“Black Sabbath, the occult-mystic British hard rock group with some promotionally-inspired Satanic orientation, is scheduled to play Winterland on October 1-2.”
Those words, written by me in 1970 at 19, presaged a lifetime of Ozzy Osbourne fandom that doesn’t end with his death on July 22nd. I was Entertainment Editor at Chabot Community College in Hayward, CA, and would often receive free tickets from Bill Graham Presents, whose offices were across the Bay in San Francisco. I attended the aforementioned concert, the first of numerous subsequent Sabbath/Ozzy shows that I’d pay to see.
Like with many burgeoning fans, it was “Paranoid,” Sabbath’s only Top Ten hit (UK), that got me interested in a band that blended Zeppelin with the rain-soaked clang of church bells, mournful air-raid sirens, and ultimate doom. My blurb for the college paper was the first of many forays into heavy metal hagiography, which has revolved to a great extent around the life of Osbourne. No rehash of the shows, the autobiography, the reality show (nope) nor the oft-told story of how Sharon Osbourne rescued a drug and alcohol-addicted Ozzy after Sabbath cut him adrift. I’ve done that.
Why did Ozzy become my icon? The answer is two-fold. While his art was dark, often anchored in the glorification of evil, Osbourne evoked a loving woundedness. The was a compelling juxtaposition between his artistic milieu and the way he cared about humanity. He sang “God Is Dead,” and you knew he hoped that God—in whatever manifestation—wasn’t dead. The brokenness inherent in the contrast between his admonishing vocal style and his soft-spoken personal style speaks to a disrupted societal context and human attempts to remain whole.
And there’s the celebration of rebellious empowerment he brought to the masses. The question, when “Children Of The Grave” cranks up once again: why does it feel good, why are we happy? The villain is nuclear Armageddon, and there’s nothing we can do about this threat of annihilation and so…. what? Ozzy and Sabbath gave us the snarling anthem in the face of theoretical extinction, and millions embraced the futile cry against it. On numerous other songs, doom was evoked, Freud’s Death Instinct made incarnate, and resisted.
At the center of the vortex was a group of musicians from steel-town Birmingham, England, who were destined to codify a genre that explores the profane, the profligate, the transcendent and the redeemed with the sound of holy hell. There’s an absence today, different from the horror of John Lennon’s death, and the intoxicant-related passings of so many rock stars. Ozzy’s finally gone. Heaven or Hell? I think Heaven.