Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today is Monday,
February 2nd, 2026. And we are settling in today
to talk about an event that even six months later,
it still feels a little hard to fully process.
It really does. The world feels a little quieter,
doesn't it? A little less chaotic and definitely
a little less loud. Yeah. It's been just over
six months. since July 2025, since we lost John
Michael Osborne. And honestly, when you look
back at the footage, you know, the funeral procession
in Birmingham or that surreal moment at Buckingham
Palace, it still feels like a fever dream. That
is the image that stuck with me. You have the
cold stream guards. I mean, the literal symbol
of British rigidity and tradition. The red tunics,
the bearskin hats. Exactly. And they're standing
there playing paranoid during the changing of
the guard. I mean, if you had told a, you know,
a pearl clutching parent in 1980. that the Prince
of Darkness would get a royal send -off like
that. It would have had you committed. We would
have thought you were insane. Absolutely. It's
the ultimate irony, isn't it? It is. But that's
the story we're here to unpack today. Because
the headlines, Ozzy Osbourne dead at 76, that
doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. We
aren't just here to, like, list the hits. No.
We are here to look at the survival, the pure,
improbable nature of that survival. We have a
massive stack of sources here. We've got biographies,
retrospectives, court transcripts from those
wild lawsuits in the 80s, even the medical papers
from when they sequenced his genome back in 2010.
Oh, that's fascinating stuff. We have to get
into that later. We will. And of course, all
the reports from his final days, that final performance
at Villa Park. Our mission today is to figure
out how this kid A dyslexic abused kid from a
factory town went from a slaughterhouse to becoming
the godfather of heavy metal. And a reality TV
pioneer, a cultural icon. Yeah. And, yeah, the
guy who bit the heads off bats. All of it. We're
unpacking the man behind the Prince of Darkness
persona. So let's go back. Let's go all the way
back to the very beginning. Because usually when
we talk about rock stars, their origin stories
are, you know, art schools or maybe some kind
of middle class rebellion. Right. But to understand
Ozzy, you have to understand Aston Birmingham
in 1948. I was looking at the census data and
some of the historical records of that area post
-war. It was grim. Grim is absolutely the right
word. You really have to visualize the environment.
Michael Osborne was born December 3, 1948. And
Birmingham, Birmingham had just been decimated
by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz. Because it
was a major industrial hub, right? All the factories.
Exactly. That's where they made the planes, the
tanks. So the city was a target. And what you're
left with is a landscape of bomb sites, factories
just belching soot into the air. It wasn't a
leafy suburb. It was just gray on gray. And the
Osborne home itself at 14 Lodge Road, I read
a description of it. It was a two -bedroom terraced
house. Which sounds small, but it wasn't just
Ozzie and his parents. No, not at all. It was
his parents, Jack and Lillian, and their six
kids. Six kids. Eight people total in a two -bedroom
house. And get this. No. No indoor plumbing.
Wow. In the 1950s. Yep. They had a tin bath that
they'd have to drag in front of the coal fire
to heat up the water. And the toilet was an outhouse
in the back garden. That level of claustrophobia
of just... Constant proximity. It shapes a person.
And his parents were working nonstop. Constantly.
His father, Jack, was a toolmaker at General
Electric, working grueling night shifts. And
his mom, Lillian, worked in a car factory, testing
car components. It was a life of pure grinding
manual labor. So there wasn't really an escape
at home. And there certainly wasn't one at school
for him either. Today, we diagnose him immediately.
Instantly. But in the 1950s British school system,
if you couldn't read well, you were just labeled
thick or lazy. He had severe dyslexia. He also
had attention deficit disorder. But the teachers
just saw a troublemaker. He was humiliated by
them. He talked about being caned. Oh, yeah.
And the sources detail something much darker
that happened around that time, too. He was the
victim of pretty horrific sexual abuse by school
bullies when he was around 11 years old. Which
is something he didn't speak about publicly for
decades. A deep, deep trauma. Absolutely. And
when you combine that trauma with the constant
academic failure, with the feeling of being trapped
in this gray industrial world, you get a kid
who's just desperate to get out of his own head.
The biographies mention he attempted suicide
multiple times as a teenager. He did. He felt
completely trapped. He left school at 15 with...
