In 1995, I had a ticket to see Ozzy Osbourne for the first time. He’d performed at La Cigale, a small theater tucked into Paris’s red-light district, in 1992, but my parents deemed me too young back then. This time, he was set to play Le Zénith, a medium-sized arena. Geezer Butler was on bass, and Fear Factory would open. My high school friends and I were absolutely stoked.
My local record store and ticket vendor kept a whiteboard, just like at school, listing upcoming concerts. Not very high-tech, but that's what life was like before internet ruled the world. One day, while scanning the board, I noticed that the Ozzy show had been canceled. I was gutted. I rushed home to grab my ticket and demand a refund. Behind the counter, I asked if anyone knew why the show was off. The clerk looked at me gravely and said, “Ozzy died.”
I spent the rest of the day in a funk. I called my best friend who was coming with me to the show to share the terrible news. I think we even cried. Again, this was pre-internet for us; there was no way to fact-check. For days, we genuinely mourned Ozzy. Later, we discovered that ticket sales had been soft and the show was simply not commercially viable. So in a strange way, I’ve already mourned one of the musicians who had been part of my life for as long as I could remember.
I can’t pinpoint when I first heard him or Black Sabbath. Maybe it was from a friend’s older brother’s record collection, but I’m not certain. All I know is he was always there. His legend, his scandals, and above all, his music. Like The Beatles or The Rolling Stones, there was never a moment when Ozzy or Sabbath didn’t exist in my musical universe.
Having ‘buried’ him thirty years ago doesn’t soften today’s blow, not by a long shot. I did eventually see him live, though: in 2010, in a massive Parisian arena. Finally, there he was in all his glory, belting out his classics before 18,000 maniacs. No soft ticket sales that day, no sir! Of course, it was everything I’d hoped. Ozzy, ever the goofball, splashed us with buckets of water, ambled awkwardly across the stage, and roared, “I can’t hear you!” “Go fucking crazy!” It was glorious.
Then the unexpected happened and I got to see him with Sabbath not once, not twice, but thrice, including the band’s final full concert in Birmingham in 2017. Even without Bill Ward, it was a fitting farewell. This was back when he could still walk and still sing. This month's farewell show was great, fantastic, the biggest Metal party in the world... But to me that 2017 show was the last real Black Sabbath concert.
In 2018, I saw him solo again, with Zakk Wylde back in the lineup. All the classics, all the hits... fantastic. Ozzy always looked as if his hard living had taken a toll vocally, physically, even mentally, since his late twenties. Yet in 2018, he didn’t look like a man seven years from death. More often, he seemed like a child. A mischievous, demented, slightly scary little kid.
It would do him and his career a disservice to pen only hagiographic eulogies proclaiming every move magical. That wasn’t always true. There were shady business deals, lip-syncing rumors, mediocre albums, the feud with Iron Maiden, and deleted musicians’ tracks on early records out of spite. Even if Sharon Osbourne drove much of it, he was still at the center of those storms.
Because Ozzy was human. That’s the hard lesson we relearned today. Humans die, even those who help create entire genres that spawn dozens of offshoots. Ozzy died, but his legend lives on. Yes, it’s corny, but even Ozzy wasn’t above a little sentimental sap.
Among all the songs Ozzy sang—Sabbath or solo, from "Black Sabbath" to "Paranoid," "Iron Man" to "Sweet Leaf," "After Forever" to "Dirty Women," "Mr. Crowley" to "Crazy Train," "I Don’t Know" to "Shot in the Dark," one hits especially hard right now. Allegedly written by him (though credits in the Osbourne camp are notoriously, shall we say, murky), it sums up his life so perfectly that if he didn't write it, then perhaps only Lemmy could have written it. That song is “Road to Nowhere,” the closing track on No More Tears. If it doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, between the elegiac guitar solos, the haunting melody, and those words that resonate today, then you might have no soul.
