Miracle Man: Ozzy Osbourne Turns 75
Careening through the complex history of a heavy metal pioneer
It’s select company to be in the music business and be instantly known by your first name. Madonna. Cher. And turning 75 years old today? Ozzy.
The name was a childhood nickname from taunting kids that stuck, but Osbourne has had the last laugh several times over. He hasn’t been referred to as “John” in a long, long time.
Birmingham, post-World War II, was an industrial city with a lot of poor working families like the Osbournes, who fit a family of eight into a small house.
Ozzy had a rough childhood. There was poverty. Undiagnosed dyslexia and ADHD made school difficult. A couple of school bullies abused him sexually before he was a teenager. He eventually dropped out of school, turning to alcohol and petty crime.
His father wound up doing two things that changed his life. First he refused to pay his son’s fines when he was arrested, which meant six weeks in jail.
That was enough to put Ozzy on, well, not the straight and narrow, but able to make a few better choices. He started work in a meatpacking plant, one of a number of jobs he did to make ends meet.
The other thing proved to be even bigger. He went into debt, buying his son a P.A. to use at gigs.
Guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward and Osbourne all knew each other, but hadn’t played in the same band together. The desire to get out of factory life was understandable, especially for Iommi, whose career almost ended before it began thanks to an accident at a sheet metal factory in which a machine he hadn’t been trained to use cut off the tips of two fingers on his right (fretboard) hand.
Iommi recovered, adapted and improvised, coming up with a heavy sound that influenced countless guitarists in his wake while propelling the band and Osbourne.
The four had joined together, playing in a band called Earth, but they were going to have to change the name as another band got there first. As luck would have it, Butler came up with a song that Osbourne put lyrics to.
Inspired by horror films (this had been the period of Hammer Studios) and novels of mysticism and dark arts, the song “Black Sabbath” was a new sound for the band — heavy, ominous and full of slow menace before it boiled over in its last 100 seconds. Ozzy was perfect to deliver it (“Oh, no, no, no. Please God help me.”).
Black Sabbath had a name, a direction, a perfect lineup and, soon, a record deal. Their self-titled debut drew few critical raves, but sold well and remains the template-setter made to be played loud (“N.I.B” alone doubtless annoyed many teens’ parents and neighbors).
Paranoid, which followed later in 1970, expanded that audience with three hard rock standards (“War Pigs”, “Paranoid” and “Iron Man”) and a perfect distillation of their sound — a killer rhythm section, Iommi’s unique and highly skilled playing and Ozzy at the mic.
There were much more technically skilled hard rock singers, like Robert Plant or Ian Gillan. But where Ozzy succeeded was through sheer magnetism and intense force of will, as well as being a perfect fit.
Just as by decade’s end, it would be hard to picture David Lee Roth (who was more clown prince than dark lord) without Eddie Van Halen, Ozzy was a perfect foil for Iommi, able to sing in the character the songs demanded, in more subdued darkness, intense bellow and anything in-between.
1971’s Master of Reality, 1972’s Vol. 4 and 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath only cemented Black Sabbath’s reputation. While there was proto-metal that preceded them, the first albums remain unassailable pioneers of the genre that still hold up.
It’s here, however, where another key part of Ozzy’s story has to be mentioned – drugs.
For a time, acid was his choice, one he later claimed to have taken daily for close to two years. Take that with a grain of salt, but there’s no denying he was an avid consumer, until one day in the early ’70s. As he told Classic Rock, “I took 10 tabs of acid then went for a walk in a field. I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour. In the end the horse turned round and told me to fuck off. That was it for me.”
As the ’70s wore on, Ozzy wasn’t one to turn down a drink and cocaine became ever more present, not just for him, but within the band. Coke is a lot of things, but a performance-enhancing drug for musicians it is not.
That began to show on record and in band relationships. Iommi began to feel like he was being asked to do more than his fair share of the work. Collectively, they began to question Ozzy’s level of commitment. By the time of 1976’s Technical Ecstasy, he was clearly pondering leaving.
