Ozzology

The prince is gone.

Long live the prince.

You could sense it coming in the air at the Birmingham show. You could see it in the Hessian tears caught on video.

He was going to ride it out one last time before going home to mama.

Not gonna lie, I got a little choked up.

I only have a few Ozzy-adjacent stories, none of which involve me meeting him face to face.

There was the Paranoid cassette loaned to me by a bandmate in college that I never returned.

There was the contract job passing out Trojans at Ozzfest to make ends meet.

In 2007, Armed and Famous was filmed in Muncie, IN, and Jack Osbourne would pop up in our weird little dive bars on Walnut and Main. Someone would nudge your elbow and mouth that's Jack Osbourne and you'd turn to look and he'd be standing there watching a local band along with the rest of us.

We'd act like it was no big deal, or at least try to.

Before that, sister Kelly came to a Brazil show in NYC once at the Continental. Not to see us, but to catch her friends in From First to Last. She may have watched us, but it was a sea of swooping haircuts and eyeliner, as was the fashion of the time.

It was hard to tell.

I never met the Ozzman himself, but his doppelganger lives (or lived) somewhere in south Michigan. I met him during sound check at a club with a motorcycle on the wall.

He gave us a self-published book he wrote accounting for every show Ozzy ever performed, written in sort of a workingman's patois, rife with misspellings and poor grammar but thoroughly documented in astonishing detail.

He was a middle-aged guy who'd built an entire personality seemingly out of becoming Oz himself - rings, tattoos, round Dracula shades and a long black trenchcoat.

An admirable dedication to another man-as-symbol that stuck with me for a long time.

Slayer fanatics carved the band's name in their arms with razors. Ozzy fans inked 0-Z-Z-Y on their knuckles with sharpened guitar strings.

A kind of working class solidarity that linked the industrial highlands of the UK with its Rust Belt counterpart sister-city in the States.

The iron-rich blood that runs in our factory towns.

Now, who wants the talking pillow?

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What I’m reading: The Velvet Underground and Nico (Joe Harvard for 33 1/3)

What I'm listening to: The Nephilim (Fields of the Nephilim)

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