“The greatest things”: The 1991 song Ozzy Osbourne called a “gift from nowhere”
There’s no real rhyme or reason as to how Ozzy Osbourne became one of the biggest names in all of music.
Sure, there was a lot of careful marketing at play whenever he emerged from Black Sabbath’s shadow, but up until the day he passed away, ‘The Prince of Darkness’ was out there to have a good time and play songs that he loved to anyone and everyone he performed for. But even after years of making some of the best hard rock ever made, Osbourne still felt that the best ones were the tunes that seemed to fall out of the sky half the time.
That’s what happened with ‘Paranoid’ back in his Sabbath days, and sometimes even the biggest hits of his solo career came down to luck. No one would have thought that Osbourne would have had one of the greatest guitarists of all time turn up at his doorstep, but the minute that he met someone like Randy Rhoads, he knew that there was life after Sabbath. Rhoads was a gift from God if there ever was one, but after he passed away, no other guitarist seemed more equipped for Osbourne than Zakk Wylde.
No disrespect at all meant to Jake E Lee, but Wylde seemed to be one of the few people who seemed genuinely honoured to play every single note he could onstage with Osbourne. He was one of the biggest Rhoads fans in the world, and he wanted to take that opportunity to make the tunes that he could. He was playing like he had everything to prove on a song like ‘Miracle Man’, but it wasn’t until No More Tears that everything started to gel.
Which is insane, considering the timeline of everything. Osbourne seemed to fit in pretty well with the era of hair metal that had become all the rage in the late 1980s, but right as grunge was about to take over, the idea of him having hits like ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’ almost felt impossible. But aside from some assistance from his bandmates and friends like Lemmy behind the scenes, the one song that tied the entire record up came out of the blue when bassist Mike Inez was tuning up.
He was still getting his bearings in the band, but the bassline to ‘No More Tears’ practically fell out of the sky when the rest of the band locked in. It’s not the hardest bassline that anyone ever came up with, but compared to what the rest of the hard rock world was doing, Osbourne was counting his blessings every day that he was able to capture that kind of song in the moment before it flew away.
Nobody thought that they were creating one of the best songs of their careers at the time, but Osbourne felt honoured to have been given that kind of masterpiece, saying, “Sometimes the greatest things come on the spur of the moment. On ‘No More Tears’, we were in pre-production, and Mike started playing the bassline. It was like a gift from nowhere, and we had been writing for about two years or so. That’s always the fun part of it. You can stay in the studio forever and a day and all of a sudden, you’re ready to go and something goes ‘BANG’.”
The same thing could be said about a lot of Osbourne’s later records. Not all of his albums were meant to be the greatest thing in the world by any means, but even when looking at some of the biggest tunes of his career, the fact that a song like ‘Perry Mason’ could come out later in his career and still hold up as one of the finest tracks that he ever made is a testament to him waiting for the right moment to strike.
Every songwriter usually goes through those spells where things aren’t working, but creating ‘No More Tears’ out of nothing is further proof that you don’t need to chase the muse all the time. Many people have tried to chase it, but the important thing to realise is that the muse will always eventually come back.
