Eulogy For A Madman: Rest Easy, John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne

Being actively online can be a terrifically strange thing to experience if you happen to be old enough to remember… the Before Times. This becomes imminently clear when misfortune hits because, if you’re like me—and if you’re reading these words, you are, to an extent, floating in a comparable boat—you have spent the last week or so seeing images of John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne from most every conceivable angle. This includes the mutually rock and metal-minded in your respective circle(s), complete strangers from all manner of miles away, metal musicians, non-metal musicians, famous athletes, famous actors, has-beens, politicians, LITERAL CITIES, etc. ad infinitum. It’s a strange phenomenon, grieving massively en masse, but it’s also peculiar doing so in these strange sort of bite-sized frameworks that result in a hurricane of collective heartbreak pounded into our brains in a matter of hours. Is it helpful to process pain this way? Hell if I know. I’m sure way smarter people than yours trul study that sort of thing for a living.

Back in the Before Times, when the leveling news of a musician’s passing hit, it was mostly MTV that bore the responsibility of welcoming everyone together to commiserate the loss. Cliff Burton in ’86, for example. I recall a fair bit of MTV coverage from all manner of angles, but even with that I mostly remember feeling isolated with my grief over his passing. Like I’d just lost a beloved family member I’d never actually met in person, and everyone else equally affected out there in the world was also teetering and trying to figure out how to process the dreadful loss. So, yes, I have come to the conclusion that the way we collectively experience the loss of icons today en masse is one of those increasingly rare circumstances where the internet uses its power for good, because misery loves company, and maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I feel bad, you feel bad, and so does everyone from Robert Plant to Rob Halford to Randy Johnson to Gavin Newsom to Dan frigging Quayle, plus countless others from nearly every walk of life. All these people paying tribute to someone as wildly unpredictable and entertaining as our Ozzy has put a sudden rush of testimonial positivity into the universe that transcends most all of the seemingly uncrossable cultural lines we’ve managed to establish in the modern age, and that’s pretty remarkable.

Yes, unfortunately there will always be those who labor to find ways to throw some form of shade (on the DAY of Ozzy’s death, no less—how miserable these people must be), but imagine trying to dig for pejoratives on a fellow who once snorted ants, for hell’s sake. None of us looked to Ozzy as some sort of bastion of cultural sensitivity. He was the guy we expected to put his head through a wall at Christmas dinner, and there’s really not much more info we need to know about his personal life outside of how much he adored his family, his friends, his fans, and Pomeranians.

Like so many of you, my first experience with Ozzy came with Black Sabbath in my youth. It’s pretty difficult to pinpoint a true first experience, though, because, as my friend Wolf Rambatz stated so perfectly in his recent ‘Tracks of Note’ Substack, “Black Sabbath is so entwined with the culture that I don’t actually remember the first time I heard it. It was just there, a fact of life, elemental, like dirt, like rocks, like the sun rising and setting.” Bullseye, that.

Ozzy’s solo career, though? That I trotted alongside in realtime. To be honest, I sort of avoided it at first because at the time my focus was mostly pointed toward the wholly uncharted terrain that metal was all too willing to supply in spades amidst its embryonic years. Then one day in school I saw a kid named Phil Manzo getting his ear bent by a teacher in the hallway for wearing an OZZY FOR PRESIDENT t-shirt, and I suddenly found my interest piqued. Phil was one of those dudes who’d constantly get reprimanded for wearing sunglasses during class, and he always seemed to have a pair of drumsticks in his hands, so… yeah, he obviously knew what the hell was up. It’s funny how something like that can stick with a kid, but if a teacher thought something—ANYthing—was offensive enough to warrant a reprimand: [RADAR PING RADAR PING RADAR PING]

From there, the full dive commenced. And while I enjoyed the first three LPs, the album that made the biggest and most immediate impact for me was The Ultimate Sin in 1986. The record’s cover artwork was completely unhinged, and you honestly couldn’t escape its hook if you paid attention to MTV as they slowly wobbled into the Headgiver’s Ball years. The Ultimate Sin just felt more metal, too, even if that metal was glossy as balls and the band looked unnecessarily bedazzled. Plus, Jake E. Lee’s playing style, particularly those leads, very much appealed to the George Lynch fanboy baked into my heart, and really… who in the shit could ever find the strength to NOT root for a maniac who looked like a crooked oil tycoon one minute and Delta Burke haunting the set of Designing Women the next.

