July 25, 2025 • 60 mins
We honor the work of Ozzy Osbourne, who passed away this week at age 76.
Andrew and Dominique give Ozzy his flowers for being a much greater singer, performer and ambassador for rock and heavy metal music than people realize.
We talk about the grim circumstances that led to Ozzy co-founding Black Sabbath with Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, and we consider how Satanic panic unwittingly fueled the band’s rise in the ‘70s.
We stop down on some highlights from Ozzy’s incredible solo career and consider how music history would have been different had his widow and longtime manager Sharon Osbourne not entered the picture.
Also, we consider how perfectly Ozzy exited, from his revelatory final performance in Birmingham, raising $200 million for charity, and seeing all of his friends one last time.
Tell us about your first listen @AtFirstListenpodcast on Instagram!
Subscribe so you don't miss an episode!
(Episode 38.)
Andrew and Dominique give Ozzy his flowers for being a much greater singer, performer and ambassador for rock and heavy metal music than people realize.
We talk about the grim circumstances that led to Ozzy co-founding Black Sabbath with Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, and we consider how Satanic panic unwittingly fueled the band’s rise in the ‘70s.
We stop down on some highlights from Ozzy’s incredible solo career and consider how music history would have been different had his widow and longtime manager Sharon Osbourne not entered the picture.
Also, we consider how perfectly Ozzy exited, from his revelatory final performance in Birmingham, raising $200 million for charity, and seeing all of his friends one last time.
Tell us about your first listen @AtFirstListenpodcast on Instagram!
Subscribe so you don't miss an episode!
(Episode 38.)
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:13):
Welcome to at First Listen, the music podcast for people
who don't always get the hype but want to.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm Andrew, I'm doing and we're trying to help with
Ozzy Osbourne. Kind of a bad stretch of episodes that
we're putting out with icons who have passed away. We
had the sly Stone episode, but we're like, isnt it
so cool that he's alive? Yeah, and he died like
a month later, And then we were talking about doing
(00:41):
a Beach Boys episode and Brian Wilson did not last
very long after that conversation, and then we talked about
doing a Black Sabbath episode because of the Back to
the Beginning concert earlier this month, and he didn't last
too long after that. So we're going to pay tribute
to Ozzy Osbourne today as we're recording this. He passed
(01:02):
away yesterday at the age of seventy six. Ozzie and
Black Sabbath are both very important artists to me and
my just general conception of music and my enthusiasm for music.
Them and the Beatles, and you know, their influences from
(01:24):
American blues music got me to listen to blues and
then that sort of got me into some of the
R and B and funk and then eventually like the
modern music that I like. Today, we're gonna listen down
to a bunch of Ozzie and Black Sabbath segments of
songs on this episode and talk about who he was,
(01:45):
where he came from, and sort of the impact that
he had.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
So yeah, I definitely this is an artist where I
haven't gotten the hype. I haven't previously gotten the hype,
and it was always just was never contextualized for me.
I think, like, uh, my parents always kind of hated
(02:10):
anything hard, and so then when I found like harder music,
I was listening to like scream oh or like death core.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Or just or punk, like just stuff that.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Was like stuff that Black Sabbath would have thought was
too noisy when they were.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Starting exactly, and that's why I was like. So when
I finally like went to like look up Black Sabbath
or Ozzy Osbourne and I heard their songs, I was like, oh,
this sounds like the Beatles or something. Both everybody is
being dramatic about this. My parents are certainly being dramatic
about this, and I was like, Okay, I.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Get it, and I think I just didn't.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
I didn't contextualize it in that moment, nor did I
need to at the time of like figuring out music
as a teen. This episode, I think is going to
be very good for me to kind of understand his influence.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, I think the prevailing thing about Ozzy Osbourne and
his influences as a solo artist, he became such an
incredibly famous person, and part of most of that I
think was probably because of the Osbourne's TV show, But
then Sharon Osbourne, his widow now was a daytime talk
(03:40):
show personality, and so the Osbourne's were very much in
mainstream culture, and Ozzy being from a heavy metal band
and one of the first heavy metal bands, his renown
really contributed I think to the vitality of the genre
(04:00):
and why there is still even though heavy metal is
like completely underground, it's still a vibrant underground culture and
an international underground culture. So the back to the beginning concert,
which was his farewell show that was in Ossie and
Black Sabbath's hometown of Birmingham, England. There were like forty
(04:24):
five thousand people in the stadium watching it in person,
and then they live streamed it on pay per view.
For like twenty bucks or thirty bucks or something. All
the money went to charity, and like another five million
people watched it. It's like on a Saturday. I mean,
NBC could have put that on and felt good about
programming it to have that big of an audience.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
They That's a great point that his love for attention
basically what has kept the genre alive. I think that
his whole family spelled at least Sharon seems like she
(05:11):
was kind of pushing him to do more like celebrity
type stuff. Yeah, and I definitely I always had I
always knew who they were, more so Sharon and the
daughter Kelly than Ozzy, I would say. But I was
(05:37):
always like, why are we talking about these people? Like
what do they have to do with anything? And I
realized that it was like very much before their time,
leveraged his fame.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
To create this whole like entertainment.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
It's empire empire. Yeah, they were like a mogul family
for sure. Especially how Sharon goes from being Ozzy Osbourne's manager,
the guy who's biting the heads off of small animals
in the eighties to being a daytime talk show host
is a very It's an extraordinary like glow up. I guess,
(06:23):
as with any powerful woman, Sharon Osbourne has a lot
of enemies and a lot of people who hate her,
some for valid reasons, I would think, because there's been
a lot of litigation in the Osbourne past, really starting
with Black Sabbath and Black Sabbath's former manager, who was
(06:43):
Sharon's father, Don Arden. He was a notorious music industry
thug and mobster and stole millions of dollars from Black
Sabbath and was really known as like one of the
worst people in the music business, and Sharon was one
(07:04):
of the people who kind of saved Black Sabbath. And
in sort of a roundabout way, I'm sure in like
nineteen eighty one, the other members of Black Sabbath, Tony Iomi,
Geezer Butler and Bill Ward did not feel like Sharon
was helping them at all. She didn't really have anything
to do with them. But with the reunions in the
(07:25):
nineties and the two thousands, Sharon was really kind of
the architect of those events. With oz Fest, which Black
Sabbath headlined in the early two thousand's ear late nineties,
you know, that was Sharon's manager brain in her business
mind and her understanding like how to bring people together.
(07:47):
And she also, by the way, saved Ozzy's life, like
he was going to kill himself after getting fired from
Black Sabbath in seventy nine, and if she didn't like
keep him from drinking all of the booze and doing
all of the drugs, he for sure would have died.
He tells a story that he was in a hotel
room for like a month just like waiting to die
(08:10):
essentially after Black Sabbath fired him, and he was he
was not eating, and he was doing all of the substances,
and Sharon like literally like busted down the door and
put him in treatment and then they started his solo
career basically after he got his head a little bit right.
(08:30):
I don't know if it was ever right.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Well, it seems like he had a bunch of situations
that kind of plunged him into, you know, a deep
depression because the way the way they told it in
that one documentary was.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
The the A and E documentary The Nine Lives of Ozzieololnia.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, well, and it was basically told in that way.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Where it was like this is the time he almost
died and this was the time he.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Should have died.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And like.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
His his bandmate from after his solo career had gotten started,
what was his name, Randy Roads, Yes, Randy Rhodes. That
that was like they kept and I don't know, you
know how much it was obviously dramatized, but it was
always like I had never seen him like this before,
(09:18):
and I had never seen him like that before. And
I think it was, you know, to a certain extent,
it seems like he would grow and adjust and find
a new situation, but then something would happen and he
would kind of fall victim again to his addictions. Yeah,
but I it just seems like he was such a
(09:39):
charismatic and like loving guy.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
That's one of the things that occurred to me today.
You know, Ozzie passed away. There's been a lot of
tributes out on social media, and I'm seeing a lot
of this stuff and I'm realizing that, like, I haven't
heard anyone talk about Ozzy Osbourne really, like, Okay, part
of this is Sharon protecting him and I think absorbing
(10:07):
some of the blows and being the bad guy when
it comes to firing people, and they fired a lot
of people, but even people who were fired from Ozzie
related things, who had lawsuits against him, still defend him
and still say that he was like the funniest guy.
As like I think of the Doors movie as like
(10:30):
the and I don't know what the reality of the
Doors situation with Jim Morrison and everything was, but how
he's just in that movie. Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison,
he's like a time bomb, like he's always going to
do something crazy. And it's like if he's like cutting
a slice of bread, you think he's going to stab somebody.
(10:50):
He's like such a loose cannon because of his drug addiction,
and you're like, how could anyone work with this person?
Like it can't possibly be real. And here here's Ozzy Osbourne,
who is his for like forty years of his life,
he's totally out of it and people like he was
a blast to be around.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Well, that's the crazy thing.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
It's like he not only did he was he always
in and out of intense drug use, always touring. He
was also constantly womanizing, like a lot, cheating on his
He always had a wife and he was always.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Cheating on them.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
That's the part where it's kind of it's a fascinating
thing to figure out because like, the people he mistreated
the worst are the people who loved.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Him the most.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
And yeah, it's just fascinating because I think that a
lot with the current, you know, pr is everything culture
that we have now, Like I think part of why
it works for Ozzy is because, like, yeah, he was
literally unabashedly high all the time, button heads off animals.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
One of which was an accident, just to say the
one time was an.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Accident, honest mistake.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
I was high and I accidentally bent the head of
a bat.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Right. So the.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Dove thing, whether he's happened first, and that was very
early in his solo career. They had some dispute with
the record label. They were going into like smooth things over,
iron out a deal, and for some reason they brought
these doves in. They're like, we're going to release these
birds as a symbol of peace and reconciliation, and Ozzie
(12:44):
is like blasted out of his mind and he just
gets bored in this meeting and he's like has the
inclination to, I guess, freak out all these people in suits.
So he grabs one of the doves in just bites
its head off. Yeah, and they were all horrified, and
(13:05):
he actually got much more famous for doing that. Yes,
So the second time was the bad incident that was
at a show and some weird person brought a dead
bat to the show and threw it on to the stage. Like,
we focus on Ozzie and the weird thing that he
(13:26):
did and immediately regretted. Ozzie thought it was a toy
so or like a rubber, like a Halloween sort of decoration.
