Since it’s my birthday month, June was supposed to be filled with easy favorites, albums I love and didn’t review yet. I woke up and couldn’t think of a single one to cover. So I went to my Discogs collection and clicked the random button and out popped Blizzard Of Ozz, the solo debut by one Mr. John Michael Osbourne, aka Ozzy Osbourne. Life is filled with coincidences: the last time I used the random button to write was for Diary of a Madman, and Blizzard… was probably the album that got me on the heavy metal train to begin with. All aboard, indeed…

More reminiscing…do you even NEED a review of this album? Few albums are so ingrained in rock culture as this one due to one very specific song, and it was that opening riff to “Crazy Train” that blew my head inside out when I first heard it. I knew I was a riff guy when I heard the keyboard riff from Gary Numan’s “Cars” from my older friend Michael Papst down the street, and I was searching for anything like that on the radio. He played me “Crazy Train” and I was cooked. Eights years old and I had the bug. Years later when I picked up a guitar the first riff I learned was that one, followed by Judas Priest’s “Breaking The Law.”

It’s an album I probably never need to listen to again, it’s so ingrained in my mind from endless wearing out of tape as a child. One of the few albums I owned on cassette, then CD, and then vinyl when I started collecting again (I only owned The Ultimate Sin on vinyl as a kid, go figure…and no, I won’t be reviewing that one). Listening to it now? Let’s start with Bob Daisley’s bass, loud and pronounced on opener “I Don’t Know”, thankfully returned after Sharon’s stupid and petty decision to re-record it, along with Lee Kerslake’s drums. It didn’t work for Zappa and it sunk like a stone here, so thank you my original vinyl pressing for preserving the original goods. Randy Rhodes is already a phenomenon one sing in, and Ozzy sounds more engaged then he did on the final two Sabbath albums, though I’ll go to bat for 1976’s Technical Ecstasy.

“Crazy Train” is, well…it’s “Crazy Train”, you know? Overplayed and overused to death, certainly. You may be sick of it, but I can’t help but sing along every time it’s on. Every note of Rhodes’s solo is burned into my brain, and I particularly love how bouncy that descending chord sequence is in the verses. The rest of Side A is a murderer’s row of great songs – “Goodbye to Romance” has a fantastic vocal melody and I remember singing it over and over as a kid. I’m not 100% convinced the keyboards from Don Airey at the end are wise or even good choice, but they definitely stood out, and didn’t detract from Rhodes’s perfect solo. “Dee” may be an interlude, but it makes me think about how different future albums would be had Rhodes not died in that plane crash. And “Suicide Solution” for