We honestly never thought you’d make it this far, Oz — and we’re glad you did.
On July 5, the band Black Sabbath played its final-ever show, with a visibly diminished Ozzy Osbourne — suffering from advanced Parkinson’s disease — singing his way through one last nostalgic reunion while seated on a throne. Yesterday, he died at the age of 76. As the old guard of ’60s and ’70s rock stars passes away on a generational level, I sometimes feel gloomy about the loss of the musical heroes of my youth. But then there are other times — like with Dickey Betts, or with Brian Wilson — when my first reflex instead is to raise a glass and pay tribute to an improbably long life. We honestly never thought you’d make it this far, Oz — and we’re glad you did.
This isn’t even the first time I’ve praised Ozzy and Black Sabbath here in the digital pages of National Review, and you have no idea how much that fact pleases me. Sabbath are the canonically acknowledged founders of heavy metal — their early 1970 self-titled debut album revolutionized hard-rock aesthetics even as it horrified both critics and parents alike. The parents and critics both whiffed this time — this band was on to something revolutionary. Built around Tony Iommi’s sludgy, bludgeoning four-fingered guitar riffs — Iommi lost the first knuckle of his fifth in an industrial accident — bassist Geezer Butler’s lyrics, and drummer Bill Ward’s secret jazz predilections, Black Sabbath not only invented heavy metal in its simplest prototypical form, they pioneered its evolution into more progressive realms throughout the rest of the Seventies.
But the reason they truly exploded as a phenomenon was due to the ineffable blokish charisma of lead singer Ozzy Osbourne. Osbourne was a rock star’s rock star, whose reedy yet laserlike voice carried with it a strangely relatable normal-guy appeal. That charm was amplified by tales of his wild behavior on the road, only some of which are exaggerated. We are talking about a man who was the origin of some of rock ’n’ roll’s most ridiculous drug-fueled escapades (most of which took place, ironically enough, long after Ozzy had departed Sabbath).
Few among us can claim to have bitten the head off a bat while live on stage in Des Moines — I’ve only done it once myself, and that was in Rockford — but Ozzy entered the history books in January 1982 with that stunt. What fewer realize is that the Ozzman followed this up a mere month later with a far more impressive feat: getting mind-warpingly drunk, putting on his girlfriend Sharon’s dress, and escaping from his San Antonio hotel room to go urinate all over the Cenotaph at the Alamo. (He was banned from performing in the city for a decade, but on the bright side, at least he probably broke Phil Collins’s heart.)
After a certain point in the late Eighties, Ozzy became famous for “being famous,” rather than for his solo work — the transition to a reality TV show with The Osbournes was more a recognition of that reality than a reason for it — but even with that fluffy trifle, Osbourne’s natural, dissipatedly lunkish charisma was impossible to ignore: Beyond everything else, the man simply came across as authentically cheerful and utterly thrilled that he got to live his best life, as the lead singer in one of rock’s most influential bands. I’ll miss the ol’ madman, and I’m glad he got to write the final chapter of his career on his own terms.
If you want to listen to Political Beats‘ wonderful (and head-banging) celebration of Black Sabbath, then I invite you to click here and learn about what Ozzy Osbourne brought to a group that was smarter than your parents ever realized. R.I.P., wild man.