As far as paying proper tribute to an individual with an impact as huge as Ozzy’s… Well, that’s no easy task. He was the voice of heavy metal, and that goes beyond his role as a singer and a bonafide fountainhead for the juice for any of the musicians who always seemed so stoked to play alongside him. Much like John Madden was to football and Bob Uecker was to baseball, Ozzy was the ambassador we most wanted to represent the metal realm to the world, and that’s with full knowledge that he could very well end up shooting off a bottle rocket from his pants at a formal dinner. He was… everyone’s crazy uncle, hauling a sixer to your little league game and possibly hitting the police blotter the very next day, but also the first person to make you feel better about your own failings, even if it was from afar inside the bars of a song like “Secret Loser.” Ozzy was larger than 9 lives, exceptionally charismatic, deeply flawed, and from most every indication later in his life, an absolute prince to have in your immediate sphere because of the sheer amount of love his heart was willing to dispense.

As is our wont, Last Rites chooses to eulogize our fallen icon by of course bringing it back to the music: A simple formula where individuals acknowledge a single song that’s hit us with a particularly noticeable thump. Maybe that song landed at precisely the right time, maybe that song has simply managed to stand the test of time, or perhaps it’s some combination of both. For me, despite the fact that I will likely always consider The Ultimate Sin my ultimate pick for a favorite Ozzy solo record, it is the phenomenal “Miracle Man” that hauls home the bluest ribbon. So with that in mind, let’s get to the Ozzy Osblurbs!

THANK YOU, John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne, from a very full heart for all the years of wonderful music AND for being the wild, fun-loving uncle I never had the chance to appreciate face-to-face. You will be missed. [CAPTAIN]

MIRACLE MAN

[No Rest for the Wicked, 1988]

By 1988, my taste in metal was mostly focused on the more extreme and / or progressive end of the spectrum, so I don’t really recall No Rest for the Wicked making even the smallest splash in my life until years later. Sure, songs hit terrestrial radio and MTV, but any time spent with either of those mediums for me was time torn away from records such as Forbidden Evil, Born to Expire and Dimension Hatröss, and that seemed impossible.

Years later, though, whilst rotting in an Econ class and fighting to stay conscious, I glanced a CD version of No Rest sitting atop some dude’s notebook a desk away. An odd thing to suddenly notice as some pickled suit droned on and on about the causes of inflation, but also strange because it felt a bit like the Ozzy represented on the album cover was staring daggers straight through me. “WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME. LOOK AT YOU, THINKING ABOUT BEING A BLOODY BUSINESS MAN, YOU BELLEND.”

Ozzy was right.

Some unspecified number of days later, I shuffled into Magnolia Thunderpussy and found a used cassette version for like two bucks, not really expecting to have my lid flipped. The opening “Miracle Man” set the stage so forcefully, however, that the album ended up in regular rotation amidst a playlist that mostly involved slaughterings from the burgeoning death metal scene. A most welcome palette cleanser, if you will.

Truth is, No Rest for the Wicked boasts more than a couple true heavy hitters in its ranks: “Fire in the Sky,” “Breakin’ All the Rules,” and “Hero,” not to mention the ballad from the Japanese version, “The Liar.” But the launch to “Miracle Man” features a riff intro to the Zakk Wylde years of the band that’s such a fucking world-beater that ZW wouldn’t have been able to top it if he’d had another 100 years to try. Seriously, standing at the pearly gates with St. Peter holding an already warm glock to my head, I might go with that opening riff as my favorite of all time—certainly in the top five. It’s just so insanely infectious, and so warm AND leveling at the same time. And that unmistakable Ozzy laugh that slides in so sinisterly as the song quickly works into its invincible strut is damn-near supernatural in its power to demand the listener to abuse the volume knob. The rest of the song is fire as well, as is the unhinged video, but that warhead riff is clearly the epicenter, especially when it rolls in again like a backdraft fueled by gin off Wylde’s explosive lead.

Bottom line: To consider “Miracle Man” just a ‘good opener’ should be a crime punishable by… having to be in a two-hour Econ class at 8am three days a week for the rest of your life. That or waterboarding, whichever seems worse. It’s a song that’s never failed to make me feel ten feet tall, and it’s something I often look to when I need a boost from feeling lost, isolated and / or dejected. So, yes, a tune that’s come in very handy over this past week, for sure. Thanks again for orchestrating that one for us, Ozz. [CAPTAIN]

MR. CROWLEY

[Blizzard of Ozz, 1980]

Like many, I find it hard to believe that Ozzy is gone. Despite the fact that he’s been tempting death for most of his adult life, he always seemed so invincible, so eternal. Part of that is due to his unequaled stature in this thing we love called heavy metal; there might be people that are more musically important to metal, but no one was a bigger figure or celebrity. Ozzy held a grip on the spirit of metal for more than 50 years, and he was loved because all he ever wanted to do was share that spirit with the world and smile through it all. His unyielding musical generosity made him a magnetic presence for decades, as did his humanity. Ozzy was a flawed, regular bloke – his misdeeds are legendary – but all of that just made his fans love him all the more.

