As with most people my age, I grew up hearing the rumors about him and listening to his music, first with Sabbath (although to be honest I didn't really know anything about music) and then his color stuff.
As my musical taste started to develop, I didn't much care for him, probably because I'd read too much into the hype about biting the heads off of bats and so on.
Yup. I was an idiot.
Time went on and I started playing guitar and I developed a massive interest in Randy Rhoades, who played first with Quiet Riot and then was tragically killed shortly after starting to play with Ozzy. I read everything I could about Randy Rhoades in the guitar mags and so on, and I learned that Randy and Eddie Van Halen were rivals when it came to playing in the clubs on Sunset Strip in LA, and they would constantly try to be more outrageous than the other.
If it weren't for Randy Rhoades, Eddie Van Halen may not have been the icon that he came to be.
As I was also a fan of Zack Wylde I started to form an opinion that Ozzy's skill wasn't his music, it was recognizing talent in others.
Then his show came out, and to be honest, I never watched it.
But Ozzy was somehow becoming more and more of an icon, which was amazing given his status at the time- TV star, rock star with multiple bands and incarnations, and an absolute legend of for no other reason than everyone knew who he was and could retell stories about his antics, whether they liked him or not.
Antics like the reason why he wasn't allowed in parts of Texas.
You see, Sharon wanted to go sightseeing while they were on tour, and she didn't want Ozzy to cause trouble, so she took all of his clothes, gave him a bottle of something and went off by herself, figuring he'd drink himself unconscious and be asleep when she got back.
Ozzy though, had finished the bottle, decided he needed more, and, with no clothes of his own, put on one of Sharon's dresses and stumbled out into the city to find more booze.
Before he did though, this stumbling, drunken, long haired guy in a dress in Texas decided he needed to pee, so he found a conveniently placed wall, hiked up his frock and let it flow.
Except that the wall was part of a building that is very sacred to Texans- that Alamo.
Ozzy was never allowed back in San Antonio after that.
And then the song Suicide Solution, which was an anti suicide song, but the Powers That Be decided to blame Ozzy for youth suicide rates, suggesting that the song was encouraging kids.
And there were a lot more, some true, some not so true.
Alice Cooper once famously said "You hear a lot of stories about guys like me and Ozzy, and maybe ten percent of it is true. But the stories about Keith Moon are all true, and you probably haven't heard half of them."
As the years went by I started to appreciate Ozzy's music, and eventually Ozzy as well.
I started to see his appeal and I really and truly became an Ozzy fan, and I was finally able to see him live when he playing in Halifax in 2014. It was an exceptional show, as I mentioned above. Well, exceptional for me, I imagine it was average at best for his shows, but I was thrilled.
If there was any doubt in my mind at that point that Ozzy was an amazing man, not just a judge of talent, not just an over the top rock star, but a real, true
man, in every proper sense of the word was while watching a video on YouTube.
It seemed someone had managed to find some previously unknown recordings of Randy Rhoades, and they arranged to play them for the first time since they were recorded with Ozzy.
I watched Ozzy break down and unashamedly cry.
This wasn't the guy in a dress pissing on a monument. This wasn't a guy mumbling on TV to sell Doritos. This wasn't the guy that bit the heads off bats, or destroyed hotel rooms or someone looking to generate album sales.
This was a man, who truly, genuinely missed a great talent and a close friend. This was a man with genuine emotions and was completely unashamed of them. He didn't know anyone in the room- these were guys who bought an old recording studio or something and found some old tapes in a box, and had probably staged this meeting to drum up interest in their "new" studio and YT channel.
But none of that mattered.
Not to Ozzy.
He was hearing a voice from his past, of someone that meant the world to him, and who was silenced many, many years before.
I've often argued that Ozzy's solo career owes a lot to Randy Rhoades. Let's face it, while Ozzy was the driving force, he couldn't really step out of a band like Sabbath and release a mediocre album. That would have been (arguably) the end of his career- the world is full of talented people who either haven't gotten a break or made a bad decision, and everyone would have said "he just hasn't been the same since Sabbath" and dismissed him.
Randy's raw talent helped Ozzy come out of the gates with the power to re-establish himself as a solo artist.
And Ozzy knew that. You could see it in his eyes in probably the most candid moment any rock star has ever had on film.
Yes, he had his problems.
No, he wasn't perfect.
But what man is?
When I say I'm going to miss Ozzy, I truly mean I am going to miss him. He wasn't afraid to show his feelings, he was all for poking fun at himself for the delight of others, and even as serious as his body of work was, he never took himself too seriously to miss out on something fun- like when he and Frank Zappa's son Dweezil covered Stayin' Alive by the BeeGees.
If you haven't heard it (or even if you have) take a few moments out of your day and play this.
https://youtu.be/Lj5fSeBPlC8?si=6E9EHU9laM9xkglhHe was both faithful to the original while still managing to make it his own.
"Everybody on the dance floor darlings, we're going to dance with the Devil!"
Absolutely brilliant.
Absolutely Ozzy.
Another long winded Def post I know, but I'd love to end this on a high note- just like Ozzy did.
The sound may be terrible, but this may have been, in my opinion at least, the finest moments for Ozzy, which is saying a lot because he had a lot of amazing moments.
https://youtu.be/mSfNvTVEALw?si=rqDLTbrzwUwqVaDtI'm truly, absolutely going to miss him.
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