He was also mad.
One hundred Cypriot lira used to be serious money. Still, for a beginner’s Washburn electric guitar and a 10-watt amp? Not a bad deal. My chug–chug-chugging sounded like the rotor blade of a defective helicopter: assume the brace position. But I’ve a kid brother who can lay down a solid drumbeat. That’s it, we’ve got it: the main riff of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid.” Admission into the princedom of darkness for CYP£100. Not a bad deal at all.
John Michael Osbourne wasn’t the greatest musical talent. A first-rate second-rater, really, next to his old schoolmate Tony Iommi, who had to fret his six-string with makeshift plastic thimbles after he sliced off his fingertips in a sheet metal factory. (Last thing Tony must’ve wanted was to spend the rest of his life shaping metal: it was fated.) And every one of the vocalists Sabbath had in the Eighties was more technically proficient than the original. But Ozzy was a first-rate talent scout. Whether or not he tried very hard. In 1968, Iommi and drummer Bill Ward materialized at his doorstep. Daemons summoned by a poor man’s prayer posted to a bulletin board: “OZZY ZIG Needs Gig — has own PA.”
What kind of gig? Summer ’67 was over. Or, in Birmingham, it had never happened. Ozzy says: “When I heard the silly fing words, ‘If you go to San Francisco, be sure to put a flower in your hair,’ I wanted to fing strangle John Phillips.” In summer ’68, the Warsaw Pact’s T-55 tanks crept into Czechoslovakia and strongly suggested that perhaps love was not all you needed. Peace had already been given several chances. Now, kids barricaded streets in Paris, in Toulouse, in Bordeaux. Murderous hippies terrorized Hollywood. When Iommi played the interval between C-sharp and F, the unholy diminished fifth, Ozzy must have sensed it. They had given sound to The Mood; they were onto something. A Hegelian might say Black Sabbath was necessary for the dialectic.
Ozzy’s end could’ve come in spring 1979, when his blitzed, baked, tweaked, toasted bandmates kicked him out for being too blitzed, baked, tweaked, and toasted. The madman’s setting his drummer on fire, or smuggling a shark carcass into a hotel room, might’ve been a bit too much. Was he sober enough, a few months later, to remember the audition of a 22-year-old guitar virtuoso, with whom he would soon write the monumental album Blizzard of Ozz? Were they in a Los Angeles studio or at Ozzy’s hotel? Randy Rhoads was hired on the spot, whichever that was.
Tom Waits, in an interview around that time, said that being a drunk is a full-time job; that he couldn’t have been a musician if he were a drunk. Not a multitasker, Waits. Ozzy put in the work. Double shifts. He could magnetize genius and repel it. Rhoads was eventually repelled. He had decided to bow out of the project soon, but was worried for Ozzy. “You’ll kill yourself one of these days.” Smart money would’ve bet on that prediction. The next day, during a stop in central Florida on the way to Orlando, Rhoads was convinced by their tour bus driver (and amateur pilot) to take a short joyflight in a single-engine Beechcraft plane. It crashed. He was 25.
Somehow, the old boy kept mining precious metal talent. Drummer Randy Castillo in 1986. Guitar prodigy Zakk Wylde in 1987. Bassists Mike Inez, in 1989, and Robert Trujillo, in 1996, who is now a member of Metallica. Guitarist Gus G, of the Greek power metal band Firewind, in 2009.
CNN says “no details surrounding cause of death were immediately available.” That right? The man’s life was a string of such details. Uppers, downers, tremors, spinal injuries, Parkinson’s. His speech was all stammer and staccato. What was said was inaudible; what was audible was inchoate. Had he been just a bit older, he’d be a prime candidate for the presidency of the United States. But onstage, something possessed him — hear his crystalline wail, the perfect enunciation: even two weeks ago in Birmingham. I’m still trying to get the “Paranoid” riff right.