So he picked it up and he bit and was
like ha ha, and then he was like, why is
there blood in my mouth? Why did that? Why was
that crunchy? So we focus on Ozzie doing a weird thing,
(13:49):
but who brings a dead animal.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
To Okay, that is actually much That makes a lot
more sense for sure. So there were two that he
did it.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
There were two times, both I guess sort of worked
out for him. Although the bad incident he needed to
get a bunch of rabias. Yeah, he said he did not.
He wished he did not do that, and then he
did a peda campaign about declining your cats, you know,
years later.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Okay, so my point is that like he's the prince
of darkness, he's like into being purposefully scary and like
threatening and demonic one might say, or you know, evoking
kind of demonic imagery. And I just feel like now
(14:39):
people are always getting accused of being like demonic. Oh,
it's like, oh little nas X and Beyonce, they're they're
doing the signs of the Beast or whatever. Ozzy Osbourne is, like,
I am this, So what can you say about him
at that point? Like what how can you can't, like,
(15:00):
I think, other than personal slights and like litigation and
stuff with people he knows. I feel like if somebody
were to go about trying to cancel Ozzy Osbourne's legacy,
where would you even start?
Speaker 2 (15:16):
And by the way, I'm also silly.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Yeah, mainly that, and like I could totally understand the
instinct to, like, if you thought something was like a
stuffed toy, to like pick it up and bite the
head off of it when you're performing. That's and then
the dove thing, Yeah, to me, it is closer to
being like a chicken, So it's not as weird.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
I'm not.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
I would like any meat that I consume to be
ethically slaughtered.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah, which we can't always have that, but I would
say slaughtered at all is a good route, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I mean, that's the goal. We're gonna have lab grown
meat someday and it'll probably give us super cancer.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
But we won't find out about that till well, no.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Until later. So let's take a break and then we'll
talk more about how spooky Ozzy Osbourne was when we
come back. Welcome back to at first listen, we are
(16:27):
talking about the legacy of Ozzy Osbourne, and before we
get to the music, I do want to talk about
like where Ozzie came from, who he was. Of course,
the back to the beginning fundraiser concert was in his
hometown of Birmingham, England. Birmingham, Yeah, and so Birmingham was
(16:51):
a steel town in the midlands of England. This was
in World War Two before Ozzie was born, a place
where the English Army was making munitions and I believe
also tanks and planes that they were using the war effort.
(17:13):
As such, the Nazis wanted to blow Birmingham to smithereens.
So Ozzie, I think, who was born in forty eight,
his older siblings, his parents, if they weren't in the war,
certainly remembered the war, and so Ozzi Geezer Bill Tony
(17:35):
from Black Sabbath literally grew up in a former war zone.
If if we were to hear of children living in
these conditions today, we would think it's a third world country.
But it was the UK in the forties and fifties.
It was a pretty grim place. So I have Geezer
Butler's memoir here, and Dominique found a passage in that.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Okay, so Geezer Butler's still alive, right, yes, So would
it be just respectful for me to try it to
do a British accent? Yeah, go for it, Okay, Okay,
I'm just gonna do the first bit, and then I'll
do it in an American accent.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Af favor.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Good start.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Off.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Favorite playground was a bomb site literally because those two
houses and the shop that got to blitter, okay, obliterated by.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
The LOOFTWAFFA hadn't been rebuilt.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
One day I found a huge fragment of the bomb
that had done damage. An abandoned lorry on the site
became our den. We'd leave bread and milkoff neighbors doorsteps,
retreat to the den and fill our faces. And across
the road was an air raid shelter which was half
flooded in which we dare each other to enter. My
parents and sim siblings used it during the war when
(18:59):
the bombing got to heavy for them to use the
Anderson shelter in our backyard. Having a bomb site as
a playground might sound a bit grim. Far from it,
it was a child's paradise, a place where young imagination
could run wild.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Yeah, so these kids literally grew up playing in a
bomb crater. We think of the UK as being like
America about like a little bit culturally different, But in
this time period where Black Sabbath was coming from, it
was a bombed out, post apocalyptic hellscape and it was
(19:36):
gradually rebuilding. But when you think about how much blues
infiltrated British rock music, when you think about that environment,
it makes a little bit more sense as to why
musicians in the UK in the sixties were really getting
(19:59):
something deep out of American blues music and how they
were trying to put their own spin on it. And
that's ultimately what Black Sabbath was was they were just
trying to be like a louder, heavier blues band than
anyone had ever heard, and they saw a horror movie
one night, a Italian film called Black Sabbath, and they thought,
(20:22):
what if we were like the horror movie version of
the Beatles, and we call our band Black Sabbath and
we make spooky lou blues music. And that's what they did.
This is the title track of their debut album, Black Sabbath.
This song scared the shit out of me. So a
(20:50):
lot is made of that interval the flat fifth here.
A lot of people today are saying that this interval
was outlawed by the church because it was too spooky.
That's not true, that's fake news, but it is a
spooky sounding interval.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
I feel like the church is the Church is disapproving
of most things, so I feel like they don't have
to go out of their way to be like, oh,
this one's this one interval, Like, I feel like they're
not having Black Sabbath at there.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Well, there's like some document from the fifteen hundreds where
they're like, you can't do this thing, oh in your chance,
But then there are like way more examples of chance,
like grain chants and stuff like that. They use that
interval specifically, so did.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
It They love spooky stuff? Anyway?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
The church is so spooky. That's why heavy metal is spooky. Yeah,
they're pulling from Christian usually Catholic dogma and imagery. Yeah,
Black Sabbath for what it's worth. The spooky, their spookiness
was mostly a concoction from their record label because they
(22:03):
had some of the spooky vibe in the music, but
their record company thought it would be way better if
it was if they marketed them as these like accult fiends,
because there was a lot of satanic panic in that
time and they were basically unaware of this until they
got their album back and they're like, what, this is
(22:25):
so dark and grim and black. This isn't what we meant.
And they're like, just shut up. We're already stealing millions
of dollars from you. This is going to be good
for you, guys, just let it go.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
It was kind of like a you. It still is
like this, like you.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
They were just trying to be more shocking and yeah
than whatever the other.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
And eventually they embraced it because they saw that it
was it was cool to make a lot of money,
but it never really it never really became part of
their music or their lyrics. Like the music was always
was going to sound like it sounded. It doesn't. I
don't think creatively in the music or in the lyrics
(23:10):
they played with those types of themes, or if they did,
it was like this stuff is bad.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Yeah, Barry that.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
I also want to give Ozzie some props for his
harmonica playing. So there's a lot of harmonica on the
first album and they basically never used this instrument again.
Maybe there's some on the second, but yeah, this is
Ozzy shredding the harp. And I don't think he played
harmonica on any of his solo albums, but there is.
(23:42):
He had another TV show, Ozzie and Jack's World Tour
with his son Jack. I think it was on the
History Channel because Ozzie was a big history buff and
at one point they go to like the National Harmonica
Museum or something, and he still has those child ups
and he plays a little harmonica in the show. It's
(24:03):
cool because he's a guy who was like severely dyslexic,
didn't play guitar, didn't write music, didn't write lyrics. He
contributed melody. Was kind of the way that his collaborators
always described him as as a songwriter. He would write
a melody, he would sing you a song without lyrics,
and then he needed someone else to write lyrics for
(24:26):
him because his dyslexia was such a barrier.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Harmonica is tough because you can't sing at the same time.
And I feel like, when I'm seeing a vocalist and
they're tearing up the harmonica, I'm like just saying, go
back and singing.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
That sounded better? I mean, do you but that was
really good.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
That was better than I think I've ever heard harmonica
live at least, so yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
I think it's because you get a harmonica and it's
like this is in the kiva, and it's like, great,
my song's in the kiva. I'm just gonna blow into
this thing and then I'll be like I'm playing the harmonica.
But there are people who are good at it.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
You can like just be like an asshole with the
harmonica and just blow into it willy nilly, But if
you do know how to play it, it's actually very pleasant.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
One of my favorite Black Sabbath songs is a song
called war Pigs, one of their biggest hits. Also, Black
Sabbath is never really considered a political band. They don't
get credit for the What I think is a really
powerful statement in this song.
Speaker 5 (25:44):
Generals gathered in their massive just like witches at Black
Massive Minds it ploot destruction saucer of death construction.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
I mean, that's a heavy metal song, but it's a
protest song as well. The line conclude, or the rest
of the verses in the fields, the body's burning as
the war machine keeps turning death and hatred to mankind,
poisoning their brainwashed minds. That's not an endorsement of evil stuff.
That's a condemnation of evil stuff. Black sabbage they were
(26:30):
not hippies, but they were about peace and love. They
liked that they could scare hippies because I think they
were annoyed by the same aspects of hippies that are
universally annoying, but they were about the same things.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, I think people have always decided to like take
things at surface level and not and not engage with
the actual meaning. I think it's across the board. It's
(27:08):
like a pretty common thing. I think it's like, oh,
I don't like this, so therefore I have decided that
it's evil and I'm not gonna look deeper into it
at all.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yeah, it's like, oh, I saw that movie Star Wars.
There's this guy in a Darth Vader who's like killing everybody.
That movie is totally satanic.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Yeah, everyone who likes it is is devil worship.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Worshiping the devil. That's exactly, and it's completely missing, like
this figure in the film serves a function for the
plot and the message, which is evil's bad.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Oh as much as I love a movie or I
love a song, I love an art where everyone's just
having a good time the whole time, it's called a comedy.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Called the comedy.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
It's great. But yes, that's that's exactly right. I think
that you know, we're like the grandkids of him. Yeah, basically.
