Black Sabbath has blazed an inextinguishable trail across music history's already crater-marked face.
But, music aside, it's hard to ignore that other glaring aspect of Sabbath lore: The legacy of Ozzy Osbourne.
Ozzy's past has as much myth as history.
Many of rock's urban legends, from cartoonish to sordid to just plain sad, can be traced to him.
When I interviewed him in 1998, on the eve of the original band's first tour together in 20 years, the singer seemed as bewildered by his reputation as anyone who could survive 50 years as Ozzy Osbourne would be.
An affable guy with impenetrably slurred speech and a wry wit, he brought up his past antics by saying that he hated discussing them.
Then he said: "That's like asking Hitler what he felt when he first f---ed Eva Braun."
With all apologies to the Ozz-man, here's a look at what one man can stir up in the name of rock 'n' roll.
Just imagine you were a fly on the wall. Then again, if you were, Ozzy might have snorted you.
1948: John "Ozzy" Osbourne is born Dec. 3 in Birmingham, England. Ozzy later says that there was "lots of insanity" in his family, and that he made several suicide attempts "just to see what it would feel like."
1963: The Beatles' She Loves You is released on Aug. 23. "It changed everything," Ozzy told Mojo recently. He admits to owning 17 copies of The Beatles' 1 CD -- one for every room of his house.
1967: Ozzy forms Earth with fellow teens Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward in Birmingham's working-class district of Aston.
"Everybody was singing about flowers and San Francisco," the singer told me in '98. "We played what we wanted to play, and if anybody told us to do something different we'd tell them to f--- off." The band logs tons of gigs and plays Hamburg's fabled Star Club more times than The Beatles. They change their name to Black Sabbath in 1969 and record their 1970 debut, Black Sabbath, in two days. It reaches No. 8 on the U.K. charts and cracks the U.S. top 40.
1970-1976: As the hits continue with Paranoid (1970), Master Of Reality (1971), Volume IV (1972) and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), Sabbath's image starts to cloud the music. The flirtations with netherworldly imagery lead to a rather silly (and false) reputation as satanists. "When we came out of The Exorcist, we had to all stay in one room together," Ozzy once said. "That's how black magic we were."
More believable were the stories of Ozzy's propensity for testing the limits of his body when it came to substances. One apocryphal tale has Ozzy and Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward doing LSD every day for two years.
1977-1979: Ozzy leaves Sabbath for the first time in 1977, over differences that were likely more chemical than musical. He returns in 1978 for the album Never Say Die, but is turfed by Iommi and replaced by Ronnie James Dio in 1979; 1985 and 1992 see some frosty reunion one-offs.
1980: Ozzy stuns his critics when -- under the aegis of indomitable manager and future wife Sharon Arden, daughter of British rock kingpin Don -- he kickstarts his solo career with the double-platinum selling Blizzard Of Ozz.
1981: Embroiled in a dispute with record company executives at Columbia, Ozzy allegedly makes a point by biting the head off a live dove. He denies the allegation. A few months later, another legend grows when a fan throws a live bat onstage at a concert in Des Moines, Iowa. Mistaking it for a rubber toy, Ozzy picks up the animal and bites into it. It bites back. He's treated for rabies.
February 1982: The story goes that at a stop in San Antonio, Tex., Sharon tried to curb Ozzy's boozing by locking away his clothes. He allegedly puts on one of her dresses and relieves himself on the wall of a building. That building turns out to be the Alamo. Ozzy is charged with defiling a national monument and banned from San Antonio for 10 years. He's also been unwelcome in Boston, Baton Rouge, Corpus Christi, Las Vegas and Philadelphia.
March 19, 1982: Ozzy is on the sidelines for an ultimately tragic stunt that leaves guitarist Randy Rhoads dead. At a tour stop in Florida, Rhoads is riding in Ozzy's private plane with the pilot and Ozzy's hairdresser. Ozzy and the rest of his outfit are on their tour bus. It's believed that, for a prank, the pilot attempts to buzz the bus, and, swooping in from the air, the plane nicks it and crashes into a nearby house. All on board the plane are killed.
1983-1984: Sharon's hopes of keeping Ozzy on the straight-and-narrow are foiled when Motley Crue sign on to open on his Bark At The Moon tour. Egged on by members of the notoriously toxic L.A. band, Ozzy gets down on all fours and laps up a puddle of bassist Nikki Sixx's urine. He then snorts a line of ants off the pavement.
1985-1990: Repeatedly a target and scapegoat for the religious right, Ozzy is sued by three different sets of parents (two in Georgia, one in California) who claim his 1980 song Suicide Solution prompted their sons to commit suicide. The song is actually a tribute to AC/DC singer Bon Scott, who drank himself to death, and is clearly anti-suicide. The courts rule in favour of the singer.
1986: Ozzy is fined several thousand dollars after his fans trash New Jersey's Meadowlands arena. The same year, he plays an anti-rock crusader in the movie Trick Or Treat, and disappears for three weeks before entering the Betty Ford clinic. His final, successful trip to the clinic comes later in the decade after he drunkenly tries to strangle Sharon and then blacks out.
1990-1998: Ozzy announces his retirement with the 1991 No More Tears album and the No More Tours tour in 1992. He reneges and follows it up with the Retirement Sucks tour. Black Sabbath regroup in 1998.
July 2001: It's announced that Ozzy Osbourne will receive a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame.
Lock up your daughters
The original lineup of Black Sabbath -- singer Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward -- descends on The Docks this Tuesday
at the head of the Ozzfest tour.
