Ozzy was a rock star with a personality so complex that even he never knew what he was going to do next. Ozzy was born with nitrogen instead of blood in his veins; the only way he could stop his body exploding was to try to suppress it with music, drugs, and alcohol. It seldom worked. He allegedly bit the head of a bat while on stage, thinking it was a toy. Tried to strangle his wife while on a combination of drugs and alcohol. had an affair that nearly ended the marriage.
When he was young, he worked in several jobs and probably hated most of them, but that changed when he heard ‘She Loves You’ on a blue transistor radio he was holding while walking along Witton Road, Birmingham; suddenly, he had a direction in life, something I could understand because music had started to change from black and white to colour. Somehow I missed the music of Black Sabbath, perhaps because I was seven years older, but I always liked the one song, ‘Paranoid.
Ozzy came from the same streets where my Mom lived her early life, a part of the city where I spent some of my teens.
They were made up of rows and rows of small terraced houses without front gardens. His dad was a toolmaker working at a local firm called GEC, only a short distance from where he lived. It was rare back then for most working-class families to have cars, so they tried to get jobs close to their homes.
The day after his death, I caught the metro to Birmingham and walked the short distance to the recently named Black Sabeth Bridge, mingling with an ever-growing crowd. There were People from all genres of life, just there to pay their respects, many not fans of that type of music, but most realised Ozzy felt something more important than music alone. He never forgot where he came from. Or what he came from. Ozzy loved Birmingham
Then I walked the short distance to the art gallery, where an amazing collection of his gold albums and various awards was on display. I couldn’t believe how many he had accumulated over the years. Yes, he was flawed, but we all are. And, of course, Ozzy was fortunate to be married to Sharon, who loved and cared for him despite his many faults.
He must be causing chaos in heaven.
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