‘SATO’: the Ozzy Osbourne song that was phoned in
Any great artist needs to know the importance of quality control after a while. It’s usually better to leave the audience satisfied with a couple of songs that they love than have them waiting around through a bunch of musical mush, and even in his prime, Ozzy Osbourne knew that a handful of album cuts were far from the classics they were made out to be.
Even before he left Black Sabbath, ‘The Prince of Darkness’ knew that there were pieces of his band’s discography that he wasn’t that proud of. They had already been forced to make some “sell-out” songs as far back as their debut album when they cut the track ‘Evil Woman’, but during the last few years of Sabbath’s run, Osbourne felt that he was spinning his wheels throughout the last few records.
Realistically, the band should have split with the frontman right after Sabotage, and judging by how much Osbourne went out of his way to talk shit about songs from albums like Never Say Die, it’s not like he was itching to dig up pieces of the past. But if he wanted to stay in the musical conversation, he was going to need to launch a solo career as fast as possible.
You have to remember that Osbourne was dangerously close to being looked at as the casualty of Black Sabbath, and since he spent the first few months after being fired drinking his troubles away, it was up to his wife, Sharon, to get him the care he needed. He was far from sober when he put together Blizzard of Ozz, but he at least had a shot in the arm thanks to Randy Rhoads beside him.
If the debut set him up for stardom, though, Diary of a Madman was the proof that everything wasn’t a fluke. ‘Over the Mountain’ is still among the finest singles he ever made, and the title track is a nice piece of sophisticated metal music with strange jazzy voicings on the guitar, but Osbourne knew that he was well below his usual standards when working on the song ‘SATO’.
The tune was already a bit of commentary on his relationship with Sharon as well as his fractured marriage to his first wife, Thelma, but Osbourne was among the only songs from the Rhoads years that felt like filler, saying, “’SATO’ was one. I always remember that. I was in the studio, and Sharon wanted to go somewhere and I went, ‘That’ll do!’ And in the back of my mind, I knew I let something go. But you know what? The amount of people that come up to me and go, ‘Why don’t you ever play that live?’”
While the song does have a haunting quality to it, this was the first time that it felt like the theatrical music was doing a lot of the heavy lifting for Osbourne. He could have certainly kept everything going for a little while longer, but even for an album that is made up of only eight tracks, this felt like the one time where Osbourne wanted to crank out a tune and break for lunch.
Hell, even the B-side from the Blizzard days, ‘You Lookin’ At Me Lookin’ At You’, has a lot more personality than this. Granted, most of the metal crowd probably wasn’t ready for Osbourne to include a song that poppy on one of his albums, but it would have helped diversify the track listing a lot better than a song that feels like the result of romantic drama.
