Ozzy Osbourne’s biggest Black Sabbath regret: “Do you know what would be cool?”
Only a few bands can claim to have ended their careers on their own terms. While many groups aim to bow out gracefully, the biggest bands often attempt to recapture their former glory onstage and end up as mere shadows of their former selves. Black Sabbath managed to close the chapter on their career as they wanted, but Ozzy Osbourne felt they had unfinished business since they didn’t perform with original drummer Bill Ward.
During the first handful of reunion attempts, it looked like all the band members were at least on board with working together again. When the chequebooks came out for what would become their reunion record 13, Ward said he had not been able to accept the reunion because he found out that he would be getting a fraction of what the rest of the band was making.
Although the band was operating without the group’s heartbeat, they got another drum god to play behind them: Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine. While it may not have had the same power as the first iteration of the group, Wilk certainly has a decent sense of swing about him when working on the album, making a song like ‘God is Dead?’ sound pretty menacing when bouncing off Geezer Butler.
But Ward always had a certain power to his playing that was suddenly gone. There were occasions when he would just serve the song, but his knowledge of different jazz-style drumming made him one of the most in-demand percussionists of the hard rock scene, even getting praise from John Bonham on some of his performances.
You can call it bad business decisions that drove Ward out of the band, but Osbourne still had a massive amount of guilt surrounding the end of the group, saying, “It wasn’t really Black Sabbath. If you had Ginger Baker playing with The Beatles, it wouldn’t be The Beatles. Do you know what would be cool? If we went to a club unannounced and just got up and [played] … ’cause we started up in a club.”
That kind of friendship didn’t just apply to the ending of Sabbath, either. When Osbourne was let go from Sabbath in the early 1980s, Ward was one of the few people who stuck by his old mate, even saying how awkward it was playing music with Ronnie James Dio out front on Heaven and Hell.
But Ward always felt more natural with Osbourne’s version of the group. That version of the band was still indebted to 12-bar blues half the time, so seeing him put that kind of jazzy swing to a lot of their songs gave them a certain versatility that no other metal band could really boast at the time.
Regardless of Osbourne’s dreams of what Sabbath’s final show should have been, they may have been far too big to handle a modest club gig these days. But that’s the beauty of all the great early Sabbath tunes. When you strip away all of the macabre sides of their sound and the demonic lyrics, they were still a kickass bluesy hard rock band, and seeing them in their natural habitat would be a treat for any fan of the originators of metal.
