“I was pissed off”: the singer Ozzy Osbourne was jealous of
Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t the kind of person to look back on his life with too many regrets.
There are definitely parts that he wasn’t proud of and would have rather erased from his memory, but up until the moment that he passed, he was more than happy to keep moving forward and delivering the best shows that he could to his fans whenever he performed. But even when he was at the top of his game, he admitted that there were more people who were singing far better than he could when he started performing.
Then again, to call Osbourne a ‘metal singer’ is really underselling what he’s doing. Pieces of his vocal timbre do scan as the beginnings of heavy metal when you listen to the first Black Sabbath album, but when you peel back all the layers of his voice, Osbourne had a lot more in common with what the biggest blues bands in the world were doing rather than trying to build a new genre under his feet.
No one in Sabbath was really thinking along those lines, and a lot of what Osbourne was doing even seemed to have pieces of gospel and Beatlesque tones to it. ‘Goodbye to Romance’ wouldn’t have been out of place on a Fab Four record, and even when he was singing under some of the most sinister riffs that Tony Iommi ever made, he was the one forming the dark melodies that made up tracks like ‘Children of the Grave’ and ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’.
His sound was so distinct for Sabbath, so if they were going to move on without him, they were going to need someone who wasn’t going to exist in the shadow of ‘The Prince of Darkness’. Osbourne wasn’t looking to rely on Iommi’s riffs for the rest of his life, either, and while Randy Rhoads was a godsend when he first joined his band for his first two albums, no one was really prepared for what Sabbath came out with once Ronnie James Dio joined their ranks for Heaven and Hell.
Osbourne may have refuted the fact that Sabbath were remotely the same band once Dio joined, but you weren’t going to mistake Iommi’s riffs for anything else once ‘Neon Knights’ started. This was the same old darkness from before, only this time there was a singer who was trained a lot better than Osbourne was, to the point where it felt like a vocal acrobat getting hold of every one of their songs.
And while ‘The Ozzman’ engaged in a lot of mudslinging between Sabbath and his solo band, he remembered being a lot more jealous of what Dio was doing, saying, “Everybody thinks I hate [replacement singer] Ronnie James Dio. At one time, I was pissed off at him, but not now. God bless him. To be truthful, I wish I had as many people trying to imitate my voice as him.” But that may have been a blessing and a curse when it came to people trying to copy Osbourne’s voice.
Like it or not, Osbourne had the kind of timbre that no one could properly duplicate whenever he sang. Sure, there have been countless jokers that have done their best impression of him stumbling through his house shouting for his wife on The Osbournes, but when it comes to his singing, there was always a certain magic in his voice that was as distinct as when people heard someone like Bob Dylan for the first time.
It was easy for someone to parody, but if you wanted to do him justice the right way, it wasn’t about trying to make the best Osbourne impression. Most people could only bow in reverence to ‘The Prince of Darkness’, and while many Dio clones have tried their hand at reaching into the vocal stratosphere, no one is ever going to replace the voice that breathed life into songs like ‘Crazy Train’.