Absolutely no qualifications, no prospects, nothing.
And this leads to my favorite part of his early
biography, his resume, because the list of jobs
he bounced between before music, some of them
are just bizarre. It's incredible. You know,
everyone talks about the slaughterhouse. We'll
get there. But the car factory horn tuner is
the one that always gets me. It sounds like a
Monty Python sketch, doesn't it? It really does.
I just have this image of him. You know, 16 years
old, standing on a factory line, just honking
horns all day long to check the pitch. Beep,
beep, beep, beep. For eight hours a day. The
monotony. The sheer loudness of it. Actually,
when you think about it, it's surprisingly good
training for a career in heavy metal. It really
is. But we shouldn't gloss over the slaughterhouse
job because that one was loud. That one was different.
He worked in the abattoir. So he was on the kill
floor. He was. He was killing cows, dealing with
sheep carcasses. It was visceral, smelly, bloody.
gut -wrenching work and he said later that the
screams of the animals haunted him and you think
about that later in his life when critics would
ask why his music was so dark or why he was so
comfortable with imagery of you know blood and
guts it wasn't just a costume it wasn't an act
he put on he'd spent his formative years literally
ankle deep in it he'd seen the machinery of death
up close he saw the inside of a slaughterhouse
And then he saw the inside of a cell. This is
the pivot point, right? Around 1965, he gets
arrested. He was 17. He tried to burglarize a
clothes shop in the neighborhood. But he was
not a very good burglar. What did he steal? Some
shirts and a small television that he couldn't
even carry properly. He got caught almost immediately.
The fine was relatively small, something like
40 quid. But his father, Jack, refused to pay
it. That feels harsh. Go to prison, son. It'll
teach you a lesson. It was that old school tough
love mentality. Jack had worked his whole life,
never been in trouble, and he was ashamed. So
Ozzy spends six weeks in Winston Green Prison.
And this is where he physically brands himself.
You know the famous tattoo across his knuckles?
O -Z -Z -Y. I would just assume that was done
in a proper tattoo parlor later on, you know,
once he was famous. No. He did it himself in
that prison cell. Wow. With a sewing needle and
great polish. Wait, great polish, like for a
fireplace? Essentially, yes. Graphite and grease.
He sat there and poked the ink into his own skin,
letter by letter. Just think about the pain of
that, the risk of infection. But it shows you
his mindset. He was carving out an identity.
He wasn't just John from Lodge Road anymore.
He was O -Z -Z -Y. He was marking himself as
an outsider permanently. So he comes out of prison,
he's got the tattoos, he's got all this trauma,
and he's got this dead -end life in Aston. Yeah.
How do we get from there to the invention of
an entire genre of music? Because it wasn't a
straight line. Not at all. He heard She Loves
You by the Beatles, and that was the moment he
said, that's what I want to do. He tried a few
bands, but nothing stuck. He eventually put that
ad in the paper. Ozzy Zig needs gig. And he links
up with Geezer Butler, who knew Tony Iommi and
Bill Ward. At first, they were playing blues,
the band was called. Oh, Polka Talk Blues, right.
Just a terrible name. An all -time bad band name.
Then they changed it to Earth. Which is not much
better for a metal band. It sounds like a folk
group. It was very hippie, very of the time.
Yeah. But they were playing these loud 12 -bar
blues gigs in pubs, and nobody cared. They were
bored. The audience was bored. It wasn't working.
Until the famous light bulb moment, their rehearsal
space was across the street from a movie theater.
And the theater was showing the 1963 Boris Karloff
horror movie, Black Sabbath. Right. And Tony
Iommi and Gieser are looking out the window and
they see this long line of people stretching
down the block waiting to get in. And one of
the legends is Iommi says, isn't it strange that
people pay money to get scared? That might be
the single most important insight in rock history.
It really might be. They realized that Disney
and love songs weren't the only market. Fear
is a commodity. Yeah. So they decided right then
and there to try and make music that sounded
like a horror movie. But it wasn't just a marketing
tactic, was it? It was rooted in a specific,
genuinely frightening experience that Geezer
had. Yes. This is crucial. Geezer Butler was
obsessed with the occult. He was reading all
these books by a Leister Crowley. He'd painted
his apartment black, filled it with inverted
crosses, the whole nine yards. So he was really
living it. He was. And he claims that one night
he woke up and saw a black, shadowy figure standing
at the foot of his bed, just staring at him.
