Ozzy Osbourne, whose distinctly dark vocals and appetite for extreme behavior made him the ideal frontman for the transformational heavy metal band Black Sabbath — qualities which also propelled him through an even more successful solo career — has died at age 76. “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning,” reads a statement released on Tuesday (July 22). “He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.” No cause of death was provided.
His death comes just weeks after Black Sabbath’s final concert, which took place on July 5 and netted $190 million, making it the highest grossing charity concert of all time.
Osbourne’s abilities as a vocalist – his uniquely sharp timbre and bellowing lung power – gave him the fortitude to cut through even the densest metal songs like a foghorn. Starting with Sabbath in 1970, his voice helped defined what heavy metal became. The image he inaugurated at that time became just as indelible. By voicing Sabbath’s reliably morbid lyrics, clad in the band’s trademark funereal attire, he earned the nickname The Prince of Darkness. The credibility of that image, at times, struck Mr. Osbourne as hilarious. “They all thought I lived in some Bavarian castle and at midnight my bat wings came out and I flew around the battlements,” he told British GQ in 2004.
Osbourne’s solo career, which began in 1980, saw his notoriety soar through a series of increasingly outrageous, and alarming, antics, two of which involved decapitation. During a 1981 meeting with executives at his record company, he bit the head off a live dove to get their attention, while the next year, he performed the same act on a dead bat while on-stage, spitting the creature’s blood on the audience for good measure. One month later, while wearing a dress owned by his later wife Sharon Arden, he urinated on a monument erected to honor those who died at the battle of the Alamo in Texas. As a consequence, he was banned from the city of San Antonio for a decade. Osbourne later blamed all those actions on profound intoxication, a state he frequently admitted to maintaining for much of his career. One such binge escalated to the point where he tried to strangle Sharon, by then his wife, an act he didn’t remember committing. “It’s one of the most regretful things,” he told British GQ. “I woke up in jail the next morning. Thank God, she dropped the charges. And still I didn’t stop drinking.”
At the same time, Osbourne appreciated the PR power of his out-of-control behavior. “Part of me is happy,” he told Rock Hard Magazine in 1991. “Because rock ‘n roll is a sensationalist business. If you haven’t got controversy, you haven’t got rock ‘n roll. You’ve got fucking Phil Collins.”
Osbourne’s image received an improbable overhaul when he arose as an oddly lovable TV star in the early aughts. Along with his wife and two of his children, he starred in the MTV series The Osbournes, one of the first family-centered reality shows, and one of network’s biggest hits. The show, which served as a precursor to such powerful reality programs as Keeping Up with The Kardashians, presented Osbourne as doddering, gibberish-spewing dad but one who adores his family unendingly. While some saw the portrayal as a contradiction of his devilish image, he viewed them as part of a piece. “I’m just a zany ham,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2018. “It’s all entertainment.”
With Sabbath, Osbourne was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. All nine of the albums he recorded with that band went gold, while five achieved platinum status. Among his solo efforts are 1991’s No More Tears, which peaked at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 chart and sold over 3 million copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen Music. Seven of his solo releases went top 10 on the Billboard 200, while 17 of his singles made the top 10 of the Mainstream Rock Songs chart, two hitting that list’s peak. His creation of Ozzfest in 1996, dedicated to his beloved heavy metal, became one of the most successful, and enduring, festival tours of all time, spawning affiliated roadshows from the U.K. and Europe to Israel.
John Michael Osbourne was born on Dec. 3, 1948, in the Aston area of Birmingham, England. He was the fourth of six children to mother Lilian, who was a factory worker, and father, John, also known as Jack, who toiled as a toolmaker. He earned the nickname Ozzy in elementary school, by which time he was struggling with undiagnosed dyslexia, attention deficit disorder and low self-esteem. “I’ve never been comfortable in my own skin,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “For some reason, I’m a frightened soul.”
Embarrassed about the lack of money in his home, Osbourne lost himself in the fantasy of music. Listening to the Beatles’ “She Loves You” made him want to be a musician. He quit school at age 15 and worked in construction, plumbing and in an abattoir. He tried burglary but, “it was less than three weeks before I got caught,” he told The Big Issue in 2014. “I did feel very stupid.”
