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.
