Black Sabbath frontman John Michael ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, father of heavy metal and one of its most enduring and outlandish figures, died on Tuesday at 76. Earlier this month, suffering from Parkinson’s and unable to stand without assistance, Ozzy rose from beneath the stage at the jam-packed Villa Park in Birmingham, less than a mile away from his home in Aston, where he grew up, seated on a custom-made throne fashioned like a bat. Forty thousand metalheads, who had gathered for a final hat tip to the metal pioneer, roared to the theatrical nod to that shocking moment from 1982 when Ozzy chewed off the head of a bat thrown on stage.
Ozzy’s bat bite, while not deliberate — he later said he thought it was a rubber toy — clouded the line between performance and reality. The confusion allowed for the power of the absurd to prevail. Parents were worried if kids lined their eyes with kohl, wore black and blared the music of “Satan’s friends”. Ozzy, the freak, was the children’s hero, their “Prince of Darkness”. He himself grew up on a steady dose of The Beatles. After leaving school, he worked as a labourer and in a slaughterhouse before being recruited by bassist Geezer Butler as the singer for his band Rare Breed in 1967. With guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward, they became Black Sabbath in 1969. The eponymous debut album, followed by Paranoid, Master of Reality and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, shot through the charts. While Ozzy’s substance abuse and alcoholism got him fired by the band in 1979, he embarked on a solo career and was off-balance thereafter musically, and otherwise.
A strange Act Two came with The Osbournes, a reality-TV peek into his home. It had Ozzy roaming around in a robe, flinging profanities, trying to figure out a TV remote. While it took away the rock star myth, the vulnerability made it work the TRPs. It felt the same during the farewell concert, when he sang “Mama, I’m coming home”, struggling with the notes. The metalheads sang along, letting him feel the last song. Just before it was time to leave.