That album, which didn’t sell well, was an effort to change the band’s sound. Ozzy complained that Iommi wanted to sound like Foreigner or Queen.
Ozzy left early during work on the next album, then returned while refusing to sing any of the songs they’d put together with his temporary replacement, Dave Walker.
Iommi wasn’t happy with Ozzy. Butler, the primary lyricist, wasn’t pleased with the singer Monday morning quarterbacking his lyrics. And, yes, more drugs.
Nobody in Black Sabbath at the end of the ’70s was anywhere close to a teetotaler. In retrospect, it was an obvious warning sign when the other three have their respective chemical intakes and are still legitimately able to say, in effect, “Dude. What you’re doing is too much. You’re gone.”
The album, Never Say Die! was a deserved flop. A number of tour dates for it saw the band get regularly upstaged by the hungry upstarts in Van Halen. A follow-up went nowhere as Ozzy was only at early sessions physically.
He told Spin in 2013, “With Never Say Die!, we were down on our luck. We were just a fucking bunch of guys drowning in the fucking ocean. We weren’t getting along with each other and we were all fucked-up with drugs and alcohol. And I got fired. It was just a bad thing. You try to lift your head up above water, but eventually the tide sucks you under.”
Rather than Iommi or Butler telling Ozzy he was fired, they made would-be peacemaker Ward do it. In Steven Rosen’s 1996 book, The Story of Black Sabbath: Wheels of Confusion, Ward said, “I hope I was professional, I might not have been, actually. When I’m drunk I am horrible, I am horrid. Alcohol was definitely one of the most damaging things to Black Sabbath. We were destined to destroy each other. The band were toxic, very toxic.”
Sabbath moved on, with vocalists great (Dio), poorly chosen (Gillan) and those who inspired general indifference (Tony Martin).
Ozzy didn’t heed the wake-up call to become sober. This would lead to many moments that became part of his lore. He bit the head off a bat onstage at a 1982 show in Des Moines. He instantly realized it wasn’t a fake bat like he thought, with subsequent required rabies shots a painful reminder.
The year before, Ozzy was supposed to give a short rah-rah speech at a CBS sales convention before releasing three doves as “birds of peace.” Only nobody had bothered to make sure the birds were safe. Ozzy was tired of being pestered by some P.R. person. Having already consumed levels of brandy well above the level of most humans, he pulled out one dead dove and bit its head off, then another before being asked to leave.
Neil Strauss’s book about Mötley Crüe, The Dirt, is full of tales of debauchery. But in there with the stories of how Nikki Sixx miraculously came back from literal death in an overdose and how Vince Neil killed Hanoi Rocks’ Razzle Dingley in a drunk-driving crash, there was Ozzy, front and center in a ridiculous and gross anecdote.
Mötley Crüe members swear by the story. Ozzy’s said he doesn’t remember. His guitarist at the time, Jake E. Lee, says it didn’t happen. It goes like this: Everyone’s hanging out at a Florida hotel. Ozzy asks for a bump of coke from Mötley Crüe. They say they don’t have any. He takes the straw and proceeds to snort a bunch of ants off the pavement. Not done, he pulls down his pants and relieves himself. He drops to the ground and licks up some of his own urine (with more licks than it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop), then stands up, looks at Crüe’s bassist and says, “Do that, Sixx!”
It wasn’t his first urine-related incident, as he’d been banned from San Antonio for 10 years after he peed on the Alamo.
Addiction can lead people to do darkly ridiculous things.
Regardless of his drug and booze intake, Ozzy was able to regroup musically. His good fortune was in finding his next great guitarist.
A friend in the L.A. music scene kept urging Randy Rhoads, who’d quit Quiet Riot (which he’d co-formed) to audition when Ozzy was trying to put together a band there. Classically trained with melodic rock chops, he left the other auditioners without a chance.
“I loved him in an instant. I fell in love with him as a player, and I fell in love with him as a person,” Ozzy told Guitar Player in 1982.
Rhoads had ideas and riffs that had gone unused in Quiet Riot. Ozzy had also recruited bassist Bob Daisley before adding former Uriah Heep drummer Lee Kerslake. He had his second great band and he was more focused, knowing the Dio-fronted Sabbath was out there.
