A Requiem For Ozzy Osbourne

Plus: I Saw Oasis at Wembley Stadium on Friday! And the great new Ryan Davis LP is out now!

Allo! Checking in from jolly old England. I’ve been in London since Tuesday. Great city! Nice people! No ice cubes! Why no ice cubes?

Also: I saw Oasis on Friday at Wembley Stadium with my friend Australian Dave. An incredible experience I’ll be writing about in much more depth once I get back to the States and my day job. But for now I’ll say this: Outside of England, Oasis can be a good live act, and occasionally Oasis can be a mediocre live act. But inside of England, there are an incredible live act.

The devotion this band inspires here has to be seen to be believed. I’ll tell a quick story to illustrate my point: The other day I went to a pub near where I’m staying with my pal Alex. He was telling me about the first time he went to this place a number of years ago. They were having a piano sing-along night, and they started doing Oasis songs. One after another. And another. And another. Not just the big ones, but also the B-sides. And not just the B-sides, but also the album deep cuts. Deep cuts only the heads in America care about. Only this bunch of normal everyday English drinkers knew every single one. Alex (who like me hails from the American Midwest) says that the crowd was able to get halfway into “The Girl In The Dirty Shirt” until they finally started missing a word or two.

Like I said, I’ll be writing more about this soon. For now, I want to talk a bit about some news that hit the day I landed in England.

Ozzy Osbourne died on Tuesday July 22, 2025 at the age of 76. The news might have been surprising if you watched him perform 17 days prior at the Black Sabbath farewell show. Though maybe it wasn’t surprising if you watched the livestream of that last hurrah. Afflicted with Parkinson’s, Ozzy looked frail and hauntingly fragile. Ill health had burdened him for some time, but this time the “farewell” part of the billing seemed like it could be all too apt. Alas, it was.

Ozzy is the first original member of Black Sabbath to die. (His replacement, Ronnie James Dio, passed on in 2010.) I don’t know if anyone has remarked upon this, but it’s stunning to me that this band of all bands has been so durable. All four Ramones are long gone, and the death of Garth Hudson earlier this year finally took out all five guys in The Band. Two of the Beatles have left us, as have two of the original Rolling Stones. But until this week, Satan’s favorite quartet was still intact. Never say die, indeed.

Much has been said and written in the past few days about Black Sabbath, particularly the first five albums, the run from 1970’s Black Sabbath up through 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath that stands as not only a defining body of work in metal, but in all of rock music. (I also have affection for the next three records Ozzy made with Sabbath, especially 1975’s Sabotage and 1976’s underrated Technical Ecstasy, but there’s no disputing those records are slightly downward steps.) The consensus on those early LPs is pretty much unanimous at this point. Nobody disputes their greatness or influence. It’s an agreed-upon fact that Black Sabbath is a foundational band for modern rock music, from metal to punk to grunge to alt-rock to indie and so on and so forth. Which is pretty amazing when you consider that, for a good 20 or so years at least, they were treated as a joke by the critical community. If memory serves — I’m on the road so I don’t have access to my home library — the first two editions of The Rolling Stone Record Guide rated those first five Sabbath records one star a piece. They were dismissed as brain-dead boogie for stoners! But in retrospect the hostility from the first generation of music writers likely stemmed from Sabbath being the first important post-1960s band, which in time morphed into them becoming one of the architects of how contemporary rock would sound, look and feel.

After Ozzy died, some dope on the social app formerly known as Twitter opined that Osbourne’s “main contribution” to Black Sabbath “was his strange & iconic voice,” which the tweeter construed as a criticism “because everyone else in the band was way more important.” It’s an odd point to make about a man who was, of course, the lead singer. What more can be possibly expected of a lead singer than to provide an “iconic voice”? It’s true that Ozzy wasn’t sonically influential in the way that Robert Plant was, given the scores of poodle-haired screamers who followed in the wake of Led Zeppelin. Ozzy’s voice has always been unusual. It was, in a sense, flat and limited. He couldn’t soar like Plant, and he wasn’t an operatic growler like Roger Daltrey. He was pitched between those extremes; he didn’t sound like a tenor, exactly, it was more like his voice was pure treble. It proved to be a perfect counterpoint to the surly rumble summoned by the three instrumentalists in Black Sabbath, who created the fattest three-pronged bass sound on planet Earth. (Or “Planet Caravan.”) Ozzy had to cut through that sludge with his voice, and cut through he did.

