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.
