I was thinking the same thing, given his substance issues.
My Random Ozzy Memory: My Buddy had a '59 Ford Pickup (metal box, no carpet, no floormats, no headliner- Nothing resembling insulation whatsoever). He had some really crappy Kraco speakers that reproduced no bass at all. I think they were surface mount, so you didn’t even get the benefit of the hollow space in the door. Just loud tweeters, basically.
He’d pick me up in the morning to go to school with Blizzard of Oz cranked up to about 12. Just ear-piercing High Frequency racket. Conversation was impossible. I’d stomp on the floor of the truck to simulate the bass beat.
Good Times!
Hehehe, my singer’s nephew (age 25 or so) says it’s all fake. Ozzy faked his death so everyone would leave him alone. The logic, as it is, is that it’s too close to the farewell concert.
Ozzy is the new Elvis. They’ll be spotting him at Chipotle.
I was never a fan, didn’t watch his TV show.
My main memory of Ozzy as a child of the 80s was that he was that generation’s scary figure. A friend had one of his albums and the cover made Ozzy look positively terrifying. Then some years later I actually listened to Black Sabbath and here was this aggressive sounding music by these demonic figures, and the lyrics were…
Maybe it’s not too late
To learn how to love and forget how to hate
And I thought, “This is the antichrist everyone is so worked up about?” Still makes me chuckle. If you arrange that song differently it could be mistaken for a Paul Williams composition.
Hehehe, technically that’s Ozzy solo, but the idea stands. Ozzy thought it was kinda humorous too. He understood why he had (and certainly sometimes cultivated) the scary image, but he was kind of bewildered about how some people thought he was “Satan’s best friend” or something.
Yeah, they started out as a blues band called “Polka Tulk Blues Band”, then changed their name to “Earth”, before becoming “Black Sabbath” and doing metal. It’s not like they emerged from a Hellpit to spread Satan’s evil; they were a blues band that decided to try something different and liked it. Partially, it was because they saw people lined up to see scary movies, and thought, if people like scary movies, let’s turn our band into the musical equivalent of a scary movie. They even got their name from a scary movie, an Italian film with segments introduced by Boris Karloff.
It was all just a persona put on by musicians having fun and trying to get attention. And it worked!
You said you never watched his TV show. Did you ever hear the opening theme to The Osbournes? If not, I think you’ll appreciate it.
Happy that some friends dragged me last minute to see Ozzy in the early 90’s. Amazed he lasted another 30+ years since then.
Spinal Tap: “Lick my love pump”
Bing Videos
Quite the legacy.
I guess ‘killing himself to live’ made him last this long.
“Dead, dead, dead.” - Dave Dictor.
I don’t know if auto-correct “fixed” it for you, but it’s Lemmy, not Lenny.
Lemmy refused to eat fruit or vegetables of any kind (just because he didn’t like them), and drank heavily almost up until the end. Ozzy had his issues, but he also had Sharon at least trying to keep him in line and trying to keep his destructive habits to a minimum. Still, I’m surprised they both made it to the ages that they did.
I think the winner of that one goes to Jimmy Hendrix opening for the Monkeys.
No doubt made worse by his many years of drinking and drug abuse. Parkinson’s has a genetic component, but lifestyle choices such as drinking and drug abuse can also have a strong effect on how the disease progresses.
He had also been dealing with serious pneumonia not long ago, which was made worse by the emphysema he’d developed from years of smoking.
It’s not like his substance abuse didn’t have any long-term effects, they just weren’t a direct contributor to his death.
I saw Ozzy at Blizzcon a few years ago (the convention for players of Blizzard games like World of Warcraft). He put on a really good show. I wasn’t a fan, per se, but I did enjoy his hits when I heard them on the radio. RIP.
I’m a huge Sabbath fan. Even learned most of the bass lines while trying to play along with the records.
Ozzy was a phenomenal singer for Sabbath. Couldn’t have asked for a better one. But - with all due respect to Ozzy - he wasn’t the brains behind their success. That goes to Geezer and Tony. Geezer came up with the lyrics, of which have not gotten the recognition they deserve. And Tony came up with the iconic riffs.
Good to know. Doesn’t surprise me. It’s funny (but understandable) how we tend to ascribe to the vocalist the qualities of an entire band. Something about the human voice speaking to us (literally), I guess. For some reason, we do this more with some acts than with others. Anyone who knows anything about Led Zeppelin, for example, knows how much Jimmy Page is responsible for so much of what they were (even though, in that case, Robert Plant actually did write most of their lyrics).
(A related issue is when the film or TV spends too much time on the lead singer. Gimme Shelter is a great documentary film, but come on, Maysles Brothers – enough with the focus on Mick, already!).
I like to think of Zeppelin as, “Page and his Hired Hands.” (Not to take away from Page, though. Guy is a genius.)
Sabbath was much more organic. None of them were superstars before Sabbath’s first album, yet what they produced is just mind-blowing, IMO. When someone asked Geezer how the songs were written, he said (my paraphrasing), “I don’t know. It’s like the hand of God wrote them. Or that they wrote themselves. It was an easy process, for some reason.”
Ozzy: my second favorite rock singer.
Geezer: incredible lyricist, and my all-time favorite bassist.
Tony: a very underrated guitarist. And the “coolest” guy in heavy metal. He is Black Sabbath.
Bill: his approach to rock drumming is completely under-appreciated. Listen closely… he didn’t employ traditional “drum beats” - he hated “drum beats” - and it has a jazz feel to it.
Right on.
My personal favorite Ozzy performance.
I wasn’t a huge fan, but I appreciate and respect the impact he had. I got to see him live somewhere around 1989, though in all honesty, I went to see one of the opening acts. A family friend was a disc jockey for the local rock station, and she gave me two free tickets, claiming that I was caller #10 (or whatever the number was).
Nah, I turned off auto-correct years ago because it got annoying with all the jargon and nonstandard spelling I use, but now my eyes and attention aren’t what they once were, and I’m making mistakes all the time. 100% thought I wrote Lemmy, and my glasses agree with me.
Don’t feel bad. The guy correcting you referred to “Jimmy Hendrix opening for the Monkeys.”
I seriously wonder about that. Like a guy who runs his business until he’s 95 and dies 2 weeks after retirement. Or the person who dies shortly after their spouse. I think that having ‘something to live for’ is often literal.