When his father decided to teach him a lesson by refusing to pay his bail, he spent six weeks in Winson Green Prison. His father did, however, buy him a microphone, inspiring him to pursue music seriously. Osbourne’s first gig came in 1967, when future Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler hired him for his band Rare Breed. After two gigs, they broke up, freeing the singer and Butler to join with the other future Sabbath members, guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward. The foursome were billed for a while as Earth before adopting their haunted moniker in 1969, based on a like-named horror movie. Recognizing the attraction people have to scary films, the band hit on the novel idea to translate the morbid thrill of Grand Guignol to rock ‘n roll. They did so by stressing menacing guitar riffs, shadowy bass lines, and thundering drums, topped by the Osbourne’s devilish voice. He credited their embrace of darkness to their hard life in Birmingham, and to their rebuke of San Francisco’s summer of love. “Drizzly rain, no shoes on my feet,” he told The Guardian in 2007. “And I put the radio on and there’s some guy singing ‘if you go to San Francisco, wear a flower in your hair!’ I thought, ‘this is bollocks. The only flower I’m likely to wear is on my fucking grave.’”
When Warner Bros. Records signed the group to a modest deal, the company had no idea their sound would tap into such a deep and enduring market – though, initially, their audience consisted mainly of young men. Sabbath’s self-titled debut made the British top 10 and the top 25 on the Billboard 200, remaining on the charts in the U.S. for a full year. By the fall, the band issued a powerful follow-up, Paranoid, which sold even better, leaping to No. 12 on the Billboard 200 while generating Sabbath’s two Billboard Hot 100 hits, “Iron Man” and “Paranoid.” As the band readied their third album, Master of Reality, in 1971, Osbourne married his first wife, Thelma Riley. He adopted her son from a previous marriage and the couple soon had two other children of their own. Osbourne later referred to his young marriage as a terrible mistake, given his absence on the road and growing substance abuse. While his inebriation didn’t affect the artistry of the band’s first five albums, by the late ’70s, Sabbath were floundering, both creatively and personally, due to in-fighting, lack of inspiration and heavy drug use. As a result, Osbourne was fired by the band in the spring of 1979, and replaced by ex-Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio.
For the next few months, a despondent, dejected Osbourne went on a self-destructive binge. He was rallied by Sharon Arden, whose father, Don Arden, then managed both the singer and his ex-band. Osbourne credits Arden with turning him around, and with encouraging him to form his own band, who backed him for his solo debut, Blizzard of Ozz. It became one of the best-selling works of his career, bolstered by songs like “Crazy Train” and “Mr. Crowley,” the latter penned for the famous Satanist Aleister Crowley. His follow-up, Diary of a Madman, in 1981, sold over 3 million copies. But tragedy came the next year when the gifted guitarist in his band, Randy Rhoads, was killed in the crash of a light aircraft, which also took the lives of two others. Though deeply depressed, Osbourne married Sharon four months after the incident. His solo albums continued to sell in huge numbers, never dipping below gold status, or missing the top 25 of the Billboard 200, right through his last studio work, 2010’s Scream; the only exception was a 2005 collection of interpretive recordings titled Under Covers.
In late 2011, the original lineup of Sabbath announced a reunion tour and an album to be produced by Rick Rubin. When contractual issues caused drummer Bill Ward to bow out, Rage Against the Machine’s stick-man Brad Wilk stepped in. Two years later, the band issued their first album with Osbourne in over thirty years. Titled 13, it hit No. 1 both in the U.K and on the U.S. Billboard 200. The band began a farewell tour in January of 2016, playing their final show the next February. One year later, Osbourne announced his farewell tour as a solo artist, though he insisted he would still do isolated gigs.
Osbourne is survived by his first wife, Thelma Riley, their two children, Jessica and Lewis, and their adopted son Eliot, as well as his second wife Sharon and their children, Aimee, Kelly and Jack.
Later in his life, Osbourne took pains to point out that he spent far more time as an established solo artist than in Sabbath and that he preferred the freedom allowed by the latter role. He also became sober, after years of drying out only to fall off the wagon. In interviews, he expressed an increasing sense of appreciation. “When we did our first Black Sabbath album fifty years ago I thought, ‘this will be good for a couple of albums and I’ll get a few chicks along the way,’” he told Rolling Stone in 2018. “My life has just been unbelievable. You couldn’t write my story; you couldn’t invent me.”