And I think it's pretty well known now that people
with like studded belts on and long, you know, scraggly hair,
(28:18):
that they're probably a really nice person.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
It's like not fake. I think that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
It's like, I don't I'm not trying to like seem
nice and like loving. I actually am trying to see
him very scary, but secretly I am really nice.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
And asked me about my cat, Yeah exactly, Oh my god,
his cats, well, they had one cat. I guess they
had a bunch of dogs.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
They had a It seems like they just kind of
collected animals the Osbourne's. There's a lot of funny scenes
from the show where there's one I saw a clip
of where he's threatening his cat for going near he
was making chicken or something.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Yeah, it seemed like as Sharon especially was like always
getting a pet. But I felt like he got along
with the cats better than the dogs. But maybe that
was just the vibe was But.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Also he didn't seem like a person who was really
capable of actively giving care to another living thing, So
it was probably just easier to vibe with a cat
than it was a needy dog.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Totally, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
The song Paranoid also from the second Black Sabbath album,
keep in mind, like the lyrics to these were all
written by Geezer Butler, the bass player, but it's still,
you know, a concept that's greenlit by the band that
Ozzie repeats these words every night for the next fifty
(29:55):
years of his life. Interesting if you listen to the
lyrics for Paranoid, it's not really about paranoia, it's about depression,
and Geezer Butler specifically suffered from a lot of depression,
but as a poor kid from the remains of Birmingham, England,
(30:18):
he did not have access to mental health care, so
he didn't He literally did not know the word depression,
so he just described his feelings as paranoia or being paranoid,
and that ended up being Black Sabbath's best selling single.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Yeah, that's definitely a song that I've heard.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
And also talking about the influence of this band, this
sort of driving guitar riff, I mean, this is where
thrash metal comes from. This is where Metallica Slayer, this
is where motor Head sort of this end communications breakdown
by led Zeppelin, That's where this comes from. This is
(30:58):
why Sabbath is such a beloved and important band.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
I'm hard pressed to like give to give a white
man credit for something, but like it does seem like
he was actually creating his own thing, like inspired by
blues and stuff going on and musically in America and
(31:24):
in the sixties, like rock and stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
That was sort of the medium of Yeah, but he.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Was It wasn't like, oh, I want to sound like
that other band or it was like a new thing.
I mean the fact that he basically was like, we're
gonna make spooky, spooky music, and he was inspired by
a horror movie. He wasn't inspired by another another band,
(31:52):
no heavy metal band, or anybody else doing music that way.
So I think that's actually I was. I It definitely
helped me to kind of understand why these songs are
so pervasive.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yeah. He also, I don't think it's enough credit for
being a good singer because he has such a weird,
unique voice, because he is like an all time marble
mouth where people just four years could not understand what
he was saying between his accent and I think just
generally mumbling for him to actually be like hitting musical
(32:31):
notes and sounding really good. And I've got an example
of his vocals coming up that's actually really impressive.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
But I think it's just like thinking about music where
music was at the time, and like what you would
have expected out of a vocalist coming out of the
sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
It was not like this.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, so there's two more Sabbath songs. I want to
stop down on sweet Leaf. I believe Tony Iomi coughing
this is obviously like a cannabis anthem. Giza writes in
his book that the idea for the title of the
song actually came from a cigarette packet. But it's one
(33:13):
of those things where I don't it doesn't really matter
what the songwriter says the song is about. It is
about It's about pot and really loving pot.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Good for them.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
But also this is one of the most undeniable riffs
in rock history. There's generations of heavy bands that are
trying to write a riff that is like as groovy
as this one. And then the last Sabbath song I
wanted to talk about is Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath. This is
(33:52):
probably their most advanced song. You're gonna hear like where
thrash metal came from, like another flash point for that
type of music. Prague. There's this rant the chorus and
the song is played on an acoustic guitar, which you
(34:12):
wouldn't expect from a band with the reputation of Black Sabbath.
But again, they were inspired inspired by the Beatles as well,
so they wanted their albums to have all these different
textures and colors, even if they were ultimately a really
heavy band. And there's also what some people consider the
first heavy metal breakdown at the end of the song,
(34:37):
another riff that they that saved Black Sabbath momentarily because
they were about to break up, and then Tony came
up with that great guitar riff we just heard and
they were like, okay, we can we can sell another
album with that one. So here their backs to being
(34:59):
in jazz band momentarily. And then they're going to come
out of the chorus and they're gonna slam it really
hard for a bit and then I'm gonna fast forward
to about three minutes in, so it gets a little
(35:37):
bit slower, a little bit darker, and an impressive note choice.
Therefore rasing He's getting up there. Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath probably
(35:58):
their last good album. The one thing that separates Sabbath
from a band like led Zeppelin. In my opinion, led
Zeppelin doesn't have any bad albums. Sabbath has some albums
that are tough to listen to because they were so
on drugs, they were so deeply in debt, because their
managers were ripping them off like it was their job
(36:19):
to rip them off. It was one of those situations
where the manager is telling you, anytime you want to
buy something like a house or a car, just let
me know and I'll get you the money for it,
and they're like, okay, cool. That works for a couple
of years and they're like, wait a minute, why is
(36:40):
my house being repossessed.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
It's like not it wasn't his house.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah, it wasn't your house, or you didn't ever pay
the mortgage on it. Like they just trusted all the
wrong people early in their career and spent actually millions
of dollars that they didn't have to get out of
some of these bad contracts. It was like in perpetuity,
all that kind of awful stuff that you never want
(37:05):
to sign. Let's take another break and we'll talk about Ozzi,
the solo artist on at First Listen.
Speaker 4 (37:13):
To Welcome back to At First Listen.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
I'm Andrew, I'm Dominie.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
And we're talking about Ozzy Osbourne as a solo artist.
Ozzie got fired from Black Sabbath in nineteen seventy nine
because in a band full of people who are high
on drugs, he was far too high on drugs and
they had to get rid of him. Ozzie was really
sad about it, almost killed himself a few times, and
(37:49):
eventually formed a new band, initially that was initially going
to be called The Blizzard of Oz with Randy Rhodes,
Lee Hursel like Bob Daisley, and Don Airy the keyboardist.
Eventually he decided, or Sharon decided, that Ozzy had to
(38:10):
be a solo artist to protect his equity and his
stake in the royalties, and so they ended up naming
the album Blizzard of Oz. Even though this was a
collaborative record, it ultimately belonged to Ozzy and was the
subject of a lot of lawsuits going forward. But as
(38:34):
far as a solo debut goes, after leaving a big
band and a band that it was not, it was
not a hot take at the time to think that
Black Sabbath was losing steam. They were clearly tired and
clearly not loving what they were doing anymore. They did okay.
(39:00):
They hired Ronnie James Dio and had a bunch of
a couple of really great albums with Doo and Ozzie
put out a song called Crazy Train, which I could
I'd be totally fine never hearing this song again, but
it is it is worth mentioning, you know, the lyrics
(39:22):
of this song are are They don't get their due
because it is such a character song for Ozzie with
that intro. You hear that III thing everywhere all the time.
It's it's a ubiquitous sound. Most people probably have no
(39:43):
idea what it's even from.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Definitely I didn't.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, I mean did I write down? Oh yeah, so
the first verse crazy, But that's how it goes. Millions
of people living as foes. Maybe it's not too late
to learn how to love and forget how to hate.
This is a song that people interpret it's about being
wild and crazy and breaking, you know, smashing up hotel
(40:10):
rooms and stuff. But it's another like peace and love tune.
It's another like can't we all be friends? Kind of
a song, Yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
It's stop being mad at me for being an insane man,
and everyone just lightly nice to me.
Speaker 5 (40:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
It's packaged with like leather pants and pointing guitars. Yes,
and people are like this guy worships Satan. One of
my favorite songs off of this record is a song
called Goodbye to Romance, which was mostly I think written
(40:44):
by Randy Rhodes. There's a neoclassical type guitar chord melody happening,
and while it's called Goodbye to Romance, I've always sort
of interpreted it as more of a farewell song in general,
like I never get romance from this song. This doesn't
(41:09):
come off to me at all like a love song totally,
And maybe part of that is Ozzie not being the
lyricist of the song. He kind of sings it how
it feels and not with necessarily the sentiment that it's written.
There's another song I think it's from this album or
(41:31):
the one after, called Suicide Solution, which people interpreted and
Ozzie was actually blamed for a teen suicide because of
the song. It was interpreted as like suicide is the solution.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
But as.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Bob Daisley, the lyricist and bass player, had to explain
in court number one, Ozzie did not write the song,
so you can't sue him for the lyrics. But two,
the song was about Ozzie's drinking.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
It's like you drink so that he doesn't kill himself hopefully,
or it's.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
A the drinking is a solution to other things that
are wrong in his life. Yeah, and it's a suicidal one.
So it was it was Bob basically writing about his
friend Ozzie, who he was concerned about, and it happened
to be Ozzie, the one singing the song on the
record and the person who took all of the blame
(42:34):
from the Christian right when young heavy metal fans had issues.
But That's always Goodbye to romance has always been a
favorite of mine. It's sort of like a like, I'm
I get a platonic feeling from that song.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah, it seems like it's goodbye to.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Some or like I have passed away.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, so goodbye to an era. It's like goodbye to
the past more than a person.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
The romance of the past, yea, the romance of nostalgia.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Maybe that, Yeah, that's the what I might get for sure.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
The first track on the Blizzard of Oz album is
a song called I Don't Know Again lyrics by Bob Daisley.
But I think this is a really appropriate song when
you think about how people get really into artists and
end up elevating them to a plateau that they are
like truth tellers and answer knowers. And it's kind of
(43:40):
a song that says, I'm just another guy. I have
no idea what I'm doing. Don't don't expect me to
be able to help you. I'm just I'm just rocking.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
I'm just here to rock totally.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
I mean, it's like that's a whole issue we're dealing
with today obviously, that it's like he's somebody who's famous,
a famous musician. He's famous because he's really good at
singing and entertaining. So I'm not going to go to
(44:15):
the plumber and be like, oh, you may I need
your opinion on politics. So why are we going to
the singer and asking his opinion on politics?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah? Or why are we not at the singer when
we don't like his opinion?
Speaker 3 (44:31):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
But it's just because so many people know him, but
not everyone knows the humble plumber. Shout out to our
plumbers who are listening, Like nobody demands answers like this.
