Therapeutic Outlet: Farewell Ozzy, Renaissance Man

Transcript

Nobody gave me sin for this That’s reason why I try both This is all that’s old, I can see a thousand times of this I’m thinking Out against mental illness Somewhere in the hazy depth of the mid-eighties, I’m thinking mid to late 1984, I was introduced to something that blew my mind I just moved to a new area of my town, started to hang around with these group of guys that was scruffy, had long hair wore mostly black t-shirts and listened to some almighty racket that I’d never heard before and completely changed my life from then onwards This was when I was first properly introduced to the art form known as metal, heavy metal, whatever you want to call it and largely through the gateway of I made an ACDC I was nine at the time, like those other kids around me I’d start to wear the same combination of jeans and black t-shirts I would grow my hair to just the length that was acceptable by my school as part of the uniform and we would hang around and listen to heavy music and I’ve been a lover of the heaviest side of music for the whole intervening years Back then, the music you listened to didn’t just reflect your tastes it defined your culture, it defined the way you dressed, the people you hang around with to a degree the views that you held, the way that you cut your hair the way that you presented yourself to the world it was as much a badge of belonging as it was a reflection on a taste in some particular art form and that wasn’t just us, it was everyone, that was who you were at least until you grew up and got a job and had a family and became boring So around this same time, I started to become aware of a guy called Ozzy who seemed to be right at the most extreme edge of what I was aware of at that point along with bands like Wasp and They’re Seeing a Blackie Lawless there was a nihilistic thread that ran through heavy metal that was apparent everywhere but was very much typified by Ozzy and Blackie and others, Alice Cooper that was both a bit scary and completely exciting and I think probably the first Ozzy Osbourne song that I was aware of and liked was Bark the Moon off the album of the same name, which remains one of my favourite songs of all time has one of my favourite guitar solos of all time by the masterful J.K. Lee I also remember hearing Paranoid by Sabbath around that time and there generally being a backdrop of Ozzy and Black Sabbath through those times he was just part of the heavy metal furniture as it were his influence touched everything and everyone and he was there churning out albums and each one of them seemed to have its own personality, its own style and indeed he switched out guitarists quite a lot, not least because they died or got very ill and we have the tragic story of Brandy Rhodes, his first guitarist on his first solo album who was a metal prodigy who ultimately died in what can only be described as a light aircraft joyriding incident which was extremely tragic, anyway Ozzy was there until he wasn’t earlier this week I suspect he was there for me and people like me at those points and others were aware of him and his antics there’s biting heads off bats and generally raising hell, taking too many drugs recording deliberately controversial music and so he was notorious back then, he was a bit of an ambassador for our genre but when he went on he became more of a celebrity in his own right while still being very much a figurehead for the metal community in the art form he started to become increasingly a household name thanks in no small part to his transition from rock and metal icon to reality TV pioneer he and Sharon and Nick, who were their three kids, largely created the reality TV genre we know today and paved the way for the Kardashians and countless other clones and all the while continuing to push boundaries in music with the creation of Ozfest as a heavy alternative to Lollapalooza which was a huge success reforming Black Sabbath more recently to much adoration given the amount of respect that his original band had and let’s be clear, it is generally agreed that Black Sabbath created the heavy metal genre rather than just being exemplars of it, they were the first band that could be meaningfully assigned that term so he created one of the largest musical genres there is with Tony Iommi, Giza Butler and Bill Ward then created a whole new type of TV, he created a new type of touring and then he came back and did it all again and did it some more and carried on doing it right up until weeks before he died it’s a story of rags to riches, it’s a story of constant reinvention and as much as Ozzy comes across as slightly bumbling and dithery and doddery and perhaps not very smart he and Sharon, his wife Sharon, his influence and his decision making and his constant championing of heavy culture Bill I’s a much smarter, shrewder guy with his finger really on the pulse and who really gave a fuck about the people who he knew and the genre that he created and everything that he did and touched it’s a story of creativity and it’s a story of constant struggles with tragedy and mental health and drug addiction and so on everyone, from way back even as early as the late eighties people were wondering how he was still going how he was