But to me, there was another thing that made him magnetic: his duality. From his campy photoshoots and tendency to dump water all over his exhausted fans to his enthusiastic clapping and jumping around on stage, Ozzy could appear more than a little goofy to those uninitiated to his music… and to those that knew his music. That was just his love for rock and roll coming out in the widest grin possible. But paired with that is the darker side of his actual music. That voice. That voice could be the scariest thing in rock and roll, and Black Sabbath wouldn’t have gained nearly the reputation for being spooky without him wailing in terror at that figure in black more than half a century ago.

While his solo career overall didn’t possess the enveloping darkness of Sabbath, there were certainly moments, and none haunts more than the 100 percent certified, undeniably perfect song called “Mr. Crowley.” Ozzy’s magical delivery throughout the song manages to convey both the horror of what ol’ Aleister was up to and a sense of sorrow, of tragedy that a human would put himself through such things in the search of some unknown, and ultimately false knowledge. Bob Daisley’s lyrics are fantastical, but through Ozzy’s voice, they communicate this feeling of failure. The song isn’t praising Crowley, but lamenting what he allowed himself to become.

Yes, the song begins with that iconic Don Airy keyboard feature, and yes, it certainly has heaps of Randy Rhoads fretboard fireworks (inarguably some of his best soloing), but if one moment stands out strongest among the five minutes of “Mr. Crowley,” it’s that first time Ozzy, with no accompaniment, sings the title. He’s restrained, almost nervous about the tales of which he’s singing. It’s a perfect moment within a perfect song, and an amazing example of how Ozzy constantly elevated the incredible musicians with whom he was always collaborating.

So farewell, Ozzy, and thank you. Thank you for “Mr. Crowley” and “Diary of a Madman” and “Killer of Giants” and “Hero” and “No More Tears” and “My Jekyll Doesn’t Hide” and a zillion other classics that have enriched my life and the lives of countless others. You were a giant that managed to feel like a relatable friend to all of us misfits and weirdos, and it’s a gargantuan understatement to say that there will never be another like you.
[ZACH DUVALL]

SHOT IN THE DARK

[The Ultimate Sin, 1986]

One major problem that humanity has yet to overcome is the issue of mortality. Despite our best efforts, the greatest humans continue to die off at an alarming rate of 100%. Sure, people have dreamed of a Fountain of Youth but those people thought it existed in Florida – land of the aged, Medicare fraud, and bath salt-fueled rampages. Needless to say we are unlikely to solve the “death issue” before we all look death in his cold eyes.

To cope, humans have invented immortal fantasies: John the Apostle, Gilgamesh, Markandaya, The Rebbe, Tithonus, al-Khidr, Ziusudra, Ashwatthama… the list goes on. By believing that these people, these creatures, have been granted the gift of immortality, simply because they are special, we’ve created hope. Humans have even invented a flawed creature plagued with immortality: vampires. And while spiritual and/or religious folks might aspire to be so special as to be granted the gift, it’s the flawed, depressingly lonely creatures of book and film that seem the most achievable.

In 1986 my own immortality dreams were shattered when I had my first heart attack. The result was an emergency operation to install a pacemaker into my tummy and jam plugs into my 5-year old heart; an electrical sensation sent to the muscle when it misbehaved like a dog barking at the UPS delivery person and receiving a shock in its collar. And while mortality loomed heavy in life expectancy figures, my yet-to-be-stifled child brain figured if they could make me a robot what couldn’t they do. So I began to dream.

I also spent endless hours driving around with my mother in her stark white Plymouth Acclaim – radio blaring. It was in that simple machine (hundreds of times larger than the infinitely more complex device inside me) that I heard riffs, voices, songs, and albums that would alter my mortal life. One of the most impactful moments was when I first heard the voice of John Michael Osbourne – better known to us as Ozzy – a man so special he should have been granted immortality.

The first time I ever heard his voice he was singing the re-worked 1983 tune by Wildlife entitled, “Shot in the Dark.” This was a different Ozzy than the character-rich singer of incantations I would come to know and love. But in a sea of spandex, teased hair, overly treble-laden riffage, and songs about “chicks” this tune stood out. The Prince of Darkness called to me from the black and green liquid crystal display offering me an endless existence if I would only accept and succumb to this ultimate sin.

At this point Ozzy too was on a path of recovery of sorts. Sure, it wouldn’t stick, but he’d undergone something while at the Betty Ford Center and he would take that more positive message into much of his work around this time. There was hope. Hope in the endless fountain of life ripping through those veins and forging connections around the globe.