But it's like, okay, if he's an elected official, we
should ask, but he never.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
I think it's he really was kind of like ahead
of his time with a lot of a lot of
observations and ways that he existed as an artist.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah. Also, just there's this lineage of amazing guitar players
that were in his solo band. You know, it starts
with Black Sabbath and people love Tony Iomi. He's sort
of the leader of that band, the architect of the band,
the only member to appear on every album, and then
as a solo artist, Ozzy got to elevate people like
Randy Rhodes, who tragically passed away in a plane crash
(45:33):
after a couple of years in Ozzie's band.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Do you understand that by the way the Randy Rhodes,
I was like, the plane crashed into a bus, and.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
Then I think the pilot was trying to do like
a trick because they were trying they were trying to
fly really low and close to the bus to like spook,
to like scare them as a joke, and they crashed.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Gotcha, Okay, I was like crazy coincidence that the plane
that he was on happened to crash into Ozzie's house.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
Or whatever it was. It was a tour bus.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
They were kind of on some sort of airfield or
tarback or something, I guess doing naughty stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, but that's one of those weird things in rock
where like Randy was did not have the reputation as
like a partier. He was not a person who was
going to die early unless something crazy happened. And something
crazy happened, and so after Randy's death, that kind of
(46:46):
started the revolving door. That was Ozzie's band for a
long time. So eventually that that original band, those members disbanded,
and he had a lot of other people to work with,
but a lot of like great guitar like Jake E
Lee who was the next not the next person to
play guitar and Nazzie's band, but the next person. He
(47:08):
did albums with Zach wild who has basically been his
music director since the late eighties, Gus g Bernie Tourmee,
and he worked with a lot of people. Mike McCready
was on his last album from Pearl Jam, so this
is one of the first big hits he had with
(47:29):
Zach Wilde. This is mom I'm Coming Home. And if
you watched the back to the beginning concert and you
can find the footage on YouTube today, this was the
part where every crowd shot has somebody crying because Ozzie
(47:49):
can't stand anymore when he's singing this at the farewell show,
so he's seated there and we all kind of get
that this is a man who's best stays are behind him,
and this is the last performance. We didn't think the
last music he was going to do. But it's a
(48:11):
great power ballad, really well produced lyrics by Lenny Kilmeister Motor.
And then I also wanted to shout out the title
(48:34):
track from Ozzie's second to last album, Ordinary Man. You
might know that I'm a big Elton John Fan Elton
John was as insane as Ozzie was in the seventies,
so they bonded over that. They were great friends for
a long time, and this I believe is the first
time they recorded together. So the piano is Elton playing,
(49:00):
and then Ozzie sings the first verse very like autobiographical.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
It's for you.
Speaker 5 (49:14):
I have traveled many months since.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I think about. The song reminds me of like if
you remember Johnny Cash towards the end of his life.
I think the movie had come out already, and he
did like one album after and he was like more
famous than he'd ever been. Everyone knew who Johnny Cash was,
was aware of that last album. That's I think the
(49:44):
album that Hurt was on the nine inch nails cover,
and he just had this moment and we kind of
got we understood as a society that like, this is
the last thing we're getting from this artist and David Bowie.
His last album was Black Star, which is a bit
of a departure because Bowie was a saxophone player and
(50:05):
a jazz head and he'd made this weird avant garde
jazz album which is actually beautiful. It's an incredible album.
And he did that whole album while he was actively
dying from cancer. So Ozzie does this record in like
twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two. This is after his
(50:28):
farewell tour has been canceled. He had started the farewell
tour for like, he didn't like two or three months
of it. It was supposed to go on for a
couple of years. He wanted to play literally every country
he'd ever played.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
This is like his fifth farewell tour, Like how many
farewell tours has he done?
Speaker 2 (50:45):
It was the no More Tours Too tour because he
tried to retire. He understood that he couldn't do it
for everyone to go out on top. And he had
to cancel a bunch of dates because he got a
staph infection. I think it was a staph infection. There
was some kind of infection in his finger and he
(51:06):
had to be hospitalized for it because he got so bad.
He's in the hospital for like two weeks. He gets
healthy again, he plays a few more shows, kind of
wraps up the leg, and then like January twenty twenty,
he's like, all right, we're gonna get back on the road.
We're gonna get back set with this farewell tour. He
gets up to pee late at night. Oh no, he
(51:28):
gets the flu first. He's hospitalized for the flu, and
this is all coming back to me now. And he
goes home. We're all like, yes, Ozzie's home. He had
to postpone a bunch of dates, but like, he's going
to reschedule those. Here he's coming back on the farewell tour.
I'm thinking, oh, you know what, maybe I will Maybe
(51:48):
I'll go see Ozzie live for the first time. He
gets up to pee late at night at home, trips
over a rug, slams his head on a nightstand, and
basically breaks his neck. He had an old injury from
like twenty years earlier where he was he nearly died
(52:09):
in an ATV accident, So he had all these screws
in his neck and his shoulders. So he always had
back problems and always had like chiropractors and massage therapists
working on him. So this happens. It basically breaks his
neck all over again. He's in the hospital for months
(52:29):
and he's rehabbing, he's trying to get better. He will
not give up on the Farewell tour. He's rehabbing, and
then he gets diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and it gets
that much harder, and of course the pandemic is happening.
So he wasn't going to play any shows anyway, and
(52:50):
just for the past five years of his life, he's
been desperately The only thing keeping him going really was
playing one more show. And finally it seems like he
and Sharon gave up on the playing one more show
thing sometime around late last year, and we're like, let's
(53:12):
put together a show where you can play it if
you're able, but people will still be happy to go
to a thing and celebrate your life in your career,
even if you're not able to be there. And so
they did the Back to the Beginning concert. Metallica played
Guns N' Roses, played Slayer, Gojira mastadon Lamb of God.
(53:35):
Sammy Hagar was there. Tom Morello was the music director.
Tom Morella from Rage Against the Machine. It's this huge affair.
Of course I mentioned it a little bit in the
earlier segment, but it was kind of designed so that
if Ozzie died before it happened, they would still be
able to do it, because they were very not committal
(53:57):
about whether he was going to performed the whole time
with Black Sabbath, whether he was just going to do
one song or not. And certainly if he did pass
away before the concert, people would have been happy to
go to a charity thing for one, but also a
thing that was going to be his memorial service. And
(54:18):
he ended up being able to do the show. He
was still singing really well, and I think he played
four songs with a solo band, four songs with Black Sabbath,
and that's after like eight hours of music before and
then he just passed away a couple of weeks later.
So as someone who followed his career really closely for
(54:45):
a long time, I can't help but think that this
is how he wanted to go out, or this is
the best he could have expected after how painful the
last few years had been.
Speaker 3 (55:00):
Yeah, I mean, he's.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
He kind of came out best case scenario for who
you know, everything he's put his self through in his life,
Like he got to keep being a rock star basically
till the day he died, keep making music as much
as he wanted, and just like be a fabulous rock
(55:24):
star with his family.
Speaker 2 (55:26):
And he also got to, especially in retrospect, like he
got to hang out with all of his friends again,
Like he and the other members of Black Sabbath, like,
I mean, you think about great friends you had from college.
Maybe you get together once every couple of years. It's
really fun to see each other again. I think that's
kind of their relationship. There was a story that like
(55:48):
he and Tony Iomi weren't talking because one of them
doesn't text and one of them doesn't call, and they
were in different time zone, so they could just never
coordinate a time to speak to each other. And so
(56:10):
they're both thinking like, oh, this guy has a problem
with me again, And it's really just that they in
this new world of technology, couldn't communicate literally couldn't communicate anymore.
Speaker 3 (56:24):
That's really cute.
Speaker 2 (56:25):
Yeah, So he got together with the old band, and
then everyone else he knew from music got to be there.
And there's all this behind great behind the scenes stuff
from that day that's really heartwarming. So I guess let's
take one more break and we'll wrap it up after
this on efforts.
Speaker 3 (56:45):
To welcome back to APP.
Speaker 2 (57:00):
I'm Andrew Dominique and we're wrapping up our Ozzy Osbourne episode. Okay,
so let's wrap it up by reading what Ozzie's Black
Sabbath bandmates had to say about him after they learned
that he had passed away. First, Tony, Iomi, I just
(57:20):
can't believe it. My dear dear friend, Ozzie has passed away,
only weeks after our final show at Villa Park. It's
just such heartbreaking news that I can't really find the words.
There won't ever be another like him. Geezer Bill and
myself have lost our brother. My thoughts go out to
Sharon and all the Osbourne family. Rest in peace, Oz,
Geezer Butler, goodbye, dear friend. Thanks for all those years
(57:44):
we had some great fun. Four kids from Assen who
would have thought, ah, so glad we got to do
it one last time back in Aston love you. And
then Bill Ward, the drummer who is mostly doing poetry
these days, and he wrote this where will I find
(58:05):
You Now? In the memories are unspoken embraces, our missed
phone calls. No, You're forever in my heart. Never goodbye,
thank you forever bill Ward.
Speaker 3 (58:19):
That's so nice.
Speaker 2 (58:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
I hope people write nice poems about me when I die.
Speaker 2 (58:27):
And hopefully you can hang out with everyone you love,
like at least a couple of weeks before you go.
Speaker 1 (58:32):
Yeah, at least like I invite everybody in the world
who is an end of mine.
Speaker 2 (58:37):
They can. I'll tell you how influential you were exactly,
and you pose for photos and then you're like sea, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (58:46):
I finally he's finally allowed to get high one more time.
Speaker 2 (58:51):
High an adulation. Yes, so, Dominique, you have a show
coming up?
Speaker 3 (58:56):
I do.
Speaker 1 (58:57):
I have a show on Saturday at U see Black
All Black Variety Show at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. It
is on the twenty sixth, eight thirty pm. Come and
come and get it. We have Chanelle Ali is going
to be doing some stand up and it's going to
(59:20):
be a great time.
Speaker 2 (59:21):
Are you calling it? You see Black Sabbath a tribute
to Ozzy Osbourne.
Speaker 3 (59:25):
Uh, that'll be for like a silo.
Speaker 2 (59:29):
I know it's short notice, but did you can pulled
that together good.
Speaker 3 (59:32):
Call this good idea? Anything else?
