I’m not sure if I can call myself an emotional wreck; I’ve always preferred Led Zeppelin to Black Sabbath and I was not the most religious Ozzy post-Sabbath listener. And yet, if there were ever a band and a performer to turn me on to metal, it had to be Ozzy Osbourne-era Sabbath.
Master of Reality, in particular. The first Sabbath record I ever bought. I can’t remember if I found it in a hole-in-the-wall record store in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood or if during a trip to Amoeba in the Haight-Ashbury, but it became a touchstone all the same. A soundtrack to dog days spent adrift in the cannabis mist, wondering if that sizzle on air was just the heat vapors or my mind playing tricks.
Regardless, it sits as the only Sabbath record in my vinyl collection and a testament to my sense for what metal is, or what it ought to be: a dense, sludge-ridden sonic swamp monster that turns any and every piece of metallurgy it touches into rust. Each riff just oozes in stereo, flooding the eardrum with a guitar tone that could corrode the copper in your headphones.
The riffs may be the doing of guitarists like Tony Iommi and Randy Rhoads, and Black Sabbath would not have amounted to much without the rhythm section of Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, but it was always Ozzy riding over top with the voice of a banshee that sirened that the hour had come.
Yes, he may have been a jester-king, an over-the-top icon of an over-the-top era, but those were days of napalm and orange sunshine. The hangover from the whiplash sixties, long before the “rules” of how to be a popular commercial rock star had been written.
And while the reasons for the rules eventually being written were understandable (Osbourne himself being a case study for several), can we not all admit that they make the whole spectacle of the rock star a bit of a drag?
Ozzy with Sabbath was a spectacle of music stretched to its theoretical limits in both how heavy it could weigh and how high it could sing. Ozzy by himself was spectacle of survival; a rock star who redefined his career outside of any band.
But just as much as Sabbath wasn’t the same without Ozzy, Osbourne was not the same without Sabbath.
It’s kind of what made that last concert so freaking beautiful. This was the jester-king and his troupemates in a court of their own making, using every last ounce of his showmanship and influence to raise over $190 million for charity. For a few hours, Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath became lords of this world, championing children’s hospitals, hospices and curing Parkinson’s.
And now the world is just not the same.
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The Casual Ramble 