Ozzy, Wildman Survivor

Copper has an exchange program with selected magazines, where we share articles between publications, including this one from PMA Magazine.

“My first job there (at the abattoir in Birmingham) was emptying sheep’s stomachs of the puke. The stink was unbelievable. But you get used to it.” – Ozzy

Yes, that might prepare you for inventing heavy metal.

The most flattering thing you can say about any outsized personality is, had he not existed, you’d have had to invent him. The most accurate thing? Your imagination would have failed. Enter John Michael Osbourne, and exit Ozzy.

After cheating death for 20 years, Ozzy Osbourne of Black Sabbath and solo career, gave up the ghost. Kicked the casket. Caught the tour bus to the Choir Invisible. Shook hands with the Whoever. But never mind the exhausted earthly casing – what of the corpus? What about the songbook, the art, and the legacy of a persona?

Black Sabbath in the 1970s: Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Warner Bros. Records/public domain.

Ozzy Osbourne is the unlikely journey from working-class car-horn tuner and, yes, abattoir killa from miseryguts Birmingham to frontman of the band that brought The Devil and his Downtuned Guitars to every parking-lot stonerfest in the Western world. And being blue-collar, did it the deadly fun way.

Made the unprecedented U-turn from maniacal metal drug addict to lovable reality TV whack-daddy. Even more so, did not merely launch a solo career – initially dismissed as a lurid gag – but one that went on to outsell his Sab releases. He once tuned car horns for a living, and his keening voice even sounds like one – and this was all him trying to sound like the Beatles, for gosh sake. He became a One-Namer who was bigger than the heavy metal genre he helped invent. So…how?

Black Sabbath was never my band, although I saw them in any number of iterations with a number of singers, but there is no arguing the enduring impact. Before that band, the heavy downer in your life was probably your duvet. Sabbath – Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, Geezer Butler and Ozzy legitimized basement rotting, blackerthanblack everything, scowling about like the world’s most put-upon teen, and of course, all the Lucifun. They brought the Dark to your living room.

We can argue about the greatest Sabbath riff, but why bother? It’s this one, from their 1978 tour before the “Nashville Cocaine Incident” and Ozzy’s subsequent sacking:

“Snowblind” is not simply about being on drugs, it is the sound of being on drugs, which makes you feel like you are on drugs. I will paraphrase a long-ago YouTube commenter under the video, who pointed out that Ozzy’s intro to the song is not, strictly speaking, in Earthling – but that his ensuing vocal is as “pure as a mountain stream.”

Hey. Perhaps “pure” is not the word we want here. The long, fractured pathway to becoming a pop culture icon is many a zigzagzug, strewn with broken bottles, vials, and janky decisions. And luck. In the words of the French proverb, there are more old drunks than old doctors. Purity isn’t the word.

Survival is. Ozzy had more opportunities than most – hell, generated more than any had before to become a casualty or a caricature. So he just became the latter – only more so. And that changed everything.

“One minute, we were a rock band doing coke. The next, we were a coke band doing rock.”

And so it went in the ‘70s, and beyond. Roll call:

Ozzy passing out in the wrong Nashville hotel room in 1978 after a coke binge with another famous rock star, forcing Black Sabbath to cancel the gig (and eventually fire him); Ozzy onscreen, pouring orange juice all over the counter making his botulism breakfast in Penelope Spheeris’s immortal film The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years; The Dove Decapitation; the Bat Bite (and what kinda fan brings a bat to a concert? An Ozzy fan, that’s who); at least 10 rehab stints that we know of, or he remembered; a drunken blackout arrest for “attempted murder” of his wife. He was even denounced as a “poor example” by Bill Cosby.

And who doesn’t like to eat some bat once in a while, amirite? Have a dozen ghastly rabies injections? Why not. Let’s get out there where the lights flicker, the road darkens and the crazed gambling begins – with your career, money, sanity, your soul. However, Ozzy was turning caricature into something…higher. A different category.

“Crazy Train” was a sports arena anthem long before “Welcome to the Jungle,” and it is useful to consider how that might have unfolded without Ozzy’s crazed gaze from 100 million T-shirts in every mall headshop. Ozzfest brought metal even further into the mainstream, under the banner of, not “Metal,” but his name. There is a difference between pioneering something (Sabbath) and becoming its face.

It’s not just about fraternizing with the mainstream. Sure, Alice Cooper could hang with Groucho Marx and John Lennon, appear on Hollywood Squares, and golf with Arnold Palmer. Could he be the guy who didn’t care about any of that? Could he star in a reality TV series, The Osbournes, which I once referred to as The Partridge-Eating Family?

Speaking of Alice – I recall an interview with him during the rise of the Marilyn Manson panic, with pop cultural gatekeepers in a tizzy over the “danger” he represented. The Antichrist lyrics, the Bible-shredding, the pole-axed contact lenses – surely nothing so diabolical had ever happened before!

“It’s an act!” Coop said. But you never got that feeling with Ozzy. Acting out or acting up, sure. Marketing, undeniably. But for all the capes and wide-eyed Beelzeebug-eyed glares, the Prince of Darkness was not fake, for good or ill. The Dove, the Bat, and all of that. His entire career was a kind of rolling car wreck that subverted the mainstream. Until it became it.

It is not conceivable, for me right now anyway, that we will witness that again. A lifer who risked his life any 597 times to sing crazy music with lyrics more plaintive than you remember, encouraging everyone in the audience to “go crazy” for no reason other than to do so.

And then there is the final show, Back to the Beginning, in Birmingham, certainly the heaviest metal bill in history. The princelings were there for the Prince.

Reflect on the image and sound of a man with Parkinson’s disease and a dozen screws in his spine, who labored through emphysema, hoisted up on a throne to bid farewell when he could not bear to. At that final Black Sabbath show, there were blown cues in “War Pigs”, etc., but also genuine emotion. What other sector of the arts would draw a gathering of 40,000, with every massive disciple and inheritor of the honoree paying homage onstage – while an infirm man allows you to witness his shedding or metamorphosis from a punished bone machine, just 17 unknown days to go, in celebration of the sensed end of his time?

With the riffs, bass, and drums still absolutely blasting?

The answer, as always, is None More Black.

Header image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Morten Skovgaard.