The 1967 song Ozzy Osbourne couldn’t bear to listen to: “What is all this flower shit?”
When Black Sabbath first debuted, you would have sworn that they had dug Ozzy Osbourne out of the crypt.
He didn’t look dead by any means, but given how dark some of the earliest Sabbath tunes were, they almost seemed like the musical version of the antichrist whenever ‘The Prince of Darkness’ started talking about demons and the evil that men do in this world. But while many would have preferred that they tone things down, Osbourne didn’t want to cater to what he was hearing on the radio, either.
After all, the band had got together trying to make music that was a little heavier than what the charts had in store. They were going through the middle of the Summer of Love, and while Sgt Peppers was the album of that generation, the blues scene wasn’t too far behind when the band formed under the name Earth in the late 1960s. They had the potential to be a decent blues act, but things changed drastically once Iommi found out what he could do with the tritone on every one of their tunes.
Their rehearsal space was already across the street from a movie theatre that was known for playing horror films, so they figured that those same people probably would want to hear music that felt a little dark as well. Osbourne may not have fully identified with heavy metal, but he certainly wasn’t going to try his hand at being one of the hippies that were ripped out of the Haight-Ashbury scene.
San Francisco had its place as one of the biggest hubs for psychedelia, but in Birmingham, Osbourne got a nice dose of reality. He was no stranger to a good time with substances, but given the amount of time that he had working with his other bands, his stomping grounds were a lot meaner for those that were talking about putting flowers into guns and preaching the good word of peace.
Osbourne liked the idea, but he felt that anyone that had the gall to write a song like ‘If You’re Going to San Francisco’ didn’t know the first thing about his life, saying, “I was thinking, ‘What the fuck is San Francisco? Where is this? What is all this flower shit? I don’t even have shoes on.’ It’s not for me. It’s alright if you’re living in the sunshine, but San Francisco was like going up to me and saying, ‘Alright Ozzy, fancy a trip to Mars?’”
And while Sabbath didn’t exactly live in a neighborhood filled with occultists or anything, a lot of their mentality was about giving a voice to those that didn’t have one. A lot of protest songs were made around this time about the Vietnam War, but ‘Children of the Grave’ was the first one that actually felt like it understood the gravity of the situation, with Osbourne practically pleading with the rest of the world to be brave ahead of the danger that was probably coming their way in the future.
For people that were used to Sonny and Cher, this kind of thing was abhorrent, but everyone else knew that Sabbath weren’t really Satanists. They were more intrigued by the darker side of life, and while it took the rest of the world a while to catch on, there’s a reason why Osbourne is still looked at as anything but a sinister figure when we look back on his contribution to the music world.
He was still looking to bring peace to the world, but no one gets peace by preaching about it and getting up on their high horse every time they make a song. You get it through showing everyone what was wrong with the world and doing whatever it is in your power to make sure that it doesn’t get any worse than what you’re seeing.