Speaker 2 (59:39):
No, that's it. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you
Ozzy Osbourne, thank you Black Sabbath. And we'll be back
next time with another episode of A First Listen, Hi
Speaker 4 (01:00:05):
And
Welcome to at First Listen, the music podcast for people
who don't always get the hype but want to.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
I'm Andrew, I'm doing and we're trying to help with
Ozzy Osbourne. Kind of a bad stretch of episodes that
we're putting out with icons who have passed away. We
had the sly Stone episode, but we're like, isnt it
so cool that he's alive? Yeah, and he died like
a month later, And then we were talking about doing
(00:41):
a Beach Boys episode and Brian Wilson did not last
very long after that conversation, and then we talked about
doing a Black Sabbath episode because of the Back to
the Beginning concert earlier this month, and he didn't last
too long after that. So we're going to pay tribute
to Ozzy Osbourne today as we're recording this. He passed
(01:02):
away yesterday at the age of seventy six. Ozzie and
Black Sabbath are both very important artists to me and
my just general conception of music and my enthusiasm for music.
Them and the Beatles, and you know, their influences from
(01:24):
American blues music got me to listen to blues and
then that sort of got me into some of the
R and B and funk and then eventually like the
modern music that I like. Today, we're gonna listen down
to a bunch of Ozzie and Black Sabbath segments of
songs on this episode and talk about who he was,
(01:45):
where he came from, and sort of the impact that
he had.
Speaker 1 (01:48):
So yeah, I definitely this is an artist where I
haven't gotten the hype. I haven't previously gotten the hype,
and it was always just was never contextualized for me.
I think, like, uh, my parents always kind of hated
(02:10):
anything hard, and so then when I found like harder music,
I was listening to like scream oh or like death core.
Speaker 3 (02:22):
Or just or punk, like just stuff that.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Was like stuff that Black Sabbath would have thought was
too noisy when they were.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Starting exactly, and that's why I was like. So when
I finally like went to like look up Black Sabbath
or Ozzy Osbourne and I heard their songs, I was like, oh,
this sounds like the Beatles or something. Both everybody is
being dramatic about this. My parents are certainly being dramatic
about this, and I was like, Okay, I.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Get it, and I think I just didn't.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
I didn't contextualize it in that moment, nor did I
need to at the time of like figuring out music
as a teen. This episode, I think is going to
be very good for me to kind of understand his influence.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, I think the prevailing thing about Ozzy Osbourne and
his influences as a solo artist, he became such an
incredibly famous person, and part of most of that I
think was probably because of the Osbourne's TV show, But
then Sharon Osbourne, his widow now was a daytime talk
(03:40):
show personality, and so the Osbourne's were very much in
mainstream culture, and Ozzy being from a heavy metal band
and one of the first heavy metal bands, his renown
really contributed I think to the vitality of the genre
(04:00):
and why there is still even though heavy metal is
like completely underground, it's still a vibrant underground culture and
an international underground culture. So the back to the beginning concert,
which was his farewell show that was in Ossie and
Black Sabbath's hometown of Birmingham, England. There were like forty
(04:24):
five thousand people in the stadium watching it in person,
and then they live streamed it on pay per view.
For like twenty bucks or thirty bucks or something. All
the money went to charity, and like another five million
people watched it. It's like on a Saturday. I mean,
NBC could have put that on and felt good about
programming it to have that big of an audience.
Speaker 3 (04:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
They That's a great point that his love for attention
basically what has kept the genre alive. I think that
his whole family spelled at least Sharon seems like she
(05:11):
was kind of pushing him to do more like celebrity
type stuff. Yeah, and I definitely I always had I
always knew who they were, more so Sharon and the
daughter Kelly than Ozzy, I would say. But I was
(05:37):
always like, why are we talking about these people? Like
what do they have to do with anything? And I
realized that it was like very much before their time,
leveraged his fame.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
To create this whole like entertainment.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
It's empire empire. Yeah, they were like a mogul family
for sure. Especially how Sharon goes from being Ozzy Osbourne's manager,
the guy who's biting the heads off of small animals
in the eighties to being a daytime talk show host
is a very It's an extraordinary like glow up. I guess,
(06:23):
as with any powerful woman, Sharon Osbourne has a lot
of enemies and a lot of people who hate her,
some for valid reasons, I would think, because there's been
a lot of litigation in the Osbourne past, really starting
with Black Sabbath and Black Sabbath's former manager, who was
(06:43):
Sharon's father, Don Arden. He was a notorious music industry
thug and mobster and stole millions of dollars from Black
Sabbath and was really known as like one of the
worst people in the music business, and Sharon was one
(07:04):
of the people who kind of saved Black Sabbath. And
in sort of a roundabout way, I'm sure in like
nineteen eighty one, the other members of Black Sabbath, Tony Iomi,
Geezer Butler and Bill Ward did not feel like Sharon
was helping them at all. She didn't really have anything
to do with them. But with the reunions in the
(07:25):
nineties and the two thousands, Sharon was really kind of
the architect of those events. With oz Fest, which Black
Sabbath headlined in the early two thousand's ear late nineties,
you know, that was Sharon's manager brain in her business
mind and her understanding like how to bring people together.
(07:47):
And she also, by the way, saved Ozzy's life, like
he was going to kill himself after getting fired from
Black Sabbath in seventy nine, and if she didn't like
keep him from drinking all of the booze and doing
all of the drugs, he for sure would have died.
He tells a story that he was in a hotel
room for like a month just like waiting to die
(08:10):
essentially after Black Sabbath fired him, and he was he
was not eating, and he was doing all of the substances,
and Sharon like literally like busted down the door and
put him in treatment and then they started his solo
career basically after he got his head a little bit right.
(08:30):
I don't know if it was ever right.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Well, it seems like he had a bunch of situations
that kind of plunged him into, you know, a deep
depression because the way the way they told it in
that one documentary was.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
The the A and E documentary The Nine Lives of Ozzieololnia.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, well, and it was basically told in that way.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
Where it was like this is the time he almost
died and this was the time he.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Should have died.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
And like.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
His his bandmate from after his solo career had gotten started,
what was his name, Randy Roads, Yes, Randy Rhodes. That
that was like they kept and I don't know, you
know how much it was obviously dramatized, but it was
always like I had never seen him like this before,
(09:18):
and I had never seen him like that before. And
I think it was, you know, to a certain extent,
it seems like he would grow and adjust and find
a new situation, but then something would happen and he
would kind of fall victim again to his addictions. Yeah,
but I it just seems like he was such a
(09:39):
charismatic and like loving guy.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
That's one of the things that occurred to me today.
You know, Ozzie passed away. There's been a lot of
tributes out on social media, and I'm seeing a lot
of this stuff and I'm realizing that, like, I haven't
heard anyone talk about Ozzy Osbourne really, like, Okay, part
of this is Sharon protecting him and I think absorbing
(10:07):
some of the blows and being the bad guy when
it comes to firing people, and they fired a lot
of people, but even people who were fired from Ozzie
related things, who had lawsuits against him, still defend him
and still say that he was like the funniest guy.
As like I think of the Doors movie as like
(10:30):
the and I don't know what the reality of the
Doors situation with Jim Morrison and everything was, but how
he's just in that movie. Val Kilmer as Jim Morrison,
he's like a time bomb, like he's always going to
do something crazy. And it's like if he's like cutting
a slice of bread, you think he's going to stab somebody.
(10:50):
He's like such a loose cannon because of his drug addiction,
and you're like, how could anyone work with this person?
Like it can't possibly be real. And here here's Ozzy Osbourne,
who is his for like forty years of his life,
he's totally out of it and people like he was
a blast to be around.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
Well, that's the crazy thing.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
It's like he not only did he was he always
in and out of intense drug use, always touring. He
was also constantly womanizing, like a lot, cheating on his
He always had a wife and he was always.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Cheating on them.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
That's the part where it's kind of it's a fascinating
thing to figure out because like, the people he mistreated
the worst are the people who loved.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Him the most.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
And yeah, it's just fascinating because I think that a
lot with the current, you know, pr is everything culture
that we have now, Like I think part of why
it works for Ozzy is because, like, yeah, he was
literally unabashedly high all the time, button heads off animals.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
One of which was an accident, just to say the
one time was an.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
Accident, honest mistake.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
I was high and I accidentally bent the head of
a bat.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Right. So the.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
Dove thing, whether he's happened first, and that was very
early in his solo career. They had some dispute with
the record label. They were going into like smooth things over,
iron out a deal, and for some reason they brought
these doves in. They're like, we're going to release these
birds as a symbol of peace and reconciliation, and Ozzie
(12:44):
is like blasted out of his mind and he just
gets bored in this meeting and he's like has the
inclination to, I guess, freak out all these people in suits.
So he grabs one of the doves in just bites
its head off. Yeah, and they were all horrified, and
(13:05):
he actually got much more famous for doing that. Yes,
So the second time was the bad incident that was
at a show and some weird person brought a dead
bat to the show and threw it on to the stage. Like,
we focus on Ozzie and the weird thing that he
(13:26):
did and immediately regretted. Ozzie thought it was a toy
so or like a rubber, like a Halloween sort of decoration.
So he picked it up and he bit and was
like ha ha, and then he was like, why is
there blood in my mouth? Why did that? Why was
that crunchy? So we focus on Ozzie doing a weird thing,
(13:49):
but who brings a dead animal.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
To Okay, that is actually much That makes a lot
more sense for sure. So there were two that he
did it.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
There were two times, both I guess sort of worked
out for him. Although the bad incident he needed to
get a bunch of rabias. Yeah, he said he did not.
He wished he did not do that, and then he
did a peda campaign about declining your cats, you know,
years later.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
Okay, so my point is that like he's the prince
of darkness, he's like into being purposefully scary and like
threatening and demonic one might say, or you know, evoking
kind of demonic imagery. And I just feel like now
(14:39):
people are always getting accused of being like demonic. Oh,
it's like, oh little nas X and Beyonce, they're they're
doing the signs of the Beast or whatever. Ozzy Osbourne is, like,
I am this, So what can you say about him
at that point? Like what how can you can't, like,
(15:00):
I think, other than personal slights and like litigation and
stuff with people he knows. I feel like if somebody
were to go about trying to cancel Ozzy Osbourne's legacy,
where would you even start?
