Ozzy Osbourne, heavy metal icon, dies at 76

Ozzy Osbourne, the influential and salt-of-the-earth singer who came to be known as the Prince of Darkness, has died in Birmingham, England, according to a statement from his family.

That statement, attributed to his wife, Sharon Osbourne, and his children Jack, Kelly, Aimee and Louis, reads, “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.”

Ozzy Osbourne was born John Michael Osbourne on Dec. 3, 1948, the son of John “Jack” Thomas Osbourne and Lillian Osbourne (née Unitt), the fourth of six children. The Osbournes lived at 14 Lodge Road in the Aston area of Birmingham, U.K., where Ozzy would remain for some time, including while pursuing a career as a rock and roll singer.

Once he became a star, he remained associated with the city, and returned often. He played a much-heralded final show with Black Sabbath, one of the most influential bands in hard rock and heavy music, in Birmingham just 17 days ago, on July 5.

England’s second-largest city, Birmingham was still pocked with rubble from World War II when Osbourne was growing up there; the city was a target of German bombers due to its importance as a hub of arms manufacturing.

He was, by his own admission, a terrible student — in large part due to his dyslexia and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, which would go undiagnosed until he was in his 30s — and left school at the age of 15. But not before being bullied by a teacher as well as fellow students who included his future bandmate Tony Iommi, who was a year ahead of him. Iommi “might have kicked me in the bollocks a few times and given me some s***, but nothing more than that,” Osbourne wrote in his memoir, I Am Ozzy. It was around this time that he self-applied both his famed knuckle tattoo, which spelled out OZZY on the fingers of his left hand, and two smiling faces on his kneecaps, which he said brought him joy whilst sitting on the toilet.

After his unceremonious exit from school, Osbourne seemed to have little future outside of manual labor, though it would later become clear that “rock star” may have been the only viable career path for him. The “class clown,” as Iommi described him in his own memoir, was dismissed from several jobs in quick succession.

After 18 months of working in a slaughterhouse — after failing at several other trades — Osbourne was fired for beating a coworker bloody with a metal rod. The dismissal led Osbourne towards a short-lived, star-crossed career as a criminal, during which he accidentally stole baby’s clothes (it was nighttime and he couldn’t see well); a television, which he had to leave behind after it fell on him mid-burgling; and finally, while pilfering some shirts, Osbourne wore gloves that didn’t cover his thumb, leaving prints all over the scene and leading the police to his door. (“Not exactly Einstein, are we,” he recalls them saying.) He was given a three-month prison sentence, and was sent to HM Prison Birmingham, known as Winson Green, where he spent six weeks. (Twenty-odd years later, Osbourne’s “last good memory of the ’80s” would be playing a gig at the same prison.)

After his release, Osbourne’s father — despite money having been tight his whole life — took out a loan in order to buy his son a PA, the only equipment required of aspiring rock singers at the time. Then Ozzy placed an ad — “OZZY ZIG NEEDS GIG” — in the window of a local music shop. “One day, I thought,” Osbourne wrote, “people might write newspaper articles about my ad in the window of Ringway Music, saying it was the turning point in the life of John Michael Osbourne, ex-car horn tuner.”

The ad led guitarist and man-about-town Geezer Butler to his door, kicking off a brief attempt at forming a band — Rare Breed — that went nowhere, but gave Osbourne his first taste of performing. The pair, now friends, went their separate ways a few months later. But, fortuitously, the ad also led a former acquaintance of Osbourne’s to his door: guitarist Tony Iommi, accompanied by drummer Bill Ward, both recent wash-outs from the relatively vibrant English rock touring circuit. (Iommi’s previous band, Mythology, had been forced to break up due to a pot bust at their hotel during a tour, making them all-but unbookable at the the time.)

