“The Prince of Darkness has died” has a distinctly different ring from “the King is dead,” the headline that marked Elvis Presley’s passing. If Elvis was the king of rock and roll, then the late Ozzy Osbourne was the patron saint of what came to be called heavy metal. For those who loved him, Ozzy was a Falstaffian madman who brought joy to millions and a consummate performer who died just seventeen days after his final concert. For others, he was the lunatic who bit the head off a dove and a bat (the bat was an accident), micturated on the Alamo, did copious amounts of drugs, and trafficked in much of the satanic imagery that haunts rock and roll.
From its inception, rock and roll has been steeped in devilish legends, the most famous being pioneering bluesman Robert Johnson’s Faustian pact with the actual Prince of Darkness at the crossroads. This infernal tradition continued unabated as the genre developed, and it’s all there in “Black Sabbath,” the opening track of Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album. To my ears, the song sounds just as revolutionary as it did in 1970, containing sonic worlds that would spawn everything from Slayer and Death to Korn and Knocked Loose. (Although the late ‘60s band Coven also had a song titled “Black Sabbath,” their frolicking folk style was more like a gothic take on Peter, Paul, and Mary than anything approaching the doom-laden juggernaut that is Sabbath.)
Forests of trees have given their lives to answer the question, “What is heavy metal?” My answer would be that it has something to do with the peculiar alchemy of Sabbath’s titular song: a confluence of distorted guitars, the infamous tritone often called “the devil’s interval,” and grim subject matter. Press into the use of the word “metal” in popular parlance and you’ll get this kind of emphasis. One of my old pastors once described the events of Acts 12 as “metal,” for instance. Verse 23 informs us that the self-aggrandizing Herod was struck down by the Angel of the Lord and “eaten by worms”—which certainly sounds like something that might crop up in an Obituary song.
If Elvis was the king of rock and roll, then the late Ozzy Osbourne was the patron saint of what came to be called heavy metal.
Unlike their fellow heavy metal pioneers in Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and Ozzy in particular, came to embrace their role as the genre’s grandfathers. Robert Plant, on the other hand, once expressed embarrassment at his band’s influence, refusing any responsibility for some of the genre’s more uncompromising acts. It’s true that Ozzy also occasionally stood back, jaw agape, at the lumbering Frankenstein’s monsters that he’d helped conjure forth. But ultimately he would sponsor Ozzfest, a sprawling celebration of all those monsters. And Ozzy would befriend, mentor, and collaborate with many of the musicians who followed in his cloven footsteps.
Satan Sells But Who’s Buying?
There’s an odd paradox at the heart of metal: The genre’s dalliance with the devil is predicated on an explicitly Christian vision of reality. Deviate too far from that vision and the potency begins to fizzle. Even an act as forthrightly Satanic as Mercyful Fate constructs its rich pageantry in the Church’s shadow—a tradition that continues up to the present with a band like Ghost. An inverted cross means nothing without the cross of Christ and Satan means very little when he becomes nothing more than a cheap marketing ploy. Later bands like Slayer capitalized on the “Satanic panic” of the ‘80s, pushing the pointy-tailed themes to their extreme limits. But shock appeal always has an expiration date and as Christianity’s influence in popular culture continued to wane, violations of the sacred carried less and less weight. Satan went from being a fiend to a cliche.
The story behind “Black Sabbath” may be apocryphal, but it’s decidedly less cynical. Ozzy had somehow managed to get his hands on a book of spells from the Middle Ages. When he brought it to bassist and primary Sabbath lyricist, Geezer Butler, Butler got a “weird vibe” from it. That night, he awoke to an image right out of a Hammer horror film: a cloaked figure in black at the foot of his bed that promptly vanished before his eyes. Determined to purge what he assumed to be the offending book from his house, Butler opened the cupboard where he’d placed it only to discover that it, too, had vanished. From that point on, he refused to have anything to do with the occult: “It scared me sh**less.”
Inspired by Gustav Holst’s “Mars, the Bringer of War,” Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi had been experimenting with the tritone interval. The eerie tones brought to mind Butler’s demonic experience and when Ozzy put pen to paper, he began with these chilling lines: “What is this that stands before me?/Figure in black which points at me.” The song opens with a sound of heavy rainfall punctuated by a church bell. Iommi’s unnerving guitar lines shatter that tranquility with a deep sense of doom. Equal parts grim and distressed, Ozzy’s vocals more than match the foreboding atmosphere. Part of what makes the song so frightening is the fear in Ozzy’s voice: “Oh, no, no, please, God, help me!” I was spellbound the first time I heard the song, anxiously replaying it in my mind all day and with deepening anxiety as I tried to fall asleep that night. Whatever the veracity of the story behind the music, it’s hard to argue with the conviction in Ozzy’s voice.
“Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” “War Pigs,” “Sweet Leaf,” “Children of the Grave, “Supernaut,” “Symptom of the Universe,” “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”—not only were these songs sonic light years ahead of their time, but they decisively shaped a musical subculture that’s continued developing to this day. And by the time Ozzy’s drug abuse essentially forced his ejection from Black Sabbath, he was ready to venture out on his own. Bursting onto the scene with Diary of a Madman, songs like “Crazy Train” and the very on-brand “Mr. Crowley” made it clear that Ozzy wasn’t exiting the stage anytime soon.
Given my age, No More Tears was the first Ozzy solo record to cross my path. I had a high school friend who was a huge fan of the album’s guitarist, Zakk Wylde—a veritable Viking-of-a-man who might have ridden a horse right out of the pages of a Heavy Metal graphic novel. Wylde’s rich Gibson tone and signature squeals exploded from the speakers. And then there’s that voice. It’s not a pretty voice. It’s raucous, insolent, and crass. But it’s also strangely joyful.
Years later, I came across William Hazlitt’s praise of Shakespeare’s Falstaff: “He is a compound of grossness and discrimination, of wit and folly, of sense and nonsense… yet there is such a rich exuberance of spirit, such a ready invention, such a thorough knowledge of the characters of men, that he is as delightful a person as any in Shakespeare.” I can’t think of a better description of the ribald madman that was Ozzy. Even when his excesses left you appalled, it was hard not to admire the man’s titanic vitality.
Coming Home
Like it or not—I don’t—the massive success of The Osbournes reality TV show introduced Ozzy to a whole new generation, and this was certainly how Ozzy entered my own teenage world. Here, Ozzy was far from the dionysian force of nature audiences had come to expect from his stage performances. Instead, he was a charming and rambling old man suffering from the obvious side effects of drug abuse. Sharon Osbourne was portrayed as his rock and the true source of sanity and stability in their household. In this sense, her theme song was arguably Ozzy’s frequent and urgent outbursts of “Sharon!” in the face of domestic adversity.
Peer into their story and it soon becomes apparent that Sharon is indeed a rock, having endured Ozzy at his psychotic worst and carried him to the shores of sanity. Their 43-year marriage is a testament to her longsuffering devotion to a man who may have been easy for millions to love from a distance, but who certainly wasn’t easy to live with, let alone love up close. In this sense, it’s fitting that the most moving part of Ozzy’s final concert was “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” This is his ode to Sharon, and Ozzy, visibly frail on his throne, pushes his failing voice to its limits, reducing an entire stadium to tears.
Is Ozzy home? I certainly hope so.
