Sharon Osbourne spent much of 1984 trying to keep Ozzy Osbourne out of trouble. Then he went on tour with Mötley Crüe.

According to Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, Sharon repeatedly flew out to the tour after hearing reports of the chaos unfolding backstage each night. Eventually, she confiscated Mötley Crüe’s after-show passes and banned them from bringing guests backstage in an effort to protect Ozzy from the nonstop partying surrounding the young band.

“Put it this way, Sharon was not happy with us,” Lee recalled during a recent appearance on The Zach Sang Show.

The tour, which paired Ozzy’s Bark at the Moon lineup with Mötley Crüe in support of Shout at the Devil, has since become one of hard rock’s most infamous road outings. Stories from the trek — including Ozzy’s notorious ant-snorting incident — have become part of rock folklore.

But Lee says those tales barely capture the atmosphere that surrounded the tour, one that ultimately left Ozzy physically and emotionally spent by its conclusion.

“Some people lost brain cells, marriages,” Lee said. “She’d get called out. Like, ‘The Mötley guys are bringing shitloads of girls backstage after the show; it’s a fucking party everywhere.’”

According to Lee, Sharon would often fly in after hearing reports of the band’s latest exploits.

“She took all of our after-show passes from us,” he recalled. “We’re no longer allowed to have any guests backstage. She cut us off.”

The restriction didn’t go over particularly well with Mötley Crüe.

“We made special shirts that had a smiley face with a bullet hole in it, and it said ‘The No Fun Tour,’ because she came out and just literally shut it down,” Lee said. “She was like, ‘There is no way this is going to continue.’”

Looking back, Lee admits Sharon had good reason to be concerned.

“When I say ‘continue,’ I’m talking about ’til-the-wheels-fall-off shit,” he added. “It was bad for Ozzy to be around.”

By the end of the tour, Lee says the toll on Ozzy had become impossible to ignore.

“I remember Ozzy coming out towards the end of the tour,” he recalled. “He came out in, like, tighty-whitey Hanes underwear, some boots, and that’s it. He had been up for days partying. I mean, days.

“He finally stumbles out to the microphone, and he just starts crying. Then he just turned away and walked right off the stage. First song. Came out, started crying, and left. That was it. The tour was done. It was time for him to go home and get some rest.”

The atmosphere wasn’t just hard on Ozzy. The tour also became notorious for clashes between members of the two camps, most notably guitarists Jake E. Lee and Mick Mars.

In a 2019 interview with Tone-Talk, Lee recalled that he and Mars frequently clashed during the run and claimed that some members of Mötley Crüe had even floated the idea of replacing Mars with him.

“Nikki [Sixx] and Tommy wanted me in the band,” Lee told Tone-Talk in 2019 (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “They wanted me to replace Mick. You can understand that — better looking and a better player. But Mick’s in-law or whatever was funding the band, so that didn’t happen.”

According to Lee, tensions eventually boiled over when Mars called him a “slant-eyed Japanese bastard.”

“I did not like that,” Lee said. “I hadn’t heard it since I was in grade school, and it pissed me off. I was gonna beat the fuck out of him, but [Ratt guitarist] Robbin Crosby, who was six-five, came up to me, picked me up and said, ‘C’mon, Jake. None of that shit matters.’ And he carried me out of the room.”

Between Sharon Osbourne’s efforts to rein in the partying, Ozzy’s deteriorating condition and tensions between members of the two bands, the Bark at the Moon/Shout at the Devil tour earned its reputation as one of hard rock’s most chaotic road adventures.

The late Ozzy Osbourne spoke on many occasions about his love for Randy Rhoads after the guitarist’s death in 1982. He released the 1987 double live album Tribute in Rhoads’ memory and once said, “I owe my career to him,” referring to Rhoads’ work on Osbourne’s first two solo albums: 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz and 1981’s Diary of a Madman.

Osbourne and his wife Sharon were also present alongside Rhoads’ mother, Delores, when the guitarist was posthumously inducted into Hollywood’s RockWalk in 2004.

But in a new interview, Bob Daisley says the idea that Rhoads had a “family bond” with Ozzy and Sharon is a myth.

Daisley should know. The bass guitarist was there alongside Osbourne when the electric-guitar virtuoso was hired for Ozzy’s band. He worked with Rhoads on Blizzard of Ozz and its subsequent tour before being fired — along with drummer Lee Kerslake — in 1981, prior to the tour’s U.S. leg.

“They built it up to make it sound like the Ozzy and Randy show,” he says of the Osbournes in a new interview with Cassius Morris. “But it was not like that, I can tell you right now.

“We all bonded in our own way. Randy and I, musically, got on very well together, and we used to sit on chairs opposite each other, just coming up with ideas and working on music. And we’d all sort of have meals together — we’d go out together, we’d socialize together.

“It was a nice situation, but there wasn’t any particular bonding of one or two — of anyone. It was not a Randy-and-Ozzy thing.”

Daisley also disputes the oft-repeated Blizzard of Ozz–related claim that Osbourne “had half the album written before we even got there.”

“That’s lies. It’s bollocks.”

Of course, Daisley was long gone from Osbourne’s band at the time of Rhoads’ death in a plane crash, having been replaced by the guitarist’s friend and former Quiet Riot bassist Rudy Sarzo. But Daisley says he later heard from former Ozzy drummer Tommy Aldridge and keyboardist Don Airey that Rhoads had been planning to leave Osbourne at the time of his death.

“Randy was not happy towards the end. I wasn’t there, but I know because Don Airey and Tommy Aldridge told me what was going on. Ozzy and Randy were not close anymore, and Randy wanted out.”

Daisley adds that Rhoads had even agreed to record a live album of Black Sabbath songs with Osbourne as a way to end his contract with the singer.

“He wanted to pursue his master’s degree and go to Europe to study,” he says. “The only reason he was gonna do the Black Sabbath stuff — he didn’t like Sabbath; he was not a fan — but he agreed to do it to get out of his contract so he could go free.”

The album was eventually made with guitarist Brad Gillis and released in 1982 as Speak of the Devil.

Asked whether Osbourne — who died in July 2025 — recast his relationship with Rhoads after the guitarist’s death, Daisley concurs.

“Oh, sure, sure. There are things right now I can’t talk about because of legal reasons, but in answer to your question, yes.”

It’s unclear what legal action could be preventing Daisley from discussing the matter. Daisley and Kerslake unsuccessfully sued the Osbournes in the 1990s over unpaid royalties, songwriting credits and performance fees related to their foundational work on Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman.

The bassist also filed a lawsuit in 2016 against Osbourne and Blizzard Music Limited seeking $2 million in unpaid royalties. Daisley alleged that Osbourne and his company were using a sham entity to siphon fees from his publishing payouts. The case was dismissed in 2022 on the grounds that the disputes stemmed from original songwriter agreements that required arbitration.

Former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Gus G has shared his reasons for turning down multiple opportunities that came his way after joining the Prince of Darkness’s band.

The Greek hotshot replaced long-serving guitarist Zakk Wylde for 2010’s Scream, joining a long line of players including Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee, and Alex Skolnick. The singer had cited a desire to pursue a different sound as the reason for the change, but Ozzy soon reunited with Black Sabbath, meaning much of his tenure in the band was fragmented. He officially departed in 2017, with Wylde returning to the fold.

He’s since launched a solo career and is set to release his fifth record, Steel Burner, on April 26. That pivot away from band life, he says, was purposeful. He’s even turned down some high-profile opportunities, because he was done with feeling “expendable”.

“It was a conscious decision for me after the Ozzy gig to not join other bands,” he tells The Metal Voice. “I've had offers to audition, potentially joining much bigger bands, of course, than mine. But I didn't wanna go into that situation again where you are an expendable guy, and you don't get to call the shots.

“I've done that a couple of times in my life,” he adds. “I had to sit down and really think [about everything] I do after Ozzy. [Whatever I do] is probably gonna be a downgrade anyway, so if you're gonna downgrade, you might as well do it on your own terms. And I really enjoy calling my own shots.”

Speaking on the Chuck Shute Podcast in 2024 (via Guitar World), he revealed the names of two bands that had enquired about his fretboard-burning services. Megadeth had looked to him as a potential replacement for the outgoing Chris Broderick in 2015, with his spot ultimately taken by Kiko Loureiro.

Four years later, he was invited to audition for Machine Head as the band looked to fill Phil Demmel's shoes. Once more, he wasn't for turning.

As he tells The Metal Voice, he realized that life in the fast lane with Ozzy, ultimately, wasn’t life in his fast lane.

“You're just working there,” he states. “You have a front-row seat to that lifestyle — you can stay at the Four Seasons every night, and you can fly private — but it's not about you. You're working for somebody else, and your job there is to make that person shine.

“So when you do your thing, it's gonna be a much smaller level, you fly commercial, as the rest of mortals do. But I personally don't have any problems with that, man. I believe in building your own empire.”

There’s no hard feelings, though, with Gus quick to praise Ozzy, the father figure, following his passing in July last year.

“He was just a very nice and very sweet guy, very warm-hearted,” he had said. “He broke the ice right away. I was nervous until I met him; once we started jamming, it felt right.”

Zakk Wylde has since claimed that Ozzy was eyeing another album in the vein of No More Tears before his passing, and has explained the all-important paint job he gave to his Grail Les Paul to avoid comparisons with Randy Rhoads when he first joined the band in the late '80s.

Ozzy Osbourne may be one of the most recognizable faces in rock today, but around 1980 he wasn’t widely known outside the rock world. In fact, during one flight at the time, a star-struck attendant showered him with attention — only to reveal at the end of the journey that she thought he was someone else entirely.

At the time, Osbourne was rebuilding his career following his acrimonious split from Black Sabbath. His solo fortunes would soon change thanks in no small part to the electric guitar brilliance of Randy Rhoads.

But as Zakk Wylde reveals in a new interview with Classic Rock, Osbourne was feeling particularly low when the airline encounter occurred.

“He’s sitting there, bummed out, and the stewardess is like: ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s you!’” Wylde recounts. “She’s giving him drinks, getting him food, and he’s just floored by it. He’s going: ‘Maybe things aren’t so bad.’

“As the plane lands, she says, ‘Can I get a picture?’ She takes the photo and says, ‘Thank you, Meat Loaf!’

“Ozzy’s like, ‘I really fucking need to cut back on the calories.’”

Elsewhere in the interview, Wylde doubles down on his claim that Osbourne had been considering another album after Back to the Beginning. Had it materialized, he says, the project likely would have revisited the sound of No More Tears, when Wylde was drawing heavily on the melodic guitar vocabulary of Southern rock.

No More Tears was Wylde’s second album with Ozzy Osbourne, following his debut on 1988’s No Rest for the Wicked and its lead single, “Miracle Man.” For the follow-up, Osbourne and Wylde folded Southern rock influences into their sound, drawing inspiration from The Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet.

“I had a slide with me, and I was thinking about all those bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet that I liked, which inspired the slide lines I started playing — almost like a ‘Free Bird’ feel,” Wylde has said of writing the title track. “What’s funny is that the way we jammed it is almost exactly how it came out on the record.”

The album became a major success. Buoyed by singles including “Mama, I'm Coming Home,” “I Don't Want to Change the World” and “Hellraiser,” No More Tears went on to become Osbourne’s second-biggest-selling album at the time, behind Blizzard of Ozz.

Wylde — who recently released a new album with Black Label Society — has also reflected on selling and later buying back his first good guitar, as well as the unlikely return of his beloved “Grail” Les Paul after it was feared lost forever.

Some guitarists are quick to dismiss their instruments as mere tools of the trade. For others, however, a guitar can carry deep sentimental value. For Zakk Wylde, his famed “Grail” Les Paul represents exactly that: the instrument tied to the most pivotal turning point of his life. When he believed he had lost it forever, a small identifying detail on the guitar ultimately helped bring it back to him.

Wylde’s life changed dramatically in the late 1980s when he went from being a Randy Rhoads–obsessed guitar teacher to becoming his successor. At just 20 years old, Wylde landed the role of lead guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, becoming the singer’s third full-time guitarist after Jake E. Lee concluded his two-album run with the band.

Wylde reportedly beat out several high-profile contenders for the job, including Dutch virtuoso Adrian Vandenberg—who would later join David Coverdale’s Whitesnake—as well as shred guitarist Chris Impellitteri. Wylde himself has suggested there may have been a reason the unknown newcomer ultimately got the nod.

Shortly after he joined Osbourne’s band, Gibson quickly offered him an endorsement deal. Around the same time, Wylde struck a deal with a friend, Scott Quinn, to acquire his dream instrument: a cream-colored 1981 Les Paul Custom.

Wylde used the guitar to write his first song with Osbourne, “Miracle Man,” paying homage to both Hendrix and Rhoads in the process. Soon afterward, however, he decided to move away from the direct visual association with Rhoads, who frequently played a cream Les Paul Custom during his time with Osbourne.

That decision led to the electric guitar’s now-famous bullseye paint scheme. Ironically, the finished result was not exactly what Wylde had originally envisioned. Yet years later, when the guitar was lost under dramatic circumstances, that imperfect paint job helped identify it and ultimately led to its return.

“Don’t ever sell your first guitar,” Wylde said in a recent interview with Thomann. “You’ve got too many memories attached to it. Never get rid of them, because it’s got the mojo.”

The story of how he lost the Grail is almost as remarkable as how he got it back.

Wylde and his band were traveling overnight from Dallas to Oklahoma after stopping to watch Dimebag Darrell perform with Pantera. While the band slept, a critical oversight occurred.

“I remember when we woke up in the morning,” Wylde recalled. “The guys didn’t lock the back of the U-Haul trailer on the back of the bus, so the door went up and gear was falling out onto the highway. The Grail fell out of the back of the trailer onto the side of the road.”

Fortunately, the guitar was protected inside a durable Gibson “Chainsaw” hard case, which allowed it to survive the fall. It was later recovered by an unknown passerby.

“I just figured it was gone forever,” Wylde said. “But somebody saw the thing on the side of the road, picked it up and brought it to a pawn shop.”

The person who found it quickly sold the instrument and moved on. But the pawn shop owner happened to notice something distinctive.

“The guy who had it in the pawn shop took off the pickup ring, and it had ‘Z.W.’ on the back of it underneath the pickup,” Wylde explained. “And he said, ‘This is Zakk’s guitar.’”

By that point—around the year 2000—Wylde and his signature bullseye design were widely recognized. That small identifying mark, combined with the guitar’s unmistakable look, allowed the shop owner to track down its rightful owner.

Wylde ultimately traded one of his signature Gibson models in exchange for the instrument.

“I swapped him one of my signature Zakk Wylde Gibsons—the Bullseye—for it,” he said. “Not a bad deal.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Wylde also reflected on some of his favorite memories with Osbourne — though he admitted at least one of those moments was far less enjoyable for the Prince of Darkness. He has also suggested that Osbourne had been considering a return to the sound of No More Tears for a future album before his passing.

While Alex Van Halen and Steve Lukather continue work on what is expected to be a final Van Halen album, the drummer has revealed just how close he and Eddie Van Halen came to launching a band with Ozzy Osbourne.

Alex recently confirmed that he and Lukather are developing material recorded during Eddie’s lifetime that was intended as a follow-up to 2012’s A Different Kind of Truth. Yet the electric guitar virtuoso’s legacy might have taken a dramatically different turn had an ambitious early 2000s collaboration with Osbourne not been derailed by a single competing opportunity.

Alex has previously spoken about the Van Halen brothers’ jams with late Chris Cornell — then of Soundgarden and Audioslave — as well as exploratory talks about forming a band with Ozzy. Both projects ultimately stalled for different reasons. The Cornell collaboration, which began taking shape in 2017, was shelved following the singer’s death just months later.

Speaking to Brazilian outlet Kazagastão, Alex revealed that plans to write an album with the Black Sabbath frontman came remarkably close to becoming reality.

“Ed and I met with Sharon [Osbourne, Ozzy’s wife and manager], because we were kind of at a loss as to which direction we wanted to go,” he said, recalling a period around 2000 when Van Halen were in flux.

Their brief tenure with Gary Cherone had ended, and relationships with former singers David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar were strained. Rumors about a new vocalist circulated, with David Coverdale among the names floated. The British singer, however, has consistently dismissed the speculation.

“So we sat with Sharon,” Alex continued. “I mean, it was kind of an interesting evening because she’s a lovely lady. I don’t know what people would say about her, but she’s a lovely lady who really had to fend for herself in a male-dominated world.

“The final thing we talked about was, she says, ‘Okay, it sounds like a good idea. Let’s do that. Let’s make a record together. Only one thing. I have a meeting tomorrow with some people about a television show.’ And the rest is history. That’s how close it got.”

That television show was The Osbournes, which ran for four seasons between 2002 and 2005. The series ultimately took priority, while the Van Halen brothers eventually reunited with Hagar instead. Still, the near-miss remains a tantalizing what-if.

In a previous interview with Rolling Stone, Osbourne confirmed that the TV project won out — and admitted lingering regret.

“Yes, we were discussing it,” he said. “It is something that, if it had come to fruition, would have been phenomenal.

“Eddie and Alex were great friends of mine for a very long time, and it’s a regret of mine that we never got it together. The Osbournes [reality show] got in the way of creating new music at that time, unfortunately.”

In hindsight, the experience left its mark. Filming — which effectively took over his Beverly Hills home — proved far more taxing than he anticipated.

“I thought it was gonna be a piece of cake, but you have a camera crew living in your house for three years and see how you feel at the end of it,” he once told Metal Hammer. “You feel like a fucking laboratory rat. It got to the point where I was falling apart emotionally.”

Elsewhere, Zakk Wylde has said Ozzy hoped they would write another album together after Back to the Beginning, one that would return to their 1990s sound. And Jack Osbourne has recalled the moment at Ozzy’s final gig that defined his partnership with Tony Iommi.

At Villa Park on July 5, what would become Ozzy Osbourne’s final performance was filled with emotion, spectacle and heavy-metal history. But behind the scenes, during a quiet soundcheck, a brief, brutally honest comment from Tony Iommi revealed everything about the decades-long bond between the singer and his guitarist — and left a lasting impression on Ozzy’s son, Jack Osbourne.

The all-star farewell — billed as the final bow for Black Sabbath and its iconic frontman — featured emotional reunions and lingering storylines, including Jake E. Lee’s long-awaited return after decades of estrangement. But it was Ozzy’s death just weeks later, at age 76, that cast the night in an even more poignant light.

Speaking in the aftermath, Iommi said he believed Ozzy sensed the end was near — even as he quietly held out hope of making one more record with Zakk Wylde. Still, Iommi — who had privately worried about his bandmate attempting two full sets — wasn’t about to spare his old friend’s feelings.

“He was so nervous about making sure that they were happy and everyone was good,” Jack recalled while appearing on The Magnificent Others, hosted by Billy Corgan. “But he was also really happy about it. He was. He felt good.

“He was soundchecking, so he wasn’t going to go out there with his A-game on. He was just making sure everything worked and ran through the set. And Tony said, ‘Hey, you’re singing flat.’ And my dad got really pissed off. He was upset.”

Ozzy’s wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, brushed it off in the moment.

“Oh, you know Dad,” she told Jack.

At the time, Jack was taken aback. Only later did he fully grasp what the exchange really meant.

“I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “I think it’s a good thing because, out of the 40-whatever-thousand people at that stadium, the only person there who could ever say to my dad, ‘Hey, do better,’ was Tony. And I think everyone needs someone like that.”

Their relationship, of course, had never been simple. A resurfaced 1990 interview shows Ozzy still bitter about the manner — and perceived hypocrisy — of his 1978 dismissal from Sabbath. It wasn’t always smooth, but their connection endured. At Villa Park, Jack saw it plainly.

“Tony and my dad’s relationship had its times of being contentious,” he said, “but they were brothers. They were the closest family that anyone could ever ask for. They’ve done life together.

“As I look back on it, I’m like, ‘No, I think that that was okay to say,’ because they knew it was the last time. It was, ‘Get out there. Everyone needs to give it.’”

Corgan, who had worked with Iommi on the electric guitarist’s 2000 solo album and fronted the Smashing Pumpkins, said he witnessed firsthand how Ozzy’s success reshaped Iommi’s perspective.

“What really struck me was — I’m not saying he underestimated your dad, but I think he was as surprised by your dad’s success as anybody,” Corgan said. “He had this guy right there, and he thought, Oh, this is not working, and obviously they parted ways.

“And then when your dad went on to greater heights and greater heights, there was this feeling of, ‘How did my little brother climb that ladder?’ When I got to know Tony in the ’90s and 2000s, that surprise turned into a sort of admiration.”

Meanwhile, Lee has also reflected on his unlikely hiring — landing the Ozzy gig despite a disastrous audition — while Lita Ford has shared her own surreal experiences hosting the Prince of Darkness at a family holiday gathering.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Randy Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen were routinely cast as rivals. Both were young, technically dazzling and widely viewed as the most important guitarists of their generation, fueling a narrative that divided fans and gave the guitar press an irresistible storyline.

The media’s role in amplifying such rivalries was nothing new — as seen in the much-publicized tensions between Metallica and Megadeth. But according to original Quiet Riot bass guitarist Kelly Garni, the supposed animosity between Rhoads and Van Halen bore little resemblance to reality.

When Van Halen exploded onto the Los Angeles club scene, his revolutionary technique — immortalized in “Eruption” — quickly made him a local phenomenon. At the time, Rhoads was still performing with Quiet Riot. Later, after joining Ozzy Osbourne and helping launch the singer’s solo career, the perceived rivalry intensified in the public imagination.

