The album that made Jack Black love heavy metal: “It changed my whole brain”
Learning to love heavy metal music almost feels like a calling for some music fans. It’s one thing to get acquainted with all the great music on the radio, but there’s some tortured spirit in all great metal music that speaks to the primal side of the brain and makes you want to rage whenever it comes on. Although Jack Black probably already had that kind of fire inside him well before he heard metal music, his conversion moment came when hearing Blizzard of Ozz by Ozzy Osbourne for the first time.
For many people looking to get into heavier music in the 1970s, though, it was a big jump to get used to what Osbourne was doing with Black Sabbath. Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple were really heavy for their time, but Sabbath’s tales from the crypt and writing macabre stories about the dark side of spirituality were enough to fill someone with dread the minute they started listening.
It’s not like they eased you into the songs, either. From the first minute you put on the first Black Sabbath album, that dreaded tritone lick made a shiver creep up everyone’s spine. While it was enough to get many people invested for life, Osbourne managed to make a gentler version of himself during his solo career.
Granted, it’s not like he was becoming a heavy metal version of the Partridge Family or anything. Osbourne could still be vicious, but having Randy Rhoads in tow was one of the greatest collaborations in metal history, taking the crux of heavy metal and putting a happy-sounding brightness to it on songs like ‘Crazy Train’.
Hearing that kind of song was enough to get Black hooked, telling George Lopez, “I went to this record store, and I was going to get the new Journey album. I was ten years old or something, and there was this kid who was 14, and he said, ‘No, man. You don’t want that. Get this’, and he showed me Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz…It just changed my whole brain, the passion and the darkness and the evil of the music”.
Black could have hardly picked a better place to start, too. Sabbath was one facet of what Osbourne could do, but hearing him in his element singing songs like ‘Mr Crowley’ and ‘I Don’t Know’ resulted in some of the greatest metal anthems of all time. That’s not to say that Black was an Osbourne purist by any stretch.
On Tenacious D’s first album, Black included the song ‘Dio’ as a gigantic love letter to Osbourne’s replacement in Sabbath, who brought a level of musicality to the band on albums like Heaven and Hell. Ever the diplomat, Dio returned the favour for Black’s praise when he starred as himself, convincing the young ‘Jables’ to give his career a kickstart in Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.
Both of those iterations of Sabbath certainly have their share of fantastic metal music, but without Osbourne’s solo career, the trails of metal would not have been blazed, and we would have probably never gotten the privilege of hearing Black grace us with such classics as ‘Master Exploder’. Truly a tragedy that we all thankfully managed to dodge.
