No dark lord of heavy metal was ever more lovable than Ozzy Osbourne.
From his days as the helium-voiced conjurer of demonic wars and time-traveling iron men to his signature pop-culture role as a dotty reality TV star, Osbourne, who died on Tuesday at 76, was perhaps rock’s most beloved mascot of excess.
Damaged by years of drug abuse, and more recently by a variant of Parkinson’s disease, Osbourne was long diminished from his peak performances of the 1970s as the lead singer of Black Sabbath, which more than any other band defined the sound (loud and molten), look (gothic black) and attitude (sneering) of heavy metal.
But his persistence, even in a weakened state, only made Osbourne more beloved. That was poignantly clear this month, when Black Sabbath made its final appearance at a charity concert in Birmingham, England, where the group was founded, called Back to the Beginning — with Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Pantera, Anthrax and even the other members of Black Sabbath apparently happy to play second fiddle to Osbourne.
Dressed in glittery black and seated on a black throne, Osbourne swayed his arms above his head as he led the crowd in “War Pigs,” the vaguely satanic antiwar epic that opens the band’s influential second album, “Paranoid” (1970).
“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he told the crowd.
For longtime fans, the image of Ozzy — everybody called him Ozzy — from the Birmingham concert echoed his most familiar posture from Ozzfest, the touring music festival that Osbourne led almost annually from 1996 to 2018. There, worshiped by a multigenerational faithful, Osbourne only had to raise his arms and mouth a benevolent grin to make the audience go wild.
Tommy Lee, the drummer of Mötley Crüe, recalled in a recent interview with The New York Times Osbourne’s “signature move” to rally a crowd.
“He kind of jumps in one place and claps,” Lee said. “There’s an evil smirk on his face as he’s doing it, but I think the evil smirk is happiness because the place is going bananas. It’s letting the audience know that you are enjoying it just as much or more than they are.”
It wasn’t always that way. For a period in the 1980s, Osbourne was one of the key targets for the rock-is-scary movement that was promoted by political conservatives but found receptive ears among parents of every stripe.
He was a legend of bad behavior. At a record company conference, he once bit the head off a live dove. On tour in 1982 in Des Moines, it was a dead bat that he decapitated. Osbourne later said he thought the bat was a toy, but antics like that were reported widely and stirred parental fears.
Osbourne also became a focus of fears in the news media and in politics that heavy metal music itself was dangerous, a vessel of hidden satanic messages and not-so-hidden corrupting themes. He was sued over his 1980 song “Suicide Solution,” which the parents of a 19-year-old man said he had been listening to before he took his life. The case was dismissed, and Osbourne said the song had been intended as a warning against the dangers of alcoholism.
Osbourne’s fragile mental state became a running joke in rock. In the 1988 comic documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years,” Osbourne is seen making breakfast while he cheerfully discusses the effects of drugs on him and other members of Black Sabbath. As he talks, viewers see a close-up of someone — Ozzy? — clumsily trying to pour orange juice into a cup, spilling it everywhere. (The director, Penelope Spheeris, later said the shot was faked.)
That character spilled over into “The Osbournes,” the hit MTV reality show that followed Osbourne as he wandered, seemingly clueless, through his home life and professional career, as in one episode when he appeared to be frightened by a demonstration of the pyrotechnics for his stage show.
In Black Sabbath, Osbourne’s wailing tenor and the thudding power chords of Tony Iommi’s guitar established much of the basic musical vocabulary of heavy metal. It was a deliberately grim, nightmarish realm; the band took its name from a late-period Boris Karloff film.
Osbourne reveled in the iconography of darkness, but he also had a softer side. A Beatles nut, he was fascinated by the vulnerability and haunted eyes on the cover of their 1964 album “Beatles for Sale,” and in 2005 Osbourne released a long-anticipated cover of the Beatles’ “In My Life.”
That side revealed itself elsewhere. The lyrics of “Crazy Train,” the stripped-down 1980 rocker that was Osbourne’s first single release as a solo artist — written by Bob Daisley, who also played bass — contain lines that sound more like a flower-child hippie than any prince of darkness: “Maybe it’s not too late / To learn how to love and forget how to hate.”