But Garni says Rhoads himself had no interest in competing.

Speaking on the Booked On Rock podcast (via Ultimate Guitar), Garni recalled how Quiet Riot became aware of Van Halen’s growing reputation while playing the same Hollywood circuit.

“We became well aware of Van Halen,” he said. “When we’d play the Starwood, we knew they were playing down the street at Gazzarri’s. But there was no competition.

“It just wasn’t in Randy to try to compete. He couldn’t. The way his brain was wired, he could not form a thought like, ‘Oh, I’m gonna be better than that guy.’”

Still, the buzz surrounding Van Halen eventually sparked Rhoads’ curiosity. According to Garni, he went to see the guitarist perform and came away impressed, if understated in his assessment.

“Randy said, ‘I’ll go see what the deal is,’” Garni recalled. “He saw him play and said, ‘Yeah, okay, the guy’s good.’”

Rhoads did make it backstage, but the timing wasn’t ideal.

“Eddie was acting kind of crazy and bouncing off the walls in his underwear,” Garni said. “And Randy was like, ‘Oh, okay … not the best time to meet this guy.’”

The two guitarists shared a bill only once, at Glendale Community College on April 23, 1977. Whether they ever properly connected remains unclear, but the mythology surrounding their supposed rivalry only grew in the years that followed.

Van Halen would later claim that “everything he did, he learned from me,” while Osbourne said in 2022 that his late guitarist “didn’t have a nice thing to say about Eddie.”

Yet decades later, Osbourne appeared to signal reconciliation of sorts. During his 2024 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he invited Wolfgang Van Halen — Eddie’s son — to perform “Crazy Train.”

Even so, Van Halen’s legacy remained entwined with rivalry. Guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen, who rose to prominence after Rhoads’ death in 1982, has claimed that Van Halen avoided sharing bills with him to sidestep direct comparisons.

True or not, Garni’s recollections suggest that at least from Rhoads’ perspective, one of rock’s most famous guitar rivalries may have existed more in headlines than in reality.

Throughout their decades together, Zakk Wylde came to see Sharon Osbourne and Ozzy Osbourne as family, so much so that he called them Mom and Dad.

But as he explains in a new interview on the Thinking About Guitar podcast, there were moments when the roles subtly reversed and he found himself playing caretaker to Osbourne.

When host Jonathan Graham asks Wylde to recall his favorite Ozzy memory, the guitarist revisits the mid-1990s, when a newly sober Osbourne was working on 1995’s Ozzmosis.

“Oz had given up smoking. He goes, ‘You know, I don’t do drugs anymore, I don’t smoke anymore, I never thought I’d give that up. I don’t even drink coffee anymore,’” Wylde recalls.

“And he goes, ‘Zakk?’ And I go, ‘What, Ozzy?’

“He goes, ‘Why am I alive?’”

Wylde laughed, but he answered sincerely all the same.

“I just go, ‘Well, Oz, you inspire a lot of people. You make people’s days better. You put a Sabbath record on — like Diary of a Madman — and if someone’s having a crummy day, it makes it better. You’re doing God’s work.’”

Ozzy’s response was a subdued, “Yeah, I suppose so,” before repeating his existential question and sending Wylde into a fit of laughter.

“He had a chuckle out of it, too,” the guitarist adds. “That’s why I always said it was a miracle any work ever got done. You’d be around him for five minutes and he’d be making fun of whatever situation was going on in the world.”

Wylde notes that Ozzy was equally adept at turning the joke on himself.

“I remember one day when Mom had a vocal coach come down to rehearsals. We’re all like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ And Oz goes, ‘Oh, that’s the vocal coach.’

“And I go, ‘A vocal coach?’

“And he goes, ‘Yes, I’ve got a vocal coach now. A little late in the game for that, isn’t it?’”

Wylde was Ozzy’s third full-time guitar foil, following Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee. An unknown when he joined, Wylde went on to justify Ozzy’s faith across six studio albums and several tours, playing electric guitar and occasionally acoustic on tracks like “Mama, I’m Coming Home.”

His own band, Black Label Society, is preparing to release its 12th studio album, Engines of Demolition, which closes with a tribute to Ozzy. Wylde has said Osbourne had planned to begin another album after Back to the Beginning

Osbourne’s long battle with drugs and alcohol led to his dismissal from Black Sabbath in 1979. But in a recently resurfaced 1990 interview, he argued that his bandmates were hardly innocent when it came to substance abuse.

Meanwhile, an all-star lineup paid tribute to the late singer at this month’s Grammy Awards, and Lita Ford recently recalled what happened when Ozzy showed up at her parents’ house for Easter.

A long-buried Ozzy Osbourne interview has resurfaced online — and it captures the vocalist at his most unfiltered, accusing his former Black Sabbath bandmates of hypocrisy in the years following his dismissal from the group.

Osbourne famously split from heavy metal’s progenitors after the release of their eighth album, Never Say Die!, in 1978. The recording sessions were fractious, with the members battling heavy substance abuse. It came to a head when Ozzy temporarily quit halfway through.

He was briefly replaced by Dave Walker (Savoy Brown/Fleetwood Mac), who fronted the band on the BBC’s Look Hear, before Ozzy returned to complete the record.

While work began on the band’s next album, Heaven & Hell — ultimately fronted by Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio — guitarist Tony Iommi fired Osbourne over his substance abuse.

Speaking in a 1990 interview uploaded to YouTube by Sunset Vinyl, Ozzy zeroed in on what he saw as the two-faced nature of his dismissal.

“We were always very heavily into alcohol and drugs, but the drugs got worse as it went along, because we thought that was the thing to do,” he said. “We sampled LSD in a big way. When we discovered cocaine, that was another wonderful thing.

“We’d sit there waffling our fucking brains out about how we were going to conquer the world, talking horse shit for three days, and end up with a jaw ache, waiting for the next Valium to bring you down.”

As Ozzy makes clear, the drug issues at the heart of the band’s implosion weren’t his alone. Iommi, bass guitarist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward were equally culpable.

“I can’t change it, but there are things I would have done differently,” Iommi told the BBC in 2013 of his own substance abuse. “Had I known the things I know now, I certainly wouldn’t have dabbled to that extent.”

Asked whether he agreed with Ozzy’s assertion that “cocaine was the cancer of the band,” Iommi didn’t hesitate.

“It was, absolutely,” he said. “Initially, we thought it was great, and it helped us create. But at the end of the day, when it came to the point where we had to replace Ozzy, we were in a bad way. It did a lot of damage.”

Iommi later described firing the founding member and two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer as “awful.” But in 1990 — seven years before the classic lineup officially reunited — Ozzy was still eager to call out what he saw as rank hypocrisy.

“It was ironic that the three of them fired me because I’m drunk all the time,” he said. “Tony’s locked himself away in his room with his bag of Quaaludes and a fucking vase of cocaine. And he’s got Bill come and fire me, and he’s got a can of Budweiser in his hand, because I was always getting drunk [laughs].

“As I look back, it’s funny now — you know, the pot calling the kettle black.”

Heavy metal history, however, may owe something to those chaotic years. Without his firing, Ozzy Osbourne might never have launched his solo career — certainly not with Randy Rhoads by his side — and his story would have unfolded very differently.

Ozzy was recently the subject of an all-star tribute at the Grammys, while Lita Ford has recalled the time the Prince of Darkness came to her family home for Easter lunch.

The Grammy Awards got a taste of heavy metal last night as Slash, Andrew Watt, Duff McKagan, Chad Smith and Post Malone joined together for a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne.

As pyro shot up from the stage at the Crypto.com Arena, in Los Angeles — and with Ozzy’s wife Sharon and children looking on from the audience — the band performed a blazing version of “War Pigs,” a classic track from Sabbath’s 1970 album, Paranoid.

A highlight of the performance occurred when Slash and Watt teamed up to perform the song’s electric guitar solo, with Malone reaching over at one point to assist Watt with some finger tapping.

Osbourne died last July 22 just weeks after making his final performance at Back to the Beginning. As the band played, tributes to recently departed rock musicians and producers — including Ace Frehley, Mick Ralphs, Blondie drummer Clem Burke, session bassist Anthony Jackson and producer Roy Thomas Baker — appeared on the screen behind them.

At one point, the camera cut to show Yungblud cheering them on. Earlier in the night, the singer and guitarist was honored — along with Nuno Bettencourt, Frank Bello and Adam Wakeman — with the Best Rock Performance Grammy for their rendition of Black Sabbath’s “Changes” at the July 5th Back to the Beginning concert.

Yungblud, who was close to Ozzy, hugged Sharon Osbourne onstage before accepting the award.

“To grow up loving an idol that helps you figure out your identity, not only as a musician but also as a man, is something that I'm truly grateful for," he said.

"But then to get to know them and form a relationship with them, honor them at their final show and receive this because of it, is something that I and I think we're all finding so strange to comprehend. We fucking love you, Ozzy!

Lita Ford has spent her life in rock and roll, so it’s only fitting that even a quiet family meal could turn into something bordering on the absurd. Especially when it involves Ozzy Osbourne, an electric knife, a generous amount of wine — and a cooked lamb that never reached their plates.

Ford was just 16 when she joined the Runaways, the rock act behind the teen anthem “Cherry Bomb,” and she has barely slowed down since. Armed with angular offset guitars — most famously the B.C. Rich Mockingbird — she carved out a career that placed her at the center of hard rock through the ’80s and beyond.

Even offstage, the teenaged guitarist couldn’t escape the orbit of rock celebrities. Judas Priest might drop by her parents’ house for a visit after shows, as would Priest guitarist Glenn Tipton and Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi.

Which is how the Prince of Darkness found himself invited to an Easter lunch one year.

“My father asked him if he wanted to cut the lamb,” Ford recalls in a new interview with the Leona Graham Podcast. “He had an electric knife, and Ozzy had just had a bunch of wine before he cut the lamb, and the lamb ended up on the floor underneath the table. My father laughed his ass off. He just stood there and watched Ozzy!”

In the end, no one got a bite of the lamb. “My mother put some fish on the barbecue,” Ford explains. “She just made something else, and Ozzy said, ‘It’s all right, I don't eat lamb anyway.’

“And I thought, Well, I do!”

Ford doesn’t pin down the year, but the timing lines up neatly with 1989, when she and Osbourne released “Close My Eyes Forever,” a song that climbed to number eight on the Billboard Hot 100.

In the same interview, she pivots from family anecdotes to a familiar frustration: the sense that her guitar work has never received its due. Asked to name an underrated guitarist, Ford doesn’t hesitate.

“I don’t know, maybe me?” she says. “‘Oh, that’s great, who played that guitar?’ I’m like, ‘Well, who the hell do you think played it?’ ‘That’s a nice solo on ‘Close My Eyes Forever,’ who played it?’ What?! Come here, let me slap you.”

The irony is hard to miss. “Close My Eyes Forever” remains the biggest hit of both artists’ solo careers — though Osbourne would later match it with 2019’s “Take What You Want” — and Ford handled every guitar part on the track, from its shimmering acoustic foundation to unapologetically ’80s electric guitar solo.

Yet many listeners still remember her primarily as the vocalist, despite a body of work that tells a different story. The Runaways’ “Cherry Bomb” is driven by her urgent riffing, while solo cuts like “You Drive Me Wild” lean into gritty blues rock.

Part of Ford’s identity as a guitarist has always been tied to her gear choices. In a recent conversation with Kylie Olsson, she explained why she gravitated toward offset guitars in the first place.

“I always wanted to be different from my superheroes,” she said. “Ritchie Blackmore always played a Strat, Jimmy Page was always on a Les Paul. I thought, ‘I don’t want to play a Les Paul or a Strat, I want to be Lita.’ So I started trying awkward-shaped guitars. It just felt good to me, like I had a weapon in my hands. And it just stuck.”

That decision set her apart at a time when few high-profile players were wielding a Mockingbird — Joe Perry and Slash among the rare exceptions — and helped her avoid direct comparisons with her idols. It also reinforced the sense that Ford was carving her own lane, both visually and sonically.

Even now, she remains outspoken, weighing in recently on the amp-versus-guitar debate and arguing for the value of learning the instrument the hard way.

“It’s good to be a little bit of a street gutter rat,” she’s said, contrasting her own formative years with a more polished, tutorial-driven modern approach. And what could be less polished than a meal with Ozzy?

“When I first met Randy Rhoads, something inside me said, ‘This man’s not going to live to be an old guy,’” Ozzy Osbourne remarks in a newly unearthed interview. “‘There’s something different about him.’”

Osbourne reflected on the late guitar virtuoso in a video interview conducted at his home in what appears to be the early 1990s. Rhoads was instrumental in helping Osbourne launch his solo career shortly after the singer was forced out of Black Sabbath in 1979.

In addition to providing Osbourne’s songs with the necessary electric guitar firepower, Rhoads cowrote many of his solo breakthrough tracks, including “Crazy Train” and “Mr. Crowley,” both from his 1980 debut, Blizzard of Ozz.

But as Osbourne explains in the newly revived video. Rhoads was very serious about his guitar playing. He would practice constantly, much to Ozzy's dismay.

Moreover, at the time, Rhoads had his eyes set on a more sedate life and planned to return to school to study classical music. That never happened. During a stop on the Blizzard of Ozz tour, Rhoads died when an airplane joyride with the tour bus driver ended in tragedy.

Osbourne, who died in July 2025, recalled his last conversation with Rhoads, in which the guitarist told him of his future plans.

"I remember in the last journey I ever had with Randy Rhoads, that fatal journey from Knoxville, Tennessee to Orlando, Florida," Osbourne said. "And we had to stop off at the bus depot for some parts, or a fucking jack or something.

"And he was learning classical music. And every town that we would go to, he'd go and get a classical lesson. He's a fucking guy in a rock band. I said, 'What, are you mad? Why don’t you go and get a chick and get a fuck or a blow job in the back of the bus? What's the matter with you?'"

He then imitated Rhoads studiously playing guitar.

"And then he said to me on this bus journey from Knoxville, 'I think I want to give up rock and roll. I want to go to university, UCLA, and get a degree in classical.'

“And my head goes, 'What? Are you crazy?’ I said, ‘We're just about to explode, man. Wait until we get the fucking dough. Don't start fucking giving me the shits at this point, because I've come a long way to get here.'

"He says, 'Oh no, not immediately.'"

Even so, Osbourne says he suddenly understood that Rhoads was serious about his growth as a guitarist and intended to leave him.

"Where 90 percent of the players today, they use their instrument as a means to becoming a millionaire, well, he wasn't interested. He would have liked to have been wealthy, but it didn’t really particularly bother him."

Moreover, Osbourne said, Rhoads defined what it means to be a musician, something he spoke about in a 1982 Guitar Player interview following Rhoads' death.

"He was the only musician — in the sense of ‘musician’ — that I’ve ever had the honor to work with. His love, first and foremost, was his instrument.

"I remember when [Guitar Player called him] ‘Best New Guitar Player of the Year,’ he was shy. I have photographs of him and he’s like shy, you know. ‘Why me?’ [The award was actually for Best New Talent of 1981.]

Rhoads recalled in a 1981 interview how he first learned that he was to receive the award through Ozzy's wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne. He also suggested that there was more than playing with Ozzy in his future.

"When they told me, I thought they were joking, because Sharon always jokes with me anyway," he said.

"And they called me one day and told me, and... I just didn't believe it for a week. Still, I don't believe it, 'cause I'm really proud and honored — and I don't want to stop here."

Pink Floyd founding bass guitarist Roger Waters is under fire by Ozzy Osbourne’s family over comments he made about the late singer.

Osbourne, who died July 22 just weeks after delivering his final performance at Back to the Beginning, became Waters’ target during an interview with The Independent Ink earlier this year.

“Ozzy Osbourne, who just died, bless him in his… whatever that state that he was in his whole life,” Waters said. “We’ll never know. Although he was all over the TV for hundreds of years with his idiocy and nonsense.

“The music, I have no idea. I couldn’t give a fuck.”

All three members of Osbourne’s family — Ozzy’s wife Sharon and their two children, Kelly and Jack — addressed Waters’ comments on a new episode of The Osbournes Podcast.

“That leads me on to somebody who is not special, that is probably one of the most twisted, sick individuals I’ve come across in years,” Sharon says on the podcast.

“Oh, you’re talking about my mate Roger?” Jack asks.

Adds Kelly, “He’s a fucking c**t.”

“He isn’t,” Sharon replies, “because c**ts are good. He has no charisma, okay? He looks like Frankenstein.”

Jack Osbourne had previous called out Waters on social media in September.

“Hey @rogerwaters, fuck you," he wrote on X. "How pathetic and out of touch you've become. The only way you seem to get attention these days is by vomiting out bullshit in the press."

He continued, "My father always thought you were a c**t — thanks for proving him right. 🤡 #fuck-rogerwaters.”

Jack noted in the podcast that his response likely generated the most press Waters had received in years .

“That's why my dad always thought you were a c**t — because it's true! Dad would always be like, ‘I love Pink Floyd. I fucking hate Roger Waters.’ But dad would never say that publicly, because you don't do that.”

Added Sharon, “Do you know what he is? He’s like a sad, irrelevant, old, miserable human being — a miserable, ugly human being.”

“The guy is sick in the head,” she went on to say. “He is not relevant in today’s world. Nobody likes him. It’s not just us. Nobody likes this man. … unless you’re a fascist.

“I don’t know how those guys in Pink Floyd put up with them as long as they did. David [Gilmour] is the most gracious, warm person you could ever meet.”

In fact, Waters did come under fire by Gilmour’s wife, Polly Samson,

In February 2023, she attacked him in a merciless tweet which, among other choice words, labelled him as “anti-Semitic” to the “rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy megalomaniac.”

The electric guitar legend backed up his wife adding, “Every word demonstrably true.”

Those comments were among others by Gilmour that reinforce the argument that Pink Floyd will not be reuniting any time soon.

Zakk Wylde says Ozzy Osbourne had plans for a new studio album before his death, and had approached him about returning to the sound of their earliest records together.

Although Wylde had several stints away from Ozzy since he replaced Jake E. Lee in 1987, he wrote for and performed on more albums with the singer than any other guitarist. His five studio albums with Ozzy eclipse the contributions of Lee and Randy Rhoads (two each), Gus G (one) and Steve Vai (one).

In the years following his exodus from the band, he returned for Ozzy's last album, Patient Number 9, which was co-written by producer Andrew Watt.

Speaking to NJ.com, Wylde says Ozzy’s vision for what would have been a 14th studio album would go back to the sound they created for 1991's No More Tears.

“He was texting me, ‘Zakk, let’s do another record, because I really loved it when you were going through your Allman Brothers, [Lynyrd] Skynyrd phase when we did No More Tears. It’s heavy but it’s more melodic, it’s not pummeling heavy,’” Wylde says.

The guitarist, who had hoped Ozzy would continue gigging after his curtain closer at Back to the Beginning, was understandably into the idea. Of course, the album never came to be, but Ozzy’s comments are tinged with a kind of ironic humor as the band had struggled to find a producer for the record. The sound of their demos failed to convince a list of producers, including Rick Rubin, who by then had worked with Slayer, Danzig and the Cult.

“I don’t worry about who’s flying the plane — I just enjoy the ride,” Wylde told Classic Rock in 2022. “I was sent to Rick’s house to get him onboard and played him basically the whole demo.

“He says, ‘Zakk, this is like a horrendous Mötley Crüe record. What we really need is some of that Sabbath Bloody Sabbath riff. We just need a whole record of that.’”

In the end, Duane Baron and John Purdell stepped up to the plate and challenged the band to make each song radio-friendly, with Ozzy admitting to CR that he had “a lot to prove.”

That approach certainly worked on "Mama, I'm Coming Home," one of its standout hits, and a track that has generated massive streaming figures since Ozzy's passing. Motörhead bass guitarist Lemmy Kilmister has a writing credit on the track, as well as on “Hellraiser.”

The album's superlative electric guitar–driven title track also helped it shift over eight million copies worldwide. Wylde explained how the tune came about.

“I had a slide with me, and I was thinking about all those bands like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Molly Hatchet that I liked, which was what inspired the slide lines that I started playing — almost like a 'Freebird' feel,” he says.

Wylde said he expected he and Ozzy would have another chance to build on what they had created in 1991. While performing at Back to the Beginning, he had no thoughts that the end was near.

“I wasn’t thinking when we were doing the show that this was the last time I’m going to be doing ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’ with the boss or this is the last time I’m going to play ‘Crazy Train,’” Wylde says.

But Ozzy, who had pondered death in his final months, was closer to making his exit than anyone knew.

“We did the show, he ended up finishing his book [Last Rites], they did the documentary, and then he was like, ‘All right, I’m out of here,’” Wylde concludes. “He finished everything he had to do, and then he was like, ‘All right, I’m done.’”

In related stories, Wylde has looked back on his Ozzy audition and why he beat others to the gig, as well as how his infamous bull's-eye guitar design was the result of a very happy accident.

Jake E. Lee has opened up on his experience auditioning to be Ozzy Osbourne’s next guitar player in a candid new interview with the Talk Is Jericho podcast, offering a fresh look into the singer’s recruitment process.

Lee became Ozzy’s second full-time guitarist in late 1982, when he succeeded the late Randy Rhoads, who helped kickstart singer’s solo career. Following Rhoads’ death in a plane crash while the band was on tour in early 1982, Ozzy and his group forced themselves to carry on, with Bernie Tormé and Brad Gillis each helping to complete the tour.