Speaker 2 (15:16):
And by the way, I'm also silly.
Speaker 1 (15:18):
Yeah, mainly that, and like I could totally understand the
instinct to, like, if you thought something was like a
stuffed toy, to like pick it up and bite the
head off of it when you're performing. That's and then
the dove thing, Yeah, to me, it is closer to
being like a chicken, So it's not as weird.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
I'm not.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
I would like any meat that I consume to be
ethically slaughtered.
Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah, which we can't always have that, but I would
say slaughtered at all is a good route, you know.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
I mean, that's the goal. We're gonna have lab grown
meat someday and it'll probably give us super cancer.
Speaker 3 (16:01):
But we won't find out about that till well, no.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Until later. So let's take a break and then we'll
talk more about how spooky Ozzy Osbourne was when we
come back. Welcome back to at first listen, we are
(16:27):
talking about the legacy of Ozzy Osbourne, and before we
get to the music, I do want to talk about
like where Ozzie came from, who he was. Of course,
the back to the beginning fundraiser concert was in his
hometown of Birmingham, England. Birmingham, Yeah, and so Birmingham was
(16:51):
a steel town in the midlands of England. This was
in World War Two before Ozzie was born, a place
where the English Army was making munitions and I believe
also tanks and planes that they were using the war effort.
(17:13):
As such, the Nazis wanted to blow Birmingham to smithereens.
So Ozzie, I think, who was born in forty eight,
his older siblings, his parents, if they weren't in the war,
certainly remembered the war, and so Ozzi Geezer Bill Tony
(17:35):
from Black Sabbath literally grew up in a former war zone.
If if we were to hear of children living in
these conditions today, we would think it's a third world country.
But it was the UK in the forties and fifties.
It was a pretty grim place. So I have Geezer
Butler's memoir here, and Dominique found a passage in that.
Speaker 1 (17:54):
Okay, so Geezer Butler's still alive, right, yes, So would
it be just respectful for me to try it to
do a British accent? Yeah, go for it, Okay, Okay,
I'm just gonna do the first bit, and then I'll
do it in an American accent.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
Af favor.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Good start.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
Off.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Favorite playground was a bomb site literally because those two
houses and the shop that got to blitter, okay, obliterated by.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
The LOOFTWAFFA hadn't been rebuilt.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
One day I found a huge fragment of the bomb
that had done damage. An abandoned lorry on the site
became our den. We'd leave bread and milkoff neighbors doorsteps,
retreat to the den and fill our faces. And across
the road was an air raid shelter which was half
flooded in which we dare each other to enter. My
parents and sim siblings used it during the war when
(18:59):
the bombing got to heavy for them to use the
Anderson shelter in our backyard. Having a bomb site as
a playground might sound a bit grim. Far from it,
it was a child's paradise, a place where young imagination
could run wild.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
Yeah, so these kids literally grew up playing in a
bomb crater. We think of the UK as being like
America about like a little bit culturally different, But in
this time period where Black Sabbath was coming from, it
was a bombed out, post apocalyptic hellscape and it was
(19:36):
gradually rebuilding. But when you think about how much blues
infiltrated British rock music, when you think about that environment,
it makes a little bit more sense as to why
musicians in the UK in the sixties were really getting
(19:59):
something deep out of American blues music and how they
were trying to put their own spin on it. And
that's ultimately what Black Sabbath was was they were just
trying to be like a louder, heavier blues band than
anyone had ever heard, and they saw a horror movie
one night, a Italian film called Black Sabbath, and they thought,
(20:22):
what if we were like the horror movie version of
the Beatles, and we call our band Black Sabbath and
we make spooky lou blues music. And that's what they did.
This is the title track of their debut album, Black Sabbath.
This song scared the shit out of me. So a
(20:50):
lot is made of that interval the flat fifth here.
A lot of people today are saying that this interval
was outlawed by the church because it was too spooky.
That's not true, that's fake news, but it is a
spooky sounding interval.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
I feel like the church is the Church is disapproving
of most things, so I feel like they don't have
to go out of their way to be like, oh,
this one's this one interval, Like, I feel like they're
not having Black Sabbath at there.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Well, there's like some document from the fifteen hundreds where
they're like, you can't do this thing, oh in your chance,
But then there are like way more examples of chance,
like grain chants and stuff like that. They use that
interval specifically, so did.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
It They love spooky stuff? Anyway?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
The church is so spooky. That's why heavy metal is spooky. Yeah,
they're pulling from Christian usually Catholic dogma and imagery. Yeah,
Black Sabbath for what it's worth. The spooky, their spookiness
was mostly a concoction from their record label because they
(22:03):
had some of the spooky vibe in the music, but
their record company thought it would be way better if
it was if they marketed them as these like accult fiends,
because there was a lot of satanic panic in that
time and they were basically unaware of this until they
got their album back and they're like, what, this is
(22:25):
so dark and grim and black. This isn't what we meant.
And they're like, just shut up. We're already stealing millions
of dollars from you. This is going to be good
for you, guys, just let it go.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
It was kind of like a you. It still is
like this, like you.
Speaker 1 (22:43):
They were just trying to be more shocking and yeah
than whatever the other.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
And eventually they embraced it because they saw that it
was it was cool to make a lot of money,
but it never really it never really became part of
their music or their lyrics. Like the music was always
was going to sound like it sounded. It doesn't. I
don't think creatively in the music or in the lyrics
(23:10):
they played with those types of themes, or if they did,
it was like this stuff is bad.
Speaker 3 (23:18):
Yeah, Barry that.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
I also want to give Ozzie some props for his
harmonica playing. So there's a lot of harmonica on the
first album and they basically never used this instrument again.
Maybe there's some on the second, but yeah, this is
Ozzy shredding the harp. And I don't think he played
harmonica on any of his solo albums, but there is.
(23:42):
He had another TV show, Ozzie and Jack's World Tour
with his son Jack. I think it was on the
History Channel because Ozzie was a big history buff and
at one point they go to like the National Harmonica
Museum or something, and he still has those child ups
and he plays a little harmonica in the show. It's
(24:03):
cool because he's a guy who was like severely dyslexic,
didn't play guitar, didn't write music, didn't write lyrics. He
contributed melody. Was kind of the way that his collaborators
always described him as as a songwriter. He would write
a melody, he would sing you a song without lyrics,
and then he needed someone else to write lyrics for
(24:26):
him because his dyslexia was such a barrier.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Harmonica is tough because you can't sing at the same time.
And I feel like, when I'm seeing a vocalist and
they're tearing up the harmonica, I'm like just saying, go
back and singing.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
That sounded better? I mean, do you but that was
really good.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
That was better than I think I've ever heard harmonica
live at least, so yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:57):
I think it's because you get a harmonica and it's
like this is in the kiva, and it's like, great,
my song's in the kiva. I'm just gonna blow into
this thing and then I'll be like I'm playing the harmonica.
But there are people who are good at it.
Speaker 3 (25:11):
Right.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
You can like just be like an asshole with the
harmonica and just blow into it willy nilly, But if
you do know how to play it, it's actually very pleasant.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
One of my favorite Black Sabbath songs is a song
called war Pigs, one of their biggest hits. Also, Black
Sabbath is never really considered a political band. They don't
get credit for the What I think is a really
powerful statement in this song.
Speaker 5 (25:44):
Generals gathered in their massive just like witches at Black
Massive Minds it ploot destruction saucer of death construction.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
I mean, that's a heavy metal song, but it's a
protest song as well. The line conclude, or the rest
of the verses in the fields, the body's burning as
the war machine keeps turning death and hatred to mankind,
poisoning their brainwashed minds. That's not an endorsement of evil stuff.
That's a condemnation of evil stuff. Black sabbage they were
(26:30):
not hippies, but they were about peace and love. They
liked that they could scare hippies because I think they
were annoyed by the same aspects of hippies that are
universally annoying, but they were about the same things.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Yeah, I think people have always decided to like take
things at surface level and not and not engage with
the actual meaning. I think it's across the board. It's
(27:08):
like a pretty common thing. I think it's like, oh,
I don't like this, so therefore I have decided that
it's evil and I'm not gonna look deeper into it
at all.
Speaker 2 (27:20):
Yeah, it's like, oh, I saw that movie Star Wars.
There's this guy in a Darth Vader who's like killing everybody.
That movie is totally satanic.
Speaker 1 (27:31):
Yeah, everyone who likes it is is devil worship.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Worshiping the devil. That's exactly, and it's completely missing, like
this figure in the film serves a function for the
plot and the message, which is evil's bad.
Speaker 1 (27:45):
Oh as much as I love a movie or I
love a song, I love an art where everyone's just
having a good time the whole time, it's called a comedy.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
Called the comedy.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
It's great. But yes, that's that's exactly right. I think
that you know, we're like the grandkids of him. Yeah, basically.
And I think it's pretty well known now that people
with like studded belts on and long, you know, scraggly hair,
(28:18):
that they're probably a really nice person.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
It's like not fake. I think that's what it is.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
It's like, I don't I'm not trying to like seem
nice and like loving. I actually am trying to see
him very scary, but secretly I am really nice.
Speaker 3 (28:33):
And asked me about my cat, Yeah exactly, Oh my god,
his cats, well, they had one cat. I guess they
had a bunch of dogs.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
They had a It seems like they just kind of
collected animals the Osbourne's. There's a lot of funny scenes
from the show where there's one I saw a clip
of where he's threatening his cat for going near he
was making chicken or something.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Yeah, it seemed like as Sharon especially was like always
getting a pet. But I felt like he got along
with the cats better than the dogs. But maybe that
was just the vibe was But.
