Ozzy and Me

The Road to Nowhere Led to Him.

Somewhere between “Stairway to Heaven” and “Sweet Child ‘O Mine” lies the opening riff to “Crazy Train,” performed by Randy Rhodes on Ozzy Osbourne’s debut solo album, Blizzard of Ozz. Ozzy, having just been given the boot from Black Sabbath, thought his career might be over. As the story goes, Sabbath’s former manager Sharon Arden picked Ozzy up by his drunken suspenders, put him on the path to a new solo career, and, a couple of years later, married him.

Right up there with cats fighting and fingernails dragging across a chalkboard is the sound of teenage boys trying to learn that riff. Anyone can learn how to play “Smoke on the Water” or “Iron Man” in about five minutes, but that opening riff to “Crazy Train” takes timing, skill, and more than two fingers. It’s not just enough to know the notes; they’ve got to bend and flow and let’s face it, most of the kids in my neighborhood were not Randy Rhodes. But that was probably my introduction of Ozzy Osbourne — the summer every kid in my neighborhood with an electric guitar sat around butchering that riff.

In 1985 I met my buddy Jeff, who was a big fan of Ozzy. I copied his Diary of a Madman cassette and while I didn’t like it was much as I liked Blizzard of Ozz, it was still more Ozzy. Later that year but still in seventh grade I met another kid named Matt who was either too cool or too high to give me the time of day — he had one foot in the skateboarding scene with the other planted in heavy metal. In journalism class of all places I noticed he had the new Ozzy album, The Ultimate Sin, sitting on his desk. Somehow I talked him into letting me borrow it for the night (he was probably high) and I made a copy of it, too. The dual-deck stereo got a lot of use in the 80s.

I didn’t get into Black Sabbath until I discovered all my favorite bands were not only influenced by them but were also covering their songs. Anthrax’s “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”, Megadeth’s version of “Paranoid”, and Faith No More’s version of “War Pigs” convinced me to check out “Ozzy’s first band.” In the 90s, two albums of Sabbath cover tunes were released (Nativity in Black 1 and 2) featuring even more versions of Sabbath songs. By then of course I was fan.

Diary of a Madman could have been a great name for Ozzy’s biography. Within just a few years he nit the head off a bat (he thought it was fake), bit the head off a dove (he knew it was real), got arrested for pissing on the Alamo while wearing a dress, and, if Nikki Sixx is to be believed, one upped the guys in Motley Crue by snorting a line of ants off a sidewalk.

I used to do a really funny impersonation of Ozzy in high school, based on his appearance in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. The key to the impersonation — mine, anyway — is to start talking about something, do some random British-sounding mumbling in the middle, and then end the sentence with some compeltely non-sequitur phrase. “The key to writing a good song is (mumble thingy stumble mumble) scrambled eggs.”

The first time I saw Ozzy perform live was on September 25, 1992, in Oklahoma City. It was a fairly infamous show; Layne Stayley, lead singer of opening act Alice in Chains, had just broken his leg in an ATV accident and performed the entire show while sitting on a couch.

The next time I saw Ozzy was in April of 1996, with openers Type O Negative and Sepultura, before the split. On that tour Ozzy’s backing band consisted of Zakk Wylde on guitar, Mike “Puffy” Borden on drums, and Robert Trujillo on bass who was on loan from Suicidal Tendencies as he hadn’t yet joined Metallica. When people asked me what songs did Ozzy perform I would just say “all of them.” Like, every Sabbath song, every Ozzy song… just everything. What a great, great performer.

Had that show been a few years later, I probably could have afforded or even obtained tickets. In 2002 The Osbournes debuted on MTV, turning the former self-acclaimed “Prince of Darkness” and his family into household names. Before The Osbournes, metalheads like me had posters of Ozzy on their walls. After that show, you could buy doll versions of the entire Osbourne clan and give them to your kids… which I did.

The Osbournes relaunched Ozzy’s career and put the rest of his family’s face in front of the world, too. I had mixed feelings about the show at the time. I didn’t care that Ozzy was often portrayed as a fumbling and occasionally feeble old man; it changed him from being the Prince of Darkness to an old goofball. The upside to it all was an entire new generation of kids discovered Ozzy’s music, which almost sorta/kinda balences out the fact that the show also helped launch Kelly Osbourne’s singing career. Oof.

When I was a kid, Ozzy Osbourne was scary but in a comic book way. In “Bark at the Moon”, Ozzy drinks a potion (a’la “Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde”) and turns into a werewolf, only to be pursued by townsfolk and spend a lot of time posing in front of a fog machine. It’s silly. It’s a three-minute horror movie that aired on MTV multiple times a day.

In the early 2000s a friend gifted me a mega-guitar amp, one with four 12” speakers and a zillion watts of power — a bit overkill for a guy who barely noodled around on the guitar, but it made me feel like a rockstar even while playing songs in my living room. It took me a long time but I finally learned that opening riff to “Crazy Train”… and “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” and a lot of other Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne songs. You would be hard pressed to find a metal guitarist that, if they weren’t directly influenced by Sabbath, was influenced by a band that was influenced by them. For six decades, Ozzy put out some of the greatest music of all time.

Rest in Peace, Godfather of Metal.