still functional, how he could still tour, how he could still do that weird doddery thing he does around stage how he could garner huge audiences and whip up a frenzy in gigs and he did so right up until he was I think 77, 78 and the story of Ozzy and Sabbath isn’t just one of a particular type of music it’s not a linear easy story that resulted in him becoming who he was I find actually the creation of heavy metal via Black Sabbath quite fascinating because it was a story of what people didn’t have rather than what they did have it was a story of not having enough because Ozzy had spent some time in prison he came from a very poor working-class family in Birmingham he had quite a deprived and unpredictable upbringing until his dad, while refusing to bail him out of prison invested in a PA system for him so that he could sing and via various circumstances met Tony Iommi, Giza Butler, Bill Wharton formed a band who were ultimately heavy blues band very much what the British scene was doing at that point with bands like Cream and Fleetwood Mac, the whole British blues explosion what’s interesting about this is that their iconic sound with gigantic monolithic riffs was created because Tony Iommi as part of an industrial accident lost the ends of his index finger and the one next to it which from the point of view of playing the guitar should have been what should have ended right there I mean how is he going to play the guitar if he hasn’t got all his fingers he figured out how to create some rubber fingertips so that he could still play the guitar but because he couldn’t fill the strings underneath his fingers he couldn’t manage some of the more intricate harder fingerings on the guitar so he had to keep it a lot simpler and from that was born the gargantuan riff based sound of Black Sabbath and then Ozzy himself, I mean look as much as an icon and a genius he was I don’t think anyone would argue that Ozzy was a great singer he might have an extremely recognisable and often really powerful voice but he had almost zero range and his voice box just wasn’t huge he didn’t have the ability to really develop his vocals so that he could do a lot more with them it just wasn’t ever going to happen and it didn’t but he was clearly a front man and so he just made it work he took what ability he had he took the tools that were available to him and when combined with Iommi’s minimalism just made a match made in heaven that had Ozzy not been Ozzy we wouldn’t have had Black Sabbath, we wouldn’t have had metal they were a Beatles level match made in heaven and so there’s a lesson there in using what you’ve got available which is something that resonates really really heavily with me over the last couple of years when I’ve had less available to me which really forced me to be much more creative and much more resourceful and I take a real lesson from that yeah I mean Ozzy continued to be resourceful and so when he was fired from Sabbath for being too much of a wild child let’s be clear he created a solo career out of nothing everyone I think thought he was finished but his solo career from that point was bigger than Sabbath ever were without him and had a real talent for finding the right people to back him and then constantly changing each time he changed his guitarist and changed his backing band he changed his style he changed the band that he was fronting and created album after album and then let’s be clear they’re not all great but some of them are insanely brilliant particularly the early solo works and most of them are at least solid many of them are really really good and that carried on right through until very recently and via a diversion reinventing himself yet again as a reality TV icon although other than inviting cameras into his house I’m not sure he needed to do much else and just be himself which was entertainment enough yeah I mean he reinvented TV I mean how insane is that again I don’t want to play down the role of Sharon and his family in all of this but we’re talking about Ozzy here Sharon’s still with us so it’s a story of constant reinvention constant restlessness never wanting to stop he was still wanting to record still wanting to get out of the road right up until the last days and it’s so inspiring am I the hugest Ozzy Osbourne fan in terms of music? no they’ve always been there for me Sabbath is obviously massively important to the heavier end of my music taste I like quite a lot of Sabbath but they don’t rate massively highly for me and never have the same as his solo works but it’s not about that his legacy, his career, his music, his personality has permeated my cultural life in one way or another for my whole life and yes I watch some of the Osbournes but not a lot reality TV is not really my thing and I found it a little bit sad if I’m honest he never seemed very happy it didn’t look like we were watching a happy person so yeah he’s always been there and I think he’s always been there for a lot of people but if like me you still grew up with him and although I wasn’t old enough to appreciate his time with Sabbath he’d pretty much he was full into his solo career by the time we got to those heady days of late 1984 he was there from day one for me and I don’t think that can be understated Ask Against Mental Illness