“Shot in the Dark” launched my journey begging my mother for cassettes and cassingles to play in my room while reading adventure novels. Ozzy (and of course Black Sabbath) because the soundtrack to my nights as I stared over farm lands looking at skies full of stars yet unimpeded by the immortal growth of commercialism. His pre-1985 voice hauntingly cut forth out of my cassette deck like a warm embrace; a steamy cauldron of invocation that would soon hurl me into main passion and obsession: music.

While none of us have found immortality, we can all admit that we have dreamed. Unlike Ozzy we have not put hundreds of hours of our voice on two-inch analog tape. We have not pierced millions of people’s hearts and souls nor have we toured the globe or flown as close to the sun. Yet we have a responsibility to keep those before us alive in memory. And that is why we sit here and write tributes such as this (though painful) to our youthful heroes. “Shot in the Dark,” as a recorded song, is immortal. It stays always the same age – frozen in time be it whatever format. And every single time we press play on the track Ozzy is reborn; immortal in those moments. Never let the party (of life) die.

“But just like the wounded… they’ll remember.” [MANNY]

ROAD TO NOWHERE

[No More Tears, 1991]

By 1991, Ozzy had spent two decades in the trenches of rock ‘n’ roll stardom. Ozzy The Persona had only gotten bigger and stronger, conquering the charts and the stages, while Ozzy The Person had survived inhuman levels of substance abuse and nonstop insanity. Polished and shiny and sailing in right before the grunge revolution, No More Tears was one of his most successful albums (and one of his best), and its closing track found our heroic wildman in a reflective mood, looking back at all the madness he’d somehow come through, wondering if it added up to anything at all.

By 1991, I was a young teenager, having jumped into the crazy world of metal a few years before. I had spent countless hours with Blizzard Of Ozz and No Rest For The Wicked and Tribute and We Sold Our Soul. No More Tears was the first new Ozzy record after our paths converged, and it was A Big Deal To Me. Ozzy was larger than life; he was funny and charming; the stuffy-ass old church people told us he was demonic, and that made him even more intriguing. Most importantly, he fucking rocked; his band rocked; his songs rocked; his records rocked. That was what mattered most to me then, and it’s pretty much what matters most to me now (along with continuing to annoy the stuffy-ass old church people, which is just a personal hobby). I picked up Tears on cassette at the mall in Kingsport not long after it came along, and I wore that poor tape out, cranking up “Mr. Tinkertrain” and “Desire” and “S.I.N.” and all the way through to the glory of “Road To Nowhere,” over and over and over, around and around and around again.

With its composition credited to Ozzy, Zakk, and drummer Randy Castillo, “Road To Nowhere” is a power ballad that’s heavy on the power, alternating between quieter verses and a classic Wylde-ian chorus riff (with pinch squeals, of course). That power lies in the combination of those riffs, that melody, and the melancholy lyric, a perfect-storm combination of hard rock greatness. It’s sad, pensive, lightly self-effacing – “how could anyone living Ozzy’s life wonder if it led to something meaningful?,” teenage me wondered then, and nearly-fifty-year-old me wonders now) – but it’s also hard-hitting, with a melodic hook built for arenas, and guitar leads that are soaring and searing at the same time. The video featured the Ozzman sneering at (and ultimately shooting a hole in) a television playing images of his younger self, a completely unsubtle take on the older Ozzy’s desire to break from the “wreckage of [his] past.” He announced his retirement after the album exploded, dubbing the subsequent worldwide live trek as “No More Tours,” and it seemed like our hero was going out on top…

In those moments, I thought this was it, all the Ozzy I would ever get, and it was a bummer but at least what we had was one of the greatest catalogs in rock. Of course, the story changed, we all know – retirement sucked; television beckoned; a generation of metal bands and metalheads converged on some of the biggest summer tours around, and a final show in Villa Park brought us all together one last time to show where that road really led, to prove that it wasn’t all for nothing. All that happiness and sorrow did add up – and not only to something, but in fact, to everything, for a lot of us. Seeing all the tributes flowing in from every corner of the world, from every type of person, it turns out there are a lot of us. Thanks so much for everything, Ozzy – we love you. Good night. [ANDREW EDMUNDS]

CRAZY TRAIN

[Blizzard of Ozz, 1980]

Is it fair to say that “Crazy Train” remains perhaps the most iconic (or at least emblematic) song of Ozzy’s solo career? For anyone who grew up listening to rock radio in the 80s and 90s, “Crazy Train” almost ceased to be a discrete song and became instead part of the sonic ocean we all swam in every day. On the schoolbus, at the mall, between innings at the baseball stadium… everywhere. And without fail, Ozzy’s “ALL ABOOOOOAAAAARD” was always somehow both the wildest and most relatable altar-call.

