Zakk Wylde says an audition to replace Gilby Clarke in Guns N’ Roses in the mid ’90s cost him his place in Ozzy’s band. That in turn led to the birth of Black Label Society, Wylde's southern rock–tinged heavy-metal group.
Few had heard of Wylde before he was announced as Ozzy Osbourne’s third lead guitarist in 1987, succeeding the late Randy Rhoads and Jake E. Lee. Since then, he’s built a prolific career, both with Osbourne and on his own.
In recent years, he’s been filling Dimebag’s shoes in a revitalized Pantera, but he nearly joined another American heavyweight act when Slash suggested him as GN’R’s next guitar player when Gilby Clarke departed.
“I guess Slash just threw around and my name came in the mix,” Wylde ponders on Billy Corgan’s podcast, The Magnificent Others, which has previously welcomed Gene Simmons, Richie Sambora, and Wolfgang Van Halen into its veritable hot seat.
“I'd never spoken to Axl before, but he called me up, and he was like, 'Zakk, you wanna get together and jam?'” Wylde recalls. “I was like, 'Well, yeah...let's see what happens.'”
Though he had no previous interactions with Rose, he’d crossed paths with the rest of the group plenty of times.
“I knew Slash when I first joined Ozzy, that's when Guns were blowing up. I knew Steven [Adler], and then I obviously knew Matt [Sorum] from when he was with the Cult,” he says. “So everybody kind of knows each other.
“They had a rehearsal joint all set up. I remember it was me, Matt, Dizzy [Reed] throwing down on the keys, and then you had Slash, Duff [McKagan] and Axl. We were jamming, noodling, recording a couple of riffs.”
Despite the promise of those jams, he says “nothing was materializing with it.” Time passed and he remained in the dark about GN'R's plans.
Ozzy, who was working on what would become the Ozzmosis album collaborated with the likes of Steve Vai, Geezer Butler and Lemmy, then approached Wylde to get a definitive answer.
“Oz was like, 'Are you going to do this thing with the fellas, or are we doing this thing?'” he recounts. To which he replied, “'I can't tell you yes or no, because I don't know what's going on with the guys.'
“It was going on and on, nothing was happening. Oz was getting ready to release Ozzmosis and getting ready to tour, and Oz said, 'Zakk, sit down. I'm gonna get Joe Holmes to play for a little while, and we'll see what happens.”
Next thing he knew, Ozzy was touring with the fomer Lizzy Borden guitarist, and GN'R had hired Paul Tobias, a childhood friend of Rose.
Wylde feared “the dream was over” but he refused to lie down and accept his fate. He got to work on his own music at a studio in New York CIty, dividing his time between the studio and a nearby bar, where drew both refreshment and inspiration.
“There was this place called Bruise on 34th in Lexington," Zakk recalls. "The pub had been there since 1908. So I would go after we got done tracking and I'd be drinking till six in the morning every night, hanging out at the jukebox.
“They had the Stones on there, Bob Seger, Neil Young, the Eagles, all this amazing mellow acoustic stuff. I remember just going back into my room with my acoustic guitar and writing.”
From those (presumably very early morning) writing sessions, Book of Shadows, Wylde's first solo album, was born. It found him, he told Guitar Player last year, “drawn to melancholy ideas and themes,” perhaps as a result of feeling so lost after such a dramatic reversal of fortunes.
A short tour followed, but Wylde wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to write “heavy stuff” again, and so he forged the Black Label Society in his image. Moreover, he lifted a riff from his GN'R jam to write “Rose Petalled Garden” for their debut album, Sonic Brew, creating a second life from the jam that, temporarily at least, put the kibosh on his career with Ozzy.
Asked for clarity on his second exit from Ozzy’s band, when he was replaced by Gus G for 2010’s Scream, Zakk dismissed the idea that the Black Label Society sound was bleeding into his writing for Ozzy; he said Ozzy recognized that “he had flown the nest.”
But that also meant starting over from scratch.
“I went from playing with Ozzy in arenas, stadiums and festivals to playing in clubs with, like, five people,” he reflects. “There were no other eggs in my basket.”
Today, his basket is practically overflowing. He persevered, and survived.
Meanwhile, Guns N' Roses have just played a show so hot it melted Richard Fortus' pickups., and his namesake gear firm, Wylde Audio, has been subject to the most bizarre of fake websites. Buyer beware.