Iommi was initially dismissive of Ozzy, but the four eventually ended up rehearsing together. Despite the theatrical malevolence they would come to be known for, the group was first called something far more innocuous: the Polka Tulk Blues Band, with singer Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward, saxophonist Alan Clark and bottleneck guitar player Jimmy Philips.

The group’s first gig was Aug. 24, 1968, at the County Hall Ballroom in Carlisle, in the northwest of the country. Immediately afterwards Clark and Philips were out, as was the band name (which Ozzy had come up with after seeing it on a bottle of his mom’s talcum powder). The four were now known as, simply, Earth. But just as they were generating some momentum from touring, Iommi left to join the big-deal band Jethro Tull as its new guitarist.

After Iommi returned to Birmingham and his bandmates, Earth redoubled its efforts, inspired by the professionalism Iommi saw during his brief detour with Jethro Tull. They also decided on a new, darker direction. The first fruits of the change would eventually come to be eponymous — but “Black Sabbath” was a song before it was a band, and a horror movie before it was a song, though Osbourne had no idea at the time (he suspected that Butler, who had come up with the song’s title, had never seen seen the film).

Booked by their first manager, Jim Simpson, the four spent pretty much all of 1969 touring — including a residency in Hamburg at the Star Club, the same place where Osbourne’s beloved Beatles had honed its chops. The group, now officially Black Sabbath, signed a record deal in early 1970, to Vertigo, an imprint of Philips.

Black Sabbath’s self-titled first record, which they’d recorded by essentially playing a quick live set, was released on Feb. 13, 1970 (a Friday, of course). It was an unexpected and runaway success, entering the U.K. charts the following month and cracking the top 10 that July.

Black Sabbath’s vaguely occult presentation was entirely superficial, but against the backdrop of Manson murders and the disintegration of the utopianist ’60s, the group’s overdriven, electrified take on the blues, its blackened psychedelia and vaguely political overtures, the image clicked. (Maybe too much; Black Sabbath would eventually be celebrated by Satanist leader Anton LeVay in a San Francisco parade. “At one point we were invited by a group of Satanists to play at Stonehenge. We told them to f*** off, so they said they’d put a curse on us,” Osbourne wrote. “What a load of bollocks that was.”) “The good thing about all the satanic stuff was that it gave us endless free publicity,” Osbourne remembered in his book. “People couldn’t get enough of it. During its first day of release, Black Sabbath sold five thousand copies, and by the end of the year it was on its way to selling a million worldwide.”

But it didn’t click for everyone — the record was near-universally panned by critics (“the album has nothing to do with spiritualism, the occult, or anything much except stiff recitations of Cream clichés,” Rolling Stone wrote) and was all-but ignored entirely by disc jockeys at the time (save the legendary John Peel, an acquaintance of Jim Simpson’s, who booked them for one of his historical, if off-air, sessions). Regardless, that year they performed on Top of the Pops, which Osbourne had watched religiously with his family at home while growing up. He was 21 years old.

The group had Paranoid, its indelible follow-up — which contains several canonical rock songs, like “War Pigs / Luke’s Wall,” its title track and “Iron Man” — written and practically in the can by the time Black Sabbath had reached its peak on the U.K. charts. Paranoid was released later in 1970; cementing the ascent of Osbourne, Iommi, Butler and Ward. After a management change the group would later come to regret — it hired Patrick Meehan, who it turned out “was taking nearly everything” and for whom they would title the album Sabotage — Black Sabbath was on its way.

The quartet’s early success ignited a decade of dizzying excess — for which Osbourne was, it would become evident, genetically predisposed. But by the end of the ’70s, the four were barely speaking.

Ozzy on his own

While the rest of the band may have had more musical chops, what Osbourne brought to the table was his showmanship. “Ozzy was a wild man,” said publicist and journalist Mick Wall, who wrote Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe. “He left it all on the stage, he put everything into it.”

He lived that way off stage, too, and his drug and alcohol use was a strain on the band. A breaking point came when, after a days-long bender, Osbourne fell asleep in the wrong room and slept through a gig. By 1979 he was fired from Black Sabbath.

