Ozzy Osbourne told Rolling Stone in 2002 he already knew what his epitaph would say. “I guarantee that if I was to die tonight, tomorrow it would be, ‘Ozzy Osbourne, the man who bit the head off a bat, died in his hotel room …’” he said. “I know that’s coming.” He’d made his peace with that fate. “I’ve got no complaints. At least I’ll be remembered.” But Ozzy got this one wrong. The world is in mourning for him, after the news of his death yesterday at 76. But not as a cartoon metal maniac chomping on bat flesh. We’re mourning for Ozzy as one of the most unimpeachably human voices in music, and one of the most cherished legends in pop culture. It was Ozzy’s moon. The rest of us just barked at it.
For a guy with such a niche background — no rock band had ever set out to scare normies away like Black Sabbath — he became a universal figure as beloved as Ringo. Who else could sing duets with Lita Ford, Busta Rhymes, Elton John, Post Malone, and Miss Piggy without losing any metal cred? No matter how prolific or unprolific he was, even when he was a mess, people cherished Ozzy with an intensely loyal affection that was really unlike anything else. The world never fell out of love with this Prince of Darkness.
Ozzy blew up into a Seventies teenage antihero because he seemed to speak for the misfits, the rejects, the outcasts. He helped invent metal as we know it with Black Sabbath, but he kept rolling through the years with one of the longest and strangest rock careers. With The Osbournes, he became the world’s favorite sitcom dad. By the 2000s, he could show up at Buckingham Palace for Queen Elizabeth’s Royal Jubilee, to celebrate her 40th anniversary, and serenade Her Majesty with “Paranoid.” There was nothing at all controversial about the Prince of Darkness singing for the Defender of the Faith. She greeted him in the reception line with “I hear you’re a bit of a wild man.” “Prince William said to me later, ‘It would have been great if you had done “Black Sabbath,”’” Ozzy told RS. “If I had done ‘Black Sabbath,’ the fucking royal box would have turned to stone, and the Archbishop of Canterbury would have had to douse them in holy water.”
Ozzy’s nine lives had nine lives apiece. He managed the historic feat of getting kicked out of Black Sabbath for doing too many drugs, in 1979. The fact that he kept waking up alive every morning for the next 40-plus years is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened in rock & roll. Nobody would have bet on this guy to survive the Eighties, much less keep getting more famous every year, but his star never stopped rising. He did more farewell tours than Cher, Elton, and the Who combined, following up No More Tours in 1992 with his Retirement Sucks tour, then going out again in 2018 with his awesomely titled No More Tours II. But he hated being offstage, and talked constantly in his final years about his drive to get back out there, despite his Parkinson’s diagnosis.
He even got to attend his own farewell party, performing his last concert with his old mates in Black Sabbath just a couple of weeks before his death, in his hometown of Birmingham, England. The “Back to the Beginning” farewell show was a full-on celebration of his life and legacy, an electric funeral, with a host of fellow music legends paying their respects. One of the most poignant and heartfelt tributes came from Dolly Parton, with whom Ozzy has a surprising amount in common. Both became anti-establishment stars in the 1970s, too out there for the mainstream, dismissed as cartoon jokes, yet finally celebrated as true heroes decades ahead of their time. Her video message played on the screen between sets. “Now, are we supposed to be saying farewell to you?” Dolly said. “Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen. How about we just say good luck, God bless you, and we will see you somewhere down the road. Anyway, I love you, always have. And we’re gonna miss you up onstage, but you know what? I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t show up somewhere else — and I’ll be there.”
It all came down to his voice. Even when Ozzy wasn’t the one writing the lyrics, they were inseparable from his quavering voice, as pure in its earnest simplicity as Brian Wilson. He sang about the morbid sense of doom that Seventies and Eighties kids felt during the era of the superpower nuclear arms race, a topic he revisited far more than any other rock star, in classics like “War Pigs,” “Crazy Train,” “Children of the Grave,” or “Electric Funeral.” He was one of very few voices anywhere in pop culture who brought this much moral wrath and empathy to the kids living under the mushroom cloud, especially the American teenagers reaching draft age around the time Paranoid and Master of Reality came out. For them, the fiery doom of “Black Sabbath” was no occult metaphor.
Ozzy’s Iron Man and Bowie’s Major Tom were the twin rock images of alienated youth in the 1970s, pissed off at the nuclear future their elders had built for them, sneering in aloof disdain behind a spaced-out mask. As Ozzy said, they’d seen the future and they’d left it behind. Right from the start, Ozzy sang with an authentic purity, but that purity was more than just part of his voice — it was his voice. Unlike other hard-rock singers at the time, he did not try to get bluesy, and he did not aspire to the muscle of a soul belter. He didn’t bother with sexy-stud posturing or macho bluster. He was one of us.
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His moral force is part of what made him so genuinely scary when he arrived — Alice Cooper, that guy was funny and cool, but Ozzy’s power was all in the way he undeniably meant every word he sang. Black Sabbath’s music was terrifying to me as a kid, growing up in the suburbs — it was the stuff that the cool, scary older kids listened to when the adults weren’t around, when they were smoking and partying, scared kids in the dark. On the bridge near my house, by Milton High School, the words were spray-painted: “Welcome to Ozzy’s Coven.” (Which was how I learned the word coven.)
