A kinder bit of Satanic handiwork you'll never find
Written: Jun 01 '07
Product Rating:
Pros: Tunes both blasting and delicate. Ozzy's vocals in top form. Randy Rhoads' phenomenal playing.
Cons: One of rock's most misunderstood albums. Completely blackballed by deranged Christians.
The Bottom Line: Look past the scary cover and you'll find that this album has a very warm heart. Its sinister reputation is entirely unwarranted. Still, it rocks.
pyfr's Full Review: Blizzard of Ozz [Bonus Track] [Remaster] by Ozzy O...
When I was a kid, church leaders and their political bedfellows made all sorts of strange and funny accusations at rock n’ roll music. It would seem that the Devil was really intent on obtaining our souls back in the 1980’s, either by directly encouraging us to worship him or by influencing us to take the roundabout way of drug abuse, promiscuity, murder, and suicide. Either way, according to these hypocritical idiots (many of whom were busy raping their secretaries, fleecing their flocks of lifetime savings, and engaging in other activities far from holy), Satan was on the make and about to take off with our unsuspecting souls.
Ozzy, for a few reasons that he himself created but mostly ones he didn’t, was by far the largest target of these well-groomed witch hunters. The guy couldn’t take a dump back then without religious nutjobs seeing in it some kind of sinister occult significance. Much of his evil reputation was a holdover from his days as vocalist for Black Sabbath (which really ceased to be all that scary after their first two or three albums), but biting the head off anything that moved certainly didn’t convince society that he was fit for that T-league coaching position. Still, I’ve insisted before and I’ll say it again: the dude is relatively harmless, provided you’re not a small winged animal that falls into his clutches at the moment he decides to pull a publicity stunt. The guy can barely mumble a coherent order for bacon and eggs, let alone a Satanic prayer in backwards Latin.
When Blizzard Of Ozz came out in 1980, Ozzy accomplished a couple of things. First of all, he established himself as a solo artist who didn’t have to worry about putting Sabbath on his resume (for their part, his former bandmates briefly broke their fall by bringing Dio into the band, only to turn into crap once he bailed out). Secondly, ol’ John Osbourne stuffed the machine of Satanic paranoia so full that it was hardly able to make it down the road. The funny thing is, Blizzard contains some of the most harmless, even benevolent lyrics I’ve ever heard, yet it seems to catch more flak than the far darker Diary Of A Madman.
First off, let me say that early Ozzy stuff, with the young, talented, and soon to be deceased guitarist Randy Rhoads on board, occupied a strange niche in metal land. It was heavy yet sensitive, commercial at times yet apt to be strange and esoteric at others. I once attended a drum clinic featuring Vinnie and Carmine Appice (the former drummed for Sabbath and Dio, while the latter played with Ozzy, Blue Murder, and Rod Stewart, among others), where both brothers told stories about many musicians, Ozzy included. Apparently, the main lyricist back then was bassist Bob Daisley (Carmine claimed that Ozzy had a co-dependency thing going with Bob, and was basically unable to do anything at that point without him around), while Randy was coming up with most of the music. Whatever the case may have been, Blizzard Of Ozz was a super album, even if the Ozz himself did little more than sing on it.
Most are at least familiar with Crazy Train (a driving rocker with a must-learn guitar line for all beginning players and such wicked and diabolical lyrics as maybe it’s not too late/to learn how to love and forget how to hate) or maybe I Don’t Know (an equally rocking but less poignant number, where Ozzy admits to a lack of knowledge on just about everything). However, the real magic of Blizzard is found on some of the lesser-known tracks.
Suicide Solution is a great and ballsy song with a completely undeserved reputation of evil (Daisley wrote the lyrics after observing Ozzy’s struggle with the bottle), and Mr. Crowley, despite the uber-Gothic keyboard intro, is actually something of a chastisement against Aleister Crowley, an early twentieth-century occultist who sought enlightenment via drug experimentation, sexual practices, and magical rituals. I’d be doing the late great Randy Rhoads a huge disservice if I didn’t mention the blistering solo he unleashes there. Another example of supreme devil mania would have to be Revelation (Mother Earth), a somber, mostly acoustic number with a gorgeous piano solo and lyrics about the idiots who break God’s rules by fighting each other and killing the planet.
For anybody unfamiliar with the real Ozzy Osbourne, Goodbye To Romance will probably come as a huge surprise, as it’s one of the most tender-hearted rock ballads I’ve ever heard. No Bone Movies seems to be an attack on smut addiction (the voyeur straining, in love with his hand/a poison passion, a pulsating gland line has always disturbed me for some reason), and is easily the worst on here (unless you consider Randy’s acoustic noodle session Dee dispensable- I happen to like it). Steal Away (The Night), the final track, is by far the most demonic, with Ozzy hoping that love will flow like wine tonight and declaring that happiness is what you give to me. Keep your little ones away, my people- there’s some heavy duty peddling of wickedness going on.
It’s never ceased to surprise me that this album was released during one of the lowest periods in Ozzy’s life. It’s so full of confidence and so different from what he did in Black Sabbath that I’m almost inclined to believe that we’re talking about two different Ozzy Osbournes. What you should do is forget all about the colossal misinterpretations fostered by those fundamentalist wingnuts of yesteryear and give this album an open mind; I think you’ll find that, like much of Ozzy’s life itself, the malevolence has been invented and/or overstated to serve the agendas of a far more harmful batch of deviant characters.
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