Speaker 2 (29:05):
Also he didn't seem like a person who was really
capable of actively giving care to another living thing, So
it was probably just easier to vibe with a cat
than it was a needy dog.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Totally, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
The song Paranoid also from the second Black Sabbath album,
keep in mind, like the lyrics to these were all
written by Geezer Butler, the bass player, but it's still,
you know, a concept that's greenlit by the band that
Ozzie repeats these words every night for the next fifty
(29:55):
years of his life. Interesting if you listen to the
lyrics for Paranoid, it's not really about paranoia, it's about depression,
and Geezer Butler specifically suffered from a lot of depression,
but as a poor kid from the remains of Birmingham, England,
(30:18):
he did not have access to mental health care, so
he didn't He literally did not know the word depression,
so he just described his feelings as paranoia or being paranoid,
and that ended up being Black Sabbath's best selling single.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
Yeah, that's definitely a song that I've heard.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
And also talking about the influence of this band, this
sort of driving guitar riff, I mean, this is where
thrash metal comes from. This is where Metallica Slayer, this
is where motor Head sort of this end communications breakdown
by led Zeppelin, That's where this comes from. This is
(30:58):
why Sabbath is such a beloved and important band.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
I'm hard pressed to like give to give a white
man credit for something, but like it does seem like
he was actually creating his own thing, like inspired by
blues and stuff going on and musically in America and
(31:24):
in the sixties, like rock and stuff.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
That was sort of the medium of Yeah, but he.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Was It wasn't like, oh, I want to sound like
that other band or it was like a new thing.
I mean the fact that he basically was like, we're
gonna make spooky, spooky music, and he was inspired by
a horror movie. He wasn't inspired by another another band,
(31:52):
no heavy metal band, or anybody else doing music that way.
So I think that's actually I was. I It definitely
helped me to kind of understand why these songs are
so pervasive.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yeah. He also, I don't think it's enough credit for
being a good singer because he has such a weird,
unique voice, because he is like an all time marble
mouth where people just four years could not understand what
he was saying between his accent and I think just
generally mumbling for him to actually be like hitting musical
(32:31):
notes and sounding really good. And I've got an example
of his vocals coming up that's actually really impressive.
Speaker 1 (32:37):
But I think it's just like thinking about music where
music was at the time, and like what you would
have expected out of a vocalist coming out of the
sixties and seventies.
Speaker 3 (32:48):
It was not like this.
Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, so there's two more Sabbath songs. I want to
stop down on sweet Leaf. I believe Tony Iomi coughing
this is obviously like a cannabis anthem. Giza writes in
his book that the idea for the title of the
song actually came from a cigarette packet. But it's one
(33:13):
of those things where I don't it doesn't really matter
what the songwriter says the song is about. It is
about It's about pot and really loving pot.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Good for them.
Speaker 2 (33:30):
But also this is one of the most undeniable riffs
in rock history. There's generations of heavy bands that are
trying to write a riff that is like as groovy
as this one. And then the last Sabbath song I
wanted to talk about is Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath. This is
(33:52):
probably their most advanced song. You're gonna hear like where
thrash metal came from, like another flash point for that
type of music. Prague. There's this rant the chorus and
the song is played on an acoustic guitar, which you
(34:12):
wouldn't expect from a band with the reputation of Black Sabbath.
But again, they were inspired inspired by the Beatles as well,
so they wanted their albums to have all these different
textures and colors, even if they were ultimately a really
heavy band. And there's also what some people consider the
first heavy metal breakdown at the end of the song,
(34:37):
another riff that they that saved Black Sabbath momentarily because
they were about to break up, and then Tony came
up with that great guitar riff we just heard and
they were like, okay, we can we can sell another
album with that one. So here their backs to being
(34:59):
in jazz band momentarily. And then they're going to come
out of the chorus and they're gonna slam it really
hard for a bit and then I'm gonna fast forward
to about three minutes in, so it gets a little
(35:37):
bit slower, a little bit darker, and an impressive note choice.
Therefore rasing He's getting up there. Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath probably
(35:58):
their last good album. The one thing that separates Sabbath
from a band like led Zeppelin. In my opinion, led
Zeppelin doesn't have any bad albums. Sabbath has some albums
that are tough to listen to because they were so
on drugs, they were so deeply in debt, because their
managers were ripping them off like it was their job
(36:19):
to rip them off. It was one of those situations
where the manager is telling you, anytime you want to
buy something like a house or a car, just let
me know and I'll get you the money for it,
and they're like, okay, cool. That works for a couple
of years and they're like, wait a minute, why is
(36:40):
my house being repossessed.
Speaker 3 (36:43):
It's like not it wasn't his house.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
Yeah, it wasn't your house, or you didn't ever pay
the mortgage on it. Like they just trusted all the
wrong people early in their career and spent actually millions
of dollars that they didn't have to get out of
some of these bad contracts. It was like in perpetuity,
all that kind of awful stuff that you never want
(37:05):
to sign. Let's take another break and we'll talk about Ozzi,
the solo artist on at First Listen.
Speaker 4 (37:13):
To Welcome back to At First Listen.
Speaker 3 (37:27):
I'm Andrew, I'm Dominie.
Speaker 2 (37:29):
And we're talking about Ozzy Osbourne as a solo artist.
Ozzie got fired from Black Sabbath in nineteen seventy nine
because in a band full of people who are high
on drugs, he was far too high on drugs and
they had to get rid of him. Ozzie was really
sad about it, almost killed himself a few times, and
(37:49):
eventually formed a new band, initially that was initially going
to be called The Blizzard of Oz with Randy Rhodes,
Lee Hursel like Bob Daisley, and Don Airy the keyboardist.
Eventually he decided, or Sharon decided, that Ozzy had to
(38:10):
be a solo artist to protect his equity and his
stake in the royalties, and so they ended up naming
the album Blizzard of Oz. Even though this was a
collaborative record, it ultimately belonged to Ozzy and was the
subject of a lot of lawsuits going forward. But as
(38:34):
far as a solo debut goes, after leaving a big
band and a band that it was not, it was
not a hot take at the time to think that
Black Sabbath was losing steam. They were clearly tired and
clearly not loving what they were doing anymore. They did okay.
(39:00):
They hired Ronnie James Dio and had a bunch of
a couple of really great albums with Doo and Ozzie
put out a song called Crazy Train, which I could
I'd be totally fine never hearing this song again, but
it is it is worth mentioning, you know, the lyrics
(39:22):
of this song are are They don't get their due
because it is such a character song for Ozzie with
that intro. You hear that III thing everywhere all the time.
It's it's a ubiquitous sound. Most people probably have no
(39:43):
idea what it's even from.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Definitely I didn't.
Speaker 2 (39:49):
Yeah, I mean did I write down? Oh yeah, so
the first verse crazy, But that's how it goes. Millions
of people living as foes. Maybe it's not too late
to learn how to love and forget how to hate.
This is a song that people interpret it's about being
wild and crazy and breaking, you know, smashing up hotel
(40:10):
rooms and stuff. But it's another like peace and love tune.
It's another like can't we all be friends? Kind of
a song, Yeah, but.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
It's stop being mad at me for being an insane man,
and everyone just lightly nice to me.
Speaker 5 (40:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
It's packaged with like leather pants and pointing guitars. Yes,
and people are like this guy worships Satan. One of
my favorite songs off of this record is a song
called Goodbye to Romance, which was mostly I think written
(40:44):
by Randy Rhodes. There's a neoclassical type guitar chord melody happening,
and while it's called Goodbye to Romance, I've always sort
of interpreted it as more of a farewell song in general,
like I never get romance from this song. This doesn't
(41:09):
come off to me at all like a love song totally,
And maybe part of that is Ozzie not being the
lyricist of the song. He kind of sings it how
it feels and not with necessarily the sentiment that it's written.
There's another song I think it's from this album or
(41:31):
the one after, called Suicide Solution, which people interpreted and
Ozzie was actually blamed for a teen suicide because of
the song. It was interpreted as like suicide is the solution.
Speaker 4 (41:48):
But as.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
Bob Daisley, the lyricist and bass player, had to explain
in court number one, Ozzie did not write the song,
so you can't sue him for the lyrics. But two,
the song was about Ozzie's drinking.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
It's like you drink so that he doesn't kill himself hopefully,
or it's.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
A the drinking is a solution to other things that
are wrong in his life. Yeah, and it's a suicidal one.
So it was it was Bob basically writing about his
friend Ozzie, who he was concerned about, and it happened
to be Ozzie, the one singing the song on the
record and the person who took all of the blame
(42:34):
from the Christian right when young heavy metal fans had issues.
But That's always Goodbye to romance has always been a
favorite of mine. It's sort of like a like, I'm
I get a platonic feeling from that song.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
Yeah, it seems like it's goodbye to.
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Some or like I have passed away.
Speaker 1 (43:02):
Yeah, so goodbye to an era. It's like goodbye to
the past more than a person.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
The romance of the past, yea, the romance of nostalgia.
Speaker 3 (43:11):
Maybe that, Yeah, that's the what I might get for sure.
Speaker 2 (43:14):
The first track on the Blizzard of Oz album is
a song called I Don't Know Again lyrics by Bob Daisley.
But I think this is a really appropriate song when
you think about how people get really into artists and
end up elevating them to a plateau that they are
like truth tellers and answer knowers. And it's kind of
(43:40):
a song that says, I'm just another guy. I have
no idea what I'm doing. Don't don't expect me to
be able to help you. I'm just I'm just rocking.
Speaker 3 (43:52):
I'm just here to rock totally.
Speaker 1 (43:54):
I mean, it's like that's a whole issue we're dealing
with today obviously, that it's like he's somebody who's famous,
a famous musician. He's famous because he's really good at
singing and entertaining. So I'm not going to go to
(44:15):
the plumber and be like, oh, you may I need
your opinion on politics. So why are we going to
the singer and asking his opinion on politics?
Speaker 2 (44:28):
Yeah? Or why are we not at the singer when
we don't like his opinion?
Speaker 3 (44:31):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1 (44:32):
But it's just because so many people know him, but
not everyone knows the humble plumber. Shout out to our
plumbers who are listening, Like nobody demands answers like this.
But it's like, okay, if he's an elected official, we
should ask, but he never.
Speaker 3 (44:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:53):
I think it's he really was kind of like ahead
of his time with a lot of a lot of
observations and ways that he existed as an artist.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Yeah. Also, just there's this lineage of amazing guitar players
that were in his solo band. You know, it starts
with Black Sabbath and people love Tony Iomi. He's sort
of the leader of that band, the architect of the band,
the only member to appear on every album, and then
as a solo artist, Ozzy got to elevate people like
Randy Rhodes, who tragically passed away in a plane crash
(45:33):
after a couple of years in Ozzie's band.
