Ceremonially closing the curtain on a long and storied career that began in 1968, Ozzy Osbourne, more theatrically known as the Prince of Darkness and the Godfather of Heavy Metal, took the stage one last time on Tuesday where it all began: Birmingham, England.
Following a spate of beleaguered years marked by postponed, rescheduled, and ultimately canceled tours, Ozzy returned for a final curtain call, undeterred by a worsening Parkinson’s diagnosis and a debilitating spinal injury. Reunited with Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward under the original Black Sabbath banner, he headlined a lineup stacked with heavy metal royalty. Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Guns N’ Roses, and a host of other legends took the stage in tribute — all of them, in one way or another, indebted to the man who helped forge the genre itself.
Though heavy metal’s origins are endlessly debated, it’s reasonable to say that Black Sabbath, in 1970, released one of the first, if not the first, heavy metal records. Like most new art movements, it wasn’t conjured from thin air. It emerged from the influences that fed the era’s hungriest artists — those who yearned not only to play the music they loved, but to push the envelope and test the limits of what listeners could bear.
Sabbath’s sound came out of hard rock and blues rock, filtered through the acid-fueled chaos of the late ‘60s. Their distorted amps expelled the flowery, technicolor optimism of the era. Composed of working-class kids from post-war Birmingham, with few prospects outside the steel mills, where Iommi had already lost a finger, they were brimming with genuine angst.
From their first record, it’s clear these were no art school, flower-power hippies — there was no artifice. Just listen to the opening bars of their self-titled debut: a heavy deluge of rain hits pavement, thunder roars, church bells ring, and then a slow, monstrous G power chord. It was eerie, confrontational, and unlike anything else being recorded at the time. Judas Priest’s Rob Halford once called it “the most evil track ever that’s been written in metal.”
But Sabbath’s magic wasn’t simply heavy distortion. Anyone could mimic that. They were an incredibly melodic band. The main riff in “N.I.B.,” for example, is deceptively simple — a descending, almost vocal-like line built from bluesy intervals and minor-key phrasing, delivered with a loose, swinging rhythm. It moves between clipped, staccato power chords and legato scalar runs, all articulated through a thick, overdriven tone. For all its heaviness, the riff is disarmingly graceful.
Another defining layer to their sound is how Ozzy often mirrored these riffs with his voice, following the movement of the guitar across the fretboard. His vocal phrasing tracked Iommi’s riffs almost like a second instrument. When the guitar dipped low, so did Ozzy’s melody. When it climbed, his voice rose with it.
This is particularly palpable on “The Writ,” off their 1975 record Sabotage, as lines such as “the anger I once had …” descend with the riff, only to rise again as he belts, “are you Satan, are you man.” It gives the song an eerie, almost hypnotic cohesion.
By their third record, Master of Reality (1971), Iommi had begun downtuning his strings to ease the tension on his mangled fretting fingers. Bassist Geezer Butler followed suit to match pitch, and the result was an even heavier, darker tone.
With more refined songwriting and studio production, Sabbath pushed their sound into deeper territory. “Children of the Grave,” with its relentless, cyclic riff and Bill Ward’s pulsating, tom-heavy groove, laid the foundation for bands such as Iron Maiden, Metallica, and later Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins, who all owe their downtuned riffing and rhythmic weight to Sabbath’s sonic blueprint.
As the ‘80s loomed and drug addiction consumed Ozzy, clouding his focus, he was fired from the band he founded. By then, he had already presided over a bevy of genre-defining hits — “Iron Man,” “Paranoid,” “War Pigs,” just to name a few — and his seat in music history was secure.
But Ozzy wasn’t one to rest on laurels. The aimlessness of unemployment and the horrifying advent of synthesizers and drum machines must have sparked a new creative flame. What followed was one of the most astonishing solo runs of any frontman in rock history. Between 1980 and 1983, he wrote and recorded Blizzard of Ozz, Diary of a Madman, and Bark at the Moon — three records that would come to define not just his solo career, but the evolution of metal in the ‘80s.
His solo debut, Blizzard of Ozz, charted higher than Black Sabbath’s first record without him, Heaven and Hell, both released the same year. Imagine if, after getting fired from the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones went solo and outsold Sticky Fingers. Going solo is no easy feat. Not even Mick Jagger, for all his charisma and star power, ever managed it.
Beyond record sales, going solo made Ozzy more dynamic. Freed from Sabbath’s structures, he embraced a more volatile sound and a louder persona. It was here that the mythos of Ozzy the Madman began to ossify, through such wild antics as biting the head off a bat, snorting ants through a straw, and getting banned from San Antonio for publicly urinating in his wife Sharon’s dress at the Alamo.
Ozzy blurred the line between performer and character, turning madness into both brand and theater. He cleared the path for theatrical metal acts such as Alice Cooper, Marilyn Manson, and Rob Zombie — artists who built entire careers on the kind of deranged pageantry Ozzy pioneered.
HOW THE TALKING HEADS REVIVAL FITS THE TRUMP ERA
At Back to the Beginning, Ozzy brought his career full circle. He helped invent heavy metal with Black Sabbath and went on to birth a bevy of other genres as a solo act — more unhinged, more theatrical, and more unpredictable than anything that came before.
Most artists are lucky to leave just one lasting mark on music. Ozzy left too many to count. “Don’t forget me as the colors fade,” he sang on his final 2020 record, Ordinary Man. We won’t.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds an MBA from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.