Ronnie James Dio: Ozzy Osbourne couldn’t “carry a tune if you put a radio in a suitcase”
Somewhere amid the hell-raising maelstrom of Ozzy Osbourne’s antics, it has been lost that he was a vital cog in an engine that drove music towards a dark new horizon. Black Sabbath were pioneers pushing rock ‘n’ roll towards heavy metal in a postmodern mimicry of the increasingly industrial world around them. And while Ozzy’s comic mania was a vital ingredient in this potent cocktail, it has often simply rendered him a comic maniac alone in some people’s eyes. Ronnie James Dio is one of those people.
When Ozzy’s antics began to derail Black Sabbath in 1979, his old bandmates had no choice but to fire him. So, they turned to the former Rainbow member Ronnie James Dio to replace Ozzy, with his wailing vocals forcing them further down the metal path and turning up the darkness and theatrics as they lent into the camper side of the zeitgeist that they helped to spawn.
This instantly polarised fans. While their first two Dio-fronted records, Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules, may well have been hits that hushed the critics, the general consensus was that Sabbath weren’t the same band without The Prince of Darkness. Sharon Osbourne was one of these, as she told the Wild Ride! with Steve-O podcast in July 2020: “They had two hit albums. They did, they had two good hit albums, they had two good tours together. Then it was the band were fighting. There was a lot of fighting in the band with Ronnie.”
“Ronnie had a great voice but to change a band that had a kind of bluesy type vocal, real gritty bluesy vocal to a rock opera vocal, it was so different,” she opined. “I always looked at Ronnie as a Rock opera type singer. Ozzy had such a bluesy voice. I never got it.”
Naturally, Dio disagreed with people who espoused this notion. He thought that he brought a new level of musicianship to the group. That much is clear from his scathing comments in a radio interview in the early 1980s. “Replying to the things Ozzy has said (in magazines), to me is like dueling with an unarmed man,” Dio comically quipped.
Adding: “It really is. I really feel like someone who has a sword up against someone who just has no clue what a weapon is. I find the man to be stupid, totally devoid of intelligence, an animal, and I could give you examples of all these things to back up what I’m saying. I would not say them unless I firmly believed these things. And I wouldn’t say them unless I felt that at some point someone need reply to moronic statements that Ozzy has made about people who, let’s face it, made him all the money in the world.”
Continuing: “It wasn’t Ozzy Osbourne who wrote any more than perhaps two of the songs that Black Sabbath has ever done. Geezer Butler wrote all the lyrics to the songs that have been hits: ‘War Pigs’, ‘Paranoid’, right down the line, ‘Iron Man’, but yet Ozzy claims to have written the song. Not only does he claim at this point to have written the lyrics; he claims to have written the music.”
In truth, this is a claim that is hard to decipher amid the myth of the band. While Tony Iommi undoubtedly wrote most of the music, Ozzy’s lyrical contributions are obscured by self-evident jokes like Butler quipping: “Ozzy can’t even read, how could he write a song!” So, it is perhaps his solo work credits that best showcase what he was capable of away from the mic.
Nevertheless, Dio cuttingly concluded: “I doubt very much that Ozzy could carry a tune if you put a radio in a suitcase and gave it to him in his hand. I sincerely doubt that, and I know it for a fact because I’ve heard this from the people who have worked with him for 12 years.” You’ve got to hand it to him, that is one hell of an insult—one Ozzy would certainly appreciate.