He was paralyzed with terror. He told Ozzy about
it the next day. And Ozzy being Ozzy said, That's
brilliant. Let's write a song about that. And
that song became Black Sabbath. But here's where
we need to get a little technical for a second,
because the genius wasn't just in the lyrics.
It was in the music theory. It was Tony Iommi.
And the accident he had. The accident changed
everything. He was working in a sheet metal factory,
and on his last day of work, a machine sliced
off the tips of his right hand middle and ring
fingers. His fretting hand. For a guitarist,
that's a death sentence. It should have been.
He was about to give up. But then his factory
foreman gave him a record by Django Reinhardt,
the jazz guitarist. And he learned that Reinhardt
played with only two fingers after being burned
in a fire. It inspired him. So he made his own
prosthetics? He did. He melted down a plastic
liquid soap bottle and fashioned these little
thimbles for his fingertips. But he couldn't
press down on the strings as hard, so to make
it easier to play, he tuned his entire guitar
down three semitones. And that's where the sound
comes from, that heavy, doomy, sludgy sound.
That's a huge part of it. And the other part
is the specific interval he used in that first
song. He used a tritone. The diabolus of musica.
The devil's interval. Exactly. It's an augmented
fourth. Mathematically, it creates a lot of sonic
tension. In medieval times, the church literally
banned it from their music because it sounded
wrong or evil. It doesn't resolve nicely to the
ear. It leaves you feeling anxious and unsettled.
So you have the devil's interval. You have the
downtuned guitar. You have Geezer's nightmare
lyrics. And then you have Ozzy's voice. He wasn't
a blues shouter like Robert Plant. He wasn't
trying to be sexy. No, he was wailing. He sounded
like a man in agony or like an air raid siren
warning the village that the monster was coming
over the hill. It was shrill. It was desperate.
It was unsettling. So when that debut album drops
on Friday the 13th, February 1970, it doesn't
just sound different. It sounds dangerous. It
sounded like nothing else on earth. The critics,
of course, absolutely hated it. Lester Bangs
called it unimaginative. But the kids got it.
The kids in the Rust Belt, in the factory towns,
in all those depressing places, they understood
it. Because it reflected their reality. If you're
working in a steel mill in Sheffield or Pittsburgh,
flower power doesn't resonate. The crushing,
mechanical, repetitive sound of Black Sabbath
sounded like the factory floor. It was the soundtrack
to their lives. And the success was almost immediate.
But with that success came the excess. And I
want to be careful not to glamorize it because
the consumption levels were, they were just...
By the time we get to the late 70s, the band
isn't just partying. They are fundamentally non
-functional. This is the Never Say Die era, 1978,
1979. They were trying to record in Toronto.
And it was a disaster. The studio was freezing
cold. They were spending, by their own admission,
thousands of dollars a week on cocaine and alcohol.
Tony Iommi said in his biography that they'd
show up to the studio and just stare at each
other. They couldn't play. The creative well
was dry, and the friction between Ozzy and Tony
Iommi was getting physical. Oh, it was. There's
a famous story about a fight in a hotel room
where Ozzy, in a complete drunken rage, took
a swing at Tony, and Tony, who was a big guy
and a trained boxer. He just decked him. Knocked
him out cold. The communication had completely
broken down. It was just anger and paranoia fueled
by substances. So in April 1979, the band made
the call. Bill Ward was sent to do it. He went
to Ozzy's hotel room and told him he was out.
The official reason given was unreliability and
excessive substance abuse. Which, coming from
the other members of Black Sabbath at that time,
is just, it's the pot calling the kettle black.
It was incredibly hypocritical and Ozzy knew
it. He said, we were all messed up. But Ozzy
was the one who was falling apart the most visibly.
He was the one who would just disappear for days
on end. He was the scapegoat. So he's fired.
