A Sense of Doubt blog post #3814 - Music Monday for 2507.28 - Ozzy Osbourne RIP
Welcome to a special edition of Music Monday, a tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, who died last week.
I never watched more than snippets of The Osbournes TV show.
Two songs, a cover by Chelsea Wolfe, who I am seeing in concert soon, and The Louisville Leopard Percussionists doing "Crazy Train," which is all the proof you need for Ozzy's influence.
Thanks for tuning in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozzy_Osbourne
Blizzard of Ozz
Diary of a Madman
Ozzy Osbourne, legendary heavy metal vocalist, dies at 76
The rocker's family announced that he died on Tuesday morning.
https://ew.com/ozzy-osbourne-legendary-heavy-metal-vocalist-dies-at-76-11776985
Ozzy Osbourne, the legendary rock singer who fronted Black Sabbath, has died. He was 76.
The "Crazy Train" singer's family confirmed the news in a statement Entertainment Weekly.
"It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love," the family wrote. "We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time."
The statement was signed by his wife Sharon, and children Jack, Kelly, Aimee, and Louis.
Osbourne was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 2019. "It's been terribly challenging for us all," he said as he announced the news in 2020. "I ain't going to go anywhere yet."
Also known as the Prince of Darkness, Osbourne pioneered heavy metal with his screeching vocal performances and unpredictable on-stage antics as a member of Sabbath in the late 1960s and 1970s. He also launched a successful solo career after splitting from the band, and achieved further notoriety when he shared the spotlight with family on his 2000s MTV reality series The Osbournes.
Just three weeks ago, Osbourne played his final concert, reuniting with the original lineup of Black Sabbath — guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Terence Butler (known as Geezer), and drummer Bill Ward — at England's Villain Park. "I don’t know what to say, man, I’ve been laid up for like six years," he said during the show. "You have no idea how I feel — thank you from the bottom of my heart. You’re all special. Let’s go crazy, come on."
As he introduced the band's final song, "Paranoid," Osbourne expressed his appreciation for his fans over the years.
"I just want to say to you on behalf of the guys in Black Sabbath and myself, your support over the years has made it all possible for us to live the lifestyle that we do. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I love you. We love you."
Born to a working-class family in England's Marston Green in 1948, Osbourne survived a difficult childhood and adolescence that he said included sexual abuse, a stint in prison after a burglary arrest, multiple suicide attempts. He linked up with Butler, Iommi, and Ward after dropping out of school, first naming their band Earth before switching to Black Sabbath after a 1963 Boris Karloff horror film.
Heavily inspired by the blues, the band quickly cultivated a dark, haunting sound that helped define the early days of heavy metal. Their 1970 self-titled debut album received negative reviews upon release, but was a commercial success and has since been recognized as one of the most influential metal LPs in the genre's history. Their 1970 sophomore album, Paranoid, included legendary tracks like "Iron Man" and "War Pigs."
The band's following albums — Master of Reality, Black Sabbath Vol. 4, and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath — continued Sabbath's commercial success, all achieving platinum status. Their sixth album, Saborage, and their seventh, more experimental LP, Technical Ecstasy, both sold fewer copies than their predecessors.
After the death of his father and the tumultuous recording session for their eighth album Never Say Die!, Osbourne was dismissed from Black Sabbath and replaced by Ronnie James Dio in 1979. The next year, the singer released his massively successful solo debut album, Blizzard of Ozz, featuring classic tracks like "Crazy Train" and "I Don't Know."
Osbourne continued regularly releasing solo albums throughout the '80s, '90s, and 2000s, the first eight of which eventually went platinum. In the 1990s, he launched the metal festival Ozzfest alongside his wife Sharon. The festival has seen over 5 million attendees since its launch. He reunited with several combinations of his Sabbath bandmates at various points, including 1985's Live Aid, 1997's Ozzfest, and a 2012 reunion tour that led to a new album, 13.
