Ozzy Osbourne’s journey to heavy-metal stardom started with a flier.
Fueled by a love of the Beatles, the teenage dropout propelled himself out of a mundane life in 1960s Aston, a working-class suburb of Birmingham, England, by posting a handwritten sign in a local music shop. It led the singer, who died on Tuesday at 76, to Terence Butler, a bookish soon-to-be bassist who called himself Geezer, as well as the guitarist Tony Iommi and the drummer Bill Ward.
The quartet found its footing when Iommi noticed long lines outside horror movie screenings at a local theater. It wrote a song — “Black Sabbath,” named after the 1963 Mario Bava/Boris Karloff horror anthology — changed its name and, with its 1970 self-titled debut, helped birth what we now know as heavy metal.
Osbourne’s voice, a forlorn, unpolished moan, perfectly suited the occult-themed lyrics that the singer and Butler began writing. Onstage, though, he was almost bubbly — grinning, clapping and handily dispelling any sort of menacing mystique.
Black Sabbath fired Osbourne in 1979, citing his offstage excesses, but the parting turned into a springboard. Sharon Arden — the daughter of Sabbath’s manager at the time, Don, and Osbourne’s future wife and steadfast manager — began helping him assemble his own band. A young guitar prodigy named Randy Rhoads became the linchpin of the new group, and with “Blizzard of Ozz” in 1980, the singer kicked off a solo career that would turn him into a worldwide icon.
Through the years, as collaborators came and went, Osbourne always found new ways to reinvent himself. Here are 12 tracks that sum up Ozzy’s half-century-plus trip to the dark side and beyond. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)
It didn’t take the fledgling Black Sabbath long to realize Iommi’s ambition of writing scary music. Its second original song, and the opening track from its debut LP, hit the bull’s-eye with a brilliantly sinister riff and lyrics detailing an encounter with a reaper-like apparition. Osbourne’s delivery makes the narrative — inspired by a nightmare that Butler related to the singer — feel terrifyingly vivid.
Osbourne’s voice takes center stage on the opening track from “Paranoid,” the second Sabbath LP, released just seven months after its debut. The band serves up a brief two-power-chord flourish on the verses that the singer answers with chilling evocations of battlefield horrors, written by Butler in response to the Vietnam War. Osbourne adds just a hint of vibrato to the end of each line, sounding suitably dramatic but stopping well short of the operatic delivery favored by later metal belters.
“Iron Man,” also from “Paranoid,” was Sabbath at its heaviest, a track that kicked off countless mouth- and air-guitar sessions with its stomping central riff — the perfect sonic evocation of the “heavy boots of lead” worn by the title character, a time-traveling would-be hero who snaps and runs amok. Osbourne’s main vocal melody mirrors Iommi’s fuzzed-out guitar, but during the turnaround that follows each verse, he belts out a mournful lament — the most poignant example: “Nobody wants him / He just stares at the world” — that encapsulates the loneliness at the center of this Butler sci-fi parable.
Black Sabbath’s best-known song, and highest-charting single, started out as an afterthought. The producer Rodger Bain asked the group to come up with a filler track to pad the running time of its second LP. In 20 minutes, it put together a radio-ready rocker about a man battling persistent mental malaise, inspired by bouts of depression that Butler was experiencing at the time. Osbourne’s plaintive, high-pitched delivery soared over Iommi’s locomotive riffs, and drove home the pathos of lines like “Can you help me occupy my brain?” “Paranoid” would remain a staple for the singer for close to 50 years, closing out shows on both his final solo tour dates in 2018, Sabbath’s farewell run the year prior and the Back to the Beginning concert he performed this month in Birmingham. “None of us thought it was anything special when we recorded it,” Osbourne wrote of the song in his 2009 memoir. “But [expletive] hell, it was catchy.”
Sabbath had a softer side too, epitomized by this piano-driven tear-jerker from “Vol. 4,” the template for numerous Ozzy ballads across the decades. The singer’s guileless whine easily adapted to the R&B-esque feel of the tune, collectively written by the band in response to its drummer’s romantic hardships. “Tony just sat down and came up with this beautiful riff, I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the breakup Bill was going through with his wife at the time,” Osbourne recalled in his memoir. “Changes” would have a long afterlife, revived both in a duet between the singer and his daughter Kelly, and by the veteran soul singer Charles Bradley in a wrenching cover.