He's 30 years old. He gets a payout of 96 ,000
pounds for his share of the name. And his reaction
is, well, it's terrifying. He went to the Le
Parc Hotel in West Hollywood. He took all that
money. He bought cases of booze. He bought a
mountain of drugs. And he locked the door. And
his plan was just to die. His plan was to stay
there. until the money ran out or his heart gave
out, whichever came first. He was fully prepared
to drink and drug himself to death and, if he
somehow survived, end up back on the dole in
Birmingham. That was it. Career over. And this
is where the story should have ended. A tragic
rock and roll flame out. But then there's a knock
on the door. Enter Sharon Arden. Now, at this
point, she isn't Sharon Osbourne, the TV star.
Most people have never heard of her. She's just
the 27 -year -old daughter of Don Arden. And
Don Arden was one of the most feared music managers
in the business. They called him the Al Capone
of pop. He was known for dangling rivals out
of windows. A genuinely scary guy. And he managed
Sabbath. He did. So he signed Ozzy to a solo
deal, mostly just to keep him as a business asset,
but he didn't want to deal with the mess himself.
So he sends his daughter Sharon to Los Angeles
to look after the investment. And she walks into
that hotel room. She walks in and she sees this
absolute wreck of a human being. Yeah. A pale,
shaking, bloated man surrounded by pizza boxes
and empty bottles. And something just shifts.
It wasn't instant romance, though, was it? It
was business first. It was survival. She cleaned
him up. She told him, basically, if you want
to work, Get up. If you want to die, stay here.
She forced him to start auditioning musicians
for a new band. And the romance blossomed out
of that, out of that codependency and that shared
ambition. It did. They eventually got married
in 1982 on July 4th. And Ozzy famously said he
chose Independence Day so he'd never, ever forget
his anniversary, which is very practical. Very
on brand for Ozzy. But before the wedding, they
had to build a band. And this is the most critical
musical turning point in Ozzy's entire life.
because he finds a young, quiet kid from a band
called Quiet Riot, a guy named Randy Rhodes.
We have to do a deep dive on Randy here, because
the shift in sound from Sabbath's Never Say Die
to Ozzy's Blizzard of Oz, it's just... It's drastic.
It is night and day. Tony Iommi was a genius,
but he played heavy, trudging, blues -based riffs.
He mainly used the pentatonic scale. It was muddy
and dark and powerful. But Randy Rhoads was different.
Randy Rhoads was a music teacher. He was a student
of the craft. He understood classical theory.
He played in modes Aeolian, Phrygian. He brought
elements of Bach and Vivaldi into heavy metal.
He was a virtuoso. A true virtuoso. If you listen
to the main riff of Crazy Train, that's not a
blues lick. It's precise, it's staccato, it's
almost baroque in its structure. And his solos,
his solos were these perfectly composed, lightning
fast, melodic pieces of music. And it forced
Ozzy to sing differently. Completely. He couldn't
just wail over the top of it. He had to find
actual melodies that could fit inside these complex
chord structures. Randy pushed him to be a better
vocalist, a better songwriter. And the chemistry
was instant. Blizzard of Oz comes out in 1980
and suddenly Ozzy isn't a has -been. He's the
biggest thing in rock. He completely eclipsed
Black Sabbath. You know that had to hurt the
guys in his old band. Here's Ozzy, the guy they
fired for being a mess, selling out arenas with
this blonde guitar god by his side. It was a
golden era. It felt like it would last forever.
Until March 19th, 1982, Leesburg, Florida. The
darkest day. The band is on a tour bus driving
to a festival in Orlando. The bus has a faulty
air conditioning unit, so they pull over at a
property owned by the bus company to get it fixed.
It was a place called the Flying Baron Estates.
And there's a small private airstrip there. There
is. And the bus driver, Andrew Aycock, who had
a pilot's license, decides to take a small, single
-engine Beechcraft Bonanza plane for a joyride.
Without permission. He'd been up all night driving.
Up all night. And the toxicology report later
showed he had cocaine in his system. He does
one flight with the keyboardist, Don Airy, and
their chore manager. That goes fine. Then he
lands and takes up Randy Rhodes and Rachel Youngblood,
the band's seamstress and makeup artist. And
Randy. Randy was famously afraid of flying. He
was terrified of it. He only went up because
he wanted to take some aerial photographs of
the Florida countryside for his mom. He was a
devoted son. That detail always just breaks my
heart. He was just a sweet kid wanting to take
some photos for his mother. The pilot. Aycock,
for some reason, decides to start buzzing the
tour bus, diving the plane down low to try and
scare the people sleeping inside. His ex -wife
was actually on the bus. Some people speculate
he was trying to hit the bus or just scare her.
