Colby Cosh: The tortured vulnerability of Ozzy Osbourne

Ozzy Osbourne, the original voice of Black Sabbath, died on Tuesday, thus leaving an enormous Ozzy-shaped hole in the world. He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of heavy metal for his decade in Sabbath; went on to have a solo career which, contrary to all expectations, yielded further classics; founded Ozzfest, the lucrative festival/touring series which fertilized a dozen sub-genres of guitar rock; and then, somehow, became a beloved and universally recognized “reality TV” star, mostly by just being a good-natured zillionaire drug casualty tottering around expensive estates and cursing colourfully in front of hand-held cameras.

All of this could be characterized safely as things that happened to Ozzy, rather than things Ozzy made happen; I think this is part of the secret to his late-life media success, his last act as a sort of hapless Charlie Chaplin figure. If you study the important figures of Golden Age rock music, you’ll find some canny mercenaries, some obsessed craftsmen, and some art-school kids angling to become Baudelaires or Stockhausens. Almost all of them had a strong, even pathological sense of mission, even if that mission was just to make an arpeggio sound cool on a Telecaster.

But viewers of The Osbournes quickly recognized Ozzy as a sort of Dickensian innocent who had been lifted to fame and fortune, with some wretched tragedy thrown in. Ozzy’s songwriting role in Sabbath was pure singer’s midwifery: the group shared legal writing credits four ways, but the lyrics mostly came from Ozzy’s mate Geezer Butler, and the crucial keys to the inventive Sabbath sound are, if I can risk heretical oversimplification, guitar tuning and Bill Ward’s explosive drums.

There is no Sabbath without Ozzy, but let the record(s) show that Sabbath fired Ozzy in 1979 and experienced an immediate return to form. (Ronnie Dio, a relatively obscure American veteran of U.K. folk-metal, replaced Ozzy as frontman — and eventually became a pop-culture legend of near-equal stature, almost entirely because of his two Sabbath LPs.)

Ozzy was fired from Sabbath because, after a period of creative flaccidity for the group, he was deemed more trouble than he was worth. He is acknowledged to have been the group’s drug-consumption gold medalist, and he had a continuing habit of bringing fists into arguments. He couldn’t show up on time to save his life and was chronically non compos mentis when he did arrive.

Sabbath handed him a cheque for his share of the group’s brand and he put it up his nose in a matter of weeks. He ought to have died before the end of 1980, as surely as a Star Trek character in a red shirt. But his manager’s no-nonsense daughter Sharon Arden, explicitly sent to America to extract whatever commercial value was left in Ozzy, married him — and started assembling a formidable empire around him.

Sharon has become a global celebrity in her own right, and you can underline those last four words if you like, but that’s not Sharon on “Crazy Train” or “Mr. Crowley,” either. It almost feels like a category mistake for Ozzy’s obituaries to emphasize heavy metal per se, because most metal vocalists aren’t anything like Ozzy and can’t do what he did, even though many of them have far more pure singing talent.

The accepted model of the metal frontman is a strutting peacock of a man, an avatar of imperative power and toughness. On his best records Ozzy is more of a mad prophetic conduit, someone lifted onto a higher plane and brought back to Earth in an obviously damaged state, raving in Blakean riddles as the music thunders ominously around him.

In other words, he possessed a tortured vulnerability that really suited the Sabbatarian horror movies. Nobody else could have represented quite the same attitude while singing of being lost in the wheels of confusion or looking through the hole in the sky. A particularly fine example occurs on “Snowblind” from the album Black Sabbath Vol. 4 (1972). “Snowblind” is a song about cocaine, written (by Butler) for the single most cocaine-influenced record ever made in a heavily cocaine-dependent musical genre. Cocaine is thanked in the liner notes of that LP. And the song starts off with a shimmering Sibelius quality that kind of makes you want to try cocaine:

My eyes are blind but I can see The snowflakes glisten on the tree The sun no longer sets me free I feel the snowflakes freezing me

But a few minutes into the track, Bill Ward pulls his boots on, the stillness lurches into a pell-mell boogie, the schoolboy snow metaphor is dropped, and all of a sudden Ozzy becomes a whining alleyway junkie, defending himself exasperatedly — perhaps in the face of what we would now call an intervention.

Don’t you think I know what I’m doing? Don’t tell me that it’s doing me wrong You’re the one that’s really the loser This is where I feel I belong

Ozzy, who continued struggling with drug use for three more decades, must have said stupid self-justifying words like these with total conviction a thousand times. They ring so true that you wonder whether Geezer Butler transcribed them directly. And they can only have been addressed to a concerned loved one, to a parent or sweetheart or comrade who had said something like “Hey, ease up, I don’t want you to die.” Notice how every line strikes a different note about drug addiction. “You think you’re better than me?”; “You don’t understand how bad I need it”; “To hell with all you squares anyway”; “It brings me a peace I’ve never known when sober.”

Somehow this stanza fell into a love letter to cocaine made by cokeheads while on industrial amounts of coke. Are these words in earnest, or are they an ironic acknowledgment that Black Sabbath has cornered itself in a bad place? Ozzy’s pleading vocals preserve the priceless ambiguity, the sense of fragility: “Snowblind” would never have turned out that way at any other time or with any other singer. It’s not a coincidence that Lester Bangs, the magisterial drug-abusing critic who had previously complained of Sabbath’s leadenness, suddenly started comparing them to Dylan when Vol. 4 came out.