an old chat from 1978 with Ozzie Osbourne

 

Ozzie Osbourne and me, 1978. Photo by Stan Honda
(Originally printed in the UCSD Guardian, 1978)

A fist, attached to an arm thick enough to choke a Clydesdale, hammered three times on the door of a third-floor room at the Islandia Hyatt House. The knocks echoed through the hallway like war drums along the Congo in a Tarzan movie. Seconds later, the door creaked open, offering a glimpse of a naked man mid-shower. He spun around and bolted back into the bathroom. Paul—the arm’s owner—told us that Ozzy Osbourne, lead singer of Black Sabbath and in town for a December 3rd concert at the Sports Arena, would be out shortly.

Stan, a photographer, and I sat at a coffee table near the room’s balcony, staring blankly at the television. Francis the Talking Mule was giving a rousing pep talk to the generals of the War Department, telling the slack-jawed military brass that teamwork among the branches was essential if the “Nat-zi’s” were going to be whipped. Donald O’Connor cowered in a corner, his face a stupefied blank—perhaps a bit piqued at having to shelve his song-and-dance shtick once again to play patsy to that noxious mule. I pulled out a pen and began jotting down questions for the interview. What does one ask a member of Black Sabbath?

At the height of their career, Sabbath were the undisputed kings of “downer rock.” The music was—and still is—a slow brand of raunch, built on lumbering, simple chord progressions distorted into a cacophony unmatched since the halcyon days of Blue Cheer. First gaining notoriety in 1968 (now celebrating their tenth year together), Sabbath stood in stark contrast to the hippie optimism of the time. Apart from the Velvet Underground and the Doors, they were among the rare bands venturing against the naive utopias peddled by Jefferson Airplane, the Moody Blues, and the Grateful Dead.

Sabbath’s worldview portrayed a universe unhinged—a grim panorama of murder, pointless revolution, politically motivated wars, vengeance, and natural disaster. Their song titles—“War Pigs,” “Fairies Wear Boots,” “Iron Man”—and albums like *Paranoid*, *Master of Reality*, *Technical Ecstasy*, *Sabotage*, and their latest, *Never Say Die*, reflected anything but hopeful optimism.

As expected, rock critics loathed Ozzy Osbourne and everything Black Sabbath represented, exhausting every ounce of invective to deter listeners. But rather than repelling fans, the young rock crowd embraced the band’s doomsday persona, propelling them to multiple best-selling albums and sold-out American tours.

Other acts jumped on the lucrative grim-bandwagon—Alice Cooper, Blue Öyster Cult—spinning similar apocalyptic themes to great profit. But Sabbath endured, consistently selling well and retaining a loyal following. While Cooper and Cult leaned into theatrics and overt showbiz affectation, Sabbath always cut straight to the point. However bleak their declarations, they were rarely pompous, arrogant, or preachy. Ozzy’s near-atonal yelp delivered Sabbath’s message with the blunt charm and streetwise certainty of a man on the corner.

The shower sputtered to a drip-drip drizzle. Ozzy emerged, his head wrapped in a towel like a turban. He gave a nonchalant “hello,” then paused to watch the TV. A news segment flashed across the screen, reporting on Jim Jones and the secret Swiss bank accounts tied to the People’s Temple. Ozzy lit a Winston from his pack and began discussing the mass suicides in Guyana.

“Fucking Jim Jones,” he said. “What a fucking asshole. An inhuman beast. Making naive, innocent people who thought he was the greatest fucking man on Earth, and small children who didn’t understand what was going on, fucking drink poison. Small kids, murdered. Made to drink cyanide by their parents. You know what that shit does to you? Eats out your stomach from the inside. It’s a lot of fucking incredible pain. Can you imagine what that would do to a child, a little kid? …And I read somewhere that the American government is spending fifteen million dollars to bring back the dead bodies, including Jones. I say leave them there to rot, ‘cause anyone who’d make their kids drink poison doesn’t deserve consideration, whether they’re dead or not. If I were an American, I’d be fucking outraged at the money being spent on those foes…”

I put my pen down and began to ask something. “Considering the recent spate of bad luck we’ve had—like the Guyana affair, the murders of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, the deaths of two popes, the fires in Pacific Palisades, the PSA crash, the landslides in Laguna Beach—do you think you’ve been vindicated for the pessimistic outlook you’ve been using in your lyrics?”