We'll never know for sure. He did it twice successfully.
The third time, he miscalculated. He came in
too low. The left wing of the plane clipped the
top of the tour bus. It just ripped the wing
right off. The plane spun out of control, cartwheeled
across the property, crashed into the garage
of a nearby mansion, and exploded into a massive
fireball. And Ozzie? Ozzie was asleep on the
bus. He said the impact felt like the bus had
hit a car. He woke up, stumbled outside in a
daze, and just saw the inferno. Randy, Rachel,
and the pilot died instantly. They couldn't even
identify the bodies at first. They had to use
dental records. Randy was only 25 years old.
And this just, this broke Ozzy. I mean, we talk
about his madman years and the antics, but this
was a profound psychological break. He lost his
best friend. He lost his creative soulmate. He
said later that a part of him died in that field
in Florida. And yet... This is the Sharon factor
again. They didn't cancel the tour. No. By modern
standards, it seems insane. They took about a
week off, hired a replacement guitarist, Brad
Gillis, and put Ozzy back on stage. No grief
counseling, no time to process, just the show
must go on. And it absolutely fueled his addiction.
He was drinking to numb the grief, to get through
the shows. The next few years, the Bark at the
Moon and the Ultimate Sin era, he was functioning,
he was selling records, but he was hollowed out.
And this is where the Madman mythology really
takes over. The 1980s were just one long list
of controversies for him. It starts with the
Satanism panic. This was the era of the PMRC,
the Parents Music Resource Center, led by Tipper
Gore. There was this widespread belief in America,
particularly in the Christian right, that heavy
metal was the root of all evil. And Ozzy was
poster boy number one. He was public enemy number
one. Cardinal John O 'Connor in New York actually
gave a sermon from the pulpit calling Ozzy's
music a help to the devil. Televangelists were
burning his records on TV. Which is just hilarious
because Ozzy was just a guy from Birmingham who
loved the Beatles and could barely read. Exactly.
Yeah. But he was smart. Or rather, Sharon was.
They leaned into it. When the establishment called
him a Satanist, he wrote Mr. Crowley, a song
about the occultist Leicester Crowley. He played
the villain because it sold tickets and wound
up the right people. But he also did things that
made him an incredibly easy target. The animal
incidents. We have to set the record straight
on the dove and the bat because people still
get the details mixed up. Okay, the dove. This
was 1981. This was calculated until it wasn't.
Sharon wanted him to make a good impression at
a big CBS records meeting in L .A. The plan was,
Ozzy walks in, he releases two white doves as
a sign of peace, they take some photos, and he
leaves. A nice, simple PR stunt. A simple PR
stunt. But Ozzy was incredibly drunk and bored
by the corporate speeches, so he just, he grabs
one of the doves, bites its head off, and spits
it on the conference table. Oh my god. The room
goes silent. She then pulls the other dove out,
and is about to do it again, when security guards
physically drag him out of the building. And
the bat. That was in Des Moines, Iowa in 1982.
That's a genuine mistake. It was a weird time.
Fans used to throw things on stage like raw meat
and snakes and stuff. Someone threw what Ozzy
thought was a rubber toy bat on the stage. It
was a real bat. It was a real bat. It was either
dead or stunned from being in the crowd. Ozzy,
doing his monster act, picked it up, put it in
his mouth and bit down. And the bat bit him back.
It clamped down on his tongue. He realized immediately
this was real. This was warm blood. He had to
be rushed to the hospital after the show for
a series of incredibly painful rabies shots,
which they inject directly into your stomach
and thigh. He spent the rest of the tour terrified
he was going to start foaming at the mouth. It's
like slapstick horror. But the next controversy
wasn't funny at all. The suicide solution lawsuits.
