Ozzy Osbourne on AC/DC

"By the time the fire engines arrived, the flames had already burned themselves out. Randy was gone. Rachel was gone. I finally put on some clothes and took a beer from what was left of the fridge in the bus. I couldn't handle the situation. Sharon was running around trying to find a telephone. She wanted to call her father. Then the cops arrived. Good ol' boy types. They weren't too sympathetic.

'Ozzy Ozz-Burn, huh?' They said. 'The bat-eating madman.'

We checked into some shithole called the Hilco Inn in Leesburg and tried to hide from the press while the police did their thing. We had to call Randy's mum and Rachel's best friend Grace, which was horrendous.

All of us wanted to get the fuck out of Leesburg, but we had to stay put until the paperwork was done.

None of us could get our heads around the situation. Everything had been magic one minute, and the next it had taken such an ugly, tragic turn.

'Y'know what? I think this is a sign I ain't supposed to do this anymore,' I said to Sharon.

By then I was having a total physical and mental breakdown. A doctor had to come over and shoot me up with sedatives. Sharon wasn't doing much better. She was in a terrible state, poor Sharon. The one thing that gave us some comfort was a message from AC/DC saying, 'If there's anything we can do, let us know.' That meant a lot to me, and I'll always be grateful to them for it. You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan. In fact, AC/DC must have known exactly what we'd been going through, 'cos it had only been a couple of years since their lead singer Bon Scott had died from alcohol poisoning, also at a tragically young age."

From I Am Ozzy.

Ozzy Osbourne, Blizzard of Ozz

Who would've thought that Ozzy would be the most successful member of Black Sabbath? Ozzy, with the biggest drug problem and the fewest songwriting contributions? Bat-chomping, ant-snorting Ozzy and not riff architect Tony Iommi? It'd be like having Art Garfunkel sell more records and write better music than Paul Simon. But on Blizzard of Ozz, backed up by a prodigious American guitarist and a patient but hard-headed manager whom we know today as Sharon, Ozzy recorded one of the all-time great metal debuts, a gateway metal album for generations.



For starters it's got "Crazy Train," Ozzy's signature song and a piece that seems to end up in more movies and football games every year. But it's also got the lawsuit-inspiring "Suicide Solution," the Socratic "I Don't Know" and the environmentalist "Revelation (Mother Earth)," which beat "Blackened" by nearly ten years. "Mr. Crowley" bashed all the subtlety out of Led Zeppelin's occultist leanings. There's even a classical guitar instrumental that hinted at the promise of Randy Rhoads. Ozzy rushed out two albums in the first two years of his career, perhaps because his handlers didn't think he'd live much longer, but Rhoads' neo-classical stylings never run dry on Blizzard.

Contrarians have argued that Ozzy is only as good as his guitarists, and he's certainly worked with some of the best. But like Elvis, Ozzy's mannerisms are so ingrained in popular culture that it's easy to forget what a visionary musician he was. Listen to those wacky harmonies on "Steal Away (The Night)" or the way he shifts the lunatic intro of "Crazy Train" into a cheerful singalong. Without Rhoads, he may not have had the melody, but without Ozzy, Rhoads would have been another Steve Vai, a guitartist's guitarist whose influence would never transcend music theory students. Outside of Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth, there has never been a better musician/rock star team-up in metal history.