Booted out of Sabbath at the tail end of the 70s and following two albums that weren’t so much bad as they were pulling apart at the seams of several possible futures, the 1980s could just as easily have begun with Ozzy sliding out of frame and bottoming out into irrelevance. Instead, with “Crazy Train” as his new band’s opening salvo and Randy Rhoads his ferociously hungry new guitar muse, Ozzy swiftly captured the zeitgeist and conquered the mainstream more completely than Sabbath ever had.

But all of this sounds so far like a recipe for grudging respect, right? Hey, here’s a song you’ve heard approximately eight billion times, and here’s why it was Very Important To Music. Friend, that’s not wrong, but it’s never why we love music, right? I would love to tell you that I have some extremely personal story about how and why “Crazy Train” entered my life and what it meant to me, but I can’t do that. Like I said, “Crazy Train” was there before I was. I’m certain I heard it before I had the words or thoughts to process music, to compare this song to that song or this voice to that. But precisely because of that omnipresence, it means that Ozzy’s performance here is in no small part responsible for how I became a person who vibrates to certain frequencies.

For many of those standard but obnoxious years in my twenties I assumed that, because I had wide-ranging musical tastes, all of those things I grew up knowing as ‘popular’ were bad. I wanted things that were Modern and Difficult and Extreme, and something like “Crazy Train” felt, well, dated, like an anachronism. But Ozzy was still always there, singing to me (hell, maybe at me). And “Crazy Train” was there, too, an insistent but surprisingly warm-hearted reminder that truly great music, even though it necessarily emerges within a particular context of time and trend and tone, transcends all of that. The piece that eventually hooked me ALL the way back in with Ozzy’s solo work was “Crazy Train,” and in particular the almost unparalleled chewiness of Rhoads’s guitar riff. The only thing that comes close to the combination of guitar tone and rhythmic whiplash of “Crazy Train,” for me, is Mercyful Fate’s “Curse of the Pharaohs.”

But what keeps me with “Crazy Train” now, after all these years, is Ozzy. The open-endedness of the song’s lyrics are likely not what stands out when the song first hits your memory center. Most likely you’ll think about that “All aboard” opening, the twitchy percussion, Rhoads’s squealing run down to that first, snaking riff. If I think about the song in the abstract, it feels like, “Oh, hey, a great song by this wild and crazy guy Ozzy about how wild and crazy he is.” But that’s not it! It’s actually about all the ways in which the world had gone crazy and was headed straight to hell, and the ways that unmoors us. Millions of people living as foes. Heirs of the Cold War. I’ve listened to preachers; I’ve listened to fools. But if you listen to how Ozzy sings it? Those verses? Rhoads plays a warm, grit-palmed boogie, and Ozzy matches him with a similar questioning warmth. His nasal, wobbly melodies (always – ALWAYS – piercingly simple and impossible to forget) are trying to understand, trying to bring us back home. The pre-chorus foregrounds those mental wounds, though – they gloss up high and long – and then Rhoads’s little descending half-scale to the final chorus anchors Ozzy’s voice down to the dirt of reality even as his beautiful double-tracked vocals soar impossibly high.

In “Goodbye to Romance,” Ozzy sang, “I’ve been the king, I’ve been the clown.” On “Crazy Train,” he embodied a similar duality – bringing an over-the-top pantomime, an irrepressible jester’s madcap laugh, to the everyday business of trying to live well when the world is wild and hard. Ozzy’s voice, his songs, his presence will not diminish for me now that he has passed on to the beyond, but I am sad that this affable, improbable titan of a conductor – one whose “all aboard” exhortation was truly meant to invite all of us to sing together as one – has left the station for the last time. [DAN OBSTKRIEG]

GETS ME THROUGH

[Down to Earth, 2001]

When the music video for “Gets Me Through” was released, I would’ve been around 13 years old. A prime age for beginning the journey into the heavy music abyss while simultaneously being an asshat with zero respect for the history of the genre. You see, at that point, my familiarity with Ozzy Osbourne was primarily limited to randomly hearing “Crazy Train” and watching that ridiculous reality show The Osbournes. I definitely would’ve thought he was already 76 back then and was mostly thinking along the lines of “this puttering old goober is who a bunch of people are afraid of?”

