Ozzy Osbourne Tried to Raise Hell

If you trust Ozzy Osbourne’s recollection—and, given the long and eventful life he led, as well as the chemical compounds he loved, perhaps you should not—then the idea for his band, Black Sabbath, came from a simple observation: people seemed to like horror movies. It was the end of the nineteen-sixties, and Osbourne was a boisterous rock-and-roll fan from Birmingham, England, who had decided to play loud music with some guys he knew. One of them was Tony Iommi, a guitar player who was developing an austere, unflashy style. “It was Tony who first suggested we do something that sounded evil,” Osbourne recalled, in “I Am Ozzy,” his 2009 autobiography. He said that Iommi’s proposition was simple: “Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.”

Osbourne died this past Tuesday, at the age of seventy-six; his family didn’t announce a cause, but he had previously disclosed that he had Parkinson’s disease. By the time of his death, Osbourne had been doubly transformed by Iommi’s good idea about “evil.” Starting in 1970, Black Sabbath released a string of albums so popular that they made Osbourne not just a rock star but a cultural antihero. He became known as the Prince of Darkness and, relatedly, the godfather of heavy metal, which emerged as the name for the subgenre that flourished and then fractured in the wake of Black Sabbath’s success, spawning sub-subgenres and sub-sub-subgenres through the decades. As a boy in the nineteen-eighties, I remember hearing that Osbourne was some kind of maniac, and that he had bitten the head off of a dove, or maybe it was a bat. (The answer was both: the dove in a record-company meeting, because he wanted to cause a scene, and the bat during a concert, because he thought it was fake.) But in time he emerged from the shadows to become a beloved paterfamilias. He was the guiding spirit of Ozzfest, the travelling metal festival launched by his wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, in 1996. And he was the lovable, bumbling dad on “The Osbournes,” an MTV reality show that had its première in 2002. (This despite the fact that, in 1989, he had been arrested for attempted murder, after choking Sharon; he went to rehab and she declined to press charges.) Unlike most aging rockers, he remained prominent in pop culture: he had a Top Ten hit in 2019, with “Take What You Want,” a collaboration with Post Malone and Travis Scott; in death, he has been mourned not just by peers and metalheads but by people like Lady Gaga and Drake. The first intentionally “evil” rock star had become a guy that everyone loved.

Osbourne grew up in Birmingham, the son of factory workers, and he was old enough to have been transported by the early Beatles records, but also young enough, and angry enough, to rebel against what came next, which he called “all this hippy crap about ‘gentle people’ going to love-ins at Haight-Ashbury, whatever the fuck Haight-Ashbury was.” The songs and sensibility that he created with Black Sabbath were intended as a corrective, and not a subtle one: “Black Sabbath,” the band’s 1970 début, had a huge inverted cross on the packaging, and the lyrics included a warning that “Satan’s coming ’round the bend.” The thunderous sequel, “Paranoid,” arrived later that year, and it began with a cloudy instrumental passage that dispersed in time for Osbourne to intone, “Generals gathered in their masses / Just like witches in black masses.” This was “War Pigs,” a protest song that could not be confused for “hippy crap.” It ended with divine retribution for the warmongering generals, balanced by an intimation that all was not well: “Satan, laughing, spreads his wings.”

Many of those Black Sabbath lyrics were written not by Osbourne but by Geezer Butler, the group’s bass player. Osbourne’s main role was to fit plangent melodies over Iommi’s monumental riffs, and then to howl them with a hint of grace and tenderness. He always made it clear that, for him, raising hell was a pastime rather than a theological interest. He liked to say, “The only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka, and gin.” In a 1972 profile in Creem, he said, “We have never been into black magic,” and expressed mild annoyance at the people who “think we’re going to put a fucking curse on them.” But part of what made Black Sabbath so influential was the way this music sparked listeners’ imaginations, allowing them to think that they were eavesdropping on something sinister.

Osbourne was fired from Black Sabbath, in 1979, essentially for causing more trouble than even a pioneering heavy-metal band could tolerate. (Once, after a three-day cocaine bender, he staggered into the wrong hotel room and went to sleep; when his bandmates couldn’t find him, they had to cancel that night’s concert, at an arena in Nashville.) As a solo act, he was less gloomy: “Crazy Train,” his signature song, had lyrics about insanity and the Cold War, but what most people loved was the fiendishly catchy guitar riff and the surprisingly jaunty, major-key vocal melody. Still, plenty of other bands found ways to evoke and intensify the spooky aura of those early Black Sabbath records. One of them was Venom, led by a metalhead named Cronos who was obsessed with “evil” iconography; the band’s gloriously snarling and serrated début album, from 1981, was called “Welcome to Hell.” Cronos has said that part of his goal was to outdo Osbourne. He loved when Osbourne sang, at the outset of the first Black Sabbath album, “What is this that stands before me? / Figure in black which points at me.” But he hated to hear Osbourne beg, a few minutes later, “Oh, no, no, please, God help me.” In a recent interview, Cronos remembered hearing that line and thinking, “You just spoilt the song!” And so he resolved to give his listeners a reliably godless experience: “I thought, ‘Right—well I’m gonna be that thing that stands before you. I wanna be that fucking demon who you’re afraid of.’ ”

Because we came to know Osbourne so well, it can be hard to imagine how mysterious he must have seemed in 1970, and how menacing. These days, satanic rock music is a well-worn joke, and satanism itself often seems like a quaint curiosity, or else a legal stratagem. But in the early seventies, in the immediate aftermath of the Charles Manson murders, plenty of people were both scared and offended by the group’s lyrics and imagery—that was part of the reason why the band made such an impression. “Scary music” can be enormously compelling, and over the years plenty of metal bands found ways to go far beyond “witches in black masses.” In the early two-thousands, around the same time that “The Osbournes” was conquering MTV, a shadowy French band called Peste Noire began building a reputation as an unusually fearsome and strange metal band: the buzzing guitars and screeching vocals were sometimes interrupted by pastoral acoustic passages; the lyrics, sometimes borrowed from old poems or battle cries, combined general misanthropy with reactionary nationalism. Last year, La Montagne, a French newspaper, accused the band’s main member, known as Famine, of “sliding toward Nazi fascism.” (The band’s music is generally unavailable on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.) Earlier this year, in response, Famine posted an hourlong video in which he rejected “Nazism” but acknowledged that he is inspired by Italian Fascism and other right-wing traditions. “The new religion of the West is anti‑racist human-rights-ism,” he said, in French. “So to blaspheme effectively, you must strike where it hurts.”

Plenty of people would say they don’t particularly want blasphemy in their music, especially not that kind of blasphemy. But this week’s tributes to Osbourne were a reminder that, in music as elsewhere, people sometimes want precisely the thing they are not supposed to want. And there is a difference, as Osbourne showed us, between dabbling in “evil” imagery and being an evil person—although, as he also showed us, none of us is purely anything. (The theme song of “The Osbournes” was a peppy version of “Crazy Train” sung by Pat Boone, the crooner who became, in California, Osbourne’s neighbor and friend.) One gets the feeling that Osbourne wouldn’t have been so beloved at the end if he hadn’t seemed so “evil” in the beginning. His appeal, in the later years, was the sense that he really had been to hell and back. ♦