Even before the road show was over, Ozzy had begun looking for a permanent replacement for Rhoads. George Lynch had been tagged and was touring with the group to shadow Gillis, watching him from the side of the stage.

But Ozzy clearly wasn’t sold on Lynch. As Lee explains, he had turned to Slaughter guitarist Dana Strum, who had introduced him to Rhoads, and asked for his help to find another electric guitar virtuoso.

At the time, Lee was working with Ronnie James Dio, who was assembling a band for a solo project.

“So Dana checked out all the bands and saw what he thought were the 10 best guitar players,” Lee says. “We all went into his studio and he took our photo, and then said, ‘Play something.’

“I'm like, ‘Play what?’ He goes, ‘Whatever you want.’ So I just doodled for about a minute and a half.

“They sent all those to Sharon and Ozzy, and they picked three: Me, Mitch Perry and someone else.”

From the start, Lee’s audition went sideways.

“I showed up late because Wendy Dio tried to prevent me from going to the audition,” he goes on. “All my gear was in a storage locker, and when I got there, one of our roadies said, ‘Wendy says you can’t take anything.’”

After 15 minutes of back and forth, he quipped, “Are you gonna be the guy that stops me from auditioning for Ozzy Osbourne?”

The roadie relented, but Lee says, “I had to lug all my shit out myself.”

“When I got to the audition, I was late. And according to Sharon, my whole attitude after that helped me get the gig,” he says. “She said, ‘You’re late. We just about walked out.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m here now. Do you want me to play or not?’

“I didn’t know that much about Sharon. I might not have put it that way [if I had]. But she went, ‘Yeah, okay. Go ahead and play.’

“I kind of messed the songs up because with ‘Crazy Train’ and ‘I Don’t Know,’ you could swap parts in those songs. And I did, because I’d just learned them the night before. So I was kind of screwing up, and I thought, Yeah, I'm not getting this gig.”

Lee says Ozzy nodded after the audition before going over to Sharon for a quiet word.

“Then Sharon asked, ‘Can you do a solo?’ ‘You mean, like ‘Eruption?’ And she went, ‘Yeah, could you do that?’

“I said, ‘Yeah, if I worked one out. I don’t have anything prepared, and I’m not going to do it because I already fucked the songs up.’”

Despite his attitude, Ozzy and Sharon knew Lee was the guitarist they wanted. All that was left was to tell him — and George Lynch.

Unfortunately for Lynch, he was about to find out in the worst way.

“So I’m packing my gear up, and George walks in,” Lee continues. “I’m about to introduce myself, because I hadn’t met him before that, and then Ozzy comes up, looks at me, and goes, ‘You want the gig?’ And he turned to George and said, ‘He’s got it. You don’t. You’re fired.’”

Much has been said of Ozzy’s caring and paternal side, but Lee learned in that moment how brutal he could be, too. Lynch was booted before playing a single note onstage, and, with Lee, Ozzy’s band could enjoy an element of stability once more.

Lee has also revealed the last conversation he had with Ozzy, after burying the hatchet of their soured relationship at Back to the Beginning. Lee's desire to bring 'jazz' into the band had led to a “frustrating” final chapter in the group, with Zakk Wylde ultimately taking his place in 1986.

Guitarist Jake E. Lee considers his tenure as Ozzy Osbourne’s lead guitarist to be the peak of his career, but he says his time with the Prince of Darkness was marked by moments of great creative frustration.

Lee’s arrival as Ozzy’s second full-time guitarist ended a tumultuous period for the Black Sabbath frontman’s namesake band. After Randy Rhoads' tragic death in 1982, the band was plunged into chaos.

Former Gillan guitarist Bernie Tormé got the band back out on the road weeks after the virtuoso's passing, a move that bass player Rudy Sarzo believes saved Ozzy from an almost certain death. Night Ranger's Brad Gillis would finish the tour after a frantic hotel room audition.

But it was Lee who filled the bill when no one else could. The former Ratt and Rough Cutt guitarist injected some much-needed stability into the group, and would go on to write two well-received albums, 1983's Bark at the Moon and, three years later, The Ultimate Sin. Those albums helped ensure the ‘80s would go down as Ozzy’s greatest decade.

However, Lee says the final throes of his four-year stint weren't easy by any measuer.

“To be honest, by the end of my tenure with Ozzy, I wanted to branch out more,” he explains to Guitar World. “I always like a hard rock edge to whatever I'm playing, but I wanted to experiment a little more.”

After the success of Bark at the Moon, Lee looked further afield for inspiration, but grew “frustrated” with Ozzy’s unwillingness to follow him.

“When I was writing new stuff for The Ultimate Sin record, a lot of times Ozzy would say, ‘What's that? That's not Ozzy, that's jazz.’ I'd say, ‘It's not jazz, but it's branching out a little bit.’

“Ozzy would say, ‘No. This isn't Frank Zappa, this is Ozzy Osbourne. Go back and write me something else.’”

Officially, Lee is only credited as a co-writer on the song “Bark at the Moon,” but has since contested that, saying he and bassist Bob Daisley, who was part of the group when they auditioned Randy Rhoads, wrote the spine of the record together.

Despite claiming he was forced to drop his credits for the album by Sharon Osbourne (as per an interview with Eddie Trunk), Lee felt empowered to push the band’s sound to new places. The protracted writing of The Ultimate Sin may have ultimately contributed to the breakdown of their relationship.

“We never really got that close; I don’t know why that is,” he previously told Guitar World. “Our personalities didn’t mesh as closely as his did with Randy or Zakk. He was the boss; that’s how I looked at him.”

With that boss-employee relationship, Lee knew he had to cede ground and stick to Ozzy’s more tried-and-tested heavy metal formula. Once Lee formed his own group, Badlands, that all changed.

“I could do whatever I wanted,” he says. “At that point in time, I was getting really into the blues. And [vocalist] Ray Gillen wanted to do the same thing.

“I was pretty confident in my playing and the band,” he continues. “I thought, ‘This is the best band in the world, we’ll open for anybody. I don’t care who you are, we'll open for you, and we might make you sorry.’”

When Lee was shot in Las Vegas last year, Ozzy, while sending him well wishes, revealed the pair hadn’t spoken since his dismissal from the band 37 years prior. However, their relationship was rekindled at Back to the Beginning, with the guitarist revealing the moving text message he sent to him afterwards. Old wounds began to heal.

Ozzy Osbourne wrote openly about death and his wishes for a final resting place just weeks before he died on July 22.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, Last Rites, due October 7, the Black Sabbath frontman described his July 5 concert at Villa Park in Birmingham as his “last hurrah.” He admitted that after years of health struggles, including a Parkinson’s disease diagnosis, he felt death was closer than ever.

“Death’s been knocking at my door for the last six years, louder and louder,” he writes in the excerpt published by The Times. “And at some point I’m gonna have to let him in.

“The funny thing is, I used to worry more about my mortality when I was younger. It’s weird. You get closer to the end — the very thing you were scared of your whole life — and suddenly the weight’s lifted off you.

“Not that I’m ready to go. But I’ve had a good run. I think I made a mark on the world. And I’m glad I didn’t check out early, like so many others.”

The rock legend also shared that he did not want to be cremated and had discussed being buried with his wife, Sharon. He noted, however, that his family discouraged him from speaking about death or what he wanted on his tombstone.

It was not the first time Osbourne had raised the subject. In his 2009 memoir I Am Ozzy, he said he hoped to be buried “in a nice garden somewhere” with a crab apple tree planted above him, and joked that his gravestone might read: “Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948, died whenever. He bit the head off a bat.”

The singer was laid to rest on his Buckinghamshire estate beside a lake, according to The Sun. Photos shared by his family showed a floral wreath at the site reading, “Ozzy fucking Osbourne.”

“Ozzy wanted his final place of rest to be at home, and he is buried at a beautiful point on the lake,” a source told the outlet.

In related news, Richie Kotzen is one of several electric guitar players who have come forth with stories about their auditions with Ozzy. Meanwhile, Nuno Bettencourt shared the reason why he rejected Ozzy’s offer to become his guitarist in the mid 1990s, despite his dream of taking over from Randy Rhoads when the guitar legend died in 1982.

In addition, producer and guitarist Andrew Watt — who produced the metal legend’s last two albums — recently told Rolling Stone that Ozzy was “normal” the day before he died and hinted at unused songs in the vault from their sessions together. He also shared Osbourne’s wisdom about the important ingredients every rock song needs.

Andrew Watt, who produced, co-wrote and played guitar on Ozzy Osbourne’s final two solo records, has reflected on the “genius” of the Prince of Darkness and the key lesson he learned from working together.

Born in Great Neck, New York, Watt has made a name for himself in recent years by handling guitar work and production for albums by Iggy Pop, Miley Cyrus and Lady Gaga, and producing legendary acts, including the Rolling Stones and Pearl Jam.

As a guitarist, Watt was an original member of the Glenn Hughes–fronted supergroup California Breed, played alongside an all-star cast at Ozzy's second Hall of Fame induction, and has shared stages with Warren Haynes, Robby Krieger and Paul McCartney.

But back in 2020, he'd never produced anything on the heavier end of the spectrum. In fact, most of his production credits up to that point had come as singles.

“Ozzy and Sharon were the first ones to believe that I could make them a great rock album,” Watt told Guitar World earlier this year. He went on to co-write 10 tracks with Ozzy and enlisted a strong cast of guest collaborators, including Slash, Tom Morello and Post Malone.

But the biggest gift of all was the education he got from working with a legend like Ozzy.

“You have to understand. This man was making 'Paranoid' when he was 21,” Watt tells Rolling Stone. “He had a 55-year career where everything was grandiose and at the highest level. He’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and a history buff, and a genius, a literal genius.”

There were times in the studio, he recalls, when Ozzy was busy drawing, seemingly not paying attention. But he was always locked in.

“His ears were reactive,” he says. “You could think he wasn’t listening, and he heard every single thing. He’d just give me this one line that cuts so deep, in a positive way.”

The moment he remembers most clearly was when he thought he knew the answer to one of Ozzy’s questions. He was quickly corrected.

“He said to me, ‘Listen to Led Zeppelin and tell me what the loudest thing is’. And me, having my confidence, I’d be like, ‘It’s the drums. John Bonham.’

“He said, ‘Nope, not the drums. It’s the bass.’

“He pointed out that the bass is the most important thing in a rock song,” Watt continues. “You have to make sure the bass is there and pumping and cutting through and providing that sense of rhythm, because it’s the bridge between the drums and the guitars.

"It makes the song heavy because the guitars can poke through if you have them mixed in the right way. The bass is a hard thing to really get cutting, but to also represent the bottom end. He was very bass-focused mix-wise, and making sure the bass came through.”

He points to one of Ordinary Man’s singles, “Under the Graveyard,” for evidence, emphasizing its extensive low-end, adding, “he was involved in every detail of every single mix-down too. That’s how much he cared.”

Watt says he and Ozzy spoke daily before his passing, which made his death all the more surprising. He didn’t see it coming.

“We were really big for each other, both as collaborators and as friends,” he says. “And, fuck, man, more than anything, I miss the laughter. He’s the funniest person ever of all time.”

There's also the small fact that, in working on those albums together, he etched his name onto a long list of guitar players to have featured on Ozzy records.

“He let me play guitar on his albums,” Watt recollects, “and that’s just unbelievable.”

Joe Bonamassa did likewise in 2005, jokingly asking, “Did every rock guitar player in Los Angeles disappear spontaneously at the same time?” when he got the call to play on his album, Under Cover.

The bluesman has likened what Ozzy did in promoting hotshot electric guitar players, with smaller, lesser-known shredders often given the nod over more established musicians, to what John Mayall did in the late '60s.

Producer Andrew Watt says he spoke with Ozzy Osbourne every day for the past six and a half years.

This past July 21 was no different.

“Everything was normal,” Watt tells Rolling Stone, “and the next day the news was just a giant shock.”

On July 22, the metal legend died of a heart attack, roughly two weeks after making his final appearance onstage at Back to the Beginning.

Watt, who developed a close friendship with Ozzy after producing his last two albums — 2020’s Ordinary Man and 2022’s Patient Number 9 — said he’s still grieving over the loss.

“We were really big for each other, both as collaborators and as friends,” Watt says. “And, fuck, man, more than anything, I miss the laughter. He’s the funniest person ever of all time.”

Watt has made his name producing albums for Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones, Post Malone and Lady Gaga, but he credits his success to Ozzy.

“Yeah, it changed everything for me,” Watt says. “He saw me as a serious album producer. Up until then, I wasn’t really making full albums.”

Watt says that in addition to teaching him how to mix rock music, Ozzy let him play guitar on his albums, allowing him to join the list of electric guitar legends — from Tony Iommi to Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee and Zakk Wylde — who have made their mark on Ozzy’s catalog. “He let me play guitar on his albums,” Watt says, “and that’s just unbelievable.”

The three-time Grammy-winning producer was also asked if Ozzy has anything left in the vaults from their time together, Watt will only say, “I can’t talk about that!”

Sharon Osbourne has opened up about the tragic death of Randy Rhoads that took place on Ozzy Osbourne’s tour more than 40 years ago, on March 19, 1982.

Speaking in Hulu’s eight-part documentary series Into the Void: Life, Death & Heavy Metal, Ozzy’s wife and manager said she’s still haunted by the young guitarist’s death and thinks about Rhoads “all the time.”

Osbourne explains that the band’s tour bus made an early morning stop at Flying Baron Estates, an aviation compound in Leesburg, Florida, after the air conditioner broke down. While the others slept, the driver, Andrew Aycock — a private pilot — commandeered a small plane on the property and took Rhoads and the band’s makeup artist Rachel Youngblood up for ride.

It quickly turned to tragedy when Aycock tried to buzz the tour bus and lost control. One of the plane’s wings clipped the bus, sending the plane toppling into a nearby house, where it crashed and burst into flames.

“There was this terrible smell of fuel, and all we could see was fire,” Osbourne recalled in the documentary. “I just went out, and the tour manager was on the grass with his hands over his head. I kept thinking, You’re asleep, you’re asleep! Wake up, wake up!”

Tommy Aldridge, Ozzy’s drummer at the time, remembers her reaction to the horror that unfolded that morning.

“When Sharon realized that Randy and Rachel had been killed, she came unglued,” he says. “She just went off on our tour manager, screaming, ‘How could you let that baby get on that plane!’”

Osbourne recalled the difficulty of having to tell Rhoads’ mother the news and “try and make sense” of the tragedy.

“Now you know why I didn’t want to talk about Randy,” she said, breaking into tears.

Ozzy, who died this past July 22, said in recent interviews that the accident continued to haunt him decades afterward.

“Every time I talk about that, the tape starts to run in my head of that day when he died,” he told British GQ in 2020. “It was awful. It was like a bad fucking horror movie. The house was on fire. The bus had been hit by the plane. There was glass and gasoline everywhere. The fucking house was engulfed.”

The singer said he felt responsible for the guitarist’s death, noting in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy, “if he hadn’t been in my band, he wouldn’t have died.”

Osbourne said was enamored both of Rhoads and his abilities on electric and acoustic guitar.

“He was not only a great rock and roll player, but in the classics, and in every other field, he was phenomenal,“ he told Guitar Player in a 1982 interview, shortly after Rhoads died.

“I loved him in an instant,” he added. “I fell in love with him as a player, and I fell in love with him as a person.“

It’s no understatement to say that the death of Randy Rhoads turned the world upside down for Ozzy Osbourne and the rest of the band. And while bassist Rudy Sarzo, then in Ozzy's band, defended the group's decision to continue touring after Rhoads' death, drummer Tommy Aldridge now reveals the chaos involved in finding a replacement for the guitarist on short notice.

“There was so much drama going on, so much tension,” Aldridge tells Get on the Bus of the aftermath of the plane crash that killed Rhoads. “Everybody was nervous about different things..”

Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy's wife and manager, was focused on the shows ahead.

“Sharon wanted to keep the momentum going,” Aldridge says. “She had dates that were booked, Madison Square Garden dates. These were all sold-out shows months and months in advance.”

Despite the bookings, the decision to carry on came down to Ozzy's sanity. As Sarzo has previously reported, Rhoads’ death had devastated him. .

“I felt compassion for Ozzy,” Aldridge says. “He had no rudder. But after Randy's gone, and we're trying to regroup, we get this assignment of trying to find a guitar player to meet this deadline for the dates.”

Their choice: Bernie Tormé, an Irish guitarist known for his gig as foil to Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan’s solo project. He would later play with Atomic Rooster and form Desperado with Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider.

“He was a Strat player," Aldridge notes. The guitar was a far cry from the Gibson Les Paul Custom and sleek Jackson metal machines Rhoads was known for. "I felt for whoever came in,” the drummer adds.

After three days of rehearsals, Tormé understood the unrelenting challenges that lay before him.

“Even if I played okay, even if I played a nice solo or whatever, if anyone looked at me onstage they thought, ‘Oh, shit. It isn’t Randy,'" Torme told Ultimate Classic Rock two years before his death.

He was soon thrown into the first on his first date with Ozzy, on April 1 — April Fool’s Day, no less — 1982 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

“The first show was appalling,” Tormé said. “I didn’t have my amps, my pedals and I had one guitar. There were three or four tracks where we re-tuned and I had to use a hire guitar that was a piece of shit. And apart from anything else, I did not know the songs.”

Aldridge says Tormé's state of mind was made perfectly clear whenever he spoke.

“I was nervous, but poor Bernie had a little bit of a stutter,” he says. “And the more pressure he got under, the greater it would manifest.

“I learned this about him in that short amount of time because we were in his time compression zone, trying to do three months of work in six to eight days. It was unholy, man. Rudy and I were twisting him, rehearsing with him. His calluses were falling off his fingers.

“He was so dedicated to doing it right and trying to learn those solos that were not his genre,” he adds. “He could play Gary Moore stuff, but these solos are Randy. These solos are the Holy Grail.

“By the time we're going onstage, I said, 'Bernie, bless you, man, we're gonna get through this.' He couldn't speak. He was so stressed.”

All his hard work didn’t amount to much, sadly. After only a handful of shows, Tormé stepped down from the role, with Brad Gillis taking his place after a hotel room audition saw him hired overnight.

Afterward, Jake E. Lee would become Rhoads’ full-time successor, producing two albums with the band before Zakk Wylde’s longstanding reign. Lee reunited with Ozzy, whom he hadn’t seen since his dismissal nearly 40 years earlier, at Back to the Beginning, and has since revealed the final message he got from the Prince of Darkness while he sat at the airport the next day.

Richie Kotzen has enjoyed a long and varied career in hard rock. The 55-year-old electric guitarist shredded in Poison and Mr. Big before fronting the Winery Dogs with bass guitarist Billy Sheehan and drummer Mike Portnoy in 2012.

And for a brief moment in 1995, Kotzen was one of the many guitarists hired by Ozzy Osbourne. But unlike Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee, Zakk Wylde and a handful of others, Kotzen has nothing to show for his time with Ozzy. No gigs were played, no songs recorded or rehearsed.

But he does have one very good story to tell from it.

“In 1995, my manager, Larry Mazer calls and said, ‘Listen.’ He said, ‘I got you the Ozzy gig,’” Kotzen tells Eddie Trunk in a recent episode of his SiriusXM show Trunk Nation. “I’m like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he goes, ‘I got you the gig.’ ”

At the time, Ozzy was making his return after a brief attempt at retirement. His previous studio album, 1991's No More Tears, was his second with Zakk Wylde. But as the singer considered a fresh start to his career, which would produce his next album, Ozzmosis, he was apparently considering working with a new guitarist.

Kotzen wasn’t keen on being picked for the gig.

“I didn't respond to it like the way you would expect,” he says. “I was like, ‘Man, I don't want to go in that direction. I don't wanna play metal. I don't wanna play hard rock. That's not what I'm writing. That's not where my head's at.’

“And he goes, ‘Listen,’ again. He said, ‘The deal's done. All they gotta do is meet you.’

Kotzen, accepting his fate, flew to New York and met with Sharon Osbourne at the couple’s favorite hotel.

“She's like, ‘Right, we're very excited about having you on.’ And, you know, she's talking to me about the salary. She told me what they were gonna pay me. And, talking. They were talking about this and that.

“So I went to Ozzy's room to meet him, and it was the first time I'm meeting him. And he had a suite, and we ended up watching the movie Dumb and Dumber together.”

As they were sitting there, Ozzy began smacking his arm as if trying to raise a vein.

“Ozzy's a prankster,” Kotzen notes. “And he's got what looks like a syringe on the coffee table. And I'm not really focused on it. I'm 25 years old, in my own little world. He's trying to channel that he's about to shoot up, and it's not registering.”

Kotzen explains that the device on the table was actually an oral syringe used for dental washing.

“He had a tooth taken out, like a wisdom tooth or something. So, you know, you gotta shoot medicine or water back there to clean it out.”

But Ozzy hadn’t counted on Kotzen knowing that.

“He’s fucking with me. He wants to see how I'm gonna react. And the fact that I don't react really kind of wigged him out. It's like, you know, he couldn't understand, ‘Why are you not reacting to what I'm doing?’

“And in a weird way, I just wasn't seeing it because I was just in this mode of, you know, it's Ozzy. You know, it is. He's a legend.”

Afterward, Kotzen said his goodbyes and departed.

“And so I leave there thinking that I'm in his band. And they said, ‘Yeah, all you gotta do is send us some song ideas.’

“So I ended up putting some riffs down on, you know, just the guitar, send them off.”

Weeks went by without any response.

“I didn't hear anything. And Larry didn't hear anything.”

