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.
