We feel them, almost like a puppy just knows how to dog paddle. Metal gave us a sense of self and a sense of community, buoyant music that made our highs higher and braced us through the dark times of adolescence and beyond. And so it went that kids of all ages, from similar backgrounds but wildly varying zip codes, recently made what can only rightly be called a pilgrimage to Black Sabbath’s ancestral home of Birmingham, England for an all-day, all-star tribute and farewell concert dubbed “Back to the Beginning”. Streamed worldwide for charity, the show was a colossal undertaking logistically and technically, and an emotional roller coaster, presenting a parade of artists – Metallica, Tool, Guns ‘N’ Roses, Pantera, Slayer, Anthrax, Mastodon, Gojira, Halestorm et. al., each playing a Sabbath or Ozzy cover as the headliner in a mini-set supported by their own greatest hits – in a remarkable display of homage and thanksgiving, both for Sabbath in general and Ozzy in particular. Because even though all four old friends had chosen that day to officially retire, only Ozzy was dying.
Not that you would’ve ever heard it from his lips. The consummate road warrior was marking time at home, despondent after having been forcibly retired from touring years earlier due to the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s Disease. But now here he was, defiant, ecstatic, singing shakily but forcefully this one last time, commanding the stage both solo and with his band of brothers, flanked by peers, friends, and fans indistinguishable at first glance either from one another or the jubilant throng spread out before him, conducting that crowd from a custom black throne specially built to spare his legs, and, smiling through the beginnings of tears, thanking the fans for everything, as he always did, and always had. This was his moment. Two weeks later, he was gone. If that’s not poetry in its way, then we as lovers of life and art and the hidden rough edges of smoother things are patently unworthy of the concept. There will never be another Ozzy Osbourne. It’s a small miracle there was one to begin with. Where the maligned but durable genre he so loved and nourished for six decades goes from here is anybody’s guess, but who or what might follow in his titanic wake would never remotely do so as a replacement, or even suggest it. Ozzy Osbourne is as irreplaceable in death as he was irrepressible in life. He was never strictly my favorite singer or artist, truth be told, but, then again, he didn’t have to be, because the style of music he had such a significant hand in creating…simply was. For that alone, I would and will love him forever. But there’s much more. Thanks for all of it, warts and all.
Thanks for everything, you wonderful madman. Rest in peace.
darkadaptedeye 