The next thing he knew, Zakk Wylde was back at work with Ozzy.

“The gist of it, from what I understand, was Zakk went back and actually made the album.

“But it was just this weird surreal kinda whirlwind of, ‘Oh, I'm gonna be Ozzy’s guitar player.’

“And then it was crickets.”

It was only a matter of time before Kotzen crossed paths with Ozzy. It happened in L.A., at a brunch.

“I walked over and he said, ‘Oh, that's Richie, the guitar, you're Richie, the guitar player.’ Like, he remembered me, but it just didn't connect somehow.”

Is it possible Ozzy assumed Kotzen used smack and was therefore nonchalant about Ozzy’s gesture? That’s what Trunk wondered.

But Kotzen thinks the reason he was dropped had to do with fans’ response to his being hired. He told a friend — “who will remain nameless” — that he was going to be Ozzy’s new guitarist. That person took the news into an AOL chat room, where the response was anything but kind.

“This person went in there and started talking: ‘Richie Kotzen, former Poison guitar player is gonna play with Ozzy.’ And there were fan responses that were brutal. ‘No way a guy from Poison can play with Ozzy.’”

Kotzen believes someone in Ozzy’s organization got wind of the reaction and put an end to his brief tenure in Ozzy’s band.

“I never did anything with him, but I was right there, you know,” Kotzen says. “And we watched Dumb and Dumber.”

Justin Hawkins has posted a video defending his brother’s comments about Yungblud’s role in the Ozzy Osbourne tribute at last weekend’s MTV VMAs.

Yungblud took part in a three-song medley that paid homage to the Prince of Darkness, where he was joined by Nuno Bettencourt, Aerosmith duo Joe Perry and Steven Tyler, and Black Sabbath keyboardist Adam Wakeman.

As we reported, Dan Hawkins, one-half of the Darkness’s brotherly guitar tandem, took offense at what he perceived as artists jumping on the Ozzy bandwagon to boost their own careers. He responded the next day with a scathing Instagram post in which he called it "another nail in the coffin of rock n' roll" and referred to the performers as "a bunch of bellends" (that's Brit slang for the tip of the penis for all you Yanks).

Hawkins' comment drew both praise and criticism, but Justin has made it clear he has his brother's back. In his new video, he calls Yungblud a "poser" and attacks the young singer for behaving as if he's "a natural heir to the Ozzy legacy," considering how little his music has in common with Osbourne's.

"There has been some discussion this week regarding my brother's comments on the Ozzy tribute and Yungblud at the VMAs," Justin says. "Was it really necessary to refer to anyone as a 'Bellend'? Let me try to explain."

“The tribute to Ozzy extends to what [Yungblud] was doing on the red carpet. The minute he got there, he was like 'Okay, this is for Ozzy.' One difference, though: Ozzy was fucking hilarious, he really was funny.

“I suppose one of the things that irks musicians of a certain age is to watch Ozzy invent heavy metal, then turn into this household name with the television series and his decades of being brilliant, and then you kind of think, What the fuck does all those decades of having this incredible legacy have to do with Yungblud?

“It feels like he's cynically positioned himself as a natural heir to the Ozzy legacy, having nothing to do with the really important stuff.”

The fuss over Yungblud goes back to his standout performance of the Black Sabbath ballad "Changes" at Back to the Beginning. Ozzy not only praised it but told him he reminded him of his younger self.

Yungblud’s career has undoubtedly taken a bump since then — which doesn't hurt seeing as his time in the limelight coincides with the release of his fourth album, Idols.

But it’s his attention-seeking enthusiasm that has placed him in the Hawkins brothers' crosshairs.

“All of this posturing is Jim Morrison meets the bloke from Stone Temple Pilots [Scott Weiland] meets everybody else who's ever owned a pair of leather trousers," Justin says. "It's 101 School of Rock stuff. For seven minutes, the world is looking at rock, and this is what we've given them?”

“It's like what a male stripper would do. It doesn't ring authentic,” he continues. “It's rock and roll, but not as we know it. It kind of has this Disney veneer. That's what makes it galling to the people who have tweeted their disdain.”

Of course, Hawkins has himself performed topless and delivered performances with a sexualized swagger — it’s in the spirit of rock n’ roll. But he feels the Ozzy tribute was more like a pantomime than something from the pantheon of rock greats.

Safe to say, he had no complaints about Bettencourt, whom he described as “the eighth to eighteenth wonders of the world.” Speaking on the red carpet at the VMAs, Bettencourt revealed how he turned down an offer to become Ozzy’s next guitarist in the mid-’90s, making him, according to the Black Sabbath frontman, the only guitarist that ever said no to him.

Several generations of the rock and roll elite came together to pay homage to Ozzy Osbourne at the MTV Video Music Awards. While it was a heart-warming moment for many, not everyone was charmed.

The interchanging supergroup featured the fretboard-burning talents of Nuno Bettencourt and Joe Perry, alongside vocalists Yungblud, Steven Tyler and former Black Sabbath keyboardist Adam Wakeman, who performed a medley of Ozzy hits.

Bettencourt and Yungblud handled characterful takes of “Crazy Train” and “Changes” before the Aerosmith duo — making only their second appearance together since the band was forced to retire from touring in 2023 — took over for “Mama, I’m Coming Home”. The four musicians united for its closing stages, with Bettencourt playing a Takamine 12-string acoustic guitar as Perry — wielding a reverse headstock Stratocaster — delivered a third and final guitar solo.

It was inevitable that the awards would honor an icon like Ozzy. And it's just as unlikely such a display would happen without inviting a few detractors.

Enter Darkness guitarist Dan Hawkins, who hit out at the ceremony with the Ozzy tribute in his crosshairs.

“Another nail in the coffin of rock n' roll,” he wrote in an Instagram post that shows Arianna Grande — who picked up three awards on the night — reacting to the performance's finale. While she was in awe at what was happening onstage, Hawkins called the affair “cynical, nauseating, and more importantly, shit.

“Makes me sick how people jump on this shit to further their own careers,” he added.

Certainly, no one will be calling Hawkins "the Prince of Darkness" any time soon.

Some believe his comments were a dig at Yungblud, whose popularity has had a shot in the arm following his appearance at Back to the Beginning. Impressed by his energy and musicianship at that show, Ozzy gave the singer a necklace, which he wore at the VMAs.

It could also be a scything attack against the awards, considering that heavy rock has rarely featured at the VMAs in previous years. Some have criticized the move as riding on the coattails of Ozzy’s passing and legacy.

Hawkins has turned commenting on his post off, shutting down room for further discourse. He has also hidden the post from the main page of his Instagram following his outburst, which was reported by a series of media outlets.

Speaking on the red carpet before the ceremony, Bettencourt revealed he auditioned to replace Randy Rhoads in Ozzy’s band at the age of 14, and would go on to turn the gig down 12 years later.

Perry, meanwhile, is out on the road touring as the Joe Perry Project with members of Stone Temple Pilots and Black Crowes. However, he isn’t ruling out more Aerosmith shows as he eyes at least one final hurrah.

From the moment Ozzy Osbourne left Black Sabbath following 1978’s Never Say Die! album, his guitar player slot has been one of the most coveted gigs in the industry.

Ozzy’s eye for white-hot guitar players has been indisputable ever since. He pulled Randy Rhoads away from Quiet Riot to launched his solo career. With his ample fretboard acrobatics, Rhoads quickly rose to become a guitar star put in the same league as Eddie Van Halen. When he tragically died in 1982 at just 25, a teenage Bettencourt was certain he would be his successor.

“When I was 14 and his guitar player passed in a plane accident in 1982, I believed I was going to replace him,” Bettencourt says. “There was an ad to send a cassette in, so I put a cassette together thinking, This is my gig. I'm going to get it. Of course, I didn't. Nobody ever called.”

Ozzy instead recruited Jake E. Lee as his second full-time guitarist, after Bernie Tormé and Brad Gillis had held down the fort in the interim.

Three years later, Bettencourt, having plied his trade in hair metal group Sinful, joined Extreme, the band with whom he'd make his name.

Their self-titled debut album arrived in 1989, bolstered by the song "Play with Me," which was featured in the film Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. Extreme's stock continued to rise with Extreme II: Pornograffitti (1990) and III Sides to Every Story (1992) packing plenty of chart-bothering hits.

That caught Ozzy’s attention.

“Cut to 12 years later.” Bettencourt says. “I'm opening for Aerosmith with Extreme in London, and my booking company goes, ‘Sharon just called. Ozzy wants you to be in the band.’ This is like 1995, '96, and I said no.”

Time can change one’s priorities, and though his dream gig landed right on his lap, he felt a loyalty to his bandmates.

“I was in a band that were up and coming with Extreme, and we had hits up,” he explains.

Like many, Bettencourt had his last moment with Ozzy at Back to the Beginning, when taking the group photo.

“I grabbed his hand saying, ‘Thank you for everything, and thank you Ozzy for what you mean to me.’ And he pulls me in by the hand. He goes, ‘You were the only guitar player who said no to me.’”

There were rumors that Ozzy had originally turned to Gary Moore to launch his solo career, and that the Irish rocker had turned him down. Whether or not it's true, there are no known instances of guitarists saying no to the Prince of Darkness. Most — like Slash’s right-hand man Frank Sidoris and neoclassical hotshot Chris Impellitteri — were eager for their chance and now spin tales of their failed auditions.

Bettencourt's timeline seems to line up with Alex Skolnick’s one-show stint in the band, about a year after Zakk Wylde was temporarily pushed out of the band as a chance to join Guns N’ Roses loomed.

“He was a godfather to us,” Bettencourt said to Page Six on the red carpet at last weekend's MTV VMAs. “For him to do what he did with Black Sabbath and then be out of there and have a whole other career as Ozzy Osbourne the solo artist, and be a reality star after that, this guy's affected culture and touched everybody in so many different ways.

Bettencourt said his final exchange with Ozzy was one of good spirits and that they shared a mutual love and respect for one another.

“He was a godfather to us,” Bettencourt said to Page Six on the red carpet at last weekend's MTV VMAs. “For him to do what he did with Black Sabbath and then be out of there and have a whole other career as Ozzy Osbourne the solo artist, and be a reality star after that, this guy's affected culture and touched everybody in so many different ways.”

Meanwhile, Rudy Sarzo has said the band needed to continue touring after Rhoads' passing, else Ozzy would have drunk himself to death.

Grace Bowers has become the latest big-name guitarist to pay tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, with a sizzling cover of “Crazy Train” at a recent show, having only learned the song’s classic guitar solo the day before.

Osbourne’s passing shocked the world, coming so soon after his blockbuster final show at Back to the Beginning.

Now the young guitar has followed the likes of Nuno Bettencourt and Wolfgang Van Halen — who featured at his 2024 Rock Hall induction — to play extracts of his solo work on stage as a showing of appreciation for the superlative music he’s left behind.

Her “Crazy Train” tribute also doffs its cap to Randy Rhoads, and the young guitarist said she only recently got the icon's guitar lines under her fingers. But it would be impossible to know that from her Instagram clip alone.

“Honoring Ozzy and Randy last night,” she writes. “Learned the solo the other day, so it’s not perfect, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t fun to play.”

For her performance, Bowers played her 1961 Gibson SG with a Vibrola tailpiece as she tapped her way through Rhoads' iconic licks with a ease. And the whammy-bar dump at the end of the phrase is delicious.

Beyond her honoring of two late greats, the move is an important one for Bowers who, one album deep into her career, is eager to avoid being pigeonholed as solely a blues guitar player.

She may have first picked up an electric guitar because of a blues rock legend, but she cites Funkadelic's "Maggot Brain" as a key song in helping her find her sound, which colors outside the lines of the blues.

In February, she said she “hates” being labelled as a blues-rock player because “that's not the type of music I make, nor is it the kind of music I listen to.”

Recent guest spots on stage with Peter Frampton and Trey Anastasio, with the former calling her “phenomenal,” and on Lamb of God guitarist Mark Morton's southern rock–tinged solo album, are helping her redefine how people view her.

“I’ve never tried to copy anyone else,” she said earlier this year. “I take inspiration from a lot of places, but I try to turn that into my own thing.”

But even in this day and age, a fiercely talented and young female guitarist like Bowers is still on the receiving end of sexist comments.

“People take one look at me and immediately get a thought in their head of what I am,” she said last year. “I get disrespected before I even play.”

Still, her rise, which shows no signs of slowing, is helping her silence her doubters one gig at a time. Covering “Crazy Train” is one of her most prominent forays into heavy metal playing so far, and readers can be assured it won’t be her last. The guitarist’s career is still blossoming, and seeing how she handles such a classic slice of shred with such grace and poise will do her reputation no harm.

When Zakk Wylde joined Ozzy Osbourne’s band, he had a tall order to fill: living up to the legacy of Osbourne’s previous guitarists Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee, as well as Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi.

Although he was barely 20 at the time, Wylde was up for the challenge. His bravado led to 1987’s No Rest for the Wicked, a bona fide metal masterpiece, loaded with touches of glam-meets-doom. The album was on-point for the 1980s.

“Going into it, I felt like I was standing where my heroes stood,” Wylde tells Guitar Player. “I came in after Jake and Randy, so — kind of like in baseball — I felt like I was the new catcher. And being a Sabbath freak, and loving all the stuff with Randy and Jake, it felt like I was wearing the Yankee pinstripes, so to speak.”

But paying homage to Sabbath and Ozzy’s 1980s solo work wasn’t going to cut it for the next album, 1991’s No More Tears. By the early ’90s, guitar music was changing, and Wylde knew that he and the music he made with Ozzy needed to change with it.

Which was just fine by Wylde, who had been listening to plenty of country and southern-tinged rock, like the Eagles, the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. He would inject those sounds into his guitar work on No More Tears.

And perhaps no song demonstrates it better than “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” a song that was and remains Ozzy Osbourne’s only top-40 hit as a solo artist.

“It’s like learning about foods from different countries and then mixing little parts of each into some new recipe,” Wylde says, explaining his meld of southern rock and metal. “The next thing you know, it’s like, ‘Wow, this tastes amazing! What is this?’”

Wylde boils the essence of “Mama, I’m Coming Home” down to his Ozzy’s shared chemistry, as well as the song’s lyrics, which were written by Motörhead bassist Lemmy Kilmister. As the story goes, Ozzy gave Lemmy a tape with of demos and expected to hear back from him in about a week. The bassist returned with lyrics for three of the songs within just hours. One of those was “Mama, I’m Coming Home.”

As Ozzy explained in the liner notes for his 1997 compilation, The Ozzman Cometh, the tune’s melody had been in his head for some time.

“I had been walking around with the melody in my head for a couple of years but never got a chance to finish it until I was working with Zakk on the No More Tears album,” he wrote. “At that time Zakk and I were doing a lot of writing on the piano.”

As for the song’s title? “‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’ was always something I’d say on the phone to my wife near the end of a tour.”

It’s not hard to see why Ozzy favored the song, with its strong melody and lyrics and Wylde’s mix of pretty acoustic and heavy electric guitar. Ozzy loved the tune so much that he included it in his final solo set at his and Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell concert. It was the only song in his solo set that didn’t come from 1980’s The Blizzard of Ozz.

Ozzy clearly wasn’t alone in his affection for “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” The song has been covered by everyone from Carrie Underwood to Jelly Roll. Asked why he thinks the song resonates so strongly with people, Wylde shrugs.

“I think it’s just because it’s a ballad. That’s it right there.”

No More Tears, and “Mama, I’m Coming Home” specifically, saw you incorporating a diverse range of styles into your playing. How did that come about?

I used to sit up in front of the tour bus, and we’d be listening to the Eagles and Neil Young all night. So I was listening to that as we were going into the second album, No More Tears, and I started listening to more Allman Brothers, which was always around when I was growing up.

Southern rock was a big influence on your playing around that time.

Yeah. So I started getting into the Allmans, Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker and Molly Hatchet. I was listening to a lot of that when we were working on No More Tears, and that’s where a lot of the chicken-pickin’ stuff that came from. I was also into Albert Lee, who was like the first Yngwie. [laughs]

So the intro to “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” that’s all Skynyrd, Allmans, Albert Lee and country bends.So that was creeping into the music.

It’s funny, because at Back to the Beginning, Oz was like, “Zakky, we should do some writing.” He goes, “I really liked it when you started going through your Allman Brothers phase because it was heavy, but also melodic. It was just bashing all the time. We should do some more stuff like that.” So when I look back on that record, that’s pretty much where my head was at.

Can you remember what it was like for you and Ozzy as you were initially working “Mama, I’m Coming Home” out?

Me and [Wylde’s wife] Barb had an apartment in Burbank on Case Avenue, near a drug rehab. I think it was called Cry for Help, and it was across the street from this squatter's house It was a complete shoot and stab area, if you know what I mean. [laughs]

That’s where Ozzy and I wrote it, jamming on piano. I remember driving Ozzy over there in my car. I pulled into the driveway, and it was like rusted-out cars on cinderblocks, the grass was four feet high, the windows were smashed in, shutters were crooked, and there was a couch sitting on the front lawn with springs hanging out. [laughs]

I remember as we pulled into the driveway, Oz looked at me terrified, and was like, “Sharon’s paying you, isn’t she?” [laughs] And I go, “Oz, it’s a lot nicer on the inside!”

I couldn’t stop laughing. And he was looking at me, going, “Are you fucking with me?! Please tell me you’re fucking with me. At my age, my heart can’t handle things like this.” [laughs]

So we jammed on the piano, and Ozzy had that melody. I don’t know if it was just his love for the Beatles, but if you listen to those Sabbath records and everything he did with Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee, but Ozzy is just the king of melody.

Once you two had the song worked out, how did Lemmy enter the picture with the lyrics?

Oz just called him up in the afternoon: “Lemmy, can you write some lyrics?” And three hours later, Lemmy had three different sets of lyrics. [laughs] He thought it was gonna take Lemmy a couple of days just to get something that he was happy with. But Lemmy just went, “Here, I’ve got a bunch of lyrics for you right here.”.

When it came time to record “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” how did that go down?

Obviously, the solo is just my love for the Eagles — Joe Walsh and Don Felder. Even the lick at the end, that’s from “Hotel California.” It’s a Joe Walsh lick.

But as far as the rest of it goes, it’s all layered guitars, like what Jimmy Page did. It’s the Jimmy Page guitar army! [laughs]

How did you approach the acoustic opening portion of “Mama, I’m Coming Home?”

The intro is a 12-string and a six-string, and I’m doing octaves as well. So there’s actually three guitars going on there at the same time, That one came out really pretty.

It is pretty. And then it gets very heavy thereafter.

Yeah. Just before the second chorus, where Ozzy sings “I’ve seen your face a hundred times,” we have this lead in to it that goes dun, dun, dun— that’s complete Eagles right there. [laughs] It’s just a harmony line, so that’s a complete Don Felder and Joe Walsh kind of thing. And like I said before, I was learning from, and listening to all those bands, and digesting it to where it was in my DNA.

What guitars and amps did you use while recording “Mama, I’m Coming Home?”

I had my Les Pauls: I probably used the Grail, the Rebel, or my guitar with the red bull’s eye. It was one of those. For amps, it was the Marshall JCM800s, you know, the 100-watt heads, the 2203s, with 6550 Groove Tubes.

For the acoustic intro, I didn’t have the acoustics I use now, which are the Gibson Dove and the Wylde Audio acoustics. We could have rented a six or 12-string.

“Mama, I’m Coming Home” must have meant a lot to Ozzy, as it was the only solo song he chose to sing at Back to the Beginning that wasn’t from The Blizzard of Ozz record.

It was always part of the set. I remember when we played it back for the first time after it was done, we were all like, “Wow!” We were all excited about it. Yeah, Oz liked it.

I just look at when we did that song as a magical time. The second album, No More Tears, was a magical time for me, because I look back on listening to the Eagles, the Allmans, Skynyrd, Marshall Tucker, Molly Hatchet, and all that stuff that was sneaking into my playing. And obviously, “Mama, I’m Coming Home” was a byproduct of that.

Oz loved all that stuff, too. Like when we’d be listening to “Hotel California,” or whatever, Oz would go, “God, this is so good. I remember when this first came out,” and he be telling me about all the time Sabbath did a show with Skynyrd or the Eagles. [Black Sabbath and the Eagles performed at the California Jam on April 6, 1974, along with a host of other popular groups of the day.] He would be like, “Wow, that was pretty insane!” And if you look at those lineups, it was pretty crazy. But anyway, I look back on that all as just a magical time, man.

While a former Van Halen recording engineer has recently revealed why Eddie Van Halen shunned double-tracking his parts, Randy Rhoads’ sister has detailed the late virtuoso’s oddball recording tactics. He wanted to triple-track his Ozzy Osbourne guitar solos despite the singer's protests.

“Nobody would be more shocked than Randy himself,” Kathy tells Guitar World of the seemingly boundless talents he had at his disposal.

The guitarist had featured on two Quiet Riot records before becoming the Prince of Darkness’ talisman as he looked to launch a solo career in the wake of his departure from Black Sabbath. Bassist Bob Daisley said he had a premonition that he was destined for greatness after his audition, but he was still a young, bright-eyed musician. He had a hell of a responsibility on his shoulders.

“When he recorded those albums, he was 21 or 22,” Kathy echoes.

But his youth and lack of experience didn’t stop him from going against the grain in the studio.

“He triple-tracked his solos,” she continues. “Ozzy told him, ‘Nobody can do that!’ Well, Randy could. That was just the genius of Randy.”

