Never Say Die

There was a time when "Crazy Train" was not on classic rock radio. Readers might think that I'm worth a one-way ticket with this particular recollection, but not only was "Crazy Train" not on classic rock radio, the idea of "Crazy Train" on the same station as the Steve Miller Band, as the Eagles, as ... Led Zeppelin?

No. Ozzy? No way. What's next, reanimating fossils found in the Black Sabbath Tar Pits?

Hard rock stations? They played solo Ozzy. But the first time I heard "Crazy Train" on a classic rock radio (the stations which didn't play Guns 'n' Roses, if one could also imagine) was 1999, at a summer job working adequate maintenance for a small real estate company after my freshman year of college. Cleaning out party houses lived in and abandoned by similarly-aged Purdue students not expecting any return on that security deposit, a healthy percentage long ago asked not to schedule classes for autumn.

Heard a lot of "Crazy Train" and classic rock radio because my boss – imagine Joe Lieberman, but instead he's a pretty alright guy – picked me up at 6:50 each morning with classic rock radio going and yes I was still kegbeer drunk from the night before nearly every time.

My boss was already one joint in, I know this because my friend (with whom I shared kegbeers mere hours prior) was his cul-de-sac neighbor and watched my boss gather his full and complete senses in his driveway around 6:40 before work each dewy morning, all the way to the thumb. We both needed coffee and made sure to solve this problem before driving to site.

I didn't have a car or license, this was the first classic rock radio station I'd heard in years, and classic rock radio cranking "Crazy Train" startled, but scanned. Even if, only a decade before, the classic rock station was barely distinguishable (mostly via Eagles) with a good chunk of the oldies' station playlist, where "Splish Splash" capably swung alongside Creedence Clearwater Revival.

It made sense to move from "House of the Rising Sun" and "Nowhere Man" on 1989's classic rock radio's spot among push-buttons, to "Crazy Train" and "Mysterious Ways" in 1999's classic rock radio entry within five digital FM presets. It wasn't as if classic rock radio stopped picking Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers songs up along the way, or kicking any Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers off the playlist. Tom Petty kicked more Heartbreakers out of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers than classic rock radio kicked Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers songs off rotations.

"Crazy Train" was in basketball arenas by 1999, why not on classic rock radio with the rest of the hits? Why does it have to be on the hard rock station, its production sounding comparatively ancient alongside whatever compressed 7-string thrash was around in 1999. Why couldn't "Crazy Train" live with each of Golden Earring's perpetual radio hits? Can't Skynyrd yourself a Foghat without riding a crazy, listen, I could do this for days.

They'll have 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' in here soon enough, I remember thinking. Each addition felt like a triumph, outsider Ozzy surviving, alternative rock music taking hold in classic rock spaces where Slaughter and Firehouse could not.

But soon after, with everyone and their stepmom who loves Judas Priest thrusting devil signs at every fin de siècle flash of a disposable camera, it became clear whose mediocre triumph I was viewing.

Those rocking as pose. Not rolling, like Lee Kerslake.

The former Uriah Heep drummer was old enough and hippie enough not to give "Crazy Train" the Oct. 31st treatment when Lee recorded the song's drum track. Kerslake saw through all that Saxon and castle-nonsense, popping in full by the time Ozzy cut his first album in 1980. Kerslake instead shuffles over "Crazy Train" like the heavy metal anthem is a groove about easy livin', not what Wikipedia tells me is an expression of Cold War-induced psychosis.

Ozzy Osbourne was never scare metal nor hair metal. No matter how much Sharon tried with makeup during the 'No Rest for the Wicked'-era, when even Mick and Keith battled daily with blowdryers and since-banned non-biodegradable hair mists. Times were sticky, and for a while they held.

Ozzy tried his best to drive hair metal off the face of the earth via one final extinction event before the 1990s gave out: Ozzfest hired every brand-new, heavy-handed, zero-hyphen, two-word, single-capitalization band available: Pushmonkey, Switchfoot, Bridgebaffle, Arfbutton, Coalchamber, Braintree, Godsmack, Spintackle. Terrible music, but nary a lingering reformed Ratt nor BulletBoys to be found, no pöintless ümlauts. Can't even find a Saigon Kick around here.