Osbourne's celebrity became inescapable upon the launch of The Osbournes in 2002. The show, which focused on the singer's family life with Sharon and their children Kelly and Jack, was among MTV's most successful shows during its four-season run from 2002 to 2005. He later appeared in additional shows like Ozzy & Jack's World Detour and The Osbournes Want to Believe, and acted in projects like Moulin Rouge and Gnomeo and Juliet.
In addition to being a two-time inductee to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Osbourne won three Grammys as a solo artist and two as a member of Black Sabbath. His first win came for Best Metal Performance With Vocal for "I Don't Want To Change The World" in 1994, followed by a win for Best Metal Performance for a live rendition of "Iron Man" in 2000.
The group also won Best Metal Performance for "God Is Dead?" in 2014, and the singer most recently took home a trophy for Best Rock Album for his final album Patient Number 9, as well as Best Metal Performance for "Degradation Rules" alongside Iommi in 2023.
Osbourne is survived by his wife, Sharon, and his children Elliot, Jessica, Louis, Aimee, Kelly, and Jack.
Ozzy Osbourne, ‘Prince of Darkness’
Turned Reality TV Star, Dies at 76
As the lead singer of Black Sabbath,
he helped invent heavy metal. On “The Osbournes,” he presented a comedic
counterpoint to his rock ’n’ roll infamy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/arts/music/ozzy-osbourne-dead.html
Ozzy Osbourne, who achieved enormous success as a pioneer of two wildly popular entertainment genres, heavy metal music and reality television, died on Tuesday. He was 76.
His family announced the death in a statement, which did not say where he died or specify a cause. He had been treated in recent years for a variant of Parkinson’s disease that he identified as Parkinsonism or Parkin 2, a condition exacerbated by his chronic drug abuse.
Although Mr. Osbourne repeatedly announced his retirement over the years — he called a series of live dates in 1992 the “No More Tours” tour and a 2018 series “No More Tours II” — he gave his final concert this month, at a festival in his hometown, Birmingham, England, in his honor. Seated on a black throne, visibly moved by the enthusiasm of the crowd, he closed out his career by reuniting the original lineup of his heavy metal group Black Sabbath.
As the lead singer of Black Sabbath, Mr. Osbourne was one of the inventors of heavy metal. As a solo artist, he became a remarkably durable star, with 13 platinum albums and the nickname “Prince of Darkness.”
But he achieved even wider fame for his rock ’n’ roll excess, including an onstage incident in which he bit the head off a bat.
The hit MTV reality show “The Osbournes” presented a comedic counterpoint to his infamy and his taste for satanic imagery; revealing himself as the befuddled patriarch of a chaotic but loving family, he became a TV star.
“All the stuff onstage, the craziness, it’s all just a role that I play, my work,” Mr. Osbourne insisted in an interview with The New York Times in 1992. “I am not the Antichrist. I am a family man.”
Born John Michael Osbourne in Birmingham on Dec. 3, 1948, he was the fourth of six children of John Thomas Osbourne, a toolmaker who worked the night shift at a power plant, and Lillian (Unitt) Osbourne, who worked the day shift at an auto-parts factory. The Osbournes were crammed into a small working-class home; when Ozzy was young, it had no indoor plumbing.
An indifferent student with undiagnosed dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, Ozzy dropped out of school at age 15 and had a series of short-lived jobs, including 18 months at a local slaughterhouse. After he was fired from that job (for fighting), he had a brief career as a burglar; when he was arrested, his father declined to pay the fine, and Ozzy spent three months in prison, which led him to abandon his criminal ambitions.
His father did, however, buy a P.A. system so Ozzy could pursue his dream of being a rock singer. That system, plus a flyer reading “Ozzy Zig Needs Gig,” got him into a band in 1968 with three young Birmingham musicians: the bassist Geezer Butler, the drummer Bill Ward and the guitarist Tony Iommi.