Traditionally speaking, rhythm guitar parts are double-tracked – and sometimes quad-tracked – to produce a thicker sound. They are then panned to the far sides of the stereo sound.

Leads, however, are usually single-tracked, save for harmonies. Eddie Van Halen avoided going down this route for his riffs, as there were so many nuances in his playing. Those differences would create glaring clashes in the mix. The other option was to simplify the part, or his approach to their performance, but he wasn’t willing to do that.

That Rhoads triple-tracked his solos shows the extraordinary accuracy with which he could play.

However, Rudy Sarzo, who played in Ozzy’s band during the latter part of Rhoads’ life, says he didn’t carry that mindset onto the stage – he rarely played the same lick twice.

“On the road, Randy would take what he'd already recorded and take it to new levels of intensity,” he said earlier this year. “From being there, and listening to him playing, the portion of [Ozzy's] set where Randy would be the most experimental was during the solos.

“Randy was not really wired to play the same thing every night,” he went on. “He was too creative for that.”

Kathy’s Guitar World interview also sees her reflecting on what could have been, had her brother’s life not ended so cruelly at the age of just 25.

“There was a charisma about Randy,” she beams. “He had the looks, and everybody just gravitated toward him. There was a charm that seemed to glow.

“He was only beginning [when he died]. Ozzy once said Randy was somebody that comes to this planet and bursts off like a shooting star.”

She also talks about the fact his name is still regularly mentioned in conversations about influences, heroes, and the cream of the crop players, generations later. That, she says proudly, “puts a smile on my face. They carry his memory to this day.”

Meanwhile, it's been revealed that Ozzy had a remote switch to turn off Rhoads' pedalboard from his hotel room, as his constant thirst for practicing and improving drove the singer crazy.

When Rhoads died, some questioned why the band were back out on the road so quickly, despite the tragedy. Sarzo, conversely, has explained the band's thinking and how doing so kept Ozzy alive.

Scott Ian’s Black Sabbath origin story reads like many others – hearing the demon-summoning opening riff of “Black Sabbath” blew his mind, and he became hooked. It hanged his life irrevocably.

Unlike many others, however, Ozzy Osbourne went from hero to friend as Anthrax established themselves in the metal scene in the late ‘80s, and the band later helped the singer bow out – and raise a ton of money for charity – at Back to the Beginning.

They first crossed paths on Zakk Wylde’s debut tour, promoting “No Rest for the Wicked” in 1988. Anthrax were booked as support following the release of their fourth album, “State of Euphoria”.

“He could not have been nicer,” Ian tells Louder. “He’d pop into the dressing room every day and hang out. Ozzy was firing on all cylinders, and we got to tour with him all around the States, which was incredible.”

For Ian, it was a major point in a career that might never have happened, had Black Sabbath not left him spellbound when he was still a child.

“I had an uncle, Mitch, who is only 10 years older than me – he’d be 18, I was eight. I’d sit in his room and look through his comics and flip through his vinyl collection,” he says. “One day, I look at this album cover and I’m like, ‘What is this? What is ‘Black Sabbath?’ And he went, ‘Oh, that’s ‘acid rock’, which I still have no idea what that means.

“But he put it on, and the first song starts with the wind and the bell and the thunder, and then the riff kicks in. I’m sitting in my uncle’s bedroom, with black lights on, all these weird posters, listening to Tony Iommi playing the devil’s triad riff. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is scary.’ But I instantly became a Black Sabbath fan.

“I’d probably played almost every song off the first six Sabbath albums before Anthrax was even a band,” Ian adds. “And then, of course, Anthrax covered 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' as the B-side of the 'Indians' single [1987, with the 'Sweet Leaf' riff tagged on the end]. Sabbath runs so deep for me.”

In 2001, 13 years after Anthrax had toured the US with the Prince of Darkness, Ian’s favorite Ozzy memory played out, quite fittingly, on Halloween. It came at a time when the Jackson signature artist was hosting VH-1’s The Rock Show.

“We booked Ozzy,” he says. “I’m dressed in full Gene Simmons costume and make-up, but with my bald head and beard. Ozzy shows up with Sharon; he’s been doing promo all day, and I can instantly tell he just doesn’t want to be there.

“So he sits down next to me on a roadcase – and remember I’m dressed in Gene Simmons make-up – and he’s just silently staring at me. I’m getting one-word answers, and he’s giving me the stare of death. Now, I’ve known Ozzy for 13 years at this point, he knows me, and I’m literally sweating, like, ‘Oh my god.’”

Then the penny dropped.

“He starts staring at me really closely,” Ian continues. “And he goes, ‘It’s you! Scott! I thought it was just some asshole dressed as the guy from Kiss!’ Suddenly, it was all hugs and kisses. But I do remember Sharon standing at the side and shouting, ‘I told you it was Scott, Ozzy!’”

Reflecting on Ozzy's legacy, and their remarkable friendship, in the wake of the singer's passing, he said: “Peace, love, and gratitude to one of the giants, one of the actual architects of the genre, one of the originals.

“We were with him in Birmingham just over a week ago, talking about how incredible Back to the Beginning was. Ozzy was in a great mood, laughing and cracking us up. This heartbreaking shared experience is palpable, like a disturbance in the force.”

Meanwhile, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler believe that Ozzy “held out” to play one last show, and died when the job was done.

Trends in music come and go, and former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Brad Gillis believes that the electric guitar needed grunge music to shake up the scene.

The Honolulu-born guitarist was drafted into the Prince of Darkness' band in the wake of Randy Rhoads' passing. Rudy Sarzo says Ozzy Osbourne would have died if they hadn’t carried on quickly after Rhoads' death.

His brief stint in the band is immortalized on the 1982 live album, “Speak of the Devil”, and he built on the platform with Night Ranger throughout the rest of the decade. As the ‘90s dawned, he felt that a decade littered with power ballads needed to end.

“It was a whole new ball game,” he tells 101 WRIF. “A lot of it was kind of downer music, [but] it got a little too prissy with '80s rock n' roll. [There were] too many love songs back in the '80s.”

In particular, Gillis was drawn to the gritted heaviness of the grunge movement – spearheaded by Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Alice In Chains.

“I grasped a lot of these new bands, and I was into them because it was a whole new style of music,” he says. “As it progressed in the '90s, things got a lot better, I felt.”

The legacy of those bands, and Nirvana especially, cannot be overstated. The two most expensive guitars to have ever sold at auction were Kurt Cobain’s. The pair outsold David Gilmour’s Black Strat, John Lennon's Help! 12-string Framus Hootenanny, and plenty more big hitters beyond it. Those bands reflected a whole new generation.

For those married to the ‘80s shred scene, grunge bands were often sneered at for their simplistic soloing styles. Joe Satriani recently came to Cobain’s defence in that regard, calling him a “great guitar player,” and Gillis has echoed those sentiments, stressing the need for change.

“When that happened, any rock n' roll musician was wondering, ‘What's going to happen with good old rock n' roll?’ And things kind of died,” he reflects. “I think guitar solos got to a point that they were just so crazy and [had] too many notes, that backing it down to simplify the new styles and sound with the Nirvanas, really just kind of set up a new regime. And then we just noticed little by little rock n' roll coming back into fashion.”

Gillis echoes similar comments by session legend Tim Pierce, who said that Kurt Cobain's arrival on the scene helped him become the “perfect studio musician,” by skewing the music landscape. Guitar pyrotechnics were out.

Gillis has also looked back on the moment the Ozzy gig began to feel real.

“I was up really late on a Saturday night with a... ‘new friend.’ and I get this call at seven in the morning,” he says. “‘Hello Bradley, this is Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy's manager. We'd like to fly you to New York for an audition.’ I thought someone was screwing with me. I didn't believe this would ever even happen.”

Sharon then passed the phone to Ozzy to convince him this wasn't a hoax, and the singer had said, “I'd like you to grab a pen and paper and write these songs down.”

“I started shaking,” Gillis remembers, “I was thinking this could be real! I had to learn 19 songs. When I flew to New York, I was given two live cassettes from a few months earlier.”

The cassettes had mixes taken directly from the soundboard, so that Gillis could “hear Randy clearly.

“Sharon set me up with a boom box, and an amplifier, and I'd sit in my room all day and learn by ear,” he adds.

The guitarist would hold down the fort in the band until Jake E. Lee was chosen as Ozzy’s second full-time guitarist, and 37 years after he left the band, the pair mended their relationship at the Back To The Beginning concert. Lee went on to reveal the final words Ozzy ever said to him during a touching tribute.

Despite scoring the life-changing gig as Ozzy Osbourne’s foil, Zakk Wylde has tried to remain humble over the years, and he says hanging onto his first-ever good-quality electric guitar helps him stay firmly tethered to his roots.

His comments draw parallels with Kenny Wayne Shepherd’s belief that guitarists should start their journeys with the instrument on “crappy guitars.” Doing so, he reckons. allows players to better appreciate quality gear once their talents have levelled up enough to warrant a splurge. Wylde learned his lesson the hard way.

Wylde’s journey began on a 1981 Gibson Firebrand SG in Pelham Blue. The guitar was typically sold with a natural walnut finish – Wylde got an outlier. It’s believed a number of these builds were given new, exotic colorways to help sell off the last of the remaining stock in the early ‘80s.

After a while, perhaps with the provenance of his “The Grail” Les Paul driving his new career, he opted to sell it on. Then the regret set in.

“I managed to buy it back,” he tells Guitar World in their latest issue. “Which was an amazing feeling."

Interestingly, a Reverb listing from Sky Dog Guitars claiming to be Wylde’s Pelham Blue SG appeared seven years ago. It had a fairly lofty $6K price tag on its headstock, and while it’s impossible to confirm it was really his, the timeline does seem to match up with Wylde’s appearance on the cover of Vintage Guitar Magazine in December 2021. The narrative of that feature centers on him being reunited with the axe.

A video on the Trogly's Guitar Show YouTube channel, posted in January 2022, covers this mystery in great detail, and leans towards confirming the authenticity of the listing. Either way, Wylde realized the importance of not letting go of the past.

“I think it’s important to keep your early gear if you can,” he says. “There’s something special about picking up a guitar years later and thinking about the hours you put in. Those first guitars are what set you off on the path. I have friends who say they wish they still have some old toy, and I always say just go and hunt one down on the internet! Reconnect yourself, you know?

“I did so much of my learning on it,” Wylde adds of his history with the SG. “I bought it at Red Bank Music [in New Jersey] back in the day. There was a lot of publicity for these models at the time; I remember the Gibson ads saying, ‘A Firebrand for under a grand’. It was a fantastic guitar, and a major step up for me.

“Before I got it, I had a bunch of guitars that weren’t anywhere close to the SG. There was a copy of a Gibson L6 with action that was about 10 feet off the neck. I had a Fernandes [the Japanese brand played by Robert Fripp] and a couple of Electras in crazy shapes and some other stuff that was pretty crappy.

“The ones I didn’t hang on to, I tried to pick up in later years on eBay or Reverb; some I managed to buy back from the guys I’d sold them to, so I have all my childhood memory guitars one way or another.”

Those memories extend beyond what he learned, and how he improved, on those instruments, too. As he says, they can have direct ties with the people that helped turn Jeffrey Phillip Wielandt, the son of a WW2 veteran, into Zakk Wylde, guitar hero.

“My guitar teacher at the time, Leroy, recommended the guitar to me,” he reveals. “He was a fan of SGs; he thought the double cutaways and access to the top frets would suit the stuff I wanted to play. I wasn’t really playing shows when I got it, more parties and jamming in the basement. I spent a ton of time woodshedding,” which explains the heavy wear on the neck.

“I never changed a single thing on it – it’s completely stock,” Wylde adds. “I still pull it out from time to time at home; it’s a bit of a lost classic in the Gibson range. Another thing about it was the colour, which I liked so much that I’ve used it on a few guitars since then as well as on some of my own Wylde Audio fiddles.”

Wylde has also recently recalled how one of his guitar students turned him onto the majesty of EMG pickups, a tonal ingredient he’s never wavered since, and looked back on his Ozzy audition. He believes there was one key reason why he got the gig over some stiff competition.

As Zakk Wylde prepared for a photoshoot shortly after becoming Ozzy Osbourne’s third full-time guitarist, he had a realization. His cream-colored Gibson Les Paul, known lovingly as the Grail, cut too close to the bone of the late Randy Rhoads’ much-played instrument. He needed a signature look, but the one he got back from the mod shop was not what he had asked for.

Wylde’s rise from unknown guitar teacher to Ozzy’s right-hand riff-slinger is well known. He’d beaten notable, fast-rising shredders like Adrian Vandenberg and Chris Impellitteri with his audition, and in doing so, changed both his career path and Ozzy’s by bringing a grungier brand of metal into the new decade.

Getting the gig also turned Gibson’s eye, who were quick to endorse the guitarist as one of their own. That afforded Wylde the chance to get his hands on his dream guitar: namely, the Grail, a 1981 Les Paul Custom then owned by his friend Scott Quinn.

“A friend of mine, Scott Quinn, who used to work at Garden State Music in New Jersey, made a deal with me,” he tells Guitar World. “I was endorsed by Gibson after I'd gotten the gig with Ozzy. Scott, a huge John McLaughlin fan, said that if I could get him a double-neck, he'd trade the Grail for it. Gibson hooked me up, and I made the trade.”

The Les Paul Custom came fully loaded with EMGs, high-powered active pickups that had blown Wylde's mind not long before the trade. For Wylde, it was the one.

“I'd played this guitar and been knocked out by how amazing it sounded and how well it played,” he reflects. “When I plugged it into my Marshall combo, I was astounded.”

He wrote “Miracle Man,” his first song for Ozzy, on the guitar, and it still had its stock cream paint job when they entered the studio to track their album No Rest for the Wicked.

It was only when it came to doing promo photos that Zakk realized a cream LP was Randy’s thing.

“After we'd recorded No Rest for the Wicked, I was gonna be shooting some photos and I realized I was gonna look like I was trying to be Randy, with the cream Les Paul,” he says, “so I sent it to be refinished.”

Zakk asked to have the guitar finished with a vertiginous-patterned design.

“It was meant to look like the poster for [the 1958 Alfred Hitchcock film] Vertigo,” Zakk explains. “But it came back with the bull's-eye.”

A quick Google reveals two different versions of the movie poster: one with a more intricate spiraling design, and another more akin to the bull's eye, but with thinner circles. It’s not clear which one he wanted, and that probably explains the mix-up.

Either way, the bull's-eye was what he got.

“I realized it was pretty cool anyway, and I’ve made it a signature look ever since,” he continues. “Most of the records I did with Ozzy featured this guitar.”

Then the cruel hands of fate snatched the guitar from him, and Wylde, with a heavy heart, consigned the formidable axe to the history books.

“Around 2000, it fell out of our gear trailer,” he says. “It came with one of those tough chainsaw cases, so it survived crashing onto the highway.”

Wylde wasn't certain about his electric guitar's fate until, aptly, a miracle happened.

“It turned up in a pawn shop,” Wylde reveals. “Someone bought it, realized it was mine and, three years after I'd lost it, contacted me and sold it back.”

The Grail has since been retired, and kept well away from highways, having launched his gear brand, Wylde Audio, in 2016 – just be sure to avoid this fake, AI-infested Wylde Audio website.

“I exclusively use Wylde Audio models now,” Zakk adds. “They're exactly the same as the ones for sale. They're already modded, because they're built to my specs, with the Tone Pros hardware, the EMGs and everything.” And if disaster strikes, the sentimentality wouldn’t be half as brutal.

Elsewhere, Wylde has discussed what he deems the five greatest riffs in rock history, and peeled back the curtain on his final meeting with Ozzy, the message he received from him afterwards, and how he never thought that this was the end for the Prince of Darkness.

In the 1960s, John Mayall’s Bluebreakers became known as the crucible from which great guitar careers were born. In just four years’ time, Mayall’s group became the launchpad for Eric Colton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor, each of whom would, to varying degrees, leave their mark on rock in the years following their departure.

As a fellow blues guitarist, Joe Bonamassa appreciates Mayall’s importance to guitar’s pantheon of great players. And in an interview with CBS News 24/7, Bonamassa says he believes Ozzy Osbourne created a similar breeding ground for metal guitarists when he went solo in 1979.

“His selection of guitar players was kind of like the heavy metal version of what John Mayall was doing in the late ’60s with his band — finding Eric Clapton or hiring Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor,” he said

“When you talk about the great guitar players that played with Ozzy Osbourne — I mean Tony Iommi, obviously, in Black Sabbath, [but also] Brad Gillis, Jake E. Lee, Zakk Wylde, Randy Rhoads.

“So he always required someone on the guitar that was forward-thinking and hungry."

Bonamassa notes that, like Mayall, Ozzy was very aware of the guitar scene and what he needed to be able to compete in the current scene.

“I read a quote from Ozzy himself [where he said] he wanted someone who wanted to kick Eddie Van Halen's butt on guitar,” he says. “And that was a thing for him. And his music really required a very specialized guitarist because it was very simple music, but people like Zakk Wylde, they put their own stamp on it."

“People like Jake E. Lee and Randy Rhoads, you hear those songs and it would sound a lot different with somebody else playing the guitar. And that was him being a band leader and someone that really embraced the electric guitar as part of their composition.”

Bonamassa noted that his and Ozzy’s paths crossed in 2005 when he performed a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” for Ozzy’s 2005 Prince of Darkness solo boxset. (It was subsequently released later that year on Osbourne’s album Under Cover.)

"it's always been one of the honors of my career to have played on an Ozzy Osbourne record. His legacy will live on. And the music that he made was so profound.

"And one of the things people, I think, overlook is he was a great singer. When you hear people try to cover his music, great singers trying to cover him, you realize how high a voice he had, how rich a voice he had, and he maintained that voice up until the very end. I mean, his last gig [at the Back to the Beginning], he sounded great a couple of weeks ago.”

Osbourne died July 22 just weeks after he and his former Black Sabbath bandmates performed their final show. In the days after, tributes were offered from across rock music’s spectrum, with words offered from his past guitarists.

Jake E. Lee shared the final text he received from Ozzy following the show, expressing his apologies for not having the tie to talk. He said he hoped they could catch up the next time Ozzy was in Los Angeles.

Similarly, Wylde said his final message from Ozzy was to say he was sorry for missing him at the show and sending him his love.

“He goes, ‘Thanks for everything.’ It was just us talking, saying, ‘I love you, buddy.’

“That was it.”

Zakk Wylde was unknown when Ozzy Osbourne made him his third full-time guitarist in 1987, following in the footsteps of Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee. He plucked him from obscurity, and together they built one of heavy metal’s most enduring friendships. After Ozzy's tumultuous early solo career, the young guitarist provided stability and built on his superlative legacy, album after album, tour after tour.

Through the years, Zakk came to know him simply as “Dad,” so it's no surprise that Ozzy's passing has hit him hard.

Now Zakk has revealed how he attempted to see him backstage at Back to the Beginning and the message he got from Ozzy after they failed to have one last goodbye together.

“Everybody and their mother were in the backstage dressing room,” he tells Guitar World. “I just wanted to give him a break. I figured we’d see him later on — the next day or whatever. But no.

“The last text I got from Oz was saying, ‘Zakky, sorry, it was like a madhouse back there. I didn’t see you.’

“He goes, ‘Thanks for everything.’ It was just us talking, saying, ‘I love you, buddy.’

“That was it.”

It marked a subdued ending to their celebrated relationship and has echoes of Ozzy’s final words to Jake E. Lee, the man Wylde replaced in the band.

“Oz was just the best,” Zakk reminisces. “I have my father, who was a World War II veteran, and then Ozzy, who was almost like an older brother. There was almost a 20-year age gap between us. With our relationship, there was the fun drinking — but if I ever needed advice, I could talk to him.”

The last song they played together was “Crazy Train,” which closed out Ozzy’s solo set at Back to the Beginning.

Before that, Ozzy was visibly emotional as he worked his way through arguably the finest song to come from the Ozzy–Wylde era: “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” It was a performance that would have made even the most hardened of people weep.

Tony Iommi believes that performing at the show — despite his mounting health issues — was Ozzy's dying wish. In the end, he and his fellow performers raised a record-breaking $190 million for charity. The funds will go to Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Acorn Children’s Hospice and Cure Parkinson’s, an organization dedicated to finding a cure for the disease Ozzy lived with since 2019.

“That’s unbelievable," Wylde says. "He helped a whole lot of people instead of making a profit. My God, what an incredible master. What an incredible life.”

One year before Ozzy’s forced retirement from touring, Wylde had stepped into the shoes of his late friend, Dimebag Darrell, in a new-look Pantera in 2022. He was out on tour with the band when the singer passed.

After adding “Planet Caravan” to their set — a song they first covered on 1994’s Far Beyond Driven — the band has now announced it needs to take a break from the road to process everything that has transpired over the last week or so.

“Ozzy wasn’t just a legend who shaped the very foundation of heavy metal and inspired Pantera from the beginning — he was family,” an official post from the band reads. “A mentor, a brother, and a constant presence in our lives both on and off the stage. The bond we shared with him ran far deeper than music.

“In light of this profound loss, we need time and space to grieve — to be with our families, our crew, and each other as we process and honor the life of someone who meant so much to us.”

Ozzy's relationship with Wylde had its quirks and moments of strife — Ozzy had some very strict gear rules, and a chance to audition for Guns N' Roses temporarily cost Zakk his place in the band. But above all, Ozzy was a father to the shredder. That’s a loss that won’t be easy to overcome.