Osbourne yanked the towel from his head with a firm snap and wiped some water beads off his brow. “A lot of people have missed the point of our lyrics,” he said, his Cockney accent taking on a slightly defensive edge. “I mean, Black Sabbath has been slagged for being Satanists, baby eaters, revolutionaries—all manner of strange blokes—and that’s hardly it at all. We were singing about how the world actually is, always has been, y’know?

“When Sabbath was first starting, we had to play under horrible conditions, in dirty cramped clubs in the slum parts of town, and we’ve had to put up with bad crowds: drunks, toughs, junkies, rip-off assholes and shit like that. And when you come out of a scene like that, and you’re writing your own songs and all, it’s only natural that you express what you know about what’s around you. Our words came out of our experience.

“We couldn’t tell people who came to see us in concert that the world was a beautiful place, y’know? We couldn’t sing about flowers, love, and peace. I mean, I couldn’t sing shit like that to some bloke puking his guts out in the gutter, could I? Besides…” Osbourne laughed and stood up. “…that kind of stuff wouldn’t cut it in a Black Sabbath song.”

He crooned the first bars of “Iron Man,” their largest American hit, then sang the opening of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” He laughed again and retook his seat.

“Y’see,” he continued, “poetry doesn’t go with a Black Sabbath tune. The lyrics that Geezer (Butler, bassist) writes and that I sing would be at odds with anything romantic.”

“Do you have any contempt for art-rock bands like Yes or Genesis, whose lyrics tend towards the religious or fantastic?” I asked, hoping that perhaps Osbourne might spew some caustic comments. Osbourne shook his head.

“Not at all. I enjoy some of their music. The good thing about Yes and the others is that they tell people about the world as it could be. I mean, it’s not healthy for rock audiences to only hear the bad side of things. But when Sabbath came out, there was a lot of that stuff around already, and we didn’t fit into it. We had to be honest and call things as we felt them.”

Stan broke the momentary silence. “What do you think of the punk rock movement?”

Osbourne lay back on the bed and reached over to turn the television back on—sound off.

“Not a whole lot,” he said. “I mean, I really haven’t exposed myself to it a lot, so I really can’t say, but what I have heard didn’t impress me a lot. It’s too basic, really. Too fucking simple-minded. I mean, they had a point to make—one point really—and now that they’ve made it, they don’t know what to do.

“As a movement, punk rockers had a good idea. It’s a strong movement among a lot of rockers bored with all the commercial shit they get on the radio. I like that idea a lot. But the New Waver hasn’t put much thought into the music itself, which is the thing that really tells the worth of any movement. It’s more than attitude. The power of any movement to effect anything depends on the quality of the things it produces.

“Take the flower-power hippie movement. From the Love Generation, there was a lot of excellent, exciting music that came out of it, and it still stands up today. Like the Beatles. Those guys changed the world with their music. There were kids in Taiwan wearing Beatle haircuts and singing the words in English. In the Soviet Union too. Flower-power caused a revolution that was felt throughout the world. It was a beautiful thing—until The Machine—I mean the music business, the media—got a hold of it and turned it into something meaningless. Like hamburgers.

“The real hippies just took off to do their own thing, while all the fakes came in and started making fucking money off of it…”

The talk meandered through several topics, such as Walt Disney (“Mickey Mouse was the greatest thing to happen to the planet since Jesus Christ”), and the improved appreciation they’ve been receiving from music writers over the last decade. It appears they realize the band members are not the minions of the Devil, but rather that Black Sabbath is just a rock and roll band—albeit one of the ages, truthfully, whether we like it or not.