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.