Brad Gillis leaped to the forefront of heavy metal in the spring of 1982 when he became Randy Rhoads’ first full-time replacement in Ozzy Osbourne’s band. Following Rhoads’ untimely death — and the temporary hiring of Bernie Tormé as his replacement for seven dates on the Diary of a Madman tour — Gillis stepped in wielding an aggressive style, an unusual vibrato-bar approach and a killer tone, supplying Ozzy — who died on July 22 — with much musical fire and brimstone during their six months on the road.

But as Gillis explained to Guitar Player one year later in our April 1983 issue, he wouldn’t have landed the job in the first place if it weren’t for the lack of success he was having with his band Ranger. Strictly a concert act in the San Francisco area, the group had opened shows for Eddie Money, Sammy Hagar, the Doobie Brothers and Judas Priest. But with few gigs and no immediate income, Gillis had started the Alameda AllStars, a cover band that specialized in mastering overnight any tune shouted out by the audience. On request, he learned Rhoads' solo from Osbourne's “Flying High Again.”

When Rhoads died, news of Gillis’s achievement was passed to Ozzy’s drummer, Tommy Aldridge, via mutual friends. Within a few days, Ozzy’s manager and soon-to-be wife Sharon Arden gave Gillis a call.

“‘Bradley,’ Sharon said, ‘I’d like to know if you could fly out to New York tomorrow and audition,’” Gillis recalled. “Bernie Tormé, Randy's original replacement had commitments to tour with his own band in England, so they needed somebody right away.

“I thought to myself, Man, give me a chance to think about it, much less learn the material! You don’t pass those things up, though.

“Sure enough, I flew out there thinking there were going to be 20 other guys on the same flight as me, all meeting at the airport for this big audition.

“I got to New York on the night they played Madison Square Garden, only to find out that I was the only one there for an audition. Ozzy’s people told me to come to their hotel after the show. Here I was by myself in New York with $150 in my pocket, being limoed around by who knows who, going up to the penthouse thinking, This is it! This is where it’s at.

“I opened the door and they were having a big party with all these record executives. Ozzy comes up and says, ‘Brad! How are you doing? I gotta hear you play. Go get your guitar.’”

So I brought in my electric — no amp — and I sat on the bed as Ozzy sat on the floor and sang ‘Flying High Again’ while I played it.”

Gillis laughed at the memory.

“He’s singing the song, and then he says, ‘The solo, the solo! Let’s hear the solo.’ I played all the licks, and he was chanting along with me, going, ‘Yeah, yeah.’

“After five minutes he stands up; I stand up. He gives me this big hug and says, ‘Bradley. I love you. Please pull me through.’

“He was having a real hard time. It was pretty heavy. But I had the gig.”

As it happened, Gillis wasn’t much of a fan of Ozzy’s first group, Black Sabbath.

“To tell you the truth, I liked the song ‘Paranoid,’ but I never was into Black Sabbath,” he said. “I had never met Randy Rhoads either, although I did see him once at the Oakland Coliseum.”

Although his initiation into the band was a whirlwind, Gillis won a few days’ reprieve courtesy of a snowstorm.

“After Ozzy hired me, a big blizzard hit New York and dropped a couple of feet of snow,” he explained. “They had to cancel some shows, so I sat in my hotel room for three days with a live tape with Randy on it and went over all the songs and segues. I pretty much just learned from that and then started traveling with the band on my fourth day. I think the fifth day on the road was my first show with the band.”

Gillis — whose primary guitar for the tour was his red 1962 Fender Stratocaster fitted with a Floyd Rose tremolo — was helped along by Tommy Aldridge and bass guitarist Rudy Sarzo.

“Ozzy never told me that I had to play the songs a certain way. It was either Rudy or Tommy who said, ‘You better play it this way — better do that.’ I pretty much knew what I had to do. There were some licks or lines that I obviously had to do.

“Where there was a long solo, though, I felt like I didn’t have to play Randy’s stuff note for note. I wanted to establish my own identity in doing this trip. Plus, I had my own style, which was a little different. There were things that didn’t flow the same.

“So my basic format was to start out the way Randy would and then go off into my own type of solo. If it ended with a line or certain melody, I would always end on that. I also had my own five-minute shot to go out and do a guitar solo and get out any frustrations I couldn’t get out during the rest of the set.”

The tour ended on August 8. Roughly four weeks later, Gillis was back on a flight to New York City to record what would become Speak of the Devil, a live double-album featuring Black Sabbath tunes recorded with Ozzy’s current band. The venue chosen was the Ritz, a New York City club with a capacity of about 1,000, which was booked for September 26 and 27.

“The reason it was all old Black Sabbath material was that Ozzy had to put out an album by the end of the year, and we didn’t have time to go in and write and release an album,” Gillis explains. “So basically I had to do the same thing I did for the Ozzy Osbourne material: fly to New York, rehearse for four days and then record the 13 songs in two days.

“I was really disappointed with that album,” he says. “Rudy and Tommy were too. We were so rushed in getting that stuff together that it really didn’t come off as well as it should have. I mean, we were just starting to get tight at the soundcheck of the show, you know? I was concentrating so much on the arrangements of the tunes that when the solos came around, I had to remember at the last minute what the hell key the solo was in. I really didn’t have time to put together any solos on that thing. I felt I played pretty sloppy.

“But I had a good guitar sound. When I was rehearsing for the show, playing three-piece, I noticed that I had a lot more space to fill and needed a bigger sound. So I got together with my guitar roadie, Mark Neuman, and we started plugging and unplugging effects. We went stereo to two Mesa/Boogie tops and ended up with this setup that just flanged against each bottom [cabinet] with an amazingly big, fat sound.

“I crushed a chord and was letting it ring when Tommy walked into the room and said, ‘What in the hell did you do? Mark, don’t touch a thing. Don’t be touching a knob now.’”

As Gillis explained to Guitar World in 2021, they used a 10-millisecond delay between the signals going to each amp to create the chorusing effect.

“Everyone was excited with the sound I got. Ozzy came in a couple of hours later and was blown away. So I decided to run stereo during the show using two microphones.”

Gillis had been hired as a tour guitarist, but Ozzy hadn’t said whether he would become a permanent member of the group for future records. Fortunately, the guitarist had kept his options open with his former group. Prior to touring with Ozzy, Gillis and Ranger had recorded an album. Suddenly they had a label, as well as a new name — Night Ranger, which they chose after another group had claimed Ranger.

Coincidentally, as Speak of the Devil climbed up the charts toward the top 10 in November 1982, Night Ranger’s debut album, Dawn Patrol, was released by Boardwalk Records.

Although Gillis continued on with Ozzy for the first few dates of the Speak of the Devil tour starting in December, he left at the end of the month and was replaced by Jake E. Lee, who would remain with Osbourne for the next five years.

“Ozzy asked me too late to be in his band permanently,” Gillis said. “A week before I signed Night Ranger’s contract, I asked Sharon, ‘What’s the plan? Does Ozzy want to keep me?’ Sharon said that Ozzy didn’t know who he wanted to keep in the band, so I committed myself to Night Ranger.”

At the time of his Guitar Player interview, Gillis said he was open to working with Ozzy in the future. “I’m pretty much done playing with Ozzy, although he asked me to do a second album with him,” he said. “If I have the time I will, but if he’s got a new guitar player happening, it’s only right to let that guy do it.”

Gillis never did make another album with Ozzy. Night Ranger had success out of the gate with "Don't Tell Me You Love Me.” Their second album, 1983’s Midnight Madness, moved the band to headliner status with hits like “(You Can Still) Rock in America,” “When You Close Your Eyes” and “Sister Christian.”

“I just want to play hot rock,” Gillis said. “Whether it has melody or if it's heavy three-chord metal doesn't matter: I just want to play my ass off.”

Tony Iommi has spoken publicly for the first time since Ozzy Osbourne’s passing, and said he believes the singer was committed to putting everything he had left into Black Sabbath’s final show, even if it would be the death of him.

Osbourne died a little more than two weeks after the Back to the Beginning concert. The blockbuster show was arranged as a final send-off for both Black Sabbath, who performed with original drummer Bill Ward for the first time in nearly 20 years, and Ozzy Osbourne, the solo artist. Playing to a sold-out Villa Park in their hometown of Birmingham, coupled with livestream ticket sales, raised $190 million for charity.

Much of the buildup to the show was dominated by question marks hanging over the heads of Ozzy, Ward, and their ailing health. Ozzy hadn't performed at his Rock Hall induction last November and remained seated on a throne throughout. He later said he would only be “doing little bits and pieces” in Birmingham.

“The worrying thing for me is the unknown,” Iommi had said. “We don't know what's going to happen.”

Yet, Iommi says that despite having the odds stacked against him, the vocalist did everything in his power to ensure the show went ahead with him front and center.

“I think he must have had something in his head that said, ‘Well, this is gonna be it, the last thing I’m ever gonna do,’” he tells U.K. broadcaster ITV. “Whether he thought he was gonna die or what, I don’t know. But he really wanted to do it; he was determined to do it. And fair dues, he’d done it.”

“I think he really just held out to do that show. I really feel — me and Geezer were talking about it — that we think he held out to do it, and just after that, he’s done it and said goodbye to the fans. And that was the end of it.”

Iommi also revealed that the band had done as much as they could to limit his involvement in rehearsals to avoid taking too much out of the 76-year-old, who was diagnosed with Parkinson's in 2019.

“He’s not looked well through the rehearsals. We didn’t want him there every day, because it’s too much. He just wouldn’t be able to stand it,” he details. “So they’d bring him in and he’d sit down and sing a few songs, and then we’d talk about some rubbish old times or whatever, have a laugh, and then he’d go.

“The gig was for him, really, and for us, to say goodbye. It was the end of the band, and to have Bill drum with us as well after all these years. I can’t believe it’s 20 years, to be honest.”

Ozzy may have gotten his final wish of saying goodbye to his fans the proper way, especially considering that Sabbath’s 2016-17 The End tour happened without Ward, and that his farewell No More Tours II run was ultimately axed amid ongoing health concerns. But Iommi could sense that he wanted to give me than he was able to.

“I think he was moved and frustrated as well, ’cause he wanted to stand up. You could see he was trying to get up. But it meant everything to him. This is what we built up for, for that big ending where he could see all the people and we could all see all the people, and close it in that way.

“[After the show], he came around before he was leaving on a wheelchair that brought him in to say goodbye and have a little chat,” he adds. “And he seemed all right. He enjoyed it. And he said, ‘Oh, it went all right, didn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it did.’”

Just a few days ago, Ozzy had texted the guitarist saying he was feeling extreme fatigue. But the guitarist didn’t see his death coming.

“It was a shock for us,” he says. “When I heard yesterday, it couldn’t sink in. I thought, It can’t be. I only had a text from him the day before. It just seemed unreal, surreal. In the night, I started thinking about it: God, am I dreaming all this? We didn’t expect him to go that quickly.”

Tributes to the singer have continued to pour in from around the world, with Slash guitarist Frank Sidoris sharing a letter he received from the metal icon after his failed audition in 2017.

“[The letter] proves that he was truly everything that you would hope he was as a person,” he says. “It was an honor to be in his welcoming presence and feel his genuine warmth in person.”

Bob Daisley was an emotional and musical pillar for Ozzy Osbourne after the singer was fired from Black Sabbath in 1979. It was Daisley who helped Ozzy put together the band that appeared on his debut solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, and who stuck by him through the 1980s, even after he was fired.

Now, after Ozzy’s passing on July 22, 2025, the bass guitarist is the last man standing from the Blizzard of Ozz days.

“It just felt like it was all meant to happen,” Daisley tells Guitar Player while reflecting on his initial meeting with Ozzy.

Whether it was divine or happenstance, there’s no denying the watershed impact of Daisley on Ozzy’s music. Albums like Blizzard of Ozz and its followup, Diary of a Madman — both of which were recorded by Randy Rhoads on electric and acoustic guitar, Lee Kerslake on drums, along with Ozzy and Daisley — are proof of that.

Daisley likens the foursome’s chemistry and subsequent music to a “good pudding.”

“It was a special relationship. It didn’t need forcing or consciously making an effort. It was a real, comfortable, natural process. All of that came out in the music we did because personality-wise, we got on like a house on fire.”

What’s more, he says, those records “set up the empire for everything that came thereafter.”

Although Ozzy and his wife/manager, Sharon, fired Daisley, along with Kerslake, in the early 1980s, Daisley was repeatedly asked back in some form or another. As Ozzy carried on with different bands and guitarists — including Jake E. Lee and Zakk Wylde — he was the linchpin, as a bassist and/or songwriter, for albums such as Bark at the Moon, The Ultimate Sin, No Rest for the Wicked, and No More Tears.

Then came the fallout. What followed was nasty litigation, years of legal battles over songwriting credits, and legions of confused and heartbroken fans.

But more importantly, a friendship and musical partnership died.

“I always had the idea or hoped for a possible reconciliation or getting back together or doing something together before the end,” Daisley admits.

“But it wasn’t to be,” he sighs. “I know that over the years, what we have done has become more and more iconic as time has gone on. So the fact that we did stuff that will outlive both of our bodies — all of our bodies — means a lot to me.

“The most important thing that we left behind is the legacy — the music, what we gave people, how many people we reached, and the positive effect that it has on millions of people.”

I imagine Ozzy’s death was jarring. It must have brought up a lot of feelings for you.

Well, it sure does. It brings up a lot of past memories and thoughts, and nostalgia. It brought me to tears the day that I found out because Ozzy and I had done so much together. It was with various lineups, the ones with Randy and Lee. And then with Jake, and Zakk and other people throughout.

Many people felt you should have been a part of the Back to the Beginning show.

Yeah, but I didn’t expect to be. I didn’t expect to be mentioned at the induction at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I didn’t expect to be invited to Back to the Beginning. It was sort of a given, you know: “Well, that’s not going to happen.” Even if I had been invited to the Birmingham show, I probably wouldn’t have gone. I’m in Sydney, Australia, and it’s just an awfully long flight. And I don’t know… it’s probably just been too long.

It goes without saying that there’s been a lot of nasty litigation between you and Ozzy’s came over the years. But can you remember the last civil interaction you two had?

I remember it well. It was in Sydney, Australia, not long after I came out here myself. He was here with Sharon, and they were staying at a hotel down at Circular Quay, near the Opera House. I went to see him there.

We just sat and chatted. I think he was just here doing some sort of promo thing, or something. I didn’t see Sharon that night; she was in the room. Ozzy and I just sat in the hotel lobby, drank tea and chatted. It was pleasant. It was nice. It was friendly. Even then, we were talking about old times.

You were able to put aside the negative things. Are you able to do that now that Ozzy has died?

I don’t know… it’s a bittersweet thing. There was a lot of stuff that need not have happened. And there’s a lot of stuff that happened that did leave a bad taste.

I didn’t know how I was going to react when [Ozzy’s death] did happen. We knew it was on the way. We’d been warned. There’d been stuff in the press.

What was your reaction to the news that Ozzy died?

Well, I’m really pleased, actually, that I felt sad. I didn’t feel bitter or angry about anything that had gone on. The only thing that surfaced in my mind was all the good times: the fun, the jokes, the humor, the laughter, and all the creativity that we had together over the years, and the many albums. That’s the main thing I’m focusing on because that’s what’s heartfelt for me.

When we look at Ozzy’s career, as far as bass players go, a common thread is that he always seemed to go back to yourself and Geezer Butler. What was the secret sauce between you and Ozzy dating back to when you first hooked up in 1979?

I think it was just a chemistry and a personality thing. I’d just come out of Rainbow, and he’d just come out of Sabbath. He said, “I’m putting a band together, would you be interested?” I said, “Yeah, sure.” And as soon as we met up at his house, we knew straight away that this was going to work.

We both could just feel it. It was an energy thing. Ozzy would say, “Oh, Bob and I get on like a house on fire. The fire brigade’s just left!” That’s what his words were, and that’s how it was.

You also helped put together the Blizzard of Ozz band — and that was actually the band’s name at the time.

He didn’t have Randy at first; he had two other guys — a guitarist and a drummer. I said to him, “They’re nice guys, good players, but I don’t think they’re world-class.” And Ozzy told me about Randy then, and I said, “Well, let’s get him over.” That was when we decided to form the band with Randy.

Was your chemistry with Randy immediate?

As soon as Ozzy, Randy and I started writing songs together and auditioning drummers, it felt like it was fate. And as soon as Randy and I played together, it was the same thing. We said to each other after about 20 minutes of playing together — and we said it almost simultaneously — “I like your playing!”

A common misconception is that the genesis of Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman came from Ozzy and Randy alone. But you wrote those lyrics, the bass licks, of course, and had a huge hand in the arrangements.

Yeah, I didn’t just write lyrics. Randy and I used to sit on a chair opposite each other and work out all the music together. So it was the two of us doing that, working music out.

And to be clear, I don’t want to diminish Ozzy’s contribution.

Oh, Ozzy’s vocal melodies were integral. They were very important and very good. With all the music, he sang melodies over it, and then, I’d write lyrics to his melodies and phrasing. So that’s how it all came about. And of course, the puzzle was completed after Lee came along on drums.

Without any one of us, I don’t think it would have worked as well as it did. And the proof is in the pudding, and the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that pudding is a good pudding. [laughs] I think with any other different ingredients, it wouldn’t have had the same flavor. It did take the four of us together.

What was it like for you, Ozzy and Randy when you were just hanging out?

We didn’t have to try. It was just natural. We got on very well together. But Ozzy was going through a dark patch because he was still reeling from the effects of being out of Black Sabbath. And it did get to him.

Quite often, he would go into sort of dark places. So we were always trying to keep him up in spirit.

But Ozzy had such a great sense of humor. And he and I had a similar sense of humor, so there was no effort, really. It wasn’t a conscious effort of, “Let’s have fun.” It was just natural. It was as much about the fun and humor and clowning as it was about the music and the creating. And I think a lot of that stuff came through in the music. I think that’s what attracts people and what they feel, too.

You make a good point about Ozzy’s mental state after being fired from Sabbath. I think it’s taken for granted how traumatic that was, probably because Ozzy had success relatively quickly as a solo artist. With that success, did you notice his spirits and confidence start to lift?

At first, he was quite down. The way he described it was that it was like going through a divorce. So he was very affected by that departure from Sabbath. And I did make a conscious effort to get him out jogging, to not drink during the day, and to try and get serious about putting a band and the music together.

Was he hard to keep on track at first?

Because we were still auditioning drummers, some days were sort of non-productive because of the situation. But eventually I got through to Ozzy. I’d take him out jogging with me, we’d go out for meals together, and we’d go out for walks, or whatever.

I did try to keep his spirits up, and I think I succeeded. But it wasn’t easy. He was unsure of himself, and I suppose he had lost a certain amount of confidence having been fired from Black Sabbath. He did need reassuring, and Randy and I did plenty of that. It helped a lot, I’d say.

One has to wonder where Ozzy would have been without you then.

Well, that’s it: Where would it have gone? You see, you’ve got to consider the musical climate of those times in 1979. I was being warned against working with Ozzy because he didn’t have a good reputation.

Why did you ignore those warnings?

I just knew in my heart of hearts that I had to do it. And we didn’t think, “How can we make records that are going to get airplay? How can we have a hit album?” We just went in and were ourselves. We did what we did, hoped for the best, hoped people liked it, and it went well.

Your bond with Ozzy continued after Randy’s death. Was the vibe very different while working on Bark at the Moon with Jake E. Lee?

I thought Jake did a very, very good, admirable job of playing those songs live, making them his own and doing his version of them.

Trying to copy Randy would have been a fool’s game.

Right. He wasn’t copying Randy note for note. He still made the songs obviously recognizable, but with his flavor and style.

And I thought Jake had great ideas for songs when he came in, too. He and I got together in New York, where we were for a month or so, before we went back to London, while writing the Bark at the Moon album.

But in New York, I remember being in Jake’s hotel room at the end of the thing, and Ozzy and the tour manager were there, and I said to Jake, “You’re doing well. You’ve got really good ideas. This is going to be great.” And Jake said to me, “Yeah, but you turn the ideas into songs.” I thought, Great. That’s nice of you to say.

One day, Ozzy came into one of the rehearsals while Jake and I were working out our parts. Ozzy looked at me and said, “You know, I’d forgotten how much you did toward writing the songs.” How quickly he could forget that, I don’t know. But that’s what he said.

So I had a reputation of not only writing the lyrics but putting the songs together musically, no matter what guitarist it was — Randy, Jake or Zakk.

You’ve made a point over the years that the Blizzard of Ozz was to be a proper band, not just a group of backing players for Ozzy. It ultimately wasn’t marketed that way, which has led people to have an unclear vision of that music’s original intent. So what do you want people to understand about what you created with Ozzy?

What I want people to understand is, yes, it was a band. It was four integral ingredients of Randy, Lee, myself and Ozzy. And it wouldn’t have been the same without any one of us. It was a band called the Blizzard of Ozz.

It was meant to continue as the Blizzard of Ozz, but Ozzy and Sharon started pulling me aside, saying, “Let’s get rid of Lee.” I wouldn’t agree, and I said, “Why are you trying to fix something that’s not broken?” Lee worked perfectly.

But they kept asking, and I kept refusing. Eventually, they got rid of both of us. But then, I was asked back six weeks later to a third album, which was shelved after Randy died, but eventually did happen with Bark at the Moon, and with Jake. But that’s it, really. A lot of the magic came from me and Ozzy just being together.

In your eyes, what is the legacy of Ozzy’s first two post-Sabbath albums, with you, Randy and Lee?

The Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman albums, I think, set up the empire for everything that came after. They’re the foundation that everything was to be built on because they were such classic albums. And it was a classic lineup, not something that was contrived or put together on paper. It just happened. We met up, the magic was there, it happened, and it kept on happening.

You mentioned that despite the ugliness between you and Ozzy, you were pleased to feel sadness after he died. Is your memory of him forever reframed toward the positive now that he’s gone?

Oh, it was natural. What came to me felt very real, and I felt natural to where I felt great sadness, nostalgia, nice memories and feelings of what we created together, what it meant, and how big it was. At the time, it was sort of like being in the eye of a hurricane, where you don’t really notice the importance of it all when it’s going on.

And then, later, when it’s all over, and people start dying — you know, Randy’s gone, Lee’s gone, and now, Ozzy’s gone — I’m the last man standing. It feels really, really strange and weird.

But I feel honored and glad to have been a part of all that. I know that it was important and integral. There was some dirty water that went under the bridge, but that pales against what we actually did, and the importance of what we did together. Now it’s the good feelings that take precedence.

Ozzy Osbourne said throughout his career that the Beatles saved his life. He couldeven recall exactly where he was when he first heard their music.

So when it came to summing up the legacy of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s legendary songwriting partnership, Ozzy responded in a way that only the Prince of Darkness could.

Born John Michael Osbourne, Ozzy was raised in Aston, a working-class area of Birmingham, where opportunities were bleak. Like so many others, Ozzy seemed destined to work in one of the area's numerous factories — the old adage goes that Birmingham’s industrial air influenced the sound of heavy metal — or live life behind bars. He lacked purpose. It felt like his life was drifting nowhere.

Adding to his gloom, he suffered sexual abuse from school bullies at age 11, which left him contemplating suicide.

Three years later, when he heard the Beatles' “She Loves You,” he suddenly found purpose.

“Sometimes when you hear a song, you remember when you fell in love, or broke up with someone,” he said in a 2017 interview.

“ I remember exactly where I was. I was walking down a road called Whitten Road in Aston,” he continues. “I had a blue transistor radio, and when it came on, I knew from then on what I wanted to do in my life.”

Although the often dark, usually heavy music that has defined Ozzy Osbourne’s career is a far cry from the Beatles' sonic template, their unwitting influence on the birth of heavy metal is clear. Osbourne was obsessed.

“This was so brand-new,” he said. “It was such a great feeling. Can you imagine going to bed tonight and waking up tomorrow to a completely exciting brand-new world?

“My bedroom walls were covered with anything that had the word 'Beatles' on.”

When he later joined forces with a then-Strat-playing Tony Iommi, bass player Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward — initially plying their trade as Earth — "Day Tripper" became a part of their early live shows. And his love for the Beatles never diminished.

In 2010, Ozzy covered Lennon's 1971 song "How?" to coincide with his late hero's 70th birthday and raise funds for Amnesty International USA. The video sees him wearing Lennon-esque round sunglasses and laying flowers on the Imagine Mosaic at New York City's Memorial Park.

“It floored me,” Ozzy told Rolling Stone of that fateful day with his blue transistor radio. He'd been asked to pick his top 10 Beatles songs, leading to his typically poetic three-word response to the Lennon-McCartney tandem.

“It was as if you knew all the colors in the world,” he said. “Then someone shows you a brand new color, and you go, ‘Fucking hell, man.’”

When he finally crossed paths with McCartney, backstage at The Howard Stern Show in 2001, Ozzy gave him a massive hug and told him that meeting him had been “a lifelong ambition.”

Later, recounting that moment on an episode of The Osbournes podcast, he said, “When I first met Paul McCartney, it was like meeting Jesus Christ.” The event was captured in McCartney's documentary The Love We Make, which chronicles his journey through New York City in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Ozzy never got to fulfill his dream of collaboration with the Beatle, but it could be very easily be argued that, for heavy music, Black Sabbath were the Beatles. And that’s quite a fitting legacy.

Jake E. Lee, Ozzy Osbourne’s second full-time guitarist, hadn’t spoken to his former boss in nearly 40 years when he was shot multiple times last year. But news of the incident sent shockwaves through the vocalist, who promptly sent his well wishes to a guitarist with whom he wrote mammoth hits like “Bark at the Home” and “Shot in the Dark”.

Poetically, it would kickstart a full circle moment for Lee that saw the guitarist share a stage with Ozzy for one last time at Back to the Beginning, and he had to battle arthritis and injuries caused by his shooting to get there.

Tom Morello, the event’s creative director, had said that the show hinged on Lee’s involvement, but Lee's road to recovery saw his world grow “dark and dangerous.”

“I hadn't been playing guitar for a couple of years because this wrist was killing me [due to] arthritis,” he tells SiriusXM's "Ozzy's Boneyard" (via Blabbermouth). “I finally got X-rays, and they said there's no cartilage left. It's bone on bone whenever I move it.

“It didn't feel good, so I started doing rehab for it,” he continues. “It started to take a lot of exercising, a lot of stretching, and it was getting better.”

The impact the shooting had on his mental health, though, was tough.

“I don't wanna think about it,” he says. “I dwelled on it a little bit after I got shot, and then I realized it wasn't healthy. So I just kind of pushed it aside and didn't think about it too much.

“The world got darker, more dangerous, not as fun after that night. And since then, I don't think about it too much. And the world's getting back to where I can enjoy it.”

Morello’s invitation to Back to the Beginning’s frivolities was timely. It gave him a glimpse of light at the end of a long, shadowy tunnel. But even still, there were caveats.

Having seen his name on the poster, the world expected him to perform his staple Ozzy hit, “Bark at the Moon”, but the ferocity of the song, and Lee’s diminished condition, represented a lofty challenge. A carefully considered plan B was put in place, and it was ultimately that plan that was executed at Villa Park.

Playing in front of 45,000 people at a show streamed to millions more worldwide – which also raised a record-breaking $190 million for charity – must have been a sensation to savour.

Amid the inevitable fast-paced chaos backstage, Lee didn’t get too much time with Ozzy on the day, but he was in his thoughts.

“Still processing it,” Lee posted on Facebook in the wake of the singer’s passing. “The finality of it hits me in waves. This was a text I got from him as I was sitting in an airport headed back home two weeks ago:

“‘Hi, Jake, I’m so sorry I couldn’t spend more time with you on the weekend, it was really chaotic. I would really like to see you when I eventually get back to L.A., just to shoot the shit. It’s been so long since we saw each other.

“‘How did the gig go for you on Saturday? I really hope you had fun. I will text you when I eventually get back to L.A. We must hook up. Much love and respect, Ozzy’.”

It adds a heartbreaking lacquer to an already sorrowful scene, but it shows the type of personality Ozzy was. The fact that Lee defied the odds to grace the stage at Villa Park, and give Ozzy a well-deserved — and all too brief — retirement is something to be celebrated during a time of mourning.

Frank Sidoris has shared the letter he received from Ozzy Osbourne after auditioning for a spot in his band. Although short, the heartfelt letter, written to explain why he didn’t get the gig, gives a candid look at the legend’s humble personality.

The singer and heavy metal icon, who passed away July 22 at 76, was auditioning players in the spring of 2017. At the time, Black Sabbath's The End tour had entered its final stages, and Ozzy wanted to go back out on the road solo.

Sidoris — who joined Slash feat. Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators in 2012 and is also part of Wolfgang Van Halen’s Mammoth — was afforded the chance to take part in a private, and very loud, audition as the Prince of Darkness searched for a new guitarist.

“I was invited to Ozzy's home to perform two songs for him to audition for his band after the Sabbath reunion,” Sidoris explains. “We loaded my amp, guitar, et cetera, into his movie theater, and I played ‘Mama I'm Coming Home’ and ‘Diary of a Madman’ while he sat about 10 feet away from a very loud amp — at his request.

“He sang every word over me, playing at concert volume, which was comforting and hilarious, as it was just him and I in the room with his assistant,” he continues.

Unfortunately for Sidoris, the audition was unsuccessful, as Ozzy opted to reunite with his longtime foil Zakk Wylde, with whom he’d parted after 2007’s Black Rain.

But to Sidoris's surprise, Ozzy went to great lengths to explain his decision in a letter, which Sidoris has shared as a story on his Instagram.

“Frank, I wanted to thank you for coming by to play for me and taking the time to learn my songs. You are a talented musician, and it's obvious to me why you've already had success in this business at a young age.

“I've decided to work with Zakk Wylde, writing and recording my next studio album as well as playing guitar on my upcoming tour dates this summer. Zakk has been with me a long time, and I know that having him play with me is something my fans really want to see.

“I wish you continued success.

“God Bless, Ozzy.”

The revelation about the auditions is also intriguing. Gus G. had replaced Zakk Wylde in Ozzy's band in 2009 and co-wrote Ozzy;s 11th solo album, Scream. However, the guitarist’s time with the band was soon eclipsed by the reformation of Black Sabbath, and he was quietly phased out of the picture.

Wylde’s return was celebrated by the fanbase. He’d been an almost ever-present in the band since 1987, save for a brief period away in the wake of an audition for Guns N’ Roses. The fact that Ozzy had tried other candidates out instead of solely asking Wylde to return shows that the singer wasn’t simply resting on his laurels.

The letter, Sidoris adds, “proves that he was truly everything that you would hope he was as a person.

“It was an honor to be in his welcoming presence and feel his genuine warmth in person.”

Tony Iommi perhaps said it best when he said, “There won’t ever be another like Ozzy Osbourne.” But beyond his songs — and the wild tales of bat decapitation and ant snorting — was a father figure who got the best out of his guitarists.

The Prince of Darkness may have told Guitar Player that the late Randy Rhoads “was just a fucking born star,” but the former Quiet Riot guitarist entered uncharted territory when he was tasked with helping to launch Ozzy's post-Sabbath career. The eyes of the metal world were on them, in particular the relatively inexperienced Rhoads. Although he's had many great guitar players in his wake, Ozzy often pivoted toward lesser-known players and put his faith in the underdog.

In doing so, he understood that the crown often weighs heavily. To the guitarists whose lives he changed by employing them, he was more than a boss; he was a dad. Rhoads, Wylde and, later on, Gus G., weren't big names when they joined the band. Ozzy's job was to guide them through the chaos and help them shine.

“I grew up on Ozzy and Sabbath. I was starstruck as anybody would be,” Gus G., who replaced Zakk Wylde in 2009, tells That Metal Interview Podcast about getting the gig. “If you're into heavy metal, that's your father! That's the father of heavy metal. It was a crazy moment.”

Unlike Rhoads, Gus, who'd made his name in power-metal band Firewind, entered the fray as the latest in a long, celebrated line of guitarists, including Jake E. Lee, Wylde and Jerry Cantrell. Not to mention that Alex Skolnick had lasted just one gig before falling foul of Sharon's unforgiving management. Osbourne wasn't going to let the prestige of the job drown his new riffsmith.

“He was like, ‘Hey man, take it easy. Let's just jam and don't worry if you play a few notes wrong — it's rock and roll, that's what happens,’” Gus G. relays. “‘Just play with all your heart. Let's do it.’

“He was just a very nice and very sweet guy, very warm-hearted. He broke the ice right away. I was nervous until I met him; once we started jamming, it felt right.”

The two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Famer cared deeply about his bandmates. When he visited Zakk Wylde's newly bought North Hollywood apartment in the early '90s to work on what would become "Mama I'm Coming Home", Ozzy was struck by the state of the property.

“I drove Ozzy over to my apartment,” Wylde tells Guitar Player. “The area didn’t look great. The grass was 10 feet high, the shingles were hanging off, the paint had flaked off, there was a drug rehab place nearby, you know? The whole thing looked like a drug slum shithole.

“Ozzy took a look around and said, ‘You’re joking, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘It’s a lot nicer on the inside.’ Ozzy just asked, ‘Sharon is paying you, isn’t she?’”

The story may draw a smile from the reader, but behind Ozzy’s ever-sharp and ever-dry humor was genuine care and concern for the guitarist. There’s a reason he calls Ozzy “dad.”

Wylde says he crapped his pants when he beat the likes of Chris Impellitteri and Adrian Vandenberg in becoming Ozzy’s third full-time guitarist.

He adds that there were some insincere auditionees too, who were there for the paycheck, not the love of the job. Ozzy, then, likely saw Wylde's enthusiasm for the job and his deep-rooted respect for those who came before him, and also through the green-eyed eyed among the bunch. He might even have seen a little of himself — a working-class man from Aston, Birmingham — in the guitarist's face.

His advice to Wylde upon joining? “Just play with your heart — that's all you gotta do — and you'll be fine...and by the way, change your pants!'”

Ozzy was a leader who knew how to get the best out of his bandmates. Even when the mountain seemed steep.

However, with his paternal instincts came the harsher side; grief. When Rhoads’ life was suddenly taken in 1982, at the young age of 25, Ozzy was distraught. He hit the bottle.

Rudy Sarzo, who was the band's bass player at the time, has since said that their decision to continue touring within two weeks of the tragedy was made out of necessity.

“Here was the strategy,” he said. “Keep Ozzy moving. You cancel the tour, Ozzy goes home, goes in the hole, dies.”

There was guilt mixed with his grief. He was the reason Rhoads wasn't back home, teaching guitar out of his mum's school.

“Ozzy still to this day feels guilty,” Sharon conceded in 2020. “‘If only I was awake, I would never have let him get on that plane.’ And, you know, it’s something that Ozzy lives with.”

“The day that Randy Rhoads died,” Ozzy once said, was the day a part of me died.”

The pair will be reunited now — a small silver lining to Ozzy's death, coming just weeks after Back to the Beginning. But as the music world mourns the loss of one of its greatest figures, his caring and nurturing side should be remembered just as much as what he did to the face of heavy music over a tireless, eventful, six-decade career.

Randy Rhoads’ death in 1982 sent shockwaves through the Ozzy Osbourne camp. The fact that the band was back out on tour less than two weeks after the tragedy may seem insensitive to his legacy on the surface, but former Ozzy bass player Rudy Sarzo says that doesn’t tell the full story.

The young guitarist’s superlative talents, which saw him regularly pitted against Eddie Van Halen as the world’s best player, had launched Ozzy’s post-Sabbath career in style. As the singer said during his Rock Hall induction last year, “If I hadn't met Randy Rhoads, I wouldn't be sitting here right now.”

That wasn’t hyperbole.

While out on the road on the Blizzard of Ozz tour, Ozzy watched the plane crash that took the 25-year-old’s life. It sent him spiraling into depression. The tour resumed on April 1, 1982, not because they didn’t care about Rhoads’ untimely passing, but because it helped avoid further tragedy.

“We were auditioning guitar players,” Sarzo, Ozzy’s then-bassist, says on The David Ellefson Show. “Here was the strategy: Keep Ozzy moving. Do not cancel the tour.

“You cancel the tour, Ozzy goes home, Ozzy dies. Goes in the hole. So we gotta go back out there again. And then we're gonna pick it up here, 10 days later, after Randy passed away.”

Considering Ozzy’s predilection for substances at that time, coupled with the weight of the loss, the plan made sense.

Putting it into practice, however, was another story. The controversial manner in which Rhoads’ replacement came onboard didn’t help matters either.

The story goes that Gary Moore was initially approached but declined. Afterward, most of the camp wanted Sarzo’s brother, Robert, to help finish the tour. Movements made by management in London forced some awkward conversations.

“Dave Arden, Sharon's brother from the office in London, sends over Bernie Tormé,” Sarzo explains. The Irishman had raised his stock with Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan in his group Gillan. “He comes in, and during auditions, he's already been hired. He's already been paid in advance to come in and play in the band. But he comes in, and he sits in the corner waiting for his turn.

“My brother was part of the audition, and Sharon and Ozzy wanted him to be in the band, to continue. So when Bernie hears that, he says, 'Oh. But I've already been paid. I've been sent here.' Bernie was just sitting there, knowing he already had the gig! This went on for two or three days.

“Meanwhile, we were going to services for Randy and for Rachel Youngblood, the band's seamstress, who also died in the crash],” Sarzo continues.

The emotional weight of it all took its toll on the band, which was still very much in mourning.

“I was one of the pallbearers [at Randy’s funeral],” Sarzo adds. “There was no way that we could emotionally return to rehearsal... having already buried Randy. So we took that night off.”

The tour restarted at the Stabler Arena in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with Tormé in tow. His stint, though, was brief. Within two weeks, Night Ranger’s Brad Gillis stepped in and remained onboard for Ozzy's next solo album, Speak of the Devil.

The guitarist merry-go-round never truly stopped after that, with Chris Impellitteri missing out on the gig to Zakk Wylde after Jake E. Lee left in '87. Wylde has said that other auditionees weren’t taking the opportunity as seriously as they should have, and the chance of auditioning for Guns N’ Roses later cost him a place by Ozzy’s side.

Then there was Alex Skolnick’s one-show tenure in the band. It was always high drama where Ozzy was concerned.

As he proved once more at Back to the Beginning, where he performed a double shift by shredding with Ozzy and Pantera, Zakk Wylde is a versatile musician with a deep-rooted appreciation of the classics.

Having already shared his personal riff rundown with Guitar Player, Zakk Wylde sat down with Metal Hammer to discuss the greatest songs ever written, and locked in on a collection of riffs that underpin the history of rock guitar.

His first pick goes right back to the start of most players’ electric guitar journey.

“I think all us rock and metal guys have to learn ‘Smoke on the Water,’” he begins, believing that mastering its double-stop shifts is a rite of passage. “As soon as you hear that riff, it's just like Wow! The simplicity and power is just amazing.”

(I’m sure this writer wasn’t alone in first learning it the easy way — all on the low E string — but Simon McBride, who replaced Steve Morse in Deep Purple in 2022, says many guitarists are actually playing the song wrong.)

For Wylde, the riff also shows why guitarists should put songwriting, rather than outright showboating, first.

“For me, it was Sabbath first, and then I found Zeppelin and Deep Purple,” he says of his earliest rock discoveries. “And aside from the great musicianship of all three bands, they have great songs, they have iconic riffs.”

Another undeniable classic is one he has played countless times in front of an unfathomable amount of people since becoming Ozzy's foil in 1987: Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.”

“You can play these riffs on one string — that's how iconic and classic they are,” he explains. “The great thing about Ozzy's singing is that, if the riff is powerful, he'll sing along with it.”

Discussing the origins of the riff with Guitar Player, Tony Iommi said the idea came from Bill Ward’s kick drum.

“I was in a rehearsal room, and Bill started playing this boom, boom, boom,” he recalled. “To the guitarist, the pounding sounded ominous. “In my head, I could hear it as a monster.”

The fact that Ozzy lifts the guitar melody for the vocals is inspired, not lazy. It showcases one of his greatest strengths as a songwriter.

“From all the years of me playing with Oz, whether it was ‘Miracle Man,’ ‘Crazy Babies,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘No More Tears’ or ‘Mama I'm Coming Home,’ it would always be the first thing that came to his head,” he explains. “Very rarely did he go, ‘I've gotta come up with something better.’

“It's mindblowing; he really is the king of melody. Maybe it's because of his love of the Beatles; because Oz wouldn't know if it's major or minor — he'd just like the sound of it.”

The guitarist also believes “Jimmy Page could have quit right after ‘Rain Song’: That’s lights out, game over right there with the tuning and composition.”

He adds that Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” was “a big deal when I learned it,” praising its chord-based composition rather than turning to the iconic guitarist's more fretboard-burning creations.

The quintet of Zakk-approved tunes is rounded out by AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” a riff that had a much younger version of the guitarist stumped when he first tried to master it.

“I was able to play the chords, but I couldn't play to lick,” he reveals. Eventually he can't the hang of it. “You’ve gotta do a little by day by day: put another brick on the empire. Then I could play along to the record like, ‘Oh my god, this sounds amazing.’”

In related news, Wylde has recalled his audition for Ozzy's band, what surprised him about other candidates, and the strange gear quirks that the singer had when it came to writing riffs for him

He could have added another sterling name to his already-stacked resume, but says a Guns N' Roses audition lost him his place in Ozzy's band and sidelined his career.

Last year, he dished out his hacks for more creative guitar playing, and it’s a trick that has been the foundation of his career.

Jake E. Lee’s appearance at Back to the Beginning over this past weekend didn’t go entirely to plan, but he isn’t bothered about that. The spot rounded out a powerful full-circle moment for a guitarist who had an uphill battle to be fit for the show. He was simply “thrilled” to be part of.

Lee had huge shoes to fill when he became Ozzy’s second full-time guitarist in 1983, following the untimely death of Randy Rhoads, with Bernie Tormé and Brad Gillis populating the interim. And it was a job made even more daunting, considering he had to handle some of Tony Iommi’s most iconic riffs to boot.

While Rudy Sarzo says Rhoads was “too creative” to play songs like “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” verbatim, Lee was happy to tow the party line. He wanted to honor the “evil” tonality of the original parts.

“He bends so it’s not quite in pitch. It just made it sound so much better,” he tells Guitar World of Iommi’s innovative playing style. “There are things like that that I found challenging.

“Where did he come up with all those riffs? It’s not human. It’s unfathomable!

“I joined in the middle of the Speak of the Devil tour. Half of the set was Black Sabbath, and half was the stuff with Randy, so I just tried to get as close as I could,” he adds.

“One of my favorite Ozzy stories was from that tour,” Lee then says. “We were doing ‘War Pigs.’ It’s the first verse and Ozzy looks at me and mouths, ‘What are the words?’ I knew the words, but he stumped me. I didn’t want to say the wrong words, so I just said, ‘I don’t know…’

“So he started singing ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm!’

