MusicMusicThe Black Sabbath frontman, who died Tuesday at 76, was many things to many people—even things he, in reality, was not
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By Nate RogersJuly 23, 4:01 pm UTC • 6 min
As I was watching Back to the Beginning, Ozzy Osbourne’s recent goodbye concert extravaganza, one image in particular stood out to me—and it actually wasn’t Ozzy. That’s not to say that I didn’t find his performance moving for its tenacity and upsetting for the way it revealed just how sick he was. Even though Ozzy could barely walk due to complications from a variant of Parkinson’s disease and had to perform from a black throne—even though his voice was frail and he admirably appeared to be using no backing tracks to hide it—I was still managing to view him as simply immortal.
After all, Ozzy cheated death many times over the past 60 years and had previously done “farewell” tours four separate times. I had been viewing this latest farewell as another pit stop on the crazy train. The news that he died yesterday at the age of 76, only 17 days after the show, just seemed wrong.
So while I was still naively taking Ozzy for granted a few weeks ago, what I paid attention to instead was actually Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi as he chugged through “Paranoid” one last time. Specifically, I was looking at the cross inlays on the fretboard of Iommi’s guitar, a JayDee Custom creation named “Old Boy” that he’s been playing since the late ’70s, and trying to reconcile the fact that Sabbath had created a legitimate satanic panic in their time with the reality that it was composed of members who were deeply, overtly Christian.
To say that for many years Black Sabbath had a widespread reputation as being an agent of the Antichrist isn’t hyperbole; when the self-titled debut Black Sabbath album came out in 1970, it was panned in Rolling Stone by Lester Bangs, who noted that the project was hyped as a “rockin’ ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap.” Partially in dispute of the whole devil-worship thing, the band members wore giant crosses around their necks, and a frustrated Geezer Butler, Sabbath’s bassist and primary lyricist, even wrote the 1971 song “After Forever” about how much they literally loved Jesus. (The real lyrics to one of the heaviest songs ever written are “Perhaps you’ll think before you say / ‘God is dead and gone’ / Open your eyes, just realize / That He is the one.”)
Sabbath developed its playfully spooky identity after noticing that audiences at its early shows were especially entertained by the spectacle of a band leaning into the darker part of music and performance. The four young men desperately wanted to be successful enough not to have to go back to their jobs doing manual labor, and here they saw an opening in the market that was just sitting there for the taking.
“People feel evil things, but nobody ever sings about what’s frightening and evil,” Butler told The Guardian in 1972. “I mean, the world is a right fucking shambles. Anyway, everybody has sung about all the good things. … We try to relieve all the tension in the people who listen to us. To get everything out of their bodies—all the evil and everything.”
In the same way that George A. Romero wasn’t pro-zombie in making Night of the Living Dead, Sabbath was supposed to be viewed like a horror movie about the occult, not an endorsement of it. And either way, it’s not like they were singing about how great the devil is, even if you were poring through the lyric sheets. On the song “Black Sabbath,” from the album Black Sabbath, by the band Black Sabbath, Ozzy tells the story of being “chosen” by Satan for some kind of ritualistic burning, but the refrain of the chorus-less, pitch-black song—the undeniable big bang moment of an entirely new genre, in which Ozzy first deployed his perfect wail of despair that’s still reverberating today—is “Oh no, no, please, God, help me.” He wasn’t inviting the devil in. He was terrified of it.
“All the tracks on the first album were a warning against black magic,” Osbourne told NME in 1970. “You get old business tycoons wanting to go with young chicks, so they go along to black magic rituals and get themselves involved. … Things like that, they’re sick. I believe in black magic but I’ve not tried it and I won’t.”
I think that part of the reason I never really viewed Black Sabbath as some philosophical or spiritual lightning rod—and saw it more like some force of artistic nature—is because my introduction to the band was the MTV reality show The Osbournes. When it premiered in 2002, I was 11 years old and didn’t have any knowledge of Black Sabbath; I spent many hours getting to know Ozzy the person before I ever really got to know Ozzy the maniacal heavy metal character.
And while he may have been concerningly incomprehensible most of the time, he was often a kind and gentle person—certainly not a Prince of Darkness. Underneath all that camp and theater was a guy who loved Chipotle and the History Channel. Who loathed his wife and manager Sharon’s pack of yappy little dogs but put up with them because he loved her. Who was frequently incensed by his spoiled children, but who gave them everything they desired so that they could have the life he didn’t while he was growing up poor, working awful jobs in factories and slaughterhouses. On the show, he wasn’t presented as some rock deity—in fact, he was shown as a deeply flawed individual—and for me, anyway, that seemed to humanize the inhumanity of his gnarled and beautiful music.
People occasionally accuse Ozzy of being a subpar singer—of just singing along to the riffs—but that kind of dismissal loses sight of the role he always played in a hard rock song: that of a fastener between parts. If you listen to something like “Hole in the Sky,” he’s working with Iommi, Butler, and drummer Bill Ward to create a unified assault, like four warships moving in tandem, with Ozzy at the front, leading the charge.
But as much as he was a master of controlled chaos in the heavier songs—of creating this feeling of rock-solid propulsion—he also had a soft touch, especially on ballads like “Changes” and “Goodbye to Romance.” Rather than Satan, Ozzy was a worshipper of the Beatles—he once said that meeting Paul McCartney was “like meeting Jesus Christ”—and like any good Beatlemaniac, he never let the vibe supersede the importance of a good melody.
One reason Ozzy’s musicianship has been somewhat underplayed over the years is because of how much of a character he truly was—and how often he was made to deal with the perception that he was some blood-drinking lunatic out to enlist the youth in a cult of debasement and anarchy. “People describe us sometimes as if we ran around fields with pitchforks in our hands,” Osbourne told The Guardian in 1972. “I think they expected flames to shoot out of the cover of our second album. Want some Doritos?” Still, he certainly had his fair share of fun stoking the fire of the narrative by occasionally decapitating birds and bats, too. My guess is that Ozzy knew that, no matter what he said or did, people would prefer to see him as wielding a pitchfork and shooting flames out of his hands. And until his dying days, he was always happy to get onstage and oblige.
Music can be just as much of a fiction as a movie, and when it’s compelling enough, you lose sight of what’s real and what’s not. That’s why I looked at an ailing Ozzy two weeks ago and thought that he was immortal. That’s why we can look at the crosses on Black Sabbath and see the devil instead.
Nate Rogers is a writer in Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Stereogum, and elsewhere.
