A tear in the prince of darkness

How Lake Oszi Osbourne, who died two weeks after a farewell concert, lived and what was remembered

The listing of the merits of Ozzi Osborne, who completed his earthly path yesterday, July 22, at the age of 76, reveals the idiocy of secular stamps. He is a legend, he is the father of many musical styles, he is a guiding star for generations of youth who managed to grow old with him. How could this turn out? John Michael Osborne had no prerequisites for that biography - life was originally against him.

I graduated from high school in the last year of the existence of the Soviet Union. My teenage room was densely sealed with black and white photographs of my favorite groups. There was nowhere to take colored posters. Magazines of the Metal Hammer type brought sailors, and the craftsmen were rebuilt and sold on a flea market on the ruble - the business was profitable. Among those who were fond of Western music, Ozzi was the absolute champion in the image. From his otherworldly erysipelas, only the spectacular makeup of the KISS group was drawn. In my room, these figures were represented in an equal proportion, although Ozzi was incomparably cooler in music.

By that time, he had long left Black Sabbath, who continued to leave for previous merits with constantly changing vocalists. Photos of the “old Sabbats” were appreciated: from Ozzi, at worst - with a Dio, who, although he sang excellently, but only without that satanic raid, which Ozzi once and for all changed the appearance of “heavy” music. In the 1980s, each of his album became an event, and only the first two were also called "solo". Further, the individual Ozzi has become for granted.

He was really separate and definitely crazy, as the future drummer of Black Sabbath Bill Ward noted at the first acquaintance. Such an assessment was due to the fact that on that autumn day of 1968, Ozzi went with a boot on a rope. He was almost 20, he even sang in the Rare Breed group, but all this was not serious, since it had no future.

What future can be in the harsh industrial Birmingham in a person who was first excluded from school as poor, and then put in prison for theft? Everything was already a foregone conclusion. It remained to fool and not hope for anything.

The group that gathered at the announcement of Osborn in the Eston music store (Birmingham area) was first called Earth. The very people who surrounded Ozzi on stage on July 5, 2025 at the Black Sabbath farewell concert have already played in it. Today it is difficult to imagine that the bass guitarist Giser Batler for the first time talked with Ozzi when they stood together in a crowd of bitlomanians, waiting for the exit of the Liverpool four from the Birmingham television studio in January 1963. Their common group Rare Breed appeared four years later. And the name Earth arose when the drummer and guitarist of the Mythology group responded to the OZZI announcement. They all played fashionable psychedelia, repeating the logic of the development of The Beatles and slightly adding severity in arrangements, because in England there were already Cream and The Yardbirds, which have not yet become Led Zeppelin.

Black Sabbath - this is how the Italian horror film I Tre Volti Della Paura (“Three Persons of Fear”), released in the same 1963, shortly before the exception of Ozzi from school, was called in the English box office. It was decided to name this phrase with a song with a horror-text, which was mainly written by Giser Batler, fond of Alister Crowley. He painted his room in a matte-black color, drawing upside down on top. There he was a ghost from the text of the song: “What is this that stands before me? Figure in Black Which Points at Me ... "

In turn, the guitarist Tony Aimmy came up with a riff using the so -called “Titon” - the most dissonating musical interval, which is sometimes called the Devil's Chord. The ideal coordination of music and text was ensured as a result of Ozzi, who was fully included in the actor from the horror film. It turned out really scary-so no one did among the rock and roll teams of the late 1960s. And the name of the fateful song crawled to the group.

Of course, Tony Aimmy, who was already 77 this year, also hung in my room in different types. Putting his right hand at the factory and still learned to play the left, clamping the vulture of a crippled brush, he remained the only permanent participant in Black Sabbath. He only did that he composed new musical moves. Riff as the basis of heavy music - in fact, his invention. The riff must repeatly repeat and throw the listener into the wall. At the same time, Aiommy himself has always been and is a “kul”: the comic and insufficient poses of guitarists are not about him.

Black Sabbath immediately went forward, but somehow sideways, and only following the results of their work during the 1970s it became clear that it was a forge of “heavy metal”. Actually, they never played Hevi-Metal. Like another initial Motörhead to send, they created the prerequisites for the fact that others developed and replicated. Ozzi Osbourne, who was the face of Black Sabbath, very early realized that madness is a demanded product. Not talent, not taking a melody for the soul and not the quality of the recording - only a surprise, only hardcore.

Ozzi was even very different from the rest of the team members. They were all overgrown with mustachioed dandies, especially Aimmy and Butler. The drummer Ward now and then shaved a mustache, but Ozzi did not grow them. The mustachioed faction of Black Sabbath was very similar to hussars and musketeers from Soviet cinema. They seemed to be their guys because they resembled district plumbers.