“It worked perfectly! It was like, ‘Old MacDonald haaaad a faaarm, he had some pigs with an oink oink here, and an oink oink therrrrrre.’”

Lee says he grew up a “snob” who initially felt rock music was “stupid.” Then Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” turned his head, and from there Iommi’s influence was everything.

“It was huge,” he says. “I saved up my money to where I could finally buy a [Gibson] SG, and that was because of him. I wanted to sound like him. Tone-wise, to this day, Tony Iommi is my greatest inspiration.

“Every time I’m trying to set my stuff up to get the sound right, I play ‘War Pigs.’ If I can sound anything close to what he sounded like on that, I’m going with it.”

After two albums by Ozzy Osbourne’s side, a stint that saw him pen setlist staples like “Bark At The Moon”, and “Shot in the Dark”, Lee was let go in 1987.

When the guitarist was shot multiple times last year, it was revealed that he and Ozzy hadn’t spoken for 37 years. That made Tom Morello’s insistence on Lee playing a starring role at Back to the Beginning all the more poignant. But preparing for the show wasn’t easy.

Lee says he planned to perform “Bark at the Moon” at the show, but the task was made difficult due to arthritis in his left hand and damage to his left arm from the shooting. Instead, flanked by an all-star cast, he tackled “The Ultimate Sin” and — perhaps too close for comfort — “Shot in the Dark”.

The first tune saw him team up with Halestorm’s Lzzy Hale, Nuno Bettencourt, ex-Megadeth bass player David Ellefson, Mike Bordin, and Adam Wakeman, while Disturbed's David Draiman fronted the latter. The slower, more forgiving tracks still gave him plenty of opportunity to stamp his authority all over the songs.

For a guitarist blighted by injuries, the chance to help his biggest guitar hero, and cross paths with Ozzy for the first time in nearly four decades, proved too alluring to retire from. The fact that he even made it at all is something of a miracle; the fact that he played two songs on the night before 45,000 screaming fans and millions more via a live stream makes for a lesson in perseverance. To echo Morello's sentiment, the show wouldn't have been the same without him.

Zakk Wylde has always been a workaholic. Not content to operate with just one band, he’s combined numerous roles over the years, working intermittently as Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist and co-writer while creating albums under his own name and the Black Label Society banner. He can also be found working on any number of projects, including Zakk Sabbath, Generation Axe (with fellow shred heroes Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen) and Pantera, where he’s been re-creating the guitar parts of his late friend, Dimebag Darrell.

As of this writing, Pantera are preparing to head out on tour again in 2025 and will hit Scandinavia and Europe before landing in the states in May. “It’s been an honor to be up there playing my buddy’s stuff every night,” Wylde tells Guitar Player. “It’s great to see how much joy people get from hearing those songs again. It’s the power of music and by playing the music, it’s like the guys are still alive and well. I try to keep as faithful as possible to the original solos for nearly everything.”

Dime certainly came up with some notable riffs, and Wylde himself is no slouch when it comes to delivering killer lines. For Wylde though, the master of riff analysis was Ozzy Osbourne. “The funny thing with Ozz is that, when I played things like, say, ‘I Don’t Wanna Change the World,’ I was just messing around having a joke, riffing, singing crazy shit. But Ozzy heard something that clicked for him. When he picked up on the riff, I thought, Are you kidding? But he turned that into a Grammy-winning song.

“Oz has such an ability to hear what works and how to realize the spark that the riff created for him," he continues. "It’s a real gift that he has, and he’s been doing that since day one in Sabbath and with Randy Rhoads. I’d play riffs to Ozzy, and he’d instinctively say ‘Yeah, that’s good’ or ‘No, I’m not feeling that one.’ Same with his vocal lines. I’d say nine out of 10 times the first thing that he sings is the keeper. The first thing he comes up with is the melody, and his great gift is to be able to sing a countermelody over a riff.”

Guitar Player asked Zakk to share the five songs from his career that mean the most to him. Looking over his five selections, it's clear that there are a lot of reflective, sensitive moments, which doesn’t align with the clichéd view of Zakk as a modern-day Viking road warrior. For that matter, there’s a lot of subtlety in his playing, and a love of dynamics, with plenty of light and shade.

“Well I guess it’s a reflection of everything that I love about electric guitar," he offers. "As much as I like Zeppelin playing 'Black Dog' I also love 'Goin’ to California.' I’ve always enjoyed mellow stuff, and of course I really love Elton John, so there’s a lot of different influences in the mix.

"As well as that, it also depends on what instrument I’m writing a song on. If it’s the piano then I’m automatically in a more mellow place, and if it’s on acoustic guitar, I’m more likely to be thinking Neil Young or something.”

In fact, when Wylde works on his playing, he goes to an unlikely source of inspiration. “I usually sit in the kitchen at night with the dogs when everybody’s sleeping, and maybe put on some Pat Martino, Joe Pass or Scott Henderson or something, and cop some of those ideas. Maybe try to take some of what Martino’s doing and fit it over something completely unrelated like ‘Red House’ or ‘Voodoo Chile’ rather than the bunch of crazy chord changes that he’s playing chromatics over.

“I think it’s cool to hear something then incorporate it with something that doesn’t seem at all connected. That’s the excitement of music though, creating amazing new meals with the same ingredients everyone else has, yet managing to find something that’s uniquely your own. That’s what it’s all about for me.”

“Miracle Man” (1988)

“I picked this one as it’s a track from the first Ozzy album that I played on, No Rest for the Wicked. I’m obviously aware of some of the great rhythm guitar parts that have been laid down in the past, like Jake E. Lee’s work on ‘Bark at the Moon’ and Randy Rhoads’ on ‘Crazy Train.’ Those songs are part of my education as a guitarist. If I’m learning covers, I’m going to nail those rhythm parts or else I’m not really playing the song.

“I felt like my job as Ozzy’s guitarist was to bring something that held all the elements of the song together the way those parts did. All the things I absorbed like a sponge found their way into my own playing. It’s not stealing or borrowing; it just becomes a part of your knowledge.

“For example, on 'Miracle Man,’ the fingering that I use comes from 'Foxey Lady,’ even though it bears no resemblance to it. And the 16th-notes rhythm guitar part was informed by my ability to play those rhythm lines from Randy and Jake. I’m pouring little elements of a whole bunch of things into the mix and coming up with something new that I probably wouldn’t have created if I hadn’t spent the time working out what those great players had done. It’s like a cocktail or a new dish — you use the ingredients that you have on hand to mix up something new that’s your own.”

“Mama I’m Coming Home” (1991)

“I picked this because it reminds me of the time that I wrote it with Oz for the No More Tears album. I had an apartment in North Hollywood, and I’d just bought a piano, which I still have and use. This song was actually written on the piano. I drove Ozzy over to my apartment; the area didn’t look great, the grass was 10 feet high, the shingles were hanging off, the paint had flaked off, there was a drug rehab place nearby, you know? The whole thing looked like a drug slum shithole. Ozzy took a look around and said, ‘You’re joking aren’t you?’ I said, ‘It’s a lot nicer on the inside.’ Ozzy just asked, ‘Sharon is paying you, isn’t she?’ [laughs]

“I guess the solo is a complete Joe Walsh vibe, what with my love of the Eagles and ‘Hotel California.’ That and the acoustic parts, which are an accumulation of everything I love, including the Stones and Keith, the Allman Brothers and Skynyrd. There’s a six and 12-string, and the intro parts are a steel-string Chet Atkins acoustic. It was a song that required a strong solo statement, rather than a whole bunch of notes, so my mindset was almost, ‘What would the Eagles do here?’ This was one song where we knew that we’d created something special when we’d finished it, and I guess that was borne out by how successful it was and how it’s remained a big song for fans of Ozzy’s work ever since.”

“Losin’ Your Mind” (1994)

“Pride & Glory was the band I put together when Oz decided to take a break. He said he was going to chill for a little bit, so if we got any offers, go ahead. It was kind of like moving out of your parents’ house or something. [laughs] The security, the roof over your head and the food on the table, you know? Now it was like I had to fend for myself in my own apartment.

“It was very exciting times, though, and Pride & Glory was a very different process from the Ozzy albums, with double-tracked guitars and a much bigger production. I used the same rig I played on ‘Miracle Man’ and ‘No More Tears,’ but the sound is so different. I remember when I put the banjo on it and I was listening back and thinking, Wow, that’s a little insane. [laughs]

“This song represents a distinct period of my life – maybe it’s my Cream phase – just a three-piece trio format. There’s something magical about the sound of one guitar, a bass and the drums. It lets the guitar bloom and find its own sonic space. Without a doubt there’s more than one way to do things and that’s the way I approach playing. Whatever works best at the moment you’re in is the way to go, regardless of rules and other peoples’ ideas.”

“Road Back Home” (1996)

“I wrote this for Book of Shadows, my first solo record The thing about this song is that it was one of my first attempts at writing lyrics, and I’d never thought of myself as someone who could write lyrics. I just saw myself as someone who played guitar and maybe a little piano; I was taking care of the music department. There’d never been any need for me to write lyrics prior to coming up with the words for this, which I’d had for quite some time before I recorded it, way before the Pride & Glory record. I realized that I didn’t have to feel limited in what I could do — that I could create the whole song from the ground up and also be able to express things that I couldn’t necessarily convey by playing the guitar. I finds that I’m often drawn to melancholy ideas and themes, which is something that’s apparent when you look at a lot of the songs I’ve written.”

“Stillborn” (2003)

“I’ll admit that there’s a bit of a Zep vibe about this song [from the Black Label Society album The Blessed Hellride]. When people say things like imagine what Hendrix could have done with everything that’s available these days, I always say that it would have probably been terrible, because the magic that he created was borne out of the necessity of what he had to work with and his genius in creating something spectacular. Same with Dark Side of the Moon: If they had today’s technology I’m sure it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as good, as they were creating things that didn’t exist.

“That’s how my mindset was when I came up with the riff for ‘Stillborn.’ You have to use your imagination to make something new with the same things that are available to you and everybody else. So I was thinking that I’d see what I could do if I limited myself to writing a song with just two parts. It forced me to be creative — I just wanted to try to write a song with one note. The idea was to have as little as possible to make a song and the whole thing just rolls on that F# note.

“To me, the genius behind ‘Smoke on the Water’ or ‘Whole Lotta Love’ is that there are actually only two parts to the songs, yet they are two of the greatest songs ever written. Not that I’m saying this is as good as those two songs.” [laughs]

Black Sabbath’s blockbuster final show, Back to the Beginning, is only a day away, with half the metal world descending on England’s second-largest city ahead of the event. However, Zakk Wylde, who is set to play a starring role in the event, isn’t fully convinced this is really the end.

For one thing, Sabbath (minus drummer Bill Ward) had supposedly written their final chapter in 2017, with a tour called The End.

For another, Ozzy initially retired in 1992 with the No More Tours road show, only to change his mind. He tried again in 2018 with No More Tours II, but never finished due to his health issues and the COVID pandemic.

The band members' habit of changing their minds makes Wylde hopeful that Back to the Beginning won't be the end of things.

In fact, Wylde, who joined Ozzy’s band in 1987, believes the success of Saturday’s festivities may whet appetites for more.

Speaking to Rolling Stone, he says, “I’m sure the promoters are going to go, ‘Wow, that was pretty amazing. Let’s do another world tour right now.’”

If that were to happen, Wylde has an idea how the band could move forward. Fans may recall that when Ozzy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a second time, in 2024, he sat on a gothic-as-hell throne to accommodate his mobility issues. That, Wylde says, could provide the solution that allows future shows.

“If Oz sounds great [and] if he wants to continue carrying on singing on a throne, we’ll just make the throne so it goes out over the audience,” Wylde says. “It shoots fire and water and dragons come out of it. And we’ll make the throne part of the show. It’d be amazing.

“Why not?” he adds. “I really think it would be great. If they do this Sabbath thing and it sounds amazing, and the only difference is Oz is just sitting down, why not? You know every promoter’s just got their fingers crossed on this one.”

Interestingly, bassist Geezer Butler's thoughts align with Wylde’s thinking, and he isn’t ruling out future shows.

“Every time I think or say it’s over, things like this show come along,” he reasons. “Someone will probably have our DNA and resurrect us in the distant future… Who knows?”

In related news, Tony Iommi says preparations for the show have gone well, but he notes that everyone is on edge about the event.

"We're all nervous really,” he told BBC Midlands Today. "People are coming from all over the world and I just can't absorb it.

"I wouldn't say it's been easy. It's been tough, because none of us are getting younger and to stand there for a couple of hours is tiring.”

Maybe everyone can have a throne?

Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne may have drawn a line in the sand when insisting that Back to the Beginning will be Black Sabbath's final ever show, but bass player Geezer Butler isn't towing the party line.

The Tom Morello–curated event, which brings together a litany of heavy metal greats across generations, from Metallica to Pantera, and Gojira, is the band’s second bow. The End tour wrapped in February 2017 in their hometown of Birmingham, U.K., but over the intervening years, multiple members expressed their desire to resurrect the group in some capacity.

After years of speculation, Back to the Beginning reunites the band’s classic lineup of Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, who was absent from their 2012 reunion, for the first time in 19 years.

Iommi, who has voiced his concerns about the ailing health of both Ozzy and Butler in the build-up to the show, has told MOJO, “I won’t be doing it again.” That comes in sharp contrast to his bass player’s comments.

Speaking in the same interview, Butler says he’s “given up talking about the end of Sabbath,” because, as history has already proved, the end has never been that.

“Every time I think or say it’s over, things like this show come along,” he reasons. “Someone will probably have our DNA and resurrect us in the distant future… Who knows?”

Ozzy is forced to play a limited role on the night due to his declining health. In February, he revealed that he would only be doing “bits and pieces” with a host of big-name vocalists set to fill his shoes for certain songs. Sammy Hagar has already confirmed which song he’ll be singing.

Indeed, health issues are a major talking point as the show draws ever closer. Jake E. Lee is set to feature in Ozzy’s solo set, coming as his final show in that guise too, after being forced to cancel his No More Tours II dates. Lee’s appearance comes 38 years after being dismissed from the Prince of Darkness’ band, but he may not be physically able to play his preferred song.

Despite Ozzy's penchant for retiring and un-retiring, the singer, in a separate MOJO interview, insists this is the end. Even if Butler thinks otherwise.

“After this show, I’m going home, closing the door, and will look back upon the great career I’ve had,” he insists. “But I’m done, done, done! You gotta know when to call it quits.”

Whether or not Back to the Beginning is Sabbath's swan song, Morello wants the show to be one for the history books.

“The idea of the show,” he tells Guitar Player. “Is to curate the greatest day in the history of heavy metal for the greatest band in the history of heavy metal.”

“Metal is the music that made me love music,” he adds. “It was the metal posters on my walls and the metal riffs that I learned first that made me love playing guitar and want to be a musician. It’s a debt that I owe.”

Iommi will be bringing down the curtain on a career that changed the course of heavy music forever, but one that saw him fighting with Black Sabbath's (1970) producer to keep their heavy sound.

The record may have also sounded very different if not for a “dodgy” car park guitar swap that saw him ditch the Fender Strat for his now fabled Gibson SG.

Rudy Sarzo’s time in Ozzy Osbourne’s band was fleeting, and his time playing stages with Randy Rhoads was even shorter. But they were together long enough for him to gain a fascinating insight into how he approached the material presented to him.

Their only stint on a tour bus together was on the Diary of a Madman tour, which kicked off in Essen, Germany, on November 1, 1981. The run, cut short by Rhoads’ untimely death, saw Sabbath’s “Paranoid” regularly appear on the tail end of their set, with “Iron Man” and “Children of the Grave” also getting occasional airings.

Rhoads spoke against the idea of doing a full live album of Sabbath songs. Having established himself as a player in his own right, he felt such a move would be a step backward. But he understood that some Sabbath material had to be included. It was business., after all

But he’d do it in his way.

The covers record would ultimately morph into Speak of the Devil, which was released in November 1982 and featured Brad Gillis in the late guitarist's place. But it would have been Randy, had he still been alive.

It’s well documented that Rhoads wasn’t the biggest Sabbath fan, and there was talk about him wanting to take a break from rock at the time of his death. He regularly sought out guitar tutors while on the road and dreamed of obtaining a degree in classical music.

This created a melting pot of factors that ultimately saw him handling Tony Iommi’s material with a real freedom of expression. It even extended to the material he’d written and recorded with the Prince of Darkness. As Sarzo tells MusicRadar, Randy would never play a song the same way twice.

“To the people who never got to see Randy play live, all you have are the records,” he says. “But I've got to tell you, on the road, Randy would take what he'd already recorded and take it to new levels of intensity.

“From being there, and listening to him playing, the portion of [Ozzy's] set was where Randy would be the most experimental, during the solos."

“Playing those Black Sabbath songs was new territory for Randy. And in his solos, he found a way to make the Sabbath songs more interesting for himself.

“He needed some kind of outlet. He would come in, throw in new ideas, though not too much, just enough to feed his creativity,” the bass player adds.

“The thing was that Randy was not really wired to play the same thing every night. He was too creative for that.”

One such example was when he took on “Children of Grave”. Iommi, who had started to experiment with lower tunings around the time of Master of Reality, tracked the song in C# tuning (low to high C# F# B E G# C#). Rhoads, an advocate of standard tuning, navigated the song without retuning.

That would find Rhoads completely reinventing the track’s low-slung groove in favor of playing more akin to his signature style, with fast-paced flurries, triads on the D, G and B strings, pinch harmonics and plenty of octave jumping.

As heard on the live album, Tribute, it was more frenetic and supercharged. Even with certain parts an octave higher — or more — than the original, it still had a cutthroat heaviness. And there are flashes of tapping and Floyd Rose whammy wails aplenty in the solo. It embodied Rhoads’ inventiveness and his downright refusal to stick to play songs chapter and verse to the original.

He only wrote two albums with Ozzy, 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz and, a year later, Diary of a Madman, and he likely would have departed Ozzy if he'd lived long enough .But Sarzo believes that, had he stuck around, Randy Rhoads' best work was still ahead of him.

“In my opinion, as someone who was there, Randy never reached his peak,” he ascertains. “He was just getting started. I'm laughing at the thought of Randy reaching his peak with just two albums!

“He had so much more to explore and to create,” he concludes. “But unfortunately, he passed too soon.”

Sarzo has also recently revealed he initially rejected the chance to join Ozzy's band and, having also played with Ronnie James Dio and said the two bands were on completely different levels.

Meanwhile, Jake E. Lee is preparing to reunite with Ozzy at Black Sabbath’s final show, but he’s casting doubt over which song he’ll play. Health issues have left a question mark over his preferred song choice.

Iommi, likewise, is concerned about the health of Ozzy and Geezer Butler as the show draws nearer.

The end of the classic Black Sabbath lineup was difficult for all involved. Left without a band, Ozzy Osbourne had to build a new career from the ground up. As for Tony Iommi and the rest of Sabbath, they were left rudderless as they searched for another singer to lead them into a new era.

Ozzy found his answer in of Randy Rhoads , a young, talented guitarist he hired after bassist Bob Daisley had a premonition he’d lead the group to greatness.

Sabbath, meanwhile, turned to five-foot-four powerhouse vocalist Ronnie James Dio, who had just been fired from Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow and was down on his luck. After a serendipitous meetup at L.A.'s Rainbow bar brought them together, Iommi and Dio forged an instant musical connection when, at their first jam session, they wrote "Children of the Sea," one of the key tracks from 1980's Heaven and Hell , Black Sabbath's first album without Osbourne.

Though the task of winning over the Ozzy faithful fanbase wasn't going to be easy, Dio's vocal talents helped launch Sabbath to their highest chart position since 1975's Sabotage, outdone only by the monster catalog albums Paranoid and Master of Reality.

Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham, who was Iommi’s best man when he married Susan Snowden in 1973, was one of those many fans impressed by what Dio brought to the band. However, his habit of straight-talking caused him to put his foot in his mouth when he intended to flatter Dio. It was left to Iommi to prevent the diminutive Dio from tearing into the much larger Bonham.

“Yeah, there was some kind of a word,” Iommi admitted when asked about the kerfuffle while being interviewed by Bill Burr in 2011. “John came to the gig when we played at Hammersmith in London. And we were going to go out after the show to a bar.”

According to a Black Sabbath fan site, the band played four consecutive nights at London's Hammersmith Odeon between May 7 and 10, 1980, with Girlschool in tow. It's not clear which night Bonham attended, but it was in the English capitol that his remarks were taken in the wrong light.

“John's drinking on the side of the stage, drinking Guinness,” Iommi says, coloring the scene. “We came offstage, and as we walked past John, John said to me, ‘Oh, man, he's got a great voice for a midget.’ And, of course, Ronnie heard that, and he didn't really like that.

“He actually meant, 'What a little body, and he's got a big voice!'” the guitarist explains, interpreting Bonham’s poorly dressed pleasantries. “But the way he said it…

"Of course, Ronnie popped up and… I won't repeat what he said. They were gonna fight.”

Suddenly, Iommi found himself at the center of the ruckus and astutely defused the situation by telling the pair to “just get along.” Eloquently put. Tragically, Bonham would pass just months later, on September 25, 1980, the victim of too much drink.

Black Sabbath are set for one last hurrah at Villa Park next month, as the Tom Morello-curated Back to the Beginning farewell gig finally comes around.

However, Iommi has voiced his concerns over the health of Ozzy and Geezer Butler ahead of the show.