On Tuesday, Ozzy Osbourne, the iconic frontman of Black Sabbath, the man who helped birth heavy metal, has passed on. He was 76 years old.
His family announced the death in a statement, which did not say where he died or specify a cause. He had been treated in recent years for a variant of Parkinson's disease that he identified as Parkinsonism or Parkin 2, a condition exacerbated by his chronic drug abuse.
Just as recently as July 05, he was on stage at the "Back to the Beginning" farewell concert in Birmingham, UK, the city where it all started. Surrounded by guest stars and reunited with the classic Sabbath line-up, he performed chained to a bat-shaped chair, singing with the wild, unrelenting force that defined his career.
He left this world as he lived in it – on his own terms. A rock star until the end.
Most who don’t follow rock know Ozzy only as the man who bit the head off a bat – a story that became a kind of curse. He grew tired of it in later years, annoyed that a moment of shock theater had come to overshadow a lifetime of art. Others remember him as a foul-mouthed, lovable old rocker – the Prince of Darkness turned reality TV grandpa. A man who swore like a sailor and laughed like a child.
But there was more to him than the antics. He was outrageous, yes – he once threw raw meat into a crowd, and at Madame Tussauds, posed as a wax figure of himself, startling tourists for fun. He was devoted too. Even in a wheelchair, battling Parkinson’s, he kept making music. He once said he would perform until his last breath. And he nearly did.
Osbourne’s final solo album, Ordinary Man (2020), was widely seen as a swan song – romantic, tragic, and defiantly honest. One of its standout tracks, "Under the Graveyard", plays like a hymn of regret. It’s an unflinching confession of the wildness and wreckage of his youth: the drinking, the drugs, the chaos. His treatment of his wife Sharon. His battles with himself. In that song, he sings:
Don’t take care of me, be scared of me
My misery owns me
I don’t want to be my enemy
My misery owns me now
The man behind the myth emerges here – not Ozzy the bat-eater, but Ozzy the broken soul who somehow stitched himself back together. It must be said that he readily owned his flaws, every single one of them. And it was how he faced them that we find the heart of who he truly was.
Despite the dark image – crosses, bats, devils, and all – Ozzy was a man of faith. He often said that Satanism frightened him. The symbols were theater, not creed. In truth, he hoped for the light. Not eternal party-in-hell nonsense, but peace.
I fondly remembered listening to Black Sabbath's Paranoid album at full throttle while preparing for my final Strathclyde exams in Glasgow, Scotland in the late seventies. A whole week. It helped me study better.
And I’ll surely remember him as a person who stumbled, fell, and still staggered forward anyway. A man who clawed his way back from himself, through the mist of fame, the haze of addiction, and the fog of regret.
Thanks for the Metal, Ozzy! Rest in peace!