This is where the legal system tried to pin a
teenager's death on a rock song. This is a crucial
moment for free speech in America. In 1984, a
19 -year -old kid named John McCollum from California
committed suicide. He was found with headphones
on, listening to Ozzy's records. And his parents
sued Ozzy and the record label? They did. They
claimed the song, Suicide Solution. contained
subliminal messages or hemisync tones that hypnotized
their son into killing himself. They actually
brought in a research firm, the Institute for
Bioacoustics, to analyze the audio waves, didn't
they? They did. And they claimed to have found
subliminal lyrics sped up saying, get the gun,
shoot, shoot. It was the height of the satanic
panic. People were ready to believe anything.
And what was Ozzy's defense? Two things. First,
that the lyrics were completely misinterpreted.
The title, Suicide Solution, wasn't about solution
as an answer or a fix. It was solution as a liquid
mixture. Alcohol. Oh. The song was an elegy he
wrote about Bon Scott, the singer of ACDC, who
had recently drank himself to death. The lyrics
are a warning. Wine is fine, but whiskey's quicker
suicide is slow with liquor. He was saying, don't
do this to yourself. This is an anti -suicide
song, and the shoot, shoot lyrics. That was just
him ad -libbing in the studio, and what he was
actually saying was, get the glass out, shoot,
shoot, as in shooting a drink. The judge, thankfully,
ruled in Ozzie's favor. On what grounds? Freedom
of speech. The court basically said that art
cannot be held liable for the actions of the
consumer unless there is a direct and immediate
incitement to violence. It was a landmark case.
But it dragged on for years and cost them millions.
It took a massive toll on them. You look at the
stress, the grief for Randy, the rabies shots,
the arrests at the Alamo for urinating on a national
monument. While wearing Sharon's dress, no less.
Right. And then you add the drug intake. I want
to jump to section four here. The survivor. Because
scientifically, he shouldn't be dead now. He
should have been dead in 1990. Absolutely. The
levels of consumption are just. They're beyond
comprehension. There was a period in the 80s
where a doctor... In Beverly Hills, a Dr. Alan
Schwemmer, who was later investigated and lost
his license -prescribed Aussie over 13 ,000 doses
of narcotics in a single year. That's, what is
that, like 35 pills a day? Roughly. Yeah. Every
single day, on top of liters of vodka and cognac.
And he also admitted at one point to taking four
tabs of acid every day for two years straight.
I don't even know how the human brain functions
at that point. It doesn't, usually. Which is
why, in 2010, a Massachusetts -based company
called Gnome, a genetics research company, decided
to sequence Ozzy's full genome. They wanted to
see if he was a medical anomaly. A genetic freak.
Was he? He absolutely was. It wasn't just that
he had a strong liver or something. Yeah. It
was written in his DNA. They found a specific
and very rare mutation on the ADH4 gene. What
does that gene do? It's the gene responsible
for creating the enzyme that breaks down alcohol
and removes it from the system. Ozzy's version
of this gene was supercharged. His body could
metabolize alcohol and other toxins at a rate
that would kill a normal person. So he was literally
built for it. And didn't they find a lot of Neanderthal
DNA too? Yes. Significantly more than the average
European. The scientists joked that he was literally
a distinct subspecies of human. He was genetically
predisposed to survive the party. But the party
almost cost him his family. The 1989 Moscow Music
Peace Festival incident. This is the absolute
rock bottom. He had just performed at this massive
concert in Moscow. He came home, still loaded
on Russian vodka. which he always said made him
violent and blackout, unlike other drugs. He
walked into the bedroom where Sharon was reading.
And he just snapped. He looked at her, completely
dead -eyed, and said, We've come to a decision
that you have to go. And he lunged at her and
began choking her. My God. She managed to find
and hit a panic button they had installed. The
police arrived just in time. Ozzie woke up in
a jail cell with absolutely no memory of the
event. He asked the cop, Why am I here? And the
cop said, You're here for the attempted murder
of your wife. That chills me every time I read
it. That's not rock and roll antics. That's domestic
violence. That's terrifying. It is. And Sharon
controversially dropped the charges, but she
gave him the ultimate ultimatum. Go to rehab
and get properly clean or you will never see
me or your children again. And that was the real
turning point. He went to rehab. He started the
long, slow climb back to something resembling
sobriety. And that climb led to the most unexpected,
most bizarre, and most successful second act
in the history of entertainment, the MTV era.