Following his firing from Sabbath, a depressed Osbourne assumed that his rock-star heyday was behind him. But a chance meeting with Randy Rhoads — a classically trained virtuoso, then playing guitar in Quiet Riot — soon gave him a powerful second wind. Osbourne hired Rhoads after a dazzling audition, and the pair teamed with the bassist-lyricist Bob Daisley to write “Crazy Train,” the singer’s debut solo single and arguably his career-defining anthem. Daisley’s words alluded to political unrest and the threat of war, but paired with Osbourne’s piercing belt and Rhoads’s triumphant riffs and finger-busting leads, the song sounded like a manifesto for a life that was constantly in danger of jumping the tracks.
“Suicide Solution” will always be remembered as the song that incited a legal and PR nightmare for Osbourne when the parents of a California teen who died by suicide filed a suit — eventually dismissed — claiming their child had been influenced by the track, a deep cut from the singer’s solo debut, “Blizzard of Ozz.” But as Osbourne and the co-writer Daisley both maintained, the song was actually a warning against the dangers of alcoholism, inspired in part by the death of the AC/DC singer Bon Scott. (The word “solution” in the title refers, as the singer once explained, to “liquid, not a way out.”) Musically, it was another example of the potency of Osbourne’s first solo band, as he howled about the double-edged sword of intoxication — “Take a bottle and drown your sorrows/Then it floods away tomorrows” — over Rhoads’s swaggering riffs, which suggested a souped-up Sabbath.
Rhoads’s tragic 1982 death in a private-plane crash marked yet another crossroads for Osbourne, and the singer spent the rest of the decade experimenting with lineups. “The Ultimate Sin,” his transitional fourth LP, yielded the moody, streamlined “Shot in the Dark,” the first Osbourne solo single to crack the Billboard Hot 100. The song originated a few years earlier with Wildlife — a band featuring the bassist Phil Soussan, who later signed on with Osbourne — but even if “Shot in the Dark” wasn’t written for him, Ozzy sells it expertly, fully inhabiting its sleek pop-metal feel.
The only time Osbourne made the Top 10 of the U.S. singles chart was with this ballad about a tortured love affair, a duet with Lita Ford — then being managed by Sharon Osbourne — that grew out of a casual studio hangout and appeared on the former Runaways guitarist’s third solo album. The pair’s voices are excellently matched, with Osbourne craning for some of his highest notes on record while Ford favored a husky lower register. (Osbourne would later cut a less commercially successful duet with another female co-star: a version of Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” featuring Miss Piggy.)
The guitarist Zakk Wylde joined Osbourne in 1987 and worked with the singer on and off through Ozzy’s final years. Their collaboration peaked on “No More Tears,” which spawned two MTV hits, including the driving title track and this rootsy power ballad, originally written with Wylde at the piano, with lyrics fleshed out by Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister. As Osbourne later wrote in the liner notes to a compilation, the title phrase was something he would often say to Sharon on the phone near the end of a tour.
The title track of Osbourne’s 12th solo LP followed in the nostalgic mode of “Changes,” finding him looking back on his time in the limelight with a mixture of gratitude and melancholy. “Don’t forget me as the colors fade,” he sings. “When the lights go down, it’s just an empty stage.” The producer Andrew Watt, who first recruited Osbourne to guest on a 2019 Post Malone track that also featured Travis Scott, gave the song all the trimmings of an old-school pop showstopper — strings and choral vocals recorded at Abbey Road, a Slash guitar solo, even a guest verse from Sir Elton John, who also plays piano.
Osbourne’s next, and final, LP led off with what felt like a career culmination, returning the singer to the familiar theme of mental distress, playing the part of an institutionalized narrator who proclaims, “I’m not getting out alive.” Featuring an all-star cast of players and co-writers — Watt; Jeff Beck, in one of the guitarist’s final recorded appearances; the Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo; the Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith; and the A-list songwriter Ali Tamposi — the track showcases Ozzy as both brooding metal icon and irrepressible belter of heavy-duty hooks, still sounding powerfully, unmistakably himself more than 50 years into his career.
