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.
