Five Deep(ish) Cuts from Ozzy Osbourne
Plus live albums and covers from the late Prince of Darkness
Ozzy Osbourne, legendary lead singer of the pioneering metal band Black Sabbath and a formidable solo act in his own right, shuffled off this mortal coil last week at the age of 76, just weeks after a final concert performance in his hometown of Birmingham, England. With its ominous, menacing sound and doom-and-gloom lyrics, Sabbath invented the heavy metal genre—though Osbourne with considerable truth insisted that the group was, in fact, “the last hippie band.”
Most people have probably heard at least parts of songs like “Iron Man” and “Crazy Train” at some point, whether via Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi’s iconic, lumbering riff on the former or Ozzy’s own cackling “all aboard” call at the start of the latter. These tracks are fairly well-known to the general listening public, while others like “Paranoid,” “War Pigs,” or “N.I.B.” are likely familiar to rock fans as well.
I don’t claim the same sort of expertise on Black Sabbath or Ozzy Osbourne that I could bring to bear on a discussion about Prince or Taylor Swift or Led Zeppelin. But I’d wager that I’ve ventured a bit further into both Sabbath’s and Ozzy’s back catalogues than most, and to mark his passing here are five of my favorite deep(ish) cuts:
"Children of the Grave”: If there’s any one song that completely justifies Ozzy’s claim that Black Sabbath was “the last hippie band,” it’s this fusillade against the specter of nuclear war from the band’s third album, 1971’s Master of Reality. The song’s lyrics posits a stark choice between atomic annihilation or the triumph of peace and love, and calls on young people to fight for the latter lest they find themselves “children of the grave.” A bit sentimental for a song with such a bleak title and hard-charging guitar riff, but that’s Black Sabbath for you.
“Under the Sun/Every Day Comes and Goes”: By the time Black Sabbath recorded and released its fourth album, the aptly-titled Vol. 4, the band was abusing substances—principally cocaine—with abandon. Hence the line in this, the album’s final track, that “life is one long overdose.” But the song aims its fire at organized religion. “I don’t want no preacher telling me about the god in the sky,” Ozzy intones over Iommi’s relentless guitar, “I don't want no one to tell me where I'm gonna go when I die.” It closes with an appeal to “believe in yourself” and not “let those empty people try and interfere with your mind”—another marker of Sabbath’s flower child roots.
“I Don’t Know”: Ozzy’s first solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, begins with a bang—a buzzsaw lead guitar from Randy Rhoads backstops lyrics reflecting both Osbourne’s firing from Black Sabbath and wider themes that preoccupied his former band. If you’re looking for answers either to life or his departure from the band, Ozzy makes clear that he doesn’t have any. The song also marks the beginning of Ozzy’s brief but memorable musical partnership Rhoads, who died in a plane crash two years after the 1980 release of this record.
“I Don’t Wanna Stop” and “Let Me Hear You Scream”: These two late-career anthems—released in 2007 and 2010, respectively—might as well be Osbourne’s statements of personal and musical purpose. “All my life, I've been over the top,” he sings in the first song, “I don't know what I'm doing/All I know is I don't wanna stop.” The second track demands listeners—and presumably live audiences—“scream like you want it” and “yell like you mean it” and, more generally, prepare their bodies for the Thunderdome.
“Age of Reason”: Black Sabbath’s core reunited in 2013 and released their final studio album, 13, and the band—Ozzy, Iommi, and bassist Geezer Butler—picked up as if they hadn’t lost a step in the intervening decades. The album is full of lengthy tracks in the classic Sabbath mold: ponderous, heavy riffs, scorching solos, and intense lyrics about grave subjects. But my favorite song on the record has to be “Age of Reason,” with its arresting and portentous opening lyrics: “Do you hear the thunder/Raging in the sky?/Premonition of a shattered world/That's gonna die.” And it closes with lines that ring truer today than they did a dozen years ago:
These times are heavy
And you're all alone
The battle's over, but the war goes on
Covers, Live Albums, and… Ballet?
Over the decades, Ozzy performed with a number of talented guitar players—starting with Tony Iommi in Black Sabbath, of course, before working with Randy Rhoads and Zakk Wylde among others as a solo artist. But he paired up with Alice in Chains lead guitarist and songwriter Jerry Cantrell for his 2005 album of late 1960s and early 1970s covers, unimaginatively titled Under Cover. The resulting effort bears Cantrell’s musical fingerprints as much as Osbourne’s, with Ozzy’s vocals laid over an Alice in Chains-style interpretations of classic rock songs by the lifes of Cream, Mott the Hoople, and the Moody Blues. “Sympathy for the Devil,” featuring pedal steel guitar virtuoso Robert Randolph, stands out as the album’s best track.
Along the way, Ozzy contributed vocals to covers performed by other artists, including Dweezil Zappa’s hard-to-find “Stayin’ Alive” and Coal Chamber’s version of Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey.”
Like all long-lived rock acts, both Black Sabbath and Ozzy produced a number of live albums. Tribute showcases the frenetic energy of Ozzy’s early 1980s live shows with Rhoads on lead guitar, while The End captures the final show of Black Sabbath’s 2016-7 farewell tour in the band’s hometown of Birmingham.
Finally, in the department of things that you’d never think would go together but somehow do, there’s Black Sabbath: The Ballet conceived of and performed by the Birmingham Royal Ballet. I managed to catch it on a lark during the company’s recent blink-and-you’ll-miss-it stop at the Kennedy Center, and the seemingly bizarre marriage of heavy metal and ballet made perfect sense by the time the performance came to a close.