Most casual rock fans were never going to be prepared for what Ozzy Osbourne was going to do in Black Sabbath.
Countless artists have tried to excite the audience every single time they went onstage, but even after getting used to Robert Plant’s wails, hearing ‘The Prince of Darkness’ take to the stage looking like a madman that’s been let off the chain, he clearly wasn’t into the same tender-hearted ballads that John Lennon was used to singing at the time. He was taking no prisoners whenever he played, but he got a lot of his lessons from watching the true originators of rock and roll showmanship.
After all, what was Osbourne’s onstage rapport if not a pale imitation of what people like Elvis Presley had done a few years ago? Sure, ‘The King’ might have been absolutely disgusted seeing what Osbourne was going to do every single night, but at the same time, both of them were known for their distinctive voices, being able to cause a stir from the minute they began playing, and were enough to excite any young fan wanting to hear something dark at the time.
Because think about it for a second: what was considered ‘heavy’ at the time Sabbath debuted? Led Zeppelin was a relatively new band when Sabbath’s debut came out, and if we’re talking about pure heavy rock and roll, the closest thing that most people had to something like that on the charts would have probably been the early Kinks singles like ‘You Really Got Me’ or ‘All Day and All of the Night’.
But if any band fit the bill of “dangerous” back in the day, it was The Rolling Stones. Even though The Beatles clearly had a lot of heavy tunes of their own in their back catalogue, you couldn’t shake the idea of The Stones being the antithesis to the Liverpool lads’ ‘nice guy’ persona. They all looked like they came out of the back alleys of London, but as soon as Osbourne heard Mick Jagger, he knew that no one else was ever going to compare to his tone.
There had been many singers before Jagger came along, but the way he engaged with the crowd was exactly what Osbourne wanted to see, saying, “Mick Jagger, the greatest of all front men I’ve ever met in my life. I’ve never met him – I’m not one of the rock and rollers that goes into these fucking clubs and all this crap. Mick Jagger is fucking God to me. I saw The Stones at fucking Dallas, or something, and the fucking thing was a pile of crap, but Jagger has got the best charisma in the fucking world.”
Osbourne did have a healthy appreciation for Jagger’s moves, but that wasn’t the kind of charisma he was born with, either. When looking at the biggest artists that came before him, you can see a little bit of James Brown or Tina Turner in the way he dances, but even when he’s singing a heartbreaking ballad like ‘Wild Horses’, he’s still playing to the very back of the crowd whenever he starts singing.
And even though Osbourne is one of the most singular frontmen to walk the Earth, it’s not like there aren’t pieces of Jagger in what he did. His knack for jumping and down may have been to compensate for the fact that he couldn’t really dance, but the gusto and the bluesy shout he had was like a more bellowing version of what Jagger was doing when trying to emulate his heroes like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
If Jagger had kicked the door down for what could be done with rock and roll, though, Osbourne was looking to take it to a much darker conclusion. There was all a dangerous energy in the air when The Stones performed, but what was so wrong with someone making a living out of deliberately trying to scare the audience?
