Totaling an appropriately witchy 13 tracks, plus one inessential studio outtake, Tribute was primarily recorded at a 1981 tour stop in Cleveland, Ohio. Lee, etc.-and of course Randy Rhoads, whose playing is featured on Blizzard and Diary and whose spectacularly melodramatic death by airplane misadventure in 1982 (at age 25) led a bereaved Ozzy to give Rhoads equal billing on the live collection Tribute, released half a decade later in 1987. Of course the bulk of these pyrotechnics during this period of Osbourne’s career came via the singer’s rotating stable of hotshot guitar ringers: Zakk Wylde, Brad Gillis, Jake E.
But despite its often-kitschy packaging, the music found on these records is no less innovative, hard rocking, and technically dazzling. The music on Ozzy’s classic early solo records-1980’s Blizzard of Ozz, 1981’s Diary of a Madman, 1983’s Bark at the Moon-was lighter, faster, and fizzier than anything by his previous band, coupled with an image that was a lot more Halloween-pop-up-shop-at-the-strip-mall than full-on Satanic Black Mass. I don’t know the man personally, but if I had to put money on it, I’d wager the most authentic version of Ozzy Osbourne is early-1980s-solo-period Ozzy, who was no less drug-crazed and out-of-control (watch out, bats!) but who, overall, presented as a much more lighthearted figure than the glowering demon he struck as the frontman for Black Sabbath. But which of these two is the “real” Ozzy Osbourne? On the other, the doddering, ironically re-contextualized sitcom dad of tacky early-2000s MTV reality program The Osbournes.
On the one hand, you have 1970s Black Sabbath-era Osbourne: a terrifying proto-goth drug maniac, a wild-eyed rock Rasputin chilling the blood of Middle America. And while the Brummie vocalist has been a fixed part of pop culture since 1970, the public’s perception of Osbourne has vacillated wildly. For four decades, John Osbourne has been music’s steadfast, avuncular Black Pope of Heavy Metal.
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