One of my school comrade, choking with delight, swore that Boyarsky came to repair the toilet! Against this simple background, Ozzi was a man of a rare breed - right by the name of his early group.

The main reception of Ozzi is a defocated look. Of course, this is due to the abuse of psychotropic substances: from aristocratic opiates to workers-peasant alcohol. But even in those years when Heroin's wife, Sharon made a reality show from him and pulled out of the sucking darkness, Ozzi looked at the world with an ended moron. Eating or not is not a question if a person’s eyes are inserted into the skull so that you are amusing. With these eyes, Ozzi scared more than one generation of parents who instinctively felt that the children were not just fighting off, but go to the other side.

It was necessary to try to ensure that the group comrades were officially expelled for drunkenness and drug addiction - this is what happened in 1979. After the recording of the first solo album, Osbourne brought two pigeons to the CBS office - he released one, and bit his head to the other. Drunk Ozzi was so much that he did not remember how and why this happened. However, already in January 1982, at a concert in Iowa, a drunk but sane Osbourne bit his head in a stored bat. It was a conscious test of limits - such a spontaneous ritual, proving that there are no boundaries.

In March of the same year, during the same tour, in which Ozzi rode a new album with the characteristic name “Madman's Diary”, he witnessed the death of his guitarist Rand Rand Roads. The owner of their touring bus literally forced him to sit in his small plane and lost control. The remaining members of the group could also die - the purple pilot dived on the bus and eventually touched it with a wing before crashing into a tree. The managers wanted to stop the tour, but Ozzi did not let them do it. He had to put pressure on the gas further, otherwise he would have died shortly after the unfortunate Roads.

Having called the guitarist Brad Gillis, Ozzi went to Va-Bank, recording the concert album “Speak of the Devil” with the Black Sabbath material. This provoked a new round of the scandal in relations with the previous group. Ozzi moved along the edge and only did that he was staring at him inseparably - like the same figure in black from the first song “Black Saturday”. His third solo album Bark at the Moon, published in 1983 and partially written in co -authorship with the late Roads, drawn the image of a werewolf emerging from the grave. It was then that the press had a new surge of the accusations against Osborne, supposedly contributing to the growth of violence among young people. The first took place ten years before the song “Killing Yourself to Live”, which the Black Sabbath group allegedly promoted suicide.

In the June issue of the Soviet Youth magazine, the same age, for 1987, the article by Sergey of Castali was published “The Court of Court, but which could have been.” The biography of Ozzi was gracefully packed inside and scandals around him were beaten. It was bold and impeccable from the point of view of censorship, which no one has yet canceled. Nobody expected such a gift from the official Soviet press. Ozzi was part of the venerable tradition of English black humor and almost the heir to Byron and Mary Shelley.

Now this text may seem like a naive fencing of the “client” Osborne, but it is impossible to overestimate its symbolic importance for that time. It was an unconditional alibi for parents!

But the children grow up quickly - and Ozzi also entered into a new decade slightly more stunned, unexpectedly solid and even taking breaks in fatal binge. In paradoxically, Ozzi formed his own “post -Soviet” biography in the eyes of my generation. His last album in the aesthetics of the eighties was released literally in 1991 - it was the no More Tears. Then there was another rhythm of releases and a bunch of other activities. Among them, the most important place was occupied by The Osbournes TV show, the inspirer of which was no longer the tired Ozzi, but his faithful wife Sharon, the mother of his children. Those who complain to the pope in the series that he never tells them anything positive, and he reacts tearfully, that he cannot, because he, after all, the “prince of darkness” ...

Since the late 2010s, he began the abolition and transfer of concerts, in 2020, Parkinson was diagnosed. Every day is once indestructible, and now in the eyes of a weakening legend was a gift-who, after such tests of the body, will be lucky enough to exchange the eighth dozen! And his last appearance on stage during the farewell show Black Sabbath in his native Birmingham on July 5 of this year became the brilliant code of his crazy life. Not rising from a wheelchair, but piercing and former, Ozzi sang “Iron Man” and “Paranoid”, so that 70,000 people sobbing sobbing, catching minutes of happiness.

Osbourne, like Lemmy, who stood at the helm in the above -mentioned group Motörhead, clearly embodied the principle of "Live Fast - Die Old". Those who went through an excess storm and caught their breath on the shore are erecting a monument to modern medicine with collective efforts. But not only: Ozzi was loved until the end of his days and needs a large number of people. And his neural ties worked on the fact that everything would work out. His generation passed on that thirst for life and unquenchable curiosity that helped to recover from a big war to those who survived in it. And this is a timely reminder to us that it is really valuable in the world.