Despite that fully stupid line of thinking being firmly in place and dismissing the man’s catalogue as old man music, the first time seeing “Gets Me Through” on Total Request Live (TRL) of all places created a shift. That main Zakk Wylde riff was an undeniable earworm. In the great pantheon of Ozzy and Sabbath riffs, it’s far down the list and certainly one of its era, aiming to please the masses that were clamoring for Ozzfest at the time, but man, does it still hit. The riff is the hook, but Ozzy’s straightforward lyrics, penned like a love letter to fans, made it all the better, albeit cheesy. Even though I didn’t have the perspective on his career to get the full picture of all the references within, the sentiment was clear. I was mostly looking for all angst all the time at 13, but something about this struck that balance between coming across as heavy while feeling like getting a hug from a loved one you haven’t seen in a long time. That clicked as something unique in my mind and inspired me to give The Prince of Darkness a shot by picking up a best-of album.

That compilation wasn’t a homerun right off the bat, but steady visits over months and years would eventually lead me to dipping my toe into the world of Black Sabbath with their self-titled debut. A borderline trite tale occurred as those opening notes to “Black Sabbath” were flooring. How could something that old still be THAT heavy? The floodgates were open. I needed more Sabbath, more Ozzy and to learn about more bands that were heavier than they should’ve been at a time when heavy metal wasn’t really a thing yet. Beyond that, the jamming nature of that debut drove home the influence of the blues and started me down the path of understanding this music’s history while I dug for more blues-tinged rockers, such as Savoy Brown.

My entry point may have been different from my peers in this space, but it’s a testament to Ozzy’s ability to morph over time and surround himself with top talent that he could still entice young minds with his music 31 years into his career. I have no doubts that it was still happening 55 years into his career and what he leaves behind will continue to be a sherpa for many more in the decades ahead. “Gets Me Through” is likely a track that many fans don’t think much about these days, but that’s the power of Ozzy; even his “throwaway” tracks can usher in new devotees to the darkened kingdom. [SPENCER HOTZ]

FOOL LIKE YOU

[The Ultimate Sin, 1986]

By design, “Fool Like You” is not the most obvious choice here. Hell, it’s not even a deep cut on The Ultimate Sin. And the lyrics, well…. hardly inspired.

Yet, there’s something very Trick or Treat-era Fastway about “Fool Like You.” Or maybe even that brief era immediately Trick or Treat. Waiting for the Roar. Anthemic. Fun solos. Great opening riff. Repetitive. But also fairly hypnotic when it’s drilled into you enough. All that was enough to make this otherwise unassuming song particularly appealing to me.

And, I think consciously, that’s why I arrived, of all songs, on this song. Of course, the big hits were taken early and that didn’t help. But the larger point is the Ozzy well is a deep one and there’s a strange sort of magic from at least Blizzard to No More Tears. Distinct imprints shaped in large part by the guitarist at the time, sure. But the common thread, of course, is Ozzy. And I don’t know that there was a singer who had less training and yet possessed that same degree of adaptive ability; it’s kind of miraculous. Clearly not in that Dave King mold but he’s got me thinking of mid-1980s Fastway all the same. That’s the charm of it. And that was the charm of him and his music. [CHRIS C.]

NO MORE TEARS

[No More Tears, 1991]

I chuckle to think that “No More Tears”, a seven-and-a half-minute bulging behemoth of a track, was released 6 days after “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. What an unintentional, yet glorious Go Fuck Yourself. Playfully Osbournian, no? I like Nirvana as much as the next guy (inasmuch as one can without ever having purchased a recording), but if given the choice between a swaggering, blockbuster / riffblaster and a squirrelly, kinda dirty screacher? Maestro, please layeth upon me your mightiest synthetic orchestra. NO pianissimo, ALL MARCATO.

Ozzy and Zakk are the twin turbo grand champions of this’n. Ozzy with a perfectly slithering menace to his melodies, crafting a nebulous but satiating tale of E-ville. Zakk is playing every note with every fiber of both biceps. Truly, it doesn’t sound like he is playing his guitar so much as he is strength-ing his guitar. The opening leads and verse riffs are torn from the wood and hulk-smashed onto the tape. Their dual energies are the yin to the rest of the orchestrations yang — a beautiful amalgam of airy pomp and dreadful circumstance. Is this Ozzy’s least cheeky single? I reckon so. If there’s a sly wink in his performance I certainly can’t see it, but hey, I have abysmal vision.

I would be remiss not to mention the sinister left (here come the Redundant Police weeyoo weeyoo) turns afoot. If the stately piano midsection is intended only as a red herring to set up the volcanic guitar solo then so be it, but I, for one, appreciate it as a detour to dreamland on the SS Progrock. Come to think of it, structurally “No More Tears” is like an inverted meatball sub  two rows of neatly arranged and beefy balls surround a single, canoe-shaped and puffy middle. The clean, starchy filling acts as a bready respite and helps absorb the grease of the outer two sections. Before I get too sandwichy — how about that subtle extension of the chorus riff to close? Just like in “Perfect Strangers” by Deep Purple, you lengthen the back half of a particularly stomping riff to give the proceedings a little flair, some plectrummed pizzazz. Just wonderful stuff.

