Growing up in a small Tennessee town in the late 1980s, I thought Ozzy Osbourne was the devil. Not just devilish or evil, but the Dark Lord made flesh and bone. He looked the part, of course, with his perpetually bugged-out eyes, wild hair, and that maniacal grin. And he certainly sounded like the devil. I got a shiver whenever I heard snippets of “Crazy Train” or “War Pigs” or even “Changes” blaring from the cars and boomboxes of the older boys at my school, all of whom were conceived during the heyday of Black Sabbath. Ozzy had that hellhound bark, with its particular grain that spoke from some other reality.
Growing up in a small Tennessee town in the late 1980s, I thought Ozzy Osbourne was the devil. Not just devilish or evil, but the Dark Lord made flesh and bone. He looked the part, of course, with his perpetually bugged-out eyes, wild hair, and that maniacal grin. And he certainly sounded like the devil. I got a shiver whenever I heard snippets of “Crazy Train” or “War Pigs” or even “Changes” blaring from the cars and boomboxes of the older boys at my school, all of whom were conceived during the heyday of Black Sabbath. Ozzy had that hellhound bark, with its particular grain that spoke from some other reality.
More than any of that, I thought Ozzy was the devil because that’s what every adult I knew told me. It was peak Satanic Panic, when community leaders honestly believed in a conspiracy among devil worshippers to recruit America’s youth to the dark side and even sacrifice a few of us to Beelzebub. While groups like Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Slayer and Venom were targeted for the imagery in their lyrics and the heaviness of their riffs, few acts caused as much of a ruckus as Osbourne, who was a convenient boogeyman.
Teachers warned us against heavy metal, and one even showed parts of the legendary 1989 documentary Hell’s Bells: The Dangers of Rock ‘n’ Roll during class. Flipping channels, I caught glimpses of televangelists decrying the evils of pop music and politicians campaigning for censorship and warning labels.
And in 1985, the parents of a teenage fan from Indio, California, sued Ozzy claiming his song “Suicide Solution” included hidden lyrics: “Get the gun and try it, shoot shoot shoot!” They argued that the song encouraged their son to commit suicide. It was a horrific tragedy, but the case was quickly dismissed by a judge who described it as “more like a novel than a legal pleading.” Undeterred, concerned parents and preachers picketed Ozzy’s concerts. He received so many death threats that he had to increase security both on the road and at home.
At the Southern Baptist church my family attended, I heard frequent sermons and lectures about the evils of rock and roll, many of which mentioned Ozzy by name. One summer, my youth group spent a week in Panama City, Florida, and our guest pastor was a young seminary student who styled himself an expert on the evils of rock and roll.
He spent much of his daily sermons explaining to us how all secular music was Satanic and how the worst of it left us kids susceptible to demonic messages. He even hammered out a simple beat on his makeshift pulpit — BOOM boom-BOOM, BOOM boom-BOOM — and explained that this particular rhythm was descended from African tribes. (Yes, we got a little racism in our services!). It was now being used by American rock bands to put listeners into a trance. Ozzy used it. So did Prince and many others. It allowed them to literally hypnotize their fans at concerts, so that the devil could whisper evil nothings in our ears.
It all seemed so ridiculous, even to an impressionable kid like me. That’s around the time I stopped buying into the sermons and started listening to my favourites with no shame. It’s also the moment when I took my first steps toward becoming a music critic and journalist.
I did not watch the infamous 1988 episode of The Geraldo Rivera Show called Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground, which featured a priest, an FBI cult investigator, the daughter of Church of Satan founder Anton Lavey, and several teenager claiming to worship Satan. At least not back then. Much later I pulled it up on YouTube and laughed at how melodramatic and hokey the whole thing was.
It was sensationalist journalism, weighted more toward scaremongering and less toward engaging with actual trends, statistics, or beliefs. Still, it was quite a coup to get the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne, to appear via satellite feed from London. He looked rumpled and disoriented, but he seemed ready to give good-faith answers to Rivera’s leading questions. When asked about the Satanic imagery in his music, Ozzy said, “All I do is make music. I don’t sit down and purposely plan to freak everybody out.” When he tried to explain how his working-class upbringing in Birmingham made him relate to his younger fans, Rivera cut him off and went to commercial.
Many years later, when rap music had replaced metal as the handwringers’ main target, I sat down with Ozzy’s solo catalog and gave it a close listen. I marveled at how different it was from his Black Sabbath output, how it moved so differently, a bit more spryly but still so heavy. That’s largely thanks to Randy Rhoads, the doomed guitarist who played on Ozzy’s first two solo albums.
What surprised me even more was that Ozzy no longer sounded like the devil. He certainly wasn’t trying to recruit kids or anyone else to Satanism. In fact, the first song on Blizzard Of Ozz, his debut, is called “I Don’t Know”, and it rejects the notion he’s the devil’s pied piper or any kind of authority on anything at all. “Don’t look at me for answers,” he tells his fans. “Don’t ask me, I don’t know.” In retrospect, that’s much more powerful and much more human than the rote certainties I got from other adults in the 1980s.
Blizzard Of Ozz has become one of my all-time favourite albums and it sounds very different from how it was portrayed forty years ago. It doesn’t celebrate hedonism and nihilism and amorality, but interrogates the lifestyle associated with rock and roll. “No Bone Movies” is about porn, but it’s not a ringing endorsement (“I’m being eaten by lust”). Now that I know who Aleister Crowley is, I can see how “Mr. Crowley” doesn’t glorify the noted occultist but pities him (“Your lifestyle to me seemed so tragic”). And “Suicide Solution” is about suicide, but Ozzy is lamenting that fate for a hard drinker in his life. Alcohol, he knew all too well, led to a slow self-annihilation (“The Reaper’s traveling at full throttle, it’s catching you but you don’t see”).
In other words, Ozzy’s message wasn’t too different from my pastor’s. “All those Jesus freaks ever had to do was listen to my records, and it would have been obvious,” he wrote in his 2009 memoir, I Am Ozzy. “But they just wanted to use me for publicity.” Blizzard Of Ozz is the sound of someone trying desperately to leave bad habits and old vices behind him.
The man who bit the head off a bat and who likewise decapitated a dove and who allegedly snorted a line of ants and who did enough drugs to get kicked out of Black Sabbath was trying to grow up. It’s still my favorite album of his, because it presents Ozzy at his most vulnerable, when he was examining his own decisions and regrets. It’s his most human.
While subsequent albums lack that heart, they’re brainier than I expected. Through his songs and tours in the 1980s, Ozzy found ways to exploit the Satanic Panic and comment on the hubbub in a language he knew his young fans would understand and their parents would not. Perhaps his greatest moment came in 1988, just before that Geraldo special aired, when he released “Miracle Man” as a single. Two of his most outspoken foes – televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart – had both made weepy public apologies for sexual misconduct and Ozzy called out their moral hypocrisy with a song and video that parodied them mercilessly. “They were always putting my records down and saying I was the anti-Christ,” he said at the time, “and it turned out they weren’t so holy after all.” The tide was turning, and Ozzy emerged victorious in that particular culture war.