Ozzy’s influence wasn’t musical, it was attitudinal. He was the first rock god who was also just a guy. He once, famously, worked in a slaughterhouse and he made no attempt to disguise that fact. Instead, he leaned into it. He made it part of his onstage persona. When you hear Ozzy sing, what you hear is his toughness, his naturalness, his audio vérité intensity. All the things that grounded even the silliest Black Sabbath songs. Listen to “Black Sabbath,” the first song on the first album Ozzy and the band ever made, and imagine a more conventional He-Man rock singer like Plant or Daltrey singing it. Yes, Tony Iommi’s riff is exquisite. And, of course, Geezer Butler’s lyric is genuinely spooky and Bill Ward’s drums give the song its theatrical dynamics. But “Black Sabbath” absolutely fails without the crazed conviction of Ozzy’s vocal, the way he screams like “oh no! No! Please God help me!” like he’s Robert Johnson singing “Hellhound On My Trail.” Without that vocal, “Black Sabbath” becomes a dated B-movie curio treasured by metal historians and few others. But Ozzy elevated it into something greater and more lasting. He made it more believable. It’s like the difference between the Old Hollywood stars like James Cagney and Clark Gable and the Method guys who came in during the 1950s and changed film acting forever. Ozzy set the template for modern rock singers just as surely as Marlon Brando did for actors.

Not that Ozzy ever demanded that kind of recognition. He was a great artist, but he is the only capital-G Great artist I can think of (in rock music anyway) who didn’t care whether you thought he was smart. He never did a soul-baring interview with Jann Wenner, and you never saw him commenting on the events of the day with Dick Cavett. He willfully cultivated a dumb guy “are you high? Well so am I!” image. Because that’s what the job required.

The downside of this is that people (especially in the press) who hadn’t achieved 1/1000th of what he had felt perfectly comfortable condescending to him. But that was part of the package, an essential ingredient of what made him great, the lack of pretension that also informed his unvarnished realness. With the exception of Elvis, nobody was more skilled at simultaneously lampooning himself while also reveling in his own legend. In this analogy, the reality series The Osbournes counts as Ozzy’s “Fat Elvis” Vegas period, the time when the jokes started to overshadow the art. But even as he invited you to laugh at the Master Of Darkness doddering around his L.A. mansion like a senile grandfather — his version of the white jumpsuit — he could still fill you with awe when you caught him up close.

That was the case for me when I saw Black Sabbath in 2016 on a previous “farewell” tour. I stood on Geezer’s side of the stage, but I kept my eyes fixed mostly on Ozzy and Tony, two titans leaning on each other as they battled their own respective health issues. They were in their element, playing “Paranoid” and “Iron Man” and “N.I.B.” and “Sweet Leaf” and so many other classics in a Middle American arena for scores of inebriated maniacs. They had been broken by life, as we all are eventually, but they weren’t defeated. Not with those songs. Not with that sound. On that night, they were destined to live forever.

I’ve talked about Ryan Davis previously in this newsletter, and my big interview with him published this week. Ryan is a smart, thoughtful guy, and I really appreciated his candor re: the near-constant David Berman comparisons his just-released album New Threats From The Soul has garnered, as well as his own complicated relationship with the late singer-songwriter.

When I was in State Champion, I was actively listening to the Silver Jews and trying to figure out how to write songs like that, whereas I’ve not listened to those records since David died. But it’s not been until now that people want to talk about the Berman thing. And it’s just so interesting to me because no one ever used to compare State Champion to the Silver Jews.

I think it’s a comparison people make because of the sound of your voice, which is similar to Berman, and the country-rock milieu you operate in. And there’s the fact that Berman praised your writing. It seems like an obvious comparison to make. But like you said, there is something else going on, where Berman now is like Hank Williams for the current generation of songwriters. An icon who died tragically young that everyone now seems to point to as the ultimate purveyor of the form.

I guess what I’m saying is I always ripped him off. But for some reason, now I’m part of this pack of people who are ripping off Berman where it’s like, I’m not even thinking about David Berman anymore. It’s actually a topic that I don’t even like to talk about too much because it’s complicated, and it’s personal. We were close to him at the end, and some of the people in State Champion were helping him with that tour. And when he died, it was just the twist of the knife at the end of that band. It’s still hard to talk about and think about, but it’s just so weird to me now that it’s all coming back and that’s what every review wants to talk about.

I must imagine that being compared to the guy many consider the greatest songwriter of his generation is a big compliment. At the same time, nobody wants to be compared to somebody else. You always want to be your own person. It’s positive, and also a prison.

I think that’s a good way of putting it. But yeah, I can’t complain. I’m the one that put a quote of his on a sticker on the front of my record. Maybe I dug my own grave with that, but I think it’s ultimately a good thing. I’ve never really talked about this before, but we tried out to be the Purple Mountains band. We jammed with Berman, learned the songs, and hung out with him for a few hours. There’s video of it somewhere, and we were pretty close to the fire. Our violin player was the tour manager, and we were supposed to play some of those shows, and it was just all infighting and stressful in an interpersonal way. And then when he died, it was just kind of like, what’s the point of any of this?

Read the whole column here, and listen to Ryan’s album here.

What are you all hearing these days? Let me know in the comments!