By 1991 you could say that Ozzy had proven enough, right? Black Sabbath forever cursed the world with their brilliance, his 80’s output proved he could quite attractively couple the dark and dangerous with the sleek and scripted nature of radio. What else is there to do but many, many drugs atop a flaming throne of cashola? “No More Tears”, asshole. That’s what.

A brilliant song from a brilliant performer. A working class hero and a towering icon, the same. Rest in Power, Ozzy. [ISAAC HAMS]

SECRET LOSER

[The Ultimate Sin, 1986]

Everything in life eventually ends up as a mere memory. But when it’s there, always sitting right in front of me, it’s almost unfathomable to consider that one day, it’ll be just that: a memory.

Everyone loved Ozzy. Even with that, he somehow always connected with his admirers — those who sometimes felt like outcasts or completely alien to the world. I’ve always found it difficult to say how much music means to me. But this one is hitting differently.

Put simply, when the news broke, it was a gut punch. Hell, I named myself after the guy!

Really quick — it’s odd that I’m so connected to someone I’ve never met. But music is a powerful thing. I grew up listening to Ozzy. From Sabbath to his solo material, he somehow always howled in the background. I owe many friendships and memories to the guy. By no means is that a stretch. Without Ozzy and Sabbath, you wouldn’t be reading this right now. And I wouldn’t have these lovely folks at Last Rites to call my pals. Truly, it brightens my day to shoot the shit with these dudes. Moreover, I wouldn’t have the beautiful memories and nostalgia of sitting at home with my parents watching The Osbournes, or the road trips with The Ultimate Sin blaring on cassette as the miles and miles to Florida drifted by.

Hot take: Some days, I think The Ultimate Sin might be my favorite Ozzy album. It’s a quintessential 80s record. Nothing speaks more to that than the second track and perhaps his most underrated tune, “Secret Loser.” A young, angsty Jozzsh, who oftentimes felt misunderstood and isolated, held the lyrics close to his heart. Again, Ozzy had an unmatched connection to his listeners. Even if he didn’t write the lyrics to this one, the melodies and passion bleed through the speakers. Throw in Jake E. Lee’s lead-playing, and it’s a recipe for sheer grandeur.

And hear me out for a second. “Secret Loser” wouldn’t sound too out of place on Ratt’s Out of the Cellar, and maybe that’s what I love about it. While dark, there’s still something fun and lighthearted. A plethora of Ozzy tracks mirror that same tone. And that’s a mirror image of the man himself — vulnerable and self-deprecating yet humorous. He never shied away from his darkness, and he certainly never shied away from the lightness he gifted the world.

Ozzy no longer walks this plane of existence, but his presence through music will echo into eternity. For more than three decades, I guess I never considered that one day there wouldn’t be another show, record, or interview. He’d have to live through my memories. And that’s on my naivety and the “secret loser” in me that takes the here and now for granted. I don’t think I will anymore. Everything I hold dear in this life will somehow fade away. This was a reminder of that. I don’t think that’s a pessimistic way of looking at this at all. Instead, it’s a wake-up call that I should cherish every moment with every person/thing I have left. Thanks for everything, Ozzy.  [BLIZZARD OF JOZZSH]

CENTRE OF ETERNITY

[Bark At The Moon, 1983]

I was probably 12 when my mom caught me eyeballing Speak Of The Devil on the shelf of (probably) a Kmart record section. The look on her face said “no way,” of course, but it was unnecessary because I wasn’t going to ask anyway. Not just because I already knew the answer but also because, maaaaan, that guy kind of scared me. I don’t recall for certain where I was in discovering heavy metal, or whether the bat story was out there yet, but there was definitely a thick, foreboding air around it all in my tiny little hometown and Ozzy seemed to be at the center of it, more than KISS and AC/DC and even Black Sabbath before him.

And then a while later, Bark At The Moon hit radio and MTV. Ozzy as a werewolf!? Okay, this is… not scary at all. It’s fun! And there were interviews that showed him to be a pretty regular guy, nice even, weird, and definitely fun. The album solidified the notion with the lyrics to “You’re No Different” and “Rock ‘n’ Roll Rebel” and digging into his earlier albums reinforced it with songs like “You Can’t Kill Rock and Roll.” His delivery of that sort of everyman lyric made the music a little less dangerous and immeasurably more relatable to an angry and uncertain boy growing up in the land of Jesus and cowboys.