Yet Ozzy’s voice sounded so benign and compassionate, downright vulnerable. The first time I ever heard his voice was at my next-door neighbor’s house, in his big brother’s basement pad, where he kept a piranha and played the first Sabbath album. I remember hearing “N.I.B.,” with Ozzy singing in the voice of the devil. Yet what made it so scarily piercing was how forlorn and frail he sounded. It blew my mind when he quoted Buddy Holly, singing “Your love for me has got to be real” — I knew that line from my Fifties-rocker parents listening to “Not Fade Away.” What did Ozzy mean by making the devil a Buddy Holly-style romantic? It was a world away from the just-call-me-Luuucifaaaah strut of Mick Jagger. Ozzy’s devils sounded so scary because they were mostly afraid of themselves.
In his solo years, he played up the comedy, in a great hit like “Flying High Again,” kicking off with a massive Randy Rhoads riff while Ozzy burbles in his most hapless voice, “Oh noooo! Here we go!” It sums up his immensely lovable warmth right down to the way he sings, “Am I just a crazy guy?” and then snickers, ”You bet.” But he still had that unimpeachable realness in his voice — for him, it was practically all he had in his voice. John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats really captured his mystique for latter-day fans in his novella Master of Reality, written in the voice of an institutionalized teenage Sabbath fanatic. “No matter how many songs he sings, Ozzy always always sounds like they just grabbed him off the street and stuck him in front of a microphone, and then they either handed him a piece of paper with some lyrics on it or he already had some written on his hand or something.”
In Rolling Stone’s year-end issue for 1990, the first page had loads of stars giving their summary of the year, mostly pimping their latest career highlights. But Ozzy kept it short and sweet. “One of the greatest heroes of all time said it in 1969: ‘Give peace a chance.’ Let’s all try for it in 1991.” A typical Oz statement, full of contradictions (he was only a year past getting arrested for attacking his wife in a drunken stupor) but also that innate Ozzy sincerity. John Lennon had a similar cocktail in his personality, but he was also armored with complex layers of defensive wit and irony that Ozzy simply didn’t have in his system. “Give peace a chance” remained an aspirational ideal for Ozzy, the guy who kept doing the peace sign in public long after it went out of style for rock stars. “We were the last hippie band,” he told RS in 2002. “We were into peace.”
After bombing out of Sabbath, he could have symbolized everything complacent, decadent, and dull about old-school rock. Yet he was never a joke. Like Geddy Lee, his opposite in so many other ways, he was cherished as an evolutionary mishap who symbolized his own kind of uncompromised integrity. One of the highlights of seeing my first Replacements show, a dingy all-aged matinee in the summer of 1986, was seeing Paul Westerberg and the boys lock into “Iron Man,” one of the few songs they came close to finishing. Later that year, the Beastie Boys opened Licensed to Ill with the sampled “Sweet Leaf” riff of “Rhymin and Stealin,” dragging Sabbath into the Eighties the same way Run-D.M.C. did for Aerosmith. One of his best Eighties moments: Ozzy’s classic egg-frying scene in Decline of Western Civilization Part II. He’s the rock star at home, puttering around the kitchen in a leopard-print robe, a Real Housewife of Darkness, looking more like Rue McLanahan in The Golden Girls then any rock star you could name. He fixes breakfast, ineptly frying eggs and bacon while trying to pour himself a glass of orange juice on the counter. He gets about half of it into the actual glass. He also discusses his latest attempt to get sober. Director: “Do you feel better now?” Ozzy: “No.”
He became even more iconic in the Nineties. Beck gave him a classic shout-out on MTV’s 120 Minutes, in his famous February 1994 sit-down with Thurston Moore and Mike D — perhaps the most Nineties moment of television ever aired. Beck wore a thrift-store hockey shirt that proclaimed “Stop! Tell Me I’m Ozzy Because I Am.” He’d written “Ozzy” on a piece of masking tape and stuck it over whatever the original word was. He also made his plea in “Ozzy” on his album Stereopathetic Soulmanure. (Sample lyric: “Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy/What does it mean?/The fire is green.”)
By now, Ozzy was a fact of life that songwriters couldn’t resist evoking as a way to set the table. “It’s reigning triple sec in Tchula/And the radio plays ‘Crazy Train,’” David Berman drawled in the 1996 Silver Jews classic “Black and Brown Blues,” with Ozzy as an unelectable symbol of ur-American burnout ordinariness. The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn sang “Playing records in a rented room/Hotter Than Hell into Bark at the Moon” in 2012, just as his songwriting heir MJ Lenderman sang a dozen years later, “I’ve never seen the ‘Mona Lisa’/I’ve never really left my room/I’ve been up too late playing Guitar Hero/Playing ‘Bark at the Moon.’”
He went on to help invent reality TV with The Osbournes, the blockbuster MTV hit that turned him into a sitcom dad. It starred a real-life family who could only communicate with a camera crew present, constantly cutting a promo in every interaction, with dialogue full of bleeped profanity. It’s fitting since reality TV became the social menace as feared and dreaded as metal used to be.
But my favorite Ozzy memory will always be seeing him on the Retirement Sucks tour in 1996, at Meriweather Post Pavilion in Maryland, a love-fest where Ozzy basked in the adoration of the audience, which he craved, but nowhere near as much as the audience did. Nobody really cared that Ozzy needed a teleprompter, which was a shocking innovation at the time; everybody within six miles of the venue knew all the words to “Iron Man,” down to the security guards, but absolutely nobody was mad that Ozzy was the only one there who didn’t. “Is anyone smoking that sweet leaf?” he asked. “When I said I quit, I fucking lied!” It was an overwhelming feeling of warmth and joy just to be in the same room with Ozzy, as it always was. And as long as his music lives on — which it will — being in the same room as Ozzy is always the place to be.
From Rolling Stone US
