Month: July 2025

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The death of the prince of darkness

So, Ozzy Osbourne died on Tuesday. I’ve been thinking about this all week, because these celebrity deaths are increasingly odd to me as they become more frequent. And Ozzy’s a weird one, because of his intersection with culture and life in general.

I was too young to be into Black Sabbath as a kid. Their first two albums were released before I was born, and I think I was in the first grade when Ozzy’s first tenure with the band ended. I didn’t have an older brother who could have turned me onto them, and our town didn’t have an AOR radio station, so I had zero exposure to even the basics like “Iron Man” or “Paranoid.” As his solo career unfolded, I also had no exposure to his music. When Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman hit, my local Top 10 station (the only non-country/non-religious FM station in the area) was probably pumping out Men at Work or Phil Collins.

My first memory of Ozzy was during CCD classes at my Catholic church, where I was relegated during Sunday mornings to prepare for first communion. One of the kids in my class was explaining Ozzy to us: the long hair, tattoos, running around without a shirt and maybe some horror movie makeup on. He bit the head off a bat, or maybe a dove. I was fascinated by this, even though I didn’t know a note of his work. It was similar to how I was amazed by the band Kiss, not because I liked the music, but because of the costumes, the makeup, the pageantry of the whole thing. It was more like a cartoon than music, and at the age of nine or ten, that was awesome. I remember sitting in class, sketching out pictures of Ozzy biting the heads off of birds, done entirely from this other kid’s description, without having actually seen any album covers or live footage.

We got MTV a bit after that, and Ozzy entered the general zeitgeist, although I don’t exactly remember any of his music or videos. He played at the big spectacle of the Us Festival, and maybe his antics were covered by Kurt Loder in news segments. I can’t remember them actually playing any Ozzy or Black Sabbath videos – they were probably too busy with Michael Jackson and John Cougar Mellencamp – but it seemed like Ozzy was ever-present anyway.

I don’t remember actually listening to a Sabbath or Ozzy album until I started hanging out with Jim Manges in maybe 1986 or 1987. His parents were evangelicals who forbade him from any hard rock or heavy metal, and he’d often stash tapes or D&D books at my place. He was also very into the “satanism” of early Sabbath, although it was mostly a reaction against his parents, and Black Sabbath wasn’t really satanist. We used to listen to tapes of Sabbath a lot when driving around in my car, although it was often “nice price” tapes instead of the big albums. One in particular was the Live at Last album, which was a horrible near-bootleg released without the band’s permission, an odd mix of poorly-recorded tracks and an album cover that looked like it was done on a Commodore VIC-20.

In high school, I fell into early thrash metal, and stuff like Metallica, Megadeth or Anthrax seemed like a generation past that of Ozzy’s solo stuff, and at least two beyond Black Sabbath. It’s odd for me to listen to Bark at the Moon and then Master of Puppets back to back and they seem twenty years apart, but it was more like three years. I was too obsessed with “new” stuff and didn’t have the time or funds to go backwards through the older Sabbath catalog when I was a teenager.

When No Rest for the Wicked came out in 1988, it was a bit of a twist. At that point, Ozzy seemed like a bit of a relic, but No Rest had a fresh sound, catchy tunes, and this amazing new guitar player Zakk Wylde, who was some kid genius, only a few years older than me. That album got some heavy play in my last year of high school, even though it was competing against Metallica’s And Justice For All and the first Guns ‘N Roses album in my tape player. Same goes for 1991’s No More Tears, which featured a ton of songs written by Lemmy from Motorhead. But aside from this brief blip, I mostly thought of Ozzy as this elder statesman in the world of metal, and focused most of my attention on death metal or whatever else I was obsessed with in the mid-90s.

* * *

Fast-forward to 1996. I’m in Seattle by that point, and Ozzy was mostly off my radar. He’d “retired” and he had an album or maybe two I’d never even heard. Black Sabbath was fully in the back of my head, having listened to the first six albums pretty repeatedly over the years. But I did not keep track of anything of Ozzy’s solo career in years.

It’s a Friday, and I’m at work. There’s some ship party going on, free champagne, catered appetizers. This was at the point in tech where this happened like every week. I’m not a fan of champagne and the food was usually crap, but it meant I could waste an hour of time doing nothing. I was talking to a few people about how Ozzy was playing at the Tacoma Dome that night. The general discussion was “Ozzy is touring? I thought he retired? He’s still alive, right?” We all joked about going, in the same way one would go to a monster truck rally at the Kingdome as a goof, just to see who would show up.