Ozzfest fell, the devil horns stayed. What remained, in the decades since, is six or seven thousand-fans in an outdoor shed tossing those index and pinkie fingers up while Rikki Rockett pretends to play a single pre-recorded bass drum thump, one stick twirling, the other hand giving the crowd the same two-finger salute the crowd reflects en masse.

The salute's credo? We listen to shit music.

A grown Step-Brother at his low point on the couch watching Bret Michaels in 2008? Crueler and far more accurate than outfitting Stewart in a Winger t-shirt fifteen years earlier.

Nobody's as scary as Ozzy, nothing in music, nothing else in Black Sabbath.

Black Sabbath's guitars are scary, detuned and floppy and fuzzy. Weird lyrics, creepy thunder and rain sounds from the stock archives, all spoooooky, we get it, tritone note, whatever. Set dressing behind what was real: Ozzy's voice was scary, actually scary.

He was a teddy bear, the silliest goofball on the bus, onstage he exuded the athletic certainty of a soap bubble slowly disintegrating its way down a shower wall.

But when Ozzy opened his mouth, when he stood to read a script someone else wrote, he was scary. Everything else was costume: Black Sabbath's lyrics were irreverent and provocative, the tunes Osbourne chose as solo artist repeatedly reassured his Princedom over Darkness. His album covers routinely outfitted Ozz with the Grand Guignol effect.

Fake blood, in the shadow of what Ozzy gave us on tape.

The voice mattered. Even when it demanded we rock out and have a good time, be kind to others, Nixon's peace sign in each hand and Dolly Parton's fringes flying off each arm, the voice frightened. It was a plea from someone who knows how rocky the good times are. Ozzy Osbourne was a tremendous actor but too truthful a singer, every bit of it was pain, even he didn't believe that going home to Mama was going to make anything any different.

It wouldn't, the road was always the answer. Ozzy signed up for his final solo tour while George H. Walker Bush was president, but he played his last gig a few days ago. It's all he's known since Sabbath hit in 1968. Ozzy was 19, his brain with six years remaining before being told to conclude that All This was normal.

We don't listen to Black Sabbath for Ozzy in the same way we don't watch each movie with strictest attention to dialogue, enunciation. The feature is the entire production, and we show up for those riffs, plus Bill Ward's beatlaying with unclenched hi-hat. Plus Butler's lyrics, from which I can discern are mostly about future spacedevils chiefly motivated by issuing humans warning of excesses inherent in organized monotheistic religion.

We tune in for the time they rhyme a word with the same word, or for when Rick Wakeman shows up to do a brilliant Rick Wakeman impersonation, or for the single songs where it sounds like Black Sabbath invented three different sweet strains of stoner metal (hybrid, indica, SUPERNAUT) at once. We pull into Ozzy or Black Sabbath because it is October or because we are driving or because we have good headphones or because of the stupid treadmill with its 42 red minutes left on the clock.

Ozzy is part of it, not all or most of it, but he's the only thing which cannot be replicated.

Every guitarslinger in the 1980s shot for either Eddie Van Halen or Jimmy Page and kinda made it, not bad. Every singer stretched for David Lee Roth and Robert Plant, pretty good. Later, some even tried for the slurriest bits of Tony Iommi's tone.

Nobody tries for Ozzy. Nobody wants to be foreboding, but sometimes some Ozzy comes out of other singers, because there is hurt there. There is bode to warn of, and forely.

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi invented a type of music. Heavy metal is the only recent form of musical genesis which went from zero to 1 solely through the right fretting hand and skinny steel strings of a single person.

But life finds a way, someone would have aped Iommi, or close. Someone would have played that note. Yet it is because of Tony that heavy metal is a strutting lifeform, full of features and flourish, that we all aren't single-celled puddles of Blue Cheer, fetid and sparkless.

Ozzy, though. Tony Iommi spent the rest of his life trying to replace him in Black Sabbath and for once the drama and numbers reflected the struggle: Dio to Deep Purple Guy to Tony Martin, I can't believe I remembered Tony Martin, because you can't replace Ozzy.

Dio's dragon horns and sincere interest in occult resembled no competition to Ozzy in jeans and hockey sweater and beer and roach rolling off the recording studio's couch to sing words he's reading successfully for the first time, tape rolling, first take is always the best because the same stuff that keeps you going also clucks your throat.

Literally rolled out of bed with it, but not figuratively, Ozzy worked at this. Not by practicing singing, obviously, but 18 years of heavy lifting though every slag-sweating second spent in postwar Aston. No hope, no future, no money, no jobs because they stopped making ships and bombs, plenty of Irish. But one microphone and PA, thanks dad.

