“I’d get tarred and feathered”: the song Ozzy Osbourne never wanted to release
Anyone who has the insane pedigree of Ozzy Osbourne is going to have every piece of their catalogue dissected for years to come. No one can found a genre like heavy metal and still manage to keep a low profile, and since his solo years are as important to his story as his time in Black Sabbath, fans have been speculating for years about what a version of him may have looked like if he had gone down different roads in his career. Despite his reputation as the father of all things metal, there were a handful of times when his music could take a few twists and turns.
Even in the days of Sabbath, the band was never afraid to try something different if the time called for it. ‘Changes’ might still get hate from some Sabbath fans for not being authentically metal, but it has since gone down as one of their epic classics in many respects. And despite Osbourne not having a taste for their later material, Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die do have some undiscovered gems that fans might not have seen coming, like the horns on the back half of the latter record.
But no matter how many claim that Blizzard of Ozz was one of the foundational pieces of metal music in the 1980s, it’s not like it didn’t take a few influences from the pop sphere. People may have been under the impression that disco sucked around this point, but there was that signature disco hi-hat throughout ‘Crazy Train’, the B-side ‘Looking At Me Looking At You’ even has moments where Randy Rhoads channels his inner Nile Rodgers as well.
It’s okay to flirt with a bit of disco in the metal sphere, but Osbourne knew to steer clear of that a bit more when working on his later albums. He always had a bluesy register to his voice, and some of his heavier offerings later in his career, like The Ultimate Sin, benefited from him using darker musical motifs, whether that meant tuning down like Sabbath did or working with a truly demonic riff.
Then again, Osbourne also likes to have fun, and since he’s a consummate music fan, it wasn’t out of the question for him to go back to other genres he likes. He was a massive fan of The Beatles, and since the Fab Four were known to switch things up on every record they made, it was almost refreshing to hear Osbourne cut loose when working with Dweezil Zappa on a joke version of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by The Bee Gees.
Most metalheads would have felt their brain melt the minute they heard Osbourne in what sounded like a leisure suit, but ‘The Prince of Darkness’ felt that it should have never seen the light of day, saying, “If Ozzy Osbourne did ‘Stayin’ Alive’, I’d get pilloried. I’d get fuckin’ tarred and feathered! When I went ’round to Dweezil Zappa and did ‘Stayin’ Alive’—crap, it wasn’t meant to be released! Whatever you put on a track, somebody somewhere will put it out someday.”
It is admittedly a bit jarring to see him make something this danceable, but it’s not that bad once you break it down. Dweezil had already picked up a few cues from his father about how to blend genres together, so what could have been a musical combination on the same level as orange juice and toothpaste actually sounds a lot more integrated than it has any right to be.
Osbourne may have received a fair bit of criticism for going down this road, but it’s far from a poor attempt to put genres together. Because when looking at his track record, metalheads have a much better case to be angry at the version of ‘Shock the Monkey’ that he did with Coal Chamber in the late 1990s than this.