Later that night, I was sitting around trying to write, and thought maybe I should go. Ozzy wasn’t going to be around much longer, right? I figured his career was beyond over, and I’d never get to see him again if I didn’t go. I called the Tacoma Dome to see if there were still tickets – you couldn’t look it up online and had to actually call the box office, and they said sure, tons of tickets. So I got in my car, hit I-5, and headed down there, well after the first opening band started.

This tour was sort of a mini-festival with three opening bands, all of them notable: Biohazard, Sepultura, and Danzig. I got to my nosebleed seat maybe during Biohazard’s last song. Sepultura was decent. I always joke that Danzig opened and closed with “Mother” because he was at that point in his career, but he was decent. And then, Ozzy.

I didn’t really know what to expect. I thought this might be the dreaded “rock star karaoke” performance where he stumbled through the lyrics on a teleprompter with a completely disconnected live band, and then after maybe a few greatest hits, we’d get hit with the “here’s a song from my new album” and have to struggle through 45 minutes of that before an encore of a Sabbath tune or two. This was absolutely not what happened.

First off, Ozzy’s band was tight as hell. Joe Holmes from David Lee Roth’s solo band was there, a very underrated guitarist. Mike Bordin from Faith No More was on drums, and future Metallica bassist Rob Trujillo rounded out the lineup. The band was not only totally together, but it was very energetic and not phoned in at all. Bordin is an incredibly kinetic player and frantically banged through the set at combat power. Both Holmes and Trujillo jumped all over the stage, climbing up on amps and coming back down again to the front. The playing was incredibly tight, and they pushed ahead at a fast tempo through the whole set.

Second, Ozzy really put on a show. The stage had two giant video walls and before they started, there was a video montage that put Ozzy in various movies, like a parody of Pulp Fiction, then him interviewing Princess Diana, then him in the Beatles, then him and John Travolta in a Saturday Night Fever/Crazy Train mash-up, then him in a duet with Alanis. (There’s a fan-shot video of this here.) They then did a montage of Ozzy videos and live footage that completely pumped up the audience, and by the time he finally hit the stage and the lights came up, everyone was on their feet screaming.

Did he play old songs? He played no new songs. After screaming for everyone to go crazy, they immediately launched into a blistering version of “Paranoid” and it went on from there. He played a half-dozen Black Sabbath songs: “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” “Iron Man,” “Sweet Leaf,” basically an entire greatest hits album. “War Pigs” was absolutely awesome, the last song in the main set. Video footage of Vietnam choppers over jungles played on the big screens, spotlights going across the crowd, 20,000 people all singing, and Ozzy basically doing calisthenics on stage, screaming at everyone to get out of their fucking seats while he was doing jumping jacks and running laps to this absolutely frenetic version of the song.

I can’t find an exact setlist, but looking at ones online, he only played the song “Perry Mason” from his last album, then a dozen of the biggest songs from his solo career: old stuff like “Crazy Train,” “Bar at the Moon,” and newer hits like “No More Tears” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” (The setlist was different than the video above.) What was amazing is how into the performance Ozzy was. I mean, if I was him, I absolutely would not want to play “Iron Man” for the ten millionth time, especially after having like 20 albums after that. But he was absolutely elated that 20,000 people showed up to see him, and we were all doing him a favor by being there. He was more than happy to play the classic hits everyone wanted. Between every song, every chorus, every verse, he was telling everyone how much he loved them, how much he wanted us to get crazy. He had squirt guns and buckets of water, and everyone got drenched like it was a Blue Man Group show. He mooned people and ran around like a madman, dumping bucket after bucket of water on people in the front rows.

The show was absolutely incredible, by far the best live event I’d ever see. Ozzy was just such a showman and made every person there feel like they belonged. It was so high-energy, it was absolutely infectious.

* * *

That wasn’t his retirement tour, obviously. That format of multiple opening bands became the Ozzfest, which went on for decades. A few years later, he gained a completely different audience and morphed personas with his family’s reality show. He had a second (or third, or fourth) life in the 00s and later.

I guess what I find odd about all of this is how Ozzy has this ability to be ever-present and weave his way through life without being directly in it. I can’t remember the last time I bought an Ozzy album, but when I searched my books, he’s mentioned dozens of times. It’s very similar to when I drew that picture of him without actually seeing him. The title “Ozzmosis” is very apt in a way. And that makes it harder to imagine that he’s gone. It’s a lot like how David Lynch is gone, but he’ll never feel gone, and that makes it both easier and harder to reconcile his death.