After some false starts, including a stint as a blues band called Earth, the group embraced the logic that people paid to be scared at horror movies, and the young musicians renamed themselves Black Sabbath, inspired by a Boris Karloff film with that title. They also used the name for one of their early songs, which laid out their sonic template: deafening volume and grinding tempos, with Mr. Osbourne yowling about portents of doom.
Anthems for the Alienated
The quartet released its debut album, also called “Black Sabbath,” in 1970, and followed with seven more over the next eight years. The band’s music was largely reviled by critics and snubbed by radio stations, but its albums were consistently certified platinum, and songs like “Paranoid,” “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” became anthems for generations of disaffected youth.
Mr. Osbourne was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice, as a member of Black Sabbath in 2006 and as a solo performer in 2024. When he inducted Black Sabbath, Lars Ulrich of Metallica praised the group’s “huge hymns of doom.” “When it comes to defining a genre within the world of heavy music,” he said, “Sabbath stand alone.”
Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins told The Times in 2025: “I first heard Black Sabbath’s ‘Master of Reality’ when I was 8 years old and have been chasing that sound as a musician ever since. What drew me to them was this sense of cosmic ennui and a shadowy warmth that is only theirs.”
The songwriter and author John Darnielle, who released an Osbourne-themed EP with his band the Mountain Goats and published a novel about Black Sabbath, said in an interview for this obituary, “Ozzy’s vocal tone is distinctive, for sure, but I think the main thing is that his vocal lines just relentlessly shadow the chord progression with an insistence most singers would probably avoid so they can look more clever.” He added that Mr. Osbourne “found a way to make singing lead heavy, without trying to belt like a blues singer, which is what most of his contemporaries did.”
Mr. Osbourne had long drunk to excess, but as Black Sabbath became successful he could afford a wider variety of intoxicants, and he enthusiastically pursued all of them. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I Am Ozzy” (2009), “Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list.” Throughout his career he frequently announced his sobriety, only to backslide into addiction.
When not touring with Black Sabbath, he lived in the British countryside with his wife, Thelma, in a home he nicknamed Atrocity Cottage. “People would come to stay with us,” he wrote in his autobiography, “and they’d never be the same again.” His every whim was indulged, no matter how foolish; after repeatedly failing his driving test and tired of riding to the local pub on his lawn mower, he bought a horse.
Black Sabbath fired Mr. Osbourne in 1979, shortly after he fell asleep in the wrong hotel room in Nashville and woke up — reportedly 24 hours later — to discover that he had missed a concert. The band continued with a series of other vocalists, most notably Ronnie James Dio.
Mr. Osbourne, meanwhile, holed up in a Los Angeles hotel room, wallowing in his bad habits — until Sharon Arden, the brassy daughter of his manager, Don Arden, came to bawl him out for having stolen an envelope of cash from her (he spent it on drugs). The next day, she returned and offered to manage him. After he accepted, father and daughter sued each other; they remained estranged for decades.
Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Arden married on the Fourth of July in 1982, a date he said he chose so he wouldn’t forget his anniversary.
55 Million Sold
In 1980 Mr. Osbourne released a gleefully apocalyptic solo album, “Blizzard of Ozz,” containing his trademark song, “Crazy Train.” It was a hit. He toured and recorded relentlessly, becoming a bigger star than ever and eventually selling more than 55 million copies of albums worldwide
As Mr. Osbourne’s fame grew, his excessive behavior kept pace. He bit the head off a live dove at a record-company conference. He bit the head off a dead bat during a concert in Des Moines. (It had been thrown onstage by a fan; Mr. Osbourne said he assumed it was a rubber toy.) He pelted audiences with raw meat. When he ran out of drugs, he snorted a line of ants. Wearing his wife’s dress, he drunkenly urinated on the Alamo Cenotaph, a memorial just outside the walls of the Alamo — possibly his most expensive transgression, since it meant he couldn’t perform in San Antonio for years.
