July 22, 2005
Ozzy, wow. Just, wow. All afternoon my Facebook feed is full of tributes from his fellow musicians and mine too. Laments from people I grew up with, especially during our high school years. And interestingly, quite a few of my current acoustic singer/songwriter friends and peers too - people whom I might not have imagined listening to Ozzy Osbourne's music.
And I guess that's the crux of it, isn't it. To transcend rock music is iconic indeed, to become a one word name. Ozzy has been a global celebrity outside of the music world, yet he's also still the kid with dyslexia and ADHD growing up in the depressing industrial grimescape of post-WWII Birmingham. A nation that had left two generations of its young men on the wasted trenches and cratered moonscapes of the continent, awash in a malaise and discontent that we Americans might struggle to understand. From these seemingly hopeless streets and seasons, he and his Black Sabbath mates brought to life a sound often evocative of that hellscape - a new musical identity that I admit I didn't feel much attraction to in my youth.
But on the streets of my own fading milltown, what Ozzy unleashed in his solo career in 1980 was something powerful and transcendent. A decade previous, Sabbath basically birthed the genre of heavy metal. Two summer earlier, Van Halen's first album stood the rock guitar world on its collective head. And in the immense gifts and talents of Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne somehow harnessed and fused those elements into something new and primal and exciting. Those first two albums Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman would not yield our high school's Class Song in our yearbook, but they were the soundtrack of the wilds of my generation, living on the edge of a society that would likely not offer them the mill jobs their dads had worked. "Crazy Train", "Suicide Solution", "You Can't Kill Rock and Roll" were part of our rite of passage into whatever the hell future we had to look forward to, and Ozzy's was the voice that singing us through them.
And in a blink, one inexplicable plane ride gone horribly wrong, it vanished. In March of senior year Randy Rhoads was gone, and with him went the incredible new sounds that he and Ozzy had forged. Forever young, like so many young musical geniuses turned shooting stars. And Ozzy, what was left of him, was left to pick up the pieces while struggling with his own addictions and grief and demons.
If you had told me on graduation day that Ozzy would live to the ripe old age of 76 after all of that, and that he would have in fact overcome Parkinson's disease and various physical injuries to take the stage at his own farewell concert, that would have seemed crazier than his antics. That he would "call his shot", to triumphantly reunite with Black Sabbath as well as many of his bandmates from the past four plus decades, to do it in a football stadium in the city where it all began, and then draw his final breath just 17 days later; all that just adds to the legend.
For he IS legend now. To the tens of thousands of us young guitarists struggling to learn Randy Rhoads solos and Ozzy songs long after that terrible March of 1982. To the millions of fans who've found his music in the years since, or seen a completely different side of the Prince of Darkness in his reality TV show, or simply come to appreciate the body of work over the decades. That voice. That grin. The F-bombs. And yet too, the gentle heart aging with loss and grief, and triumph over tragedy and tablets.
I'll never be able to quite separate them in my mind, but somehow I'd like to think that reunion is happening tonight somewhere off among the heavens. Somewhere tonight in some sports stadium, thousands of fans are eagerly cheering on their team as that iconic "Crazy Train" riff thunders through the arena. I'll certainly never be able to separate the influence Ozzy and Randy had on my playing, on my early days with Nor'easter, or my understanding of the craft and the mystery of making music.
The lights have gone out. Hail the Traveler.