Anyway. I got a big smile watching that old concert footage, and that’s all that matters. Glad he went out on top, and was able to make so many people happy like that.

Categories
general

My first CD player

I had to rip a few CDs last week, which is a rare occurrence these days. I don’t even have a CD player at this point, and have to dig up an external optical drive for my Mac once or twice a year when this happens. It had me thinking about the rise and fall of CDs in my life, which brought me back to my first CD player ever, the Toshiba XR-J9.

So, 1987. The Compact Disc was released in Japan five years before, and audiophiles had been buying them in the US, but not so much in Elkhart, Indiana. The whole idea of digital audio was a thing of awe, total science fiction. Lasers! The ones and zeroes captured in the studio remained ones and zeroes until right before they hit your ears, with no degradation, no distortion, no mangling through resistance-bearing wires and analog amps. Some magazine article said if you dubbed a cassette from a CD, your copy would sound better than the professionally-duplicated one you bought in a store. I can’t even remember the first time I actually heard or touched a CD, and didn’t know anyone who had a player. I had to have one, of course. But I couldn’t spend a grand on a Sony home player, and didn’t really have the stereo to match, which would cost a few thousand more.

At that time, I had a Soundesign stereo, probably from Wards or Sears, which had tower speakers, sat in a wood rack with glass doors on the front, and was a single piece for the receiver, EQ, and double tape deck, but had grooves in the plastic face so it looked like a stack of individual components. It wasn’t exactly high fidelity, but it was better than the Sears all-in-one I had in grade school and junior high. And it had a pair of RCA connectors for Aux In, tempting me to add more.

I was out of the house more than I was in it back in high school, so cassette was my primary medium. In my pedestrian days, I ran through $20 Walkman clones on a regular basis, whatever I could pick up at Osco Drugs on a discount. Once I graduated to a car, it had a no-name tape deck in it. For a while, I would buy vinyl and record them to tapes, but I mostly bought cassettes, or dubbed friends’ albums onto blanks.

Every time I went to any store with audio gear, I’d ogle the various components, thinking about how someday when I was out of college and rich, my first priority (aside from a Commodore Amiga) would be to buy some esoteric system with gigantic speakers, two dozen bands of EQ, a DAT digital tape deck (what happened to those?), and of course a reference-quality CD player. There was a store in the Concord Mall called Templin’s that was half instruments, half audio gear. (Oddly, they also sold Atari home computers.) This was the place where they had separate listening rooms where you could go in and see full setups like the one in American Psycho, thousands of dollars of gear that was absolutely unobtainable to me.

In the summer of 1987, I started working my first “real” job at the Taco Bell across the highway from the Concord Mall. And right around then, CD player prices started dropping. They were like $1000, then hit $500, then $400 or $300. And around the time my first paycheck hit my pocket, I was in the K-Mart across the street from my ‘Bell, and there was this CD player that was a hundred dollars. I absolutely had to buy in, and I did. (For reference, $100 in 1987 is about $285 now. I made $3.35 an hour dealing with drive-through abuse and refried bean cooking at TB.)

The XR-J9 was an odd little beast. It was about twice the size of a battery-powered Sony Discman of that vintage, but way smaller than a component home CD player. It was a weird mix of the two, though. Like a Discman, it was a top-loader; you popped open a lid and put the disc directly on a hub, then closed the door to get the laser to start. (Laser! I now owned a Class 1 laser! 3-beam pickup, whatever that means! It even had a warning label on the bottom!)

Unlike the portable Discman, the Toshiba ran on mains only, with no provision for a battery. It also had a fixed set of RCA cables coming from the back, which would plug into a home receiver. It also had a headphone jack and volume slider on the front, but unless you had a Honda generator with you, it was in no way portable. And those cables weren’t removable, which bugged me.

The controls were spartan: a power button on the front; the usual play, pause, forward, and back buttons. You pressed in a corner of the lid and then it unlatched and popped open. It also had a Display button, which I think toggled the time versus the time remaining that showed on the small LCD display. Some buttons had multiple functions. If you pressed Forward once, it would skip a track; hold it and it would fast-forward through the track, playing a sliver of sound every five seconds. This was amazing coming from the tape world, because I swear I spent half my batteries jumping around tapes, and this was instant. Random access! There was also some elaborate combination of buttons you could mash to access a “memory” mode where you could program up to 16 tracks in any order to get a custom playlist, which was a huge pain in the ass to do, and then it immediately went away when you opened the player. I would very occasionally do this when listening to The Police – Synchronicity so I could skip track 4 (“Mother”) because I never felt like it matched the rest of the album. (Now I think it’s the best track.)