But Ozzy was also such a fan of escapism and the fantastical songs he made about escaping the daily grind are some of his best, “Centre of Eternity” (“Forever” on Euro editions) being the one that grabbed me hardest and has never really ever let go even after all these years.

“Centre” opens with a tolling church bell, chanting, and massive pipe organ, hitting fundamentally different from the other songs on Bark and as a reminder that this is still the Prince of Darkness. Jake Lee’s main riff is propulsive and persistent, perfect for a song about time travel or trippin’ balls or just generally hurling through the cosmos. Ozzy’s urgent, punctuated vocals alongside Jake through the verses really drive the tension, a great example of what a tremendous vocalist he was, able to impart such a wide range of emotion through genuine enthusiasm and an unfair allotment of charisma. His pensive bridge lays the groundwork for an epic buildup and absolutely world class solo from Jake, emblematic of the vast talent behind and around the iconic frontman throughout his career.

“Centre of Eternity” is actually probably at least loosely based on Asimov’s The End of Eternity, but at the time I only knew it was about not here and not now and that hit real close to home. Ozzy sang those enigmatic words with such conviction that I thought he must know just how I felt, and now I know that, at least in some small way, he really did. [LONE WATIE]

BORN TO BE WILD

[Kermit Unpigged, 1994]

I’m sure at some point I’d heard Ozzy through Black Sabbath, perhaps on the radio or in a store before coming across him on The Muppets’ Kermit Unpigged album around the age of six or seven, but the honest truth is I don’t remember hearing a note of his voice before being gifted the CD from a relative. I do remember already knowing the name Ozzy Osbourne, however, and knowing it was synonymous with a darker and more…controversial side of the rock ‘n’ roll music that I myself was only beginning to dip a toe into, at least outside the likes of The Beatles or Neil Young. You know, the stuff that my parents listened to.

As many have mentioned above in their own experiences with the Ozzman, even my developing mind and near-blank palette knew rock ‘n’ roll that got the parental/teacher/authority figure stamp of approval was watering down a vital aspect of the spirit of the genre. While I can’t recall if it was while I was playing the CD or if it was when my father was perusing the track list of my newly acquired Muppet-themed treasure, I do remember him making an off-comment along the lines of, “Ozzy Osbourne (which he pronounced “Osburn”)? That guy is a wacko!” No further context given or needed for my curious mind who still didn’t understand what made Elvis controversial in his early days.

If anything, Ozzy’s appearance on Kermit Unpigged confirmed my father’s astute observation. For those unfamiliar with the record, it follows the story of The Muppets cast getting lost in a recording studio on their way to record an album. Throughout the course of the album, various Muppets stumble across a wide variety of artists in the studio and record duets with the likes of Vince Gill, George Benson, Linda Ronstadt, Jimmy Buffett (“Look Gonzo! Jimmy’s Buffet! Let’s eat!”), Don Henley, and, of course, The Prince Of Darkness himself. The pairing couldn’t have been more perfect–Miss Piggy (voiced by another timeless Oz), looking for Kermit, wanders into a studio and exclaims “Ozzy Osbourne?! Boy, did I open the wrong door!” Ozzy convinces her to stick around for a cover of the Steppenwolf classic, “Born To Be Wild.” Swept up in the Power Of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Miss Piggy’s attitude quickly changes as Ozzy puts his unholy croning stamp on the early heavy metal thunder. By the end, Ozzy, himself caught up in the heat of the moment, begins proclaiming his love for the pig in a series of ad-libs over the ending solo, asking her for a kiss. Miss Piggy, having seen enough, tells him to stop spitting and to get off the floor before slamming the door shut with a “No. Way. I’m outta here.”

While it would be years yet before I would fully delve into Ozzy’s music–either solo or his time with Black Sabbath, I will forever remember that track as a step towards what I was looking for in rock ‘n’ roll. Something heavier, with the ability to move not just on an emotional level, but a physical one as well. Loud, rowdy, rude, bold, and taking things just a little louder than everything else. I knew there was more to it than Elvis or The Band, but I wasn’t quite certain where to look, and here it was, delivered on a silver platter from the Prince Of Darkness himself. And while it would be even more years before I could place the importance of the Steppenwolf selection into the context of heavy metal’s development, looking back it was so much of what I needed all gift wrapped in a way my young Muppet loving child brain could digest without watering down the spirit of the music. He was a maniac, but man did it sound like he was having the time of his life–a high I still chase in my rock ‘n’ roll to this day.

Thanks for everything, Ozzy. Keep playing loud and stay wild, wherever you are. [RYAN TYSINGER]