The Osbournes, 2002. We have to remember what
television was like before this show. Reality
TV was Survivor or The Real World? Game shows?
There was no keeping up with the Kardashians.
The celeb reality show did not exist as a genre.
And then MTV puts cameras in Ozzy Osbourne's
house. And instead of seeing the Prince of Darkness
sacrificing goats in the backyard. We saw a confused
shuffling dad trying to figure out how to use
a TV remote. We saw him yelling at his dogs for
peeing on the expensive carpet. We saw him struggling
to punch Rashbag in the bin. It completely demystified
him. It humanized him in a way nothing else could
have. Suddenly, the guy who bit the head off
a bat was just America's dad. He was vulnerable.
He was hearing impaired. He mumbled. He was actually
really funny. And the world fell in love with
him all over again, but for a completely different
reason. It became the highest rated show on MTV's
history. It made them hundreds of millions of
dollars. It paved the way for the entire Kardashian
empire. And it legitimized him to the mainstream.
He was hosting the American Music Awards. He
was performing for the Queen. He was having dinner
with President George W. Bush at the White House
Correspondents' Dinner. Which is just mind -blowing
when you think about where he came from. But
we also have to credit Sharon's business acumen
here with Ozzfest. Yes, this started because
of a rejection, which is a running theme in their
story. Wallapalooza. Wallapalooza. The cool alternative
90s festival. They told Sharon that Ozzy was
a dinosaur and uncool. They wouldn't put him
on the bill. And Sharon said, screw you. We'll
start our own festival. And Ozzfest became the
biggest touring festival in the world for a time.
It grossed over $170 million. But more importantly.
It launched the careers of an entire generation
of metal bands. Slipknot, System of a Down, Disturbed,
Linkin Park. So he wasn't just a dinosaur. He
used his legacy to platform the next generation.
He was the T -Rex leading the pack. So he conquered
the 70s with Sabbath, the 80s with Randy, the
90s with Ozzfest, and the 2000s with reality
TV. But time. Time is the one thing you can't
beat. Let's talk about the decline. The long
goodbye from 2019 to 2025. It started with something
so mundane. A fall. As simple as that. In early
2019, he got up in the middle of the night to
go to the bathroom, tripped in the dark, and
fell flat on his face. And because of his previous
accidents, he'd had a really bad quad bike crash
in 2003. His body was already full of metal rods
and plates. The fall dislodged the metal rods
in his spine. It compressed his vertebrae. He
needed multiple complex surgeries. The pain was
excruciating and constant. It triggered a domino
effect of health issues. And then amidst the
recovery from that came the diagnosis we had
all sort of feared was coming. Parkinson's disease.
He revealed it in a really emotional interview
on Good Morning America in early 2020. We started
to see the visible effects, the tremors, the
difficulty walking. And the tours just kept getting
canceled. The No More Tours 2, which was supposed
to be his final run, just kept getting postponed.
postponed, and then finally canceled for good.
It felt like we were watching him fade away in
real time. But, and this is why he's a legend,
he didn't stop making music. In the middle of
all this pain, this physical decline, he puts
out two of the best albums of his career. Ordinary
Man in 2020 and Patient No. 9 in 2022. Working
with producer Andrew Watt gave him this modern,
vital sound. And the collaborations were amazing.
Elton John, Jeff Beck. Impost Malone. The track,
Take What You Want. That track was brilliant.
It was a massive hit. It put Ozzy back in the
top 10 for the first time in 30 years. And the
lyrics on those final albums were so raw, so
honest. He was singing about death, about saying
goodbye, about being patient number nine. He
wasn't hiding from the decline. He was turning
it into art. Which leads us to the final stand,
July 5, 2025, Birmingham, Villa Park, the home
of his beloved Aston Villa Football Club. The
back to the beginning show. We all knew it was
a one -off. He physically couldn't tour. But
he summoned the strength for one last night in
his hometown. And he got the band back together,
the original band. The rumors were true. Tony
Iommi was there. Geezer Butler was there. And
yes, after all the bad blood and contract disputes,
even Bill Ward was there on drums. They put it
all aside for him. Tell me about the staging.
