Sometimes, some of the best music happens accidentally. It’s sort of how The Traveling Wilburys formed, after George Harrison casually floated the idea of a supergroup to Jeff Lynne. And it’s also how Ozzy Osbourne ended up writing an entire record with Steve Vai in the 1990s, when casual collaboration somehow turned into a more extensive piece of material.
No one will ever truly know what goes on inside Osbourne’s head, just as no one will ever know how to understand the inner workings of a true legend. But it’s probably safe to say that he’s exercised a fair bit of spontaneity throughout his life, some instances more substance-inspired than others. The big, great overwhelm that comes with trying to understand someone as musically monumental as our Ozzy is that there is simply far too much to talk about, especially if you’re to venture outside of the music, in which case everything becomes a bit hazy.
But that’s all a part of the fun, too. There are several parts of Osbourne’s life that just don’t make much sense, or seem too off-kilter to try to apply any logic to. If it isn’t his notorious antics while under the influence, it’s his unpredictability in interviews, or unexpected moments of comic relief, or even better – the remarks that seem deeply troubled to analyse today, but which were once brushed under the carpet with a shrug and a look that simply said, “Well, that’s just Ozzy.”
But, musically, Osbourne seems to never stop. He once said the secret to maintaining the musical spark or keeping intellectual stimulation is to never stop writing, to keep pen to paper even if the ideas are bad, just so you keep connected to what it is that you love the most, no matter what. And this is probably also why, when he started working with Steve Vai during Ozzmosis in the ’90s, things unexpectedly spiralled, and they ended up with more material than they’d bargained for.
Vai was working on Fire Garden at the time, and the thing that got them together in the first place was the plan to work on a song for Osbourne’s record. They fell into a natural groove, making music together without thinking about plans, deadlines, and the like. Until Osbourne’s management prompted him to decide on a song they’d worked on to include in Ozzmosis (‘My Little Man’). The rest of the material they created fell by the wayside.
“I got carried away because we were having a lot of fun,” Vai explained to Eonmusic, “And we ended up recording a lot of stuff. And then we started scheming; ‘hey, let’s make a new record!’, and all that was fine and good, and we got excited about it until the hammer came down, and they basically said, ‘What are you doing? No, you’ve just got to take a song from Vai and finish your record. We’re already into it for this much money, and Vai is expense’, so it worked out perfect, really.”
He added: “I’m sitting on a whole Ozzy record, and it’s like the Gash record – not ‘like’ the Gash record – but it’s a project that I recorded that’s sitting on the shelf. I don’t have any control over it or rights to it, obviously, but we did record some pretty good stuff.”
He also went on to explain that, while the songs they created would have to be re-recorded to form a full album, the sounds they made don’t “sound like anything else”, meaning there’s a goldmine of unreleased material somewhere that could reveal more about Osbourne’s tastes and attitudes in the mid-1990s than we thought. Still, though, it’s unlikely these mysterious tunes will ever make their way to the surface, considering how far into the dark they’ve fallen since Vai first revealed the news.
