The 1986 album Ozzy Osbourne couldn’t stand hearing: “The worst I’ve written”
In a world that was full of rock stars with heads the size of continents, it’s easy to appreciate what Ozzy Osbourne gave to the world.
Every other frontman seemed to be larger than life and had no problem reminding their fans of that fact, but when you look at any of the interviews ‘The Prince of Darkness’ gave over the years, he seemed to still be a genuine rock fan, despite being one of the inventors of metal. He was simply out there to have some fun making music, but he did have a few moments where he felt like he let his fans down whenever he got into the studio.
Then again, the real miracle of Osbourne’s career was that he was even able to have a solo career after Black Sabbath. Just think of the biggest rock and roll singers in the world that have made an entire separate career for themselves outside of their bands, and now think of the metal singers that have done the same thing. ‘The Ozzman’ is really the only one that comes to mind, but he had a lot of help getting there when he started working on his first records with Randy Rhoads.
His guitarist was a gift from the heavens when he wrote tunes like ‘Crazy Train’ and ‘Mr Crowley’, and when he passed away, there was bound to be a gaping hole in whatever he did next. Osbourne wasn’t going to settle for just any other guitarist, but even when people talk about the greatest musicians that he had in his band, Jake E Lee doesn’t deserve to be slept on compared to Rhoads and Zakk Wylde.
The hair metal movement had just begun, and Lee was the one responsible for Osbourne blending in with what the likes of Motley Crue were doing around the same time on tunes like ‘Bark at the Moon’. But right in the middle of that run is The Ultimate Sin, which seemed to be the first time that Osbourne was brutally honest about anything in his solo career after Sabbath. He had admitted that Never Say Die wasn’t his favourite Sabbath record, but he would have been hard-pressed to find a single song on this record that he liked.
In fact, if Osbourne ever made a ‘worst-of’ collection of his hits, he figured that The Ultimate Sin would have the least inspired material that he had come up with, saying, “It’s fair to say you can possibly find the worst song I’ve written on the Ultimate Sin album. I don’t think anyone goes into the studio with the intention of making a bad record, but it was like ‘Liberace takes acid’ at that point.” At the same time, there’s a lot to like about the album if Osbourne was willing to give it a chance.
For one thing, it was one of the heaviest solo offerings that he had made up until this point. Tony Iommi had already been known to tune down his guitar much lower than usual, and this was the first time that Lee dropped the tuning all the way to drop C# when making tunes like the title track. And while the Liberace dig is pretty funny, some of the more quiet moments like ‘Killer of Giants’ are a lot more ominous than before.
But the problem might have been that this iteration of Osbourne’s band had run its course at this point. Lee was itching to do some stuff on his own, and while he and Osbourne could have made more classic tunes together, No Rest for the Wicked was the real moment where everything came together again once Wylde took over as Osbourne’s partner in crime on the side of the stage.
Wylde was a much more comfortable fit, but even he managed to pay his respects to Lee whenever he had the chance. Some of the most underrated riffs in Osbourne’s catalogue came from Lee, and even if ‘The Prince of Darkness’ didn’t care for the album personally, it’s impossible to think of the best records that he ever made without thinking of a tune like ‘Shot in the Dark’.
