By James R. Harrigan
At Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning show on July 5th, rock royalty showed up to pay tribute to Ozzy Osbourne at his retirement gig. Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian said it best: “We’re not here to say goodbye, we’re here to say thank you.”
But as it turns out, they were there to say goodbye. Just sixteen days later, Ozzy was gone.
It’s hard to overestimate Osbourne’s impact on pop culture. With Black Sabbath, he had a hand in inventing heavy metal. Their eponymous debut in 1970 ushered in a new era, functionally putting a loud, Birmingham end to the hippie/folk movement of the 1960s. Paisley and patchouli were out; black leather and burning sulphur were in. And the music world would never be the same.
Ozzy was no saint, as biting the head off a bat, urinating on the Alamo, and sauntering into the George W. Bush White House drunk beyond repair showed. It was a fool’s game to root against him, though, and more importantly, almost no one wanted to. Sure, religious fundamentalists always seemed to find something to take issue with. He was excoriated, unfairly, as a Satanist, and very fairly as a man of endless excess. But their children lapped it up, and they are none the worse for it.
For those willing to look just an inch past Sabbath’s horror-movie aesthetic, they found four working-class boys from the back end of England playing their hearts out so ferociously that legions of young people would take up guitars like Tony Iommi, basses like Geezer Butler, and drums like Bill Ward to follow in their footsteps. And at the center of it all was Ozzy, singing about things that had never seen the light of day in rock songs: pure evil, power, mental illness…the actual human condition.
Black Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid, also released in 1970, pushed the envelope further, tackling issues like nuclear war in “Electric Funeral,” drug abuse in “Hand of Doom,” and even the senselessness of armed conflict in “War Pigs.”
Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death’s construction
All this from the so-called Prince of Darkness.
Ozzy and Sabbath would part ways in 1979, and 1980 saw him reemerge, leaner and meaner with Blizzard of Ozz. It turns out he was just getting started. Success followed success, and the standard excess was even dialed down a bit. His second solo album, Diary of a Madman, followed, cementing his status as a world-class solo artist and, not inconsequentially, making guitarist Randy Rhoads a household name.
In 1996, he took Ozzfest, a roving festival on the road, sharing a stage with bands that would never have existed were it not for the trail he blazed. Slayer, Pantera, Foo Fighters, Tool, Iron Maiden, and Megadeth were all along for the ride, as were scores of other bands. It wasn’t a tour; it was an event.
Through it all, albums, cassettes, 8-tracks, and CDs flew off the shelves. Between Sabbath and his solo releases, Ozzy sold more than 100 million units. He was, in short, an industry unto himself.
By 2002, we were all at last in on the joke as we watched Ozzy and family in the “reality” series The Osbournes. We finally got to see the Prince of Darkness wandering around his house, in a robe, bewildered, arguing with his wife and children about a bunch of nonsense that wouldn’t matter in anyone’s house, let alone his. It wasn’t The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, but it was closer to that than it was to The Exorcist.
And we loved him for it. And he loved us right back. His humility was legendary, and his Back to the Beginning Concert raised over $200 million for Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Acorn Children’s Hospice, and Cure Parkinson’s, a disease that robbed him of his mobility, but never took the best of him.
There may have been a fair amount of darkness in Ozzy’s life, but in the end, he was just a guy from Manchester holding on for dear life as he moved from one monstrous success to another. He ended every show by saying, “Thank you. Goodnight. We love you all.”
Thank you, Ozzy. Goodbye. We loved you, too.
@JamesRHarrigan is COO of Polyhymnia