While many fans were thrilled by these rock-star anecdotes, Mr. Osbourne’s erratic actions when he was intoxicated had real victims: sometimes animal (armed with a shotgun at his British estate, he slaughtered an entire henhouse and a family of cats), sometimes human. (He gave his first wife a black eye and, after trying to choke his second wife, Sharon, woke up in a cell, charged with attempted murder; believing he was remorseful, she dropped the charges.)
Tragedy struck in 1982. While Mr. Osbourne slept in his parked tour bus in Leesburg, Fla., his lead guitarist, Randy Rhoads, went for a joyride with the makeup artist Rachel Youngblood in a plane flown by the bus driver, Andrew Aycock. The plane buzzed the bus twice and, on the third pass, collided with it before crashing into a nearby house, killing everyone on the plane. Mr. Osbourne soldiered on, eventually settling on Zakk Wylde as his guitarist in 1987.
A song he had written with Mr. Rhoads about his own alcoholism, “Suicide Solution,” put Mr. Osbourne at the center of a lawsuit in 1986, when the parents of a California teenager claimed the song had induced him to kill himself. The suit was dismissed.
Undaunted, Mr. Osbourne returned to suicidal imagery in his 1989 duet with Lita Ford, “Close My Eyes Forever,” his only Top 10 single as a lead artist on the American pop charts. He also reached No. 28 two years later with the sentimental power ballad “Mama, I’m Coming Home” and was featured on “Take What You Want,” a single by Post Malone that reached the Top 10 in 2019.
When Mr. Osbourne wanted to play the Lollapalooza festival in 1995, he was rebuffed; irked, the next year Sharon Osbourne began Ozzfest, which became a long-running, lucrative summer package tour featuring hard-rock and heavy-metal acts, persisting until 2018. The headliner was usually Mr. Osbourne himself, sometimes reuniting with Black Sabbath.
A Homebody Offstage
Although Mr. Osbourne styled himself as a menacing banshee, offstage he was a genial homebody. Devoted fans had known this at least since 1988, when the Penelope Spheeris documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years” featured a gregarious Mr. Osbourne making scrambled eggs while wearing a leopard-print kimono.
The rest of the world discovered that side of his personality in 2002, when the TV series “The Osbournes” began, showing the loving (but often beeped for profanity) home life of Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and their teenage children Jack and Kelly. (Another daughter, Aimee, chose to stay away from the cameras.)
Although he periodically complained that he was supposed to be the Prince of Darkness, the show, which lasted until 2005, featured him befuddled by TV remote controls, house cats and bubble machines. It was the most popular show MTV had ever aired and inspired dozens of celebrities to allow cameras into their homes, hoping for the same quantum leap in their fame.
“One day we were normal,” Kelly Osbourne told Rolling Stone in 2002, “and the next day we were the most famous family in America.”
As Mr. Osbourne shuffled around his Beverly Hills home, viewers could see that he had a noticeable tremor. In 2019, he discovered that he had a Parkinson’s variant.
His health worsened after a near-fatal accident in 2003, when he flipped an all-terrain vehicle on his property in England. “I’d been taking lethal combinations of booze and drugs for decades,” he reflected in his autobiography, “but it was riding over a pothole in my back garden at two miles an hour that nearly killed me.”
Despite those setbacks, Mr. Osbourne continued to parlay his unlikely fame into a wide series of ventures. He starred in a flop variety show, “Osbournes Reloaded”; filmed a history-themed TV series with his son, “Ozzy & Jack’s World Detour”; and even wrote an advice column for Rolling Stone.
Survivors include his wife and their children; three children from his first marriage, Jessica, Louis and Elliot; and numerous grandchildren.
Mr. Osbourne remained devoted to his family and grateful for his success. But he said he knew exactly how he would be remembered:
“Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948. Died, whenever. He bit the head off a bat.”
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2507.28 - 10:10
- Days ago: MOM = 3679 days ago & DAD = 333 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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