The result would be two Ozzy classics, even if his U.S. label was slow on the uptake. Blizzard of Ozz, wasn’t released here until March, 1981, five months after the U.K. By that time, they’d pretty much finished Diary of a Madman, which came out that October.
The two were full of songs that would define Ozzy as much as anything he did with Sabbath — “Crazy Train,” “Flying High Again,” “Mr. Crowley,” “Goodbye to Romance” and “Over the Mountain,” for starters.
Sadly, it wouldn’t last. By accounts, Sharon Arden (who’d marry Ozzy in 1982) took over his management and allegedly had Daisley and Kerslake fired for contributing too much musically. There was enough ill will that, years later, when Daisley and Kerslake sued for unpaid royalties on Diary, the Ozzy camp pulled the undeniably shitty move of having their parts re-recorded for a 2002 reissue. The move backfired with fans, who got the superior original back in 2011.
Rhoads wasn’t happy, considering leaving before the Diary tour, but he also didn’t have much leverage. So, he stayed, which proved to be fatal.
The irony in what happened is that he was the most sensible in the band. He might like a wine with dinner, but he was more inclined to seek out guitar teachers to practice with at tour stops than snort insects and drink his own piss.
The touring party stopped at an estate outside Orlando owned by the tour bus company to get its air conditioning fixed. While Ozzy and others slept, the tour bus driver commandeered a plane on the property. He took keyboardist Don Airey and the band’s tour manager for a ride, where he buzzed the bus in an effort to wake up drummer Tommy Aldridge.
Rhoads, who didn’t like flying, agreed to go on a second ride with the tour’s makeup artist, to take some photos to send to his mom. He had no idea the pilot had cocaine in his system and didn’t have a pilot’s license. The plane buzzed the bus twice, but that wasn’t enough. The high pilot clipped the top of the bus on his third attempt, resulting in a fiery high impact crash that killed all three instantly.
Rhoads’ death was devastating, with the tour resuming with little time to grieve.
Brad Gillis was the guitarist who appeared on the subsequent live album, but he left to concentrate on his band Night Ranger.
Ozzy picked Dokken’s George Lynch as a replacement, only to change his mind and go with Lee, who’d be with him until 1987.
VIDEO: Ozzy Osbourne “Bark at the Moon”
Their first effort, 1983’s Bark at the Moon, wasn’t as consistent as the Rhoads efforts, but did yield a deserved hit in the title track with other worthy songs like “Rock N’ Roll Rebel.” Nearly the whole album was credited to Ozzy, although subsequently, it’s come out that both Lee and Daisley (brought on as an uncredited writer for hire) contributed far more than the public was led to believe. Lee said he never again started work on an album without a contract up front. Daisley, meanwhile, was amused that his shots at Sharon Osbourne in the lyrics of “Now You See It (Now You Don’t)” — “Overbearing woman makin’ it so hard for me/Now you’ve laid it down for all to see/Can I ask a question, d’ya think you can take a blow/This is why I always come and go”– were allowed intact.
Substance abuse ate at Ozzy’s solo work as it had Sabbath’s. Some albums were not up to his standards. Others were.
1988’s No Rest For The Wicked was his best work since Diary, thanks partly to new guitarist Zakk Wylde, who if he didn’t have Rhoads’ classical flash, had chops and tone to burn. It was also due to better songwriting (the stomp of “Breakin’ All The Rules” and the deserved shot at televangelist con men in “Miracle Man”).
Ozzy had been the target of those preachers for a while. He’d been the singer of, gasp, Black Sabbath after all. He sang about Aleister Crowley. With the misinformation-filled Satanic Panic in full swing, grifters seized on the opportunity.
In addition, he’d been sued in 1985 by the parents of a 19-year-old who’d killed himself after allegedly listening to “Suicide Solution” off Blizzard. Tragic as it was, the parents had no case (lawyers misquoted some of the lyrics). And indeed, the song’s lyrics, written by Daisley, were about the perils of alcoholism (“Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker/suicide is slow with liquor”, “Now you live inside a bottle/The reaper’s traveling at full throttle”).
