Imagine it is December 1970. "I Think I Love You" by the Partridge Family was just atop the charts. Billboard would soon name "Bridge Over Troubled Water" the most popular song of the year. If you listen to music, that's mostly what you are hearing: flowery pop or earnest folk. Then, you go to a show, and you see this:
How do you even react to this? Do you just kill yourself then and there? It's like nothing you've heard. It's like nothing anyone's ever heard. It's primordial. It's not so obviously grounded in the blues, like Zeppelin, or as blissfully coked-out prog as Deep Purple. There are no obvious antecedents—it is out of nowhere, or rather Birmingham, which may as well be nowhere. This was the invention of heavy metal, and heavy metal would never get better than this. Sabbath were from the future. Ozzy was their face.
Ozzy Osbourne died Tuesday morning at age 76, and he went out a king. Just 17 days earlier, he had sat on a throne and performed nine songs, after being feted at a daylong tribute show by just about every major metal figure of note from the last 50 years. He closed with "Paranoid," because it fucking rules, but also because of its closing couplet, "I tell you to enjoy life/I wish I could but it's too late." It could have been grotesque, these septuagenarians chasing faded glory, but it wasn't. It might have been a victory lap, these inventors of an entire genre of music reveling in their legacy: not a single one of the performers that day could have existed if Sabbath never had. It was, though, before anything else, a damn good rock bill. Ozzy knew how to put on a show.
Most of us discover Sabbath backward in time. No one starts with "Black Sabbath," first album, track one. You start with "Paranoid" or "Iron Man," because they're almost cartoonishly digestible and licensed to hell. You get into your metal bands of choice, and then you read an interview where they credit Sabbath as their primary influence, or maybe even cover a Sabbath song, and it invariably doesn't sound like a cover of a song from the '70s at all, but rather vital and fresh. That was my way in, anyway. And then you dip into the back catalog and you discover that, yes, indeed, Sabbath holds up. It holds up the entire world of metal. It is cornerstone and capstone. And eventually you go back to the beginning, first album, track one. It must have sounded like the future arriving. The future was pissed and paranoid and on quaaludes.
Part of the journey of discovery is realizing that Ozzy was not Black Sabbath, and Black Sabbath was not Ozzy. Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler are probably two of the three or four most important musicians of all time, and that's counting all those Mozart-types. (It's almost cruel to know for a certainty that riffs can only ever go downhill from this.) But if they were geniuses and craftsmen, Ozzy was a god. His eerie near-falsetto was in constant contretemps with the unbearable weight of the guitars, each threatening to drown out the other. He served as a focus for the chaos. It was impossible not to look at him. He dressed and acted the part of what we now consider the quintessential metal star: The LaVey-lite Prince of Darkness was a very silly persona, but he played it with such genuine glee that it was hard not to worship Satan, if Satan could inspire music like that. If Ozzy became a caricature later in life, embracing and playing off his rock-god bona fides, he had earned it. If you invent the stereotypes, you get to do what you wish with them.
It is fun to watch early clips of the band, like the one at the top of this post, before they settled on the imagery: Ozzy is a babyfaced 20-something in jeans, grinning and gesticulating because he's feeling the music. A laborer from the burned-over industrial heartland of England, performing the type of music he'd have enjoyed listening to, if anyone had been making it. I hope that at his last show earlier this month, even for a moment, he lost himself in the music and felt like that kid again.
