Ozzy Osbourne, who rose to fame as the lead singer of Black Sabbath, has died at the age of 76, two weeks and a couple of days after playing his final concert. That concert, dubbed Back to the Beginning, took place in England, in his hometown of Birmingham, before a crowd of 45,000 people and a global audience of nearly 6 million.
He performed on a throne built for the event; Osbourne, diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in February 2019, could no longer walk. From this throne, he sang, for the last time, songs that comprise the bedrock of heavy metal: songs which, when new, spoke both musically and lyrically to profound feelings of alienation and frustration, themes seldom addressed in popular music before Black Sabbath.
His musical accomplishment has few points of comparison. He did not play an instrument; with a few exceptions, he did not write the lyrics he sang. (Geezer Butler, his bassist, did that.) Osbourne’s role within Black Sabbath was frontman, a term that tells you more about the blocking of the stage than the requirements of the position. His vocal melodies, for the first several Black Sabbath albums—the ones that cemented the band’s reputation and legacy—follow the guitar lines almost obsessively. “After Forever,” from Master of Reality, exemplifies this trait: “Well I have seen the truth, yes I’ve seen the light and I’ve changed my ways/And I’ll be prepared when you’re lonely and scared at the end of our days,” he sings along with Tony Iommi’s monolithic riff. Within the line there’s barely room for breath, yet his delivery is neither frantic nor inattentive. It is casually exact, present and available to the song, and, therefore, to the listener. His task was to embody the feeling within the lyrics Butler wrote specifically for him to sing. His job, to speak crassly, was to sell us the songs.
And yet, within this framework, his musical accomplishment is so immense that it sets a standard most frontmen can only hope to approach. Possessing, by most estimates, an average vocal range of three-and-a-half octaves, give or take, he brought to his craft a natural, relatable mood, remarkably infectious across time and presumptive cultural barriers, playing in at least 43 countries during his 57 years as a performer.
The timbre of his voice—instantly recognizable; once heard, never thereafter mistaken for anybody else’s—allowed those who experienced it to feel addressed; recognized; seen. This set him apart from his peers in hard rock, vocalists of greater force and technical mastery. You cannot, on your best day, imagine being Robert Plant, but Osbourne is like Jerry Garcia. When he’s singing, he might even be you, given different circumstance. He makes the moment feel generally available.
The disparity between his image—the “fuckin’ Prince of Darkness,” in his own phrase—and the encouraging, hopeful, ultimately Christian nature of Butler’s lyrics has been amply discussed over the years. Nor did the lyricists he engaged in his solo career stray much from the essentially positive themes to which Osbourne always returned in his stage banter: love, the power of music, the hunger for justice in a world short on supply. There were also songs about guys who had turned into werewolves, true.
But take “Crazy Train,” whose canonical Randy Rhoads riff need not be described: you know it; you can hear it in your head right now. “Crazy Train” is a song about trying to find your way in a world where everybody seems to be against each other all the time and where wounds don’t heal. Each of us, every day, confronts some feeling like this; for many, the pressure seems to build without sufficient release, compounding itself as our time slips away. Bob Daisley probably wrote the lyrics—Osbourne’s named as a writer on it, but by this stage of his career, getting a publishing credit could mean any number of things—but only Ozzy, Ozzy alone, could sing
Crazy—but that’s how it goes
and evoke, in the listener, a feeling so vivid, so present. Try it yourself; practice it for an hour; you won’t attain the casual dramatic force of the original, so natural as to seem improvised, so easy that its craft slips right past you. It endures because it resonates at the level of our everyday experience. That is the magic of his craft.
And in truth, his entire career bears witness to the depth of this craft and of how readily it came to him. He is correctly understood as a song stylist—like Tony Bennett, or, I think more accurately, like the jazz singer Blossom Dearie, having located a style early and refined it throughout his life. His melodies emerge as if he’d just thought of them a moment before. He’s not speaking the words, but they arrive like thoughts voiced out loud. They’re seldom belabored for effect; he reads what’s in front of him and makes it sound like he was just singing what was on his mind. And sometimes they are punctuated by what seem—feel—like spontaneous expressions of feeling—the “All right, now!” of “Sweet Leaf,” the “You bastards!” of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.” To say “not everyone can do this” is to severely understate the case.
