Now that the Prince of Darkness has slipped behind the curtain, can I make a nomination? Just kidding, one Ozzy was probably enough.
You can't be my age and not have memories tied to that man's wailing. Black Sabbath landed just before puberty and my record collection was growing quickly. When I got my driver's license in '74, Paranoid fit neatly between the Elton John, Jim Croce and Grand Funk 8 tracks.
Somehow in early '75, I convinced my mother to let me and Teddy Mullins drive my dad's 4 speed Corolla to Johnson City to see Ruby Starr, Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and Black Sabbath. It wasn't my first concert, but it was the first one I drove further than Haysi to see.
That was 50 years ago. I can remember everything about that night, including having my eyelashes singed directly in front of Ozzy on the stage when a flash pot went off. Teddy and I got there early and had beelined to the front of the stage because that's what you did.
The outpouring of love that's come Ozzy's way since his demise has warmed my heart. Not that I was a devotee. I was far more attracted to the band's sound than to the singer's singing. After all, the riff master wrote the music and the bass player and drummer wrote most of the words.
Ozzy just sang. And not really that well.
But, he was the perfect front. As heavy as the songs were, Ozzy was all sunlight. He was flashing the peace sign and screaming we love you between verses. He was the one in the midst of the onslaught proclaiming it's all hard and scary, we might as well have a good time. If anything, he was the clown prince of darkness.
After seeing them, I felt like Ozzy was subconsciously in on the joke that the rest of the band wasn't so much in on. They weren't very deep and they definitely weren't evil. Spinal Tap is dead on.
The tv preachers and grandstanders in the media loved to play up satanic images with Ozzy and Sabbath, but those connections were never real. I've listened to that band most of my life and still never met a devil worshipper.
I saw them a couple more times before Ozzy was asked to leave, but by the time I got to college, Black Sabbath was not cool amongst my peers and I was listening to a dozen other things. I didn't follow Ozzy on his solo path, not as a record buyer. I didn't follow the different versions of the band after that, either.
But the soft spot never left and if one of their songs comes on the radio, I still crank it. It was very fulfilling to see the old band back together one more time only a couple of weeks ago in a farewell extravaganza. That band created a sound and they got their roses for it while raising millions for medical research to fight Parkinson's Disease.
The real prince of darkness would be doing just the opposite.