1991’s No More Tears, with Wylde still around, was even better, the best post-Rhoads solo album. The songwriting terrain was as wide as it had ever been — a sweetly done hit ballad in “Mama I’m Coming Home”, state of the art hard rock in “Desire” and “Hellraiser” (all three having been co-written by Lemmy) and the dark lyrical territory of “No More Tears” and “Mr. Tinkertrain.”
While Ozzy continued to put out albums of varying quality, Sharon came up with his next musical contribution. Unable to get him on the Lollapalooza bill, she came up with Ozzfest in 1996. It was just two shows that first year, before becoming an ongoing traveling festival that ran through 2008 and made limited appearances in the 2010s). It was a showcase for hard and heavy acts both established (including Sabbath when Ozzy was back in the fold) and up-and-comers (a lot of acts who’d be all over the active rock format in the 2000s).
She was also the one to come up with The Osbournes, the comic-tinged “reality” show after an Ozzy episode of Cribs on MTV went well. It cast him as, basically, the befuddled dad in his ’50s, a rock star now a sitcom trope.
Addiction can lead people to do dark things.
Ozzy was not a faithful husband, which was nothing compared to a night in 1998 where he tried to choke Sharon, with her access to a panic button that brought cops saving her life.
“I had no idea who sat across from me on the sofa, but it wasn’t my husband” she said. “He gets to a stage where he gets this look in his eyes where his shutters are down and I couldn’t get through to him.”
He lucked out when his wife didn’t press charges. Even the fear of doing something awful while blacked out, even doing something actually awful, didn’t stop him. Sharon kept at him, often getting tough (breaking platinum records on him) and creative (defecating in a pot stash his daughter Kelly found on a Hawaii vacation).
He got sober in 2006, which he has maintained outside of an 18-month period in the early 2010s. A while after that relapse, he credited going to A.A. meetings regularly as both a help and a necessity, saying, “If I don’t go, then I end up in Shit Street. I’m not in control. It’s been 480 days since my last drink and I go to the meetings as many times a week as I can. When we were in Stockholm on tour I went to one. I couldn’t understand a bloody word they were saying but it still helped. It’s just the act of going there.”
Sobriety didn’t just suit him in his personal life, it paid dividends artistically.
The last Sabbath album, 2013’s 13, was the first with Ozzy since Never Say Die!. Even though Ward’s absence due to contract disagreements was a bummer, it was still a massive gift. The other three, aided by Rage Against the Machine’s Brad Wilk, were in fine form. It was the sound of a band aware of their influence, going back to the well. The band would call it quits four years later, leaving this stellar effort as the last statement with Ozzy, rather than that 1978 dud.
The experience energized him. Even though it has some filler, the best moments on 2020’s Ordinary Man deliver a sheer heaviness in a way his solo work didn’t always go with.
Even with the jarring and unwelcome appearance of Auto-Tune, last year’s Patient Number 9 was more consistent. Throwing in some proggy moments gave it a more epic feel. And say what you will, Ozzy knows the value of a good guitar player. The late Jeff Beck, Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready and Eric Clapton (taking time out from his Covid-19 promotion duties) all appear, but the real story for longtime fans was the return of Wylde, even moreso Iommi making appearances on multiple songs.
Ozzy’s future is unclear. Sabbath’s over because of health issues for mutiple members. Osbourne was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2020. There’s the years of wear-and-tear of 21 studio albums, Sabbath and solo, and the accompanying tours that could break down an always-sober 75-year-old.
For all of his serious flaws and bad behavior, Ozzy fought through it, a sobriety that’s allowed for an ongoing final act where he’s produced music that has more than avoided tarnishing his musical legacy and been the best person he’s been in a long time.
As a metal pioneer in the ’70s and a hard rock stalwart, he’s made his mark as a man born for his role on a stage and one of the most notorious characters off it. Through it all, even cleaner, saner and older, he is unmistakably Ozzy.
VIDEO: Ozzy Osbourne “Crazy Train” (Live)
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