Please suspend your disbelief. Ozzy and I had a very intense relationship in the early 1970s. Or at least, Black Sabbath and I were a thing at the time, although I admit it may have been a little one-sided. Let me tell you the story.
In the 1970s in Deep River, Ontario (population barely reaching the mid-five digits), we had very little access to popular music in real time. Most of our consumption of the top North American hits was gleaned through the marvels of the night sky, which could conjure up radio emissions from foreign lands, like Buffalo and Detroit. But as I recall, the Stedman’s “department” store (and those are air-quotes, BTW) did sell 45’s, like the copy of the Beatle’s “Eleanor Rigby” single (B side was “Yellow Submarine”) I bought in 1967 for $1.50 – and how they came up with that combo of cuts is best left to record marketing folks. But I digress.
In order to obtain full length records of any substance, we had to go into town to Pembroke, about a 40-minute drive away in good weather. A 40-minute highway drive, I must underscore. There must have been a place where records were purveyed for sale, but I’ve forgotten where, or maybe we actually had to go to Ottawa? Two highway hours away on a good day? Who knows. But moving on.
Somehow, my friend Angela procured a copy of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album, which came out in 1971 in North America. I have no idea how she snagged it, but as a result, we spent an abundance of time misspending our summer youth listening to it in Angela’s parents’ basement.
Picture this: two young teenage girls: me 14, Angela 15. Sitting on the patio furniture that occupied the downstairs TV room – 70s pine chairs with arms wide enough you could use them as a side table, and a similar two-seater settee, all with orange floral plastic cushions. And a record-playing stereo of dubious fidelity. We would crank up Black Sabbath and sing and dance to “Iron Man” like maniacs. I’m assuming there was nobody upstairs to object.
We would also talk about boyfriends, or in my case, lack of boyfriends. For some reason, Angela was a flame to the moths. I was decidedly not. But mostly we would talk about how we would escape the geographic handcuffs of our small town and live a wider, wilder life. Angela had already been to England with her parents and had suede hotpants bought on Carnaby Street. She was way ahead of the game, in my book. Already one platform-shod foot out the door of our insular existence.
And Ozzy offered us an escape to that wilder universe of possibilities. Yesterday I listened to a rerun of a CBC interview done with him in 2022, when he had just released a new solo album, and I learned things I had never known about his back story. Apparently, he started out in an R&B band in England. Then, out of the blue, he wondered why people went to horror movies even though they were scary. And the concept of shock metal rock was born.
We often need to get the heck out of our comfort zones. And sometimes when we do, we find a door to another side. A new place to find comfort in the uncomfortable. By all accounts, Ozzy was a gentle man who just happened to create a new music genre and lived a perfectly normal suburban life in his off-hours in his later years. If only we all could make such a change in the world, to inspire teenage girls (and probably boys) to dance like nobody’s watching. RIP Ozzy