The obvious problem after sinking a whole paycheck into this thing was that I now needed music. I think at that time, a tape was like $7.99 and an LP was $9.99, but a CD was $15.99. Each title was an investment. I went to Super Sounds, my favorite record store ever in the Concord Mall, and went A-Z through their three or four racks of CDs, trying to figure this one. (At that time, CDs were in “long boxes” which were the same height and half the width of an LP, so stores could use the same vertical racks for the new format.)

My first purchase was the most recent Iron Maiden album, Somewhere in Time. I was way too into Maiden at the time, and this album was a perfect storm for me: it was Iron Maiden; it had this futuristic cyberpunk theme; it was what I thought at the time was super-modern, ultra-technical sounding; it was digitally mastered; it was Iron Maiden; it was loud, but precise. It was also almost an hour long, so it was like twice as long as if I’d just bought a Boston album or whatever. I remember bringing the CD home, listening to the whole thing on headphones, and there was this one part on the song “Deja-Vu” where Nicko McBrain is playing this snare volley right before the chorus comes back in, and I could suddenly hear that he was also tapping out time on the hi-hat, which wasn’t audible on the cassette. It absolutely blew my 16-year-old mind.

Of course, I had no more money, so I had to go sling tacos and wait two more weeks to get something else. I don’t remember why, but I got the ELP album Trilogy next. A headphone listen also bewildered me. The first song starts with a beating heart, then Emerson doodling away on keyboards, which sounded incredibly crisp, compared to a muddy cassette. After two minutes, the rest of the band suddenly came crashing in, and the dynamic range demonstrated by the sudden change was incredible.

I can’t remember what was the third disc, but I did waver on whether I wanted the high quality of a CD or having twice as many at-bats by sticking to tape. By that fall when I started working at Wards and moved to weekly paychecks, I vowed to myself that I’d buy a tape every week, if not more. I pretty much stopped buying CDs for a while, until maybe my senior year, when I discovered the Columbia House and BMG CD clubs.

About twenty years later, the CD thing came to an end, with just shy of a thousand titles in my collection. I’d slowly been ripping things to MP3 when the 21st century started. Once the iPod hit, CDs became a temporary medium I used until I could rip the tracks to a hard drive, then became a backup in storage in case my computer died. On November 22, 2005, I made my first purchase on iTunes, and that was the beginning of the end. Now, almost everything is added from Apple Music or bought from Bandcamp.

(Oddly enough, the first track I ever bought online was Harry Nilsson’s “Remember.” The reason I suddenly needed to hear it again was a memory of the Michiana student TV show Beyond Our Control, which closed each episode with the song.)

That Toshiba lasted until maybe 1992, when it mysteriously died, stopped loading up discs. I bought a Kenwood portable player that summer (this was described in Summer Rain) and that unit suddenly became my main CD player for a few years until I bought a Kenwood 6+1 changer at the start of 1994. The Kenwood portable never really got used as a portable, because it drained AA batteries so fast, and this was before the anti-skip memory thing was out, so it was fairly useless on the go. I never considered CD as a portable medium, using the MiniDisc from the late 90s until the iPod showed up. I didn’t own a car with a CD player until 2007, when the format was dead. My 2014 car had a CD player that I think I used once. I honestly could not remember if my 2025 car even has one, and I guess it doesn’t.

All of this is so strange to think about, because that 1987 dream of someday having a gigantic reference system in my home is long gone. (So’s that desire for a new Amiga, but that’s another story.) MP3 wasn’t even a dream back then. I listen to 99% of my music on AirPods these days. I don’t have a room full of racks of CDs. I could afford to go buy any stereo I want, but what would I even buy? I bought a pair of near-field monitors for my desk literally a month before the pandemic started and I had to go to pure headphones for the locked-in-the-same-apartment 24/7 thing. I think I have two different Kenwood receivers in storage, and use a $200 sound bar in the living room for the TV. Music is still important, and I’m listening to stuff every day. But the technology has changed and the meaning of where it is in my life has too. Is that good or bad?