Cover Story: Ozzy Osbourne
Ozzy Osbourne
Clean, Sober, & Still Alive
Nowadays, when you think Ozzy Osbourne, you think Ozzy, Inc. — the tours (Ozzfest), the television shows (“The Osbournes,” “Battle For Ozzfest”), the wife (Sharon briefly hosted her own daytime talk program), and the offspring (daughter Kelly has released two albums while being a tabloid mainstay). Little attention is paid anymore to the man (who helped invent a genre) and his music. With Black Rain, his first new album in six years, Osbourne hopes to change that and remind people exactly what made him famous in the first place.
Appearing: August 10th at First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre in Tinley Park.
On “I Don’t Wanna Stop,” the first single from Ozzy Osbourne’s new record, Black Rain (Epic), The Prince Of Darkness proclaims “All my life I’ve been over the top/I don’t know what I’m doing/all I know is I don’t wanna stop/all fired up I’m gonna go ’til I drop/I’m as real as the world will make me/I don’t wanna stop.”
That tune and album opener “Not Going Away” have sort of become the legendary singer’s bread and butter. Think “Rock ‘N’ Roll Rebel,” “Desire,” “Hellraiser,” or “Gets Me Through” — fist-pumping, “I’m still a crazy rock ‘n’ roller, and you can’t do anything about it” anthems Osbourne and his fans love.
To read too much into songs like these would be exactly that, but now, at the age of 59 and with nine solo records under his belt, tracks like “I Don’t Wanna Stop” start to sound like more of honest-to-goodness declarations from a true rock warrior than the cheesy, pyrotechnic-rigged, arena singalongs they represented before.
After all, following years of notorious addiction, most people probably doubted Ozzy would still be alive in 2007, let alone releasing a new album. It has been more than a decade since Ozzy tried to retire — remember, the tour cycle for 1991’s No More Tears, dubbed No More Tours, was supposed to be the exclamation point on his career.
Retirement, it seems, wasn’t for Osbourne. Can you imagine Ozzy tinkering around in the garden, hitting golf balls, or knitting a new sweater?
“The one thing about retiring I really got out of it was, you can’t just retire,” Osbourne explains one day in early May during a break from rehearsal. “How in the fuck can you retire from this job? Unless you’ve got something terminal or something.”
As has been the case with so many of his music industry peers, retirement was short-lived for Osbourne — by 1995 he had released a new record, Ozzmosis. But unlike his peers, Osbourne didn’t waver in and out of retirement — there wasn’t an endless string of farewell tours, no cloud of “Is this the last one” hovering over each new album. He simply went back to work.
And even though the “R” word wasn’t used by Osbourne’s camp or the man himself, you couldn’t help but question his future when two greatest-hits packages (2002’s The Ozzman Cometh: Greatest Hits and 2003’s The Essential Ozzy Osbourne) and a solo career-spanning box set (2005’s Prince Of Darkness) followed 2001’s Down To Earth instead of new material. Osbourne, though, was never in doubt. He was simply just too damn busy to notice it had been more than half a decade since his last record.
“Well, you know, I was as shocked as anybody else was when I found out it had been that long,” Osbourne says. “I haven’t been sittin’ on my butt doing nothing. I was doing the TV show [“The Osbournes”], I was doing the Ozzfests, and I felt like a mouse on a wheel, you know?”
The lack of surprises on Black Rain shouldn’t surprise anybody: big riffs courtesy of Osbourne’s longtime sideman Zakk Wylde, stadium-sized sing-along vocal hooks, and a few lighter-waving power ballads (“Lay Your World On Me,” “Here For You”). This formula has worked well for Osbourne through the years, so why change? Plus, can you imagine the backlash if the Ozzman were to release anything other than a distinctively Ozzy record?
That’s not to say there aren’t any differences, though, they’re just more the behind-the-scenes kind. And calling them “behind the scenes” doesn’t mean they are any less important, because recording an album for the first time in 37 years — dating back to Black Sabbath’s 1970 self-titled debut — 100 percent clean and sober is a pretty big deal to us.
“When I was recording not sober, it was a good excuse not to be fucking sober, you know?” Osbourne says of old work habits. “I was an [alcoholic] . . . I was a practicing alcoholic for a long time, and for a long time it worked for me. It gave me that fucking Dutch courage; it gave me that personality, that animal that wanted to get out.”
Anyone who has remotely followed rock ‘n’ roll history or has even a passive interest in pop culture knows that animal inside Ozzy got loose a lot. This is the man who bit the head off a bat (and a dove or two); the drunk who pissed on the Alamo; the guy who snorted ants off the ground (just before lapping up Nikki Sixx’s urine) while wearing a dress; the madman who nearly strangled his wife to death; and the person who took acid every day for a year just to see what would happen.
And, an important public service announcement for all you kids out there, the guy who barely remembers any of it.
— Trevor Fisher
To read more about what remains in Osbourne’s memory banks, grab the June issue of Illinois Entertainer, available throughout Chicagoland.
Record a full length studio disc w/ Sabbath…!