When Ozzy Osbourne paid homage to the “wreckage” of his life
Watching old clips from The Osbournes or any other quirky snippets from previous talk shows, you could almost forget that Ozzy Osbourne once sparked an entire cultural moral panic and earned the moniker ‘Prince of Darkness’ based on his proximity to the literal devil.
There’s a mismatch there that’s always kept us intrigued. A mismatch that constantly keeps us trying tirelessly to somehow connect the family man with the so-called spawn of satan. The one who tells Conan O’Brien his favourite food is cottage cheese, to the one whose band allegedly sparked a domino effect of youth falling down a rabbit hole of ill mental health and insidiously misguided ways.
“If I could try to explain this situation,” Osbourne said in 1982, cornered by the barbarism of biting off the head of a bat, “It’s like there’s a wild man in everybody. All I am is a conductor of mayhem”.
But is this the same whiplash-induced dichotomous sentiment reflected in some of Ozzy’s most well-documented quips? Or is it the disconnect that comes with finding his jokes funny but not laughing about the many times he seems to have stenched up a perfectly normal situation by pissing everywhere?
The only person who can ever understand the oddities of his ways, and the one person who did seem to understand this strange mythologisation of the man himself, was, well, Ozzy. He might not have agreed with everything he did, recognising that most of these tales of woe emerge from the throes of intoxication, but they did happen, and they were as much a part of his story as deeply embedded threads in the fabric of Black Sabbath’s legacy.
And one of the few times he actually reflected on this in a more resigned and artistic, but no less reflective, way was for his masterpiece, No More Tears. One of the undeniable show-stoppers on the entire record, ‘Road to Nowhere’ saw Osbourne grappling with the “wreckage of my past” and where that road hypothetically leads should he succumb to its darkened temptations once more (hint, it leads nowhere).
At the time, the purveyor of all things unholy himself had just gone sober, a move he wholeheartedly credited to his “soulmate”, Sharon. There was a general feeling around the creation of this album that it would change everything if done right. The one that would give Ozzy the push he needed to prove he was still at the very top of his game after a series of mishaps, misfortunes, and misjudgements (flops) that set him back more than he’d probably have liked to.
With songs like ‘Road to Nowhere’, he maintained that quintessential, tongue-in-cheek flavour of self-awareness but with a newfound authenticity that also came across as completely genuine. That, plus the fact that the song felt like one of those southern rock-inspired, Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque musings about things you’ve done versus what people have told you along the way.
“I was looking back on my life,” Osbourne begins ‘Road to Nowhere’, “And all the things I’ve done to me”.
“I still find it all a mystery,” he ponders, asking himself whether it was all a “dream” and admitting he’d probably “do it all again” even though it “keeps haunting me”.
It’s the version of Ozzy that bridges the gap between both sides of the debate: the soft, reflective family man who sees the dark corners of his past and recognises them for what they were, even though he’d probably do it all over again if he could go back, and the satirical version that probably thought about his mishaps with a knowing shrug. Even though it’s not the man he eventually became, or ever was.