Everything else hurt. Life hurt, and Ozzy couldn't understand why. Even when things were great, it hurt. When things were drunk and stoned, it hurt. Rich, poor, poor while supposed to be rich, rich again, more famous than ever, all hurt.

That's his sound, and it was scary, but he smiled for us the whole time so that we weren't scared, to let us know that if this dude could make it through, any of us could too.

Regular rock radio's aversion to Ozzy made early-1990s artifacts out of platinum-selling 1970s records.

Back then I might see a clip of MC5 or Stooges a dozen times on television – some cable retrospective on how white guys have always been far out with guitars, Kurt Loder saying the word "seminal" – before hearing a full Black Sabbath song all the way through. Even "Paranoid," all 168 seconds of it.

The first time I heard Ozzy's voice was in the backseat of a friend's mom's minivan, friend in front seat, his mom searching for actual Genesis or solo Henley on the regular radio and instead settling on "Close My Eyes Forever" by Lita Ford and Ozzy Osbourne on the hard rock station. I was eight, thought I'd heard and seen plenty of heavy metal before, Twisted Sister or bound-up Axl squirming under that metal colander, but hadn't heard Ozzy.

The voice scared the shit out of me. It was daytime, Ozzy singing a love song, a power ballad, but for two minutes I felt like I'd been allowed to watch a Freddy Krueger movie in a stranger's basement and seen an R-rated death.

Four years later, by 1992's 'No More Tours,' Ozzy Osbourne was made to be awfully familiar through MTV and six (!!) radio cuts from 'No More Tears.' Strong ones which held up under the closest of post-Nirvana scrutiny, tunes broadcast not only on cable's cultural behemoth but on the hard rock radio station near me, though not our classic rock representative.

One sunny autumn Sunday in 1992 an uncle tossed an unexpected $10 bill at his nephew, my buddy Jon. Jon and I and our friend Danny considered conniving a ride to the mall from one in our group of parents, in three separate houses all diligently watching NFL games, a wait to last hours. Instead we walked to Stop 'N' Shop: Jon bought 84 sticks of Cinn-a-Burst! and the second Sabbath album on tape.

Don't worry, he got the Soundgarden tape during the next mall visit, credibility was kept, we had the rest of our lives to get to the things people told us to buy, all that fuckin' Lou Reed. Jon bought the 'Rock and Roll High School' soundtrack tape before this cinnamon-spirited purchase, we knew what else was out there. Like the live Velvet Underground reunion tape, respective copies we shoulda kept where we found them in the knockoff spindle bin.

Black Sabbath was a brontosaurus joke, but an affordable one which we wanted to listen to in spite of what was, on tape, clearly very funny but also very, very scary. Some people pay money to be scared inside a theatre, some like to be frightened with faces an inch away from an overwhelmed woofer, smarmily aware there exists "greater" art elsewhere.

Later that spooky autumn Jon acquired Ozzy's first solo album. Copied by me immediately, I can still remember sitting in seven different junior high classes all day thinking about going home and putting on "Mr. Crowley" for the second time and scaring the shit out of myself all over again.

Then a guitar solo. Much preferable, to me, than any cinematic romance I'm asked to sit through, horror flick or otherwise.

We learned our guitar through Ozzy, the Tony-to-Randy-to-Jake-to-Zakk lineage through Ozzy's comic book. Ozzy pulled the same for the Ozzfest generation right after mine, and years before Ozzy's reality TV show hit. Think about the kid in '3rd Rock From the Sun' and the kid in 'The Sopranos,' we're all grown up now and sitting down at Guitar Center.

We're not alone, metal is forever and it looks like everyone on earth. Ozzy delivered human voice to that energy. It is the sound of premonition earned through elevated hard labor, life through adolescence and teenage seasons, of which we should be owed at least a gold watch (or entry level electric guitar and amplifier) by the time humans turn 11 or 12: heavy metal age. Later we grow up and learn that all we assumed when we were 11 or 12 turned out to be true, and it makes us feel like banging our head.

Nobody was going to approximate that movement, come across it by chance, it had to be a single person. Millions of rock and roll singers stumbled into their jobs, only one of them was always Ozzy.

NEVER SAY DIE

Not ever!

Thanks for reading! Basketball soon.