No record ever spoke to me more than Southern Rock Opera by the Drive-By Truckers. It’s a concept album released in 2001 that has lots of songs about growing up in the South in the late '70s and not having much going on, besides power drinking and rock and roll. That record could be my life. And of all the period-piece vignettes, none hit me where I live more than a verse in "Let There Be Rock" where frontman Patterson Hood bragged about a concert the rock gods blessed upon him back in the day: “I sure saw Ozzy Osbourne,” Hood warbled, “with Randy Rhoads in ‘82 right before that plane crash.”
Well, me too: On Feb. 24, 1982, I caught Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman tour when it stopped in Lubbock, Texas. Ozzy wielded an oversized crucifix while doddering around a stage that had been tarted up to look like a medieval castle. Headbangers heaven.
Memories of that show and all its quaint heavy metalness, and just how much rock and roll meant to me back then, came to mind when news came yesterday that Ozzy had died in England. He was 76 years old.
No cause of death has yet been released. But does anybody need to wait for a coroner? Ozzy died of rock and roll. Finally! An eminent rock bromide holds that “it’s better to burn out than it is to rust.” Ozzy managed to do both. As has been catalogued, no rocker lived harder than the Prince of Darkness. Every breath he took in the 1980s and beyond made a mockery of Nancy Reagan’s D.A.R.E. campaign and its “Just Say No!” mandate.
Just like the Southern Rock Opera protagonist, I’ve been boasting for a real long time about having gotten to see the most metal dude who ever lived in the midst of the most metal run in metal history. Check out this timeline: A month before that Lubbock gig, Ozzy bit the head off a live bat at a show in Iowa. On Feb. 19, 1982, five days ahead of my audience with him, Ozzy got arrested for peeing on the Alamo. And then came March 19, 1982, the day the music died for metalheads: Randy Rhoads, Ozzy's 25-year-old lead guitarist and a guy who changed hard rock by regularly forsaking the blues scale and shredding in complex musical modes with names like phrygian, dorian, and lydian, was killed when the tiny Beechcraft Bonanza he was flying in crashed while attempting to buzz the band's tour bus. Good god. That’s the tour diary of a madman, all right.
I was well-versed on Ozzy's music and madness by the time I got to see him play live. My initial exposure came in the mid-1970s, when his first band of note, Black Sabbath, appeared on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, a weekly syndicated TV show that came on after midnight in D.C. and other markets across the U.S. Kirshner introduced scads of hard-rock acts to me and millions of other kids coming of age in the Me Decade. I was happily stuck in a Bob Dylan and Lynyrd Skynyrd phase at the time the Sabbath episode aired, but recall being struck in the best way possible by “Paranoid," by far the peppiest number in the Birmingham, England, band’s catalogue. I’ve always felt that for all the historic significance of Sabbath’s lead-heavy, plodding riffs—"Iron Man" really did launch a thousand doom bands—the band deserved more notice than it got for influencing first-wave British punks like the Sex Pistols, who showed up in 1976 playing downstroked power chords at about the same pace Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi did on “Paranoid.” Its lyrical nods to mental illness and hopelessness helped keep the song a metal evergreen.
Ozzy parted with Sabbath for the first time in 1979, having been booted for what his bandmates thought was too much drinking and drugging. He says the firing only made him drink more and do more drugs. Overpartying remained a part of his M.O. for another couple decades.
After losing Iommi as a sidekick, Ozzy kept enough of his wits about him to always bring a guitar hero whenever he went into the studio or onstage. He hired Rhoads, who appeared on his first solo records, 1980's Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, released a year later. Following Rhoads’s death, he brought in Zakk Wylde, a New Jersey shredder so committed to the bit that he named his kid Hendrix Halen Michael Rhoads Wylde (the namesake of axemen Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and Rhoads, plus, um, former New York Met Mike Piazza).
Beginning in the late 1990s, Ozzy also assumed the same role Kirshner once played as an introducer of deserving bands to new, bigger audiences by founding Ozzfest, an annual barnstorming festival that featured a mix of young and veteran hard-rock acts. I owe my love of System of a Down to seeing them kill at the 2002 Ozzfest in Bristow, Va. As was usually the case with Ozzfests, Ozzy's band closed that show. His set from '02 saw Ozzy play all the vintage nuggets from Black Sabbath and his solo career, with Wylde playing the licks Iommi and Rhoads made legendary.
Ozzy closed another festival on July 5. He and all his original mates from Sabbath tossed aside long-simmering feuds that had kept them apart for 20 years, and reunited for a concert in Birmingham that was billed as his final show. Ozzy’s been holding last tours since 1992’s “No More Tours" Tour. Alas, this time the billing will hold true. I watched a live stream of the show that night, and for all the bombast I still found the performance quite touching. Because of the effects of Parkinson’s and his lifestyle over the last half-century, Ozzy stayed seated on a big throne adorned with creepy gargoyles. Iommi, 77, in customary all-black outfit to match his dyed coif and facial hair, looked to be laboring over every note. The set ended, just as I would have requested, with “Paranoid.” It was a hard watch. But when I closed my eyes…