But it wasn’t long before he found a young American guitar virtuoso named Randy Rhoads, and started working on a solo venture. Their first album together was titled Blizzard of Ozz — a sort of play on The Wizard of Oz and cocaine. The album did well in England, but the band had trouble breaking through in the U.S., despite the record containing what’s possibly his most recognizable solo song, “Crazy Train.”

Luckily, he now had a manager who knew exactly how to push the public’s buttons to get the band some attention: his future wife Sharon. The two were starting up a romantic relationship, and at the same time, Sharon was setting up stunts for Ozzy to get more attention.

“At this stage, Sharon is secretly organizing protests outside his shows, because it gets all this publicity,” said journalist Wall. “All this is stoking the fires, which is building album sales, and turning him into a major star.”

Osbourne began to be known for his wild, rock star antics. Some of these stunts (biting the head off a dove) were planned. Others, (biting the head off a bat) weren’t. But they did become part of his identity — something that, to Osbourne’s annoyance, journalists would pester him about for the rest of his life.

By 1982, Osbourne was touring the U.S. with his second solo album, Diary of a Madman. Osbourne was asleep on the tour bus when it pulled over into an airfield to fix the air conditioning when the bus driver convinced Rhoades and hair and make-up artist Rachel Youngblood to go on an airplane ride with him, promising to not pull any stunts. But in an attempt to buzz the tour bus, the plane clipped the bus and crashed. The driver, Rhoades and Youngblood died.

In his memoir, Osbourne described this moment with a mix of confusion, anger and sadness. But he and Sharon ultimately decide to continue the tour. Osbourne even kept his commitment to appear on Late Night with David Letterman, where he explained, “I’m going to continue because Randy would’ve wanted me to continue, and so would Rachel. And I’m not going to stop because you can’t kill rock and roll.”

The Osbournes

Shortly after the plane crash, Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne got married. They would later recount getting into fights, amped up by alcohol and drugs. As a father, Osbourne could be fun and lovable, until he got drunk enough that he got scary and angry. In one incident, he attempted to kill his wife in a drunken stupor.

“He lunged on me,” Sharon Osbourne told 60 Minutes Australia.” And got me down to the floor and started strangling me.”

He ended up doing a long stint in rehab, though he’d continue to have an on-again, off-again relationship with sobriety. But the family did manage to calm things down enough to start inviting cameras into their home and filming The Osbournes. The show was a hit. Premiering on MTV in 2002, and co-produced by Sharon Osbourne, it laid the groundwork for much of reality television to come (there is a fairly straight line from The Osbournes to the Kardashian empire).

The Osbournes followed Ozzy, Sharon, Kelly and Jack (eldest daughter Aimee refused to be filmed), in their day-to-day habitat — Ozzy struggling with the T.V., Kelly and Jack bickering, Sharon attempting to keep everyone in line. The show softened Ozzy Osbourne’s image enough that it wasn’t a complete shock when he was invited to the 2002 White House Correspondents Dinner and received a special shout out from President George W. Bush.

The rush of mainstream TV fame got to him. That night of the White House Correspondents Dinner, he started drinking after a long stretch of sobriety. And seeing his image constantly forced him to confront some things about his health. He’d developed a stammer. His tremors got worse. In 2020, Osbourne revealed to Good Morning America that he had Parkinson’s disease, after years of rumors about his medical condition. “To hide something inside for a while is hard,” he said. “Because you never feel proper. You feel guilty.”

As the show came and went, Osbourne never lost his ties with the music world he came from. He released solo records at a consistent clip, and he (along with Sharon, of course) ran Ozzfest — an annual music festival dedicated to the types of bands that could cite Osbourne as a primary influence: Slipknot, Slayer, Tool and more. It’s a long list of bands — and, perhaps, the most concrete example of Ozzy Osbourne’s legacy.