Because he couldn't stand for two hours. No,
he was largely immobile by then. So they leaned
into the Prince of Darkness persona one last
time. They built this massive Gothic iron throne
at center stage. Black velvet carved skulls,
the works. He performed the entire show sitting
there. like a king holding court. 40 ,000 people
in the stadium. And 5 .8 million streaming live
around the world. I was watching this stream
when I only hit the opening riff of War Pigs,
the sound of the crowd singing along. It was
so loud it drowned out the PA system. It was
deafening. Ozzy didn't have to move. He just
had to be there. And how was his voice? It held
up. It had that familial crack, that haunting
waver, but the power was still there. When they
finished the encore with Paranoid, Fireworks
going off over Aston, he just yelled, I love
you all, one last time into the mic. It was the
perfect ending. It brought the entire story full
circle, from the slaughterhouse in Aston to a
sold -out stadium in Aston. And all the proceeds
went to Parkinson's UK and the Birmingham Children's
Hospital. Even at the very end, he was giving
back. But we didn't realize how close the end
really was. No. We thought maybe he'd have a
few years of quiet retirement. But it was just
17 days later. July 22, 2025. He passed away
at his estate, Welder's House, in Buckinghamshire.
The official report cited a heart attack with
complications from Parkinson's. Sharon said he
went peacefully in his sleep. No pain. For a
man whose entire life was defined by violence
and noise, he got the most peaceful exit possible.
The global reaction was what you'd expect. Tributes
from Metallica to Elton John to Paul McCartney.
But I want to talk about the funeral procession
in Birmingham. It was a pilgrimage. They drove
the hearse past his childhood home at 14 Lodge
Road. They drove it over the Black Sabbath Bridge
on the canal. The streets were lined with tens
of thousands of fans. And it wasn't just metalheads
in leather jackets. No, that was the amazing
thing. It was grandmothers. Little kids with
their parents, people in business suits who had
stepped out of their offices. It felt like a
state funeral for the Republic of Rock and Roll.
It was. And then that moment at Buckingham Palace
we mentioned at the start, the Queen's Guard
playing paranoid. It signified that he wasn't
an outsider anymore. He was a British institution.
He was as much a part of the cultural fabric
as Fish and Chips or James Bond. Now that we're
here in 2026, we have the documentary No Escape
From. Now we have his final autobiography, Last
Rites. We have the full picture. So what is the
ultimate legacy? It's the dichotomy. That's the
magic word for Ozzy. If he was just the crazy
drug guy, he would be a footnote, a cautionary
tale. If he was just the mumbling reality TV
dad, he'd be a joke. But he was both, and neither,
all at the same time. He was a complete and utter
paradox. He was a villain who was deeply lovable.
He was a multimillionaire superstar who never
lost his working -class Aston accent. He was
the Prince of Darkness who wrote these incredibly
tender, beautiful ballads like Changes and Mama,
I'm Coming Home. And above all else, he was a
survivor. That's the headline. He survived the
poverty of post -war Britain. He survived abuse.
He survived the loss of his best friend. He survived
an addiction that should have killed him ten
times over. And he survived the music industry
itself, which is maybe the hardest trick of all.
It's hard to imagine the world without him. He
was such a constant presence for over 50 years.
He changed the sound of music forever with Black
Sabbath. He changed the image of the rock frontman
with his solo career. He changed the face of
television with the Osbournes. There aren't many
people who can say they revolutionized global
culture three separate times. I want to leave
our listeners with a final thought. We live in
an era now where celebrities are media trained
from the moment they're discovered. Their social
media is drafted by committees. They issue a
public apology if they say something even slightly
controversial. It's the era of the polished,
sanitized star. Exactly. So my question is, will
we ever see an Ozzy Osbourne again? Someone so
raw, so unfiltered, so chaotic, and so undeniably
authentically themselves, or was he the last
of the true Iron Men? I think we all know the
answer to that. There was only one double O.
I think you're right. Tonight, if you're listening
to this, pour yourself a drink, or don't, and
put on Black Sabbath Fall 4 or Blizzard of Oz.
Turn it up until the neighbors complain. It's
what he would have wanted. Rest in peace, Ozzy.
Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. We'll
see you next time.