Speaker 1 (45:37):
Do you understand that by the way the Randy Rhodes,
I was like, the plane crashed into a bus, and.
Speaker 2 (45:47):
Then I think the pilot was trying to do like
a trick because they were trying they were trying to
fly really low and close to the bus to like spook,
to like scare them as a joke, and they crashed.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Gotcha, Okay, I was like crazy coincidence that the plane
that he was on happened to crash into Ozzie's house.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
Or whatever it was. It was a tour bus.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
They were kind of on some sort of airfield or
tarback or something, I guess doing naughty stuff.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, but that's one of those weird things in rock
where like Randy was did not have the reputation as
like a partier. He was not a person who was
going to die early unless something crazy happened. And something
crazy happened, and so after Randy's death, that kind of
(46:46):
started the revolving door. That was Ozzie's band for a
long time. So eventually that that original band, those members disbanded,
and he had a lot of other people to work with,
but a lot of like great guitar like Jake E
Lee who was the next not the next person to
play guitar and Nazzie's band, but the next person. He
(47:08):
did albums with Zach wild who has basically been his
music director since the late eighties, Gus g Bernie Tourmee,
and he worked with a lot of people. Mike McCready
was on his last album from Pearl Jam, so this
is one of the first big hits he had with
(47:29):
Zach Wilde. This is mom I'm Coming Home. And if
you watched the back to the beginning concert and you
can find the footage on YouTube today, this was the
part where every crowd shot has somebody crying because Ozzie
(47:49):
can't stand anymore when he's singing this at the farewell show,
so he's seated there and we all kind of get
that this is a man who's best stays are behind him,
and this is the last performance. We didn't think the
last music he was going to do. But it's a
(48:11):
great power ballad, really well produced lyrics by Lenny Kilmeister Motor.
And then I also wanted to shout out the title
(48:34):
track from Ozzie's second to last album, Ordinary Man. You
might know that I'm a big Elton John Fan Elton
John was as insane as Ozzie was in the seventies,
so they bonded over that. They were great friends for
a long time, and this I believe is the first
time they recorded together. So the piano is Elton playing,
(49:00):
and then Ozzie sings the first verse very like autobiographical.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
It's for you.
Speaker 5 (49:14):
I have traveled many months since.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I think about. The song reminds me of like if
you remember Johnny Cash towards the end of his life.
I think the movie had come out already, and he
did like one album after and he was like more
famous than he'd ever been. Everyone knew who Johnny Cash was,
was aware of that last album. That's I think the
(49:44):
album that Hurt was on the nine inch nails cover,
and he just had this moment and we kind of
got we understood as a society that like, this is
the last thing we're getting from this artist and David Bowie.
His last album was Black Star, which is a bit
of a departure because Bowie was a saxophone player and
(50:05):
a jazz head and he'd made this weird avant garde
jazz album which is actually beautiful. It's an incredible album.
And he did that whole album while he was actively
dying from cancer. So Ozzie does this record in like
twenty twenty one, twenty twenty two. This is after his
(50:28):
farewell tour has been canceled. He had started the farewell
tour for like, he didn't like two or three months
of it. It was supposed to go on for a
couple of years. He wanted to play literally every country
he'd ever played.
Speaker 1 (50:41):
This is like his fifth farewell tour, Like how many
farewell tours has he done?
Speaker 2 (50:45):
It was the no More Tours Too tour because he
tried to retire. He understood that he couldn't do it
for everyone to go out on top. And he had
to cancel a bunch of dates because he got a
staph infection. I think it was a staph infection. There
was some kind of infection in his finger and he
(51:06):
had to be hospitalized for it because he got so bad.
He's in the hospital for like two weeks. He gets
healthy again, he plays a few more shows, kind of
wraps up the leg, and then like January twenty twenty,
he's like, all right, we're gonna get back on the road.
We're gonna get back set with this farewell tour. He
gets up to pee late at night. Oh no, he
(51:28):
gets the flu first. He's hospitalized for the flu, and
this is all coming back to me now. And he
goes home. We're all like, yes, Ozzie's home. He had
to postpone a bunch of dates, but like, he's going
to reschedule those. Here he's coming back on the farewell tour.
I'm thinking, oh, you know what, maybe I will Maybe
(51:48):
I'll go see Ozzie live for the first time. He
gets up to pee late at night at home, trips
over a rug, slams his head on a nightstand, and
basically breaks his neck. He had an old injury from
like twenty years earlier where he was he nearly died
(52:09):
in an ATV accident, So he had all these screws
in his neck and his shoulders. So he always had
back problems and always had like chiropractors and massage therapists
working on him. So this happens. It basically breaks his
neck all over again. He's in the hospital for months
(52:29):
and he's rehabbing, he's trying to get better. He will
not give up on the Farewell tour. He's rehabbing, and
then he gets diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and it gets
that much harder, and of course the pandemic is happening.
So he wasn't going to play any shows anyway, and
(52:50):
just for the past five years of his life, he's
been desperately The only thing keeping him going really was
playing one more show. And finally it seems like he
and Sharon gave up on the playing one more show
thing sometime around late last year, and we're like, let's
(53:12):
put together a show where you can play it if
you're able, but people will still be happy to go
to a thing and celebrate your life in your career,
even if you're not able to be there. And so
they did the Back to the Beginning concert. Metallica played
Guns N' Roses, played Slayer, Gojira mastadon Lamb of God.
(53:35):
Sammy Hagar was there. Tom Morello was the music director.
Tom Morella from Rage Against the Machine. It's this huge affair.
Of course I mentioned it a little bit in the
earlier segment, but it was kind of designed so that
if Ozzie died before it happened, they would still be
able to do it, because they were very not committal
(53:57):
about whether he was going to performed the whole time
with Black Sabbath, whether he was just going to do
one song or not. And certainly if he did pass
away before the concert, people would have been happy to
go to a charity thing for one, but also a
thing that was going to be his memorial service. And
(54:18):
he ended up being able to do the show. He
was still singing really well, and I think he played
four songs with a solo band, four songs with Black Sabbath,
and that's after like eight hours of music before and
then he just passed away a couple of weeks later.
So as someone who followed his career really closely for
(54:45):
a long time, I can't help but think that this
is how he wanted to go out, or this is
the best he could have expected after how painful the
last few years had been.
Speaker 3 (55:00):
Yeah, I mean, he's.
Speaker 1 (55:03):
He kind of came out best case scenario for who
you know, everything he's put his self through in his life,
Like he got to keep being a rock star basically
till the day he died, keep making music as much
as he wanted, and just like be a fabulous rock
(55:24):
star with his family.
Speaker 2 (55:26):
And he also got to, especially in retrospect, like he
got to hang out with all of his friends again,
Like he and the other members of Black Sabbath, like,
I mean, you think about great friends you had from college.
Maybe you get together once every couple of years. It's
really fun to see each other again. I think that's
kind of their relationship. There was a story that like
(55:48):
he and Tony Iomi weren't talking because one of them
doesn't text and one of them doesn't call, and they
were in different time zone, so they could just never
coordinate a time to speak to each other. And so
(56:10):
they're both thinking like, oh, this guy has a problem
with me again, And it's really just that they in
this new world of technology, couldn't communicate literally couldn't communicate anymore.
Speaker 3 (56:24):
That's really cute.
Speaker 2 (56:25):
Yeah, So he got together with the old band, and
then everyone else he knew from music got to be there.
And there's all this behind great behind the scenes stuff
from that day that's really heartwarming. So I guess let's
take one more break and we'll wrap it up after
this on efforts.
Speaker 3 (56:45):
To welcome back to APP.
Speaker 2 (57:00):
I'm Andrew Dominique and we're wrapping up our Ozzy Osbourne episode. Okay,
so let's wrap it up by reading what Ozzie's Black
Sabbath bandmates had to say about him after they learned
that he had passed away. First, Tony, Iomi, I just
(57:20):
can't believe it. My dear dear friend, Ozzie has passed away,
only weeks after our final show at Villa Park. It's
just such heartbreaking news that I can't really find the words.
There won't ever be another like him. Geezer Bill and
myself have lost our brother. My thoughts go out to
Sharon and all the Osbourne family. Rest in peace, Oz,
Geezer Butler, goodbye, dear friend. Thanks for all those years
(57:44):
we had some great fun. Four kids from Assen who
would have thought, ah, so glad we got to do
it one last time back in Aston love you. And
then Bill Ward, the drummer who is mostly doing poetry
these days, and he wrote this where will I find
(58:05):
You Now? In the memories are unspoken embraces, our missed
phone calls. No, You're forever in my heart. Never goodbye,
thank you forever bill Ward.
Speaker 3 (58:19):
That's so nice.
Speaker 2 (58:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (58:22):
I hope people write nice poems about me when I die.
Speaker 2 (58:27):
And hopefully you can hang out with everyone you love,
like at least a couple of weeks before you go.
Speaker 1 (58:32):
Yeah, at least like I invite everybody in the world
who is an end of mine.
Speaker 2 (58:37):
They can. I'll tell you how influential you were exactly,
and you pose for photos and then you're like sea, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (58:46):
I finally he's finally allowed to get high one more time.
Speaker 2 (58:51):
High an adulation. Yes, so, Dominique, you have a show
coming up?
Speaker 3 (58:56):
I do.
Speaker 1 (58:57):
I have a show on Saturday at U see Black
All Black Variety Show at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. It
is on the twenty sixth, eight thirty pm. Come and
come and get it. We have Chanelle Ali is going
to be doing some stand up and it's going to
(59:20):
be a great time.
Speaker 2 (59:21):
Are you calling it? You see Black Sabbath a tribute
to Ozzy Osbourne.
Speaker 3 (59:25):
Uh, that'll be for like a silo.
Speaker 2 (59:29):
I know it's short notice, but did you can pulled
that together good.
Speaker 3 (59:32):
Call this good idea? Anything else?
Speaker 2 (59:39):
No, that's it. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you
Ozzy Osbourne, thank you Black Sabbath. And we'll be back
next time with another episode of A First Listen, Hi
Speaker 4 (01:00:05):
And
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