That he brought this rare ability to a genre that simply did not exist before he and his friends Bill, Tony, and Geezer invented it is the great gift of his life’s work. There were bands making heavy music before Black Sabbath; heavy blues, heavy psychedelia, heavy soul. But there were not bands as singularly drenched in doom. From that singularity, heavy metal arises; the greater number of Sabbath’s children are known mainly to genre aficionados, but the list goes on for pages: Candlemass, Electric Wizard, Orange Goblin, Church of Misery, Solitude Aeternus—none of these are imaginable without Ozzy Osbourne’s life and work, and their relative obscurity doesn’t diminish what their music has meant and still means to hundreds of thousands worldwide.
His legacy is vast. It permeates broad swathes of a subculture that encompasses people from all walks of life. Black Sabbath’s music during his tenure with them covered more ground than is usually mentioned when their music is described; their mid-period gestures toward prog, on Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, are some of the best rock music ever made. That young Ozzy Osbourne did not set out to change music, but only to have fun with his friends and stay out of trouble—he’d been to jail several times for burglary—is both typical of his story, and what makes the story great.
The function of an obituary is to situate its subject’s life and work in historical context. This is a dry way to treat the meat and bone that went into living that life and doing that work, but it’s an article of faith with me. The work is what matters; we honor it by describing it as clearly as we can. “Principles before personalities,” as they say. But part of that context, too, is how this life and work play out in the lives and hearts and minds of the people who see it, and who hear it, and who respond to it.
I was 13 years old; 1980. None of my friends owned any Black Sabbath albums; I’d seen Technical Ecstasy in the record collection of some friend of my father’s a few years earlier, but the cover had scared the shit out of me, so I hadn’t played it. (In those years, lingering by the stereos of my fathers’ friends’ teenage children was an errand of supreme importance; this practice shaped me.)
I knew “Iron Man” from the Warner Special Projects compilation Heavy Metal - 24 Electrifying Performances, which I’d bought at a Fred Meyer for two bucks one summer in Portland, but I hadn’t known what to make of it. The way Ozzy’s vocal line followed the riff to the note was troubling to me—disquieting, disturbing. Black Sabbath felt dangerous. In my life, I had no need of further danger. I was drawn to the imagery of the band—the aura, the ethos—and contemplated the title of the greatest hits compilation, We Sold Our Souls for Rock and Roll, as if it had been an actual confession of signing a contract with the devil. It all seemed to beckon from a grown-up world full of threat and menace. Ozzy was no longer a member of Black Sabbath; his new project, 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz, was establishing itself.
I was on an Amtrak train, headed either to or from Portland from central California, I’m not sure which. The bubble car on the top of the train had a bar with a Fender Rhodes in it. After the bar closed for the night, a bunch of teenagers took over the place; either the porters didn’t notice or didn’t care. They heisted a case of beer from behind the bar and hung around smoking cigarettes. I was younger and smaller than all of them, but in the atmosphere of a long train ride, I’d caught the scent of the action, and insinuated myself into the party. The world outside the windows of the bubble car rushed quickly past in the night.
One of the older among the partying teenagers sat mainly by himself, drinking beer from a can; he had a beard; he might have been in his twenties. My habit was to ask every older person what music they liked, to get as much information as I could. From a swiveling chair near him, I asked: What are you into? And he said—word for word—“Ozzy Osbourne. I’m just telling everyone I know, Ozzy Osbourne.”
I was desperate to learn what the grown-up world was like. I registered this lesson as if I might later need it under duress.
Under the stewardship of his wife, Sharon, and with the support of his family, Osbourne’s fame grew until he’d successfully infiltrated the mainstream. About that, and about the head of the bat and also the dove, and the TV show and the pissing event at the Alamo, you can read in all the other obituaries. But for me, as, I suspect, for many of us who have followed his music through various lineups, departures and returns, cycles of growth, the nameless bearded guy in the bubble car speaks to the Ozzy whose work would be with us when, in harder years, we became the guy stealing beer from the unattended bar, and revealing our hearts to whoever happened to be nearby.
Contemplating the music that would speak to us then, in our time between stations, surrendering out of necessity to the uncertain motion of the moment—that moment of need, not for direction but just for the voice of someone who sounded like he understood. Someone who might be us, if we got lucky: who sounded like us when we sang to ourselves, hollering “Yeah!” when the intensity peaks but otherwise requiring words written by a friend. Because sometimes you can’t, yourself, find the words beyond the moment. So you lurch, and you whip your hair, or you lean back drunk in your chair. Lost. Wasted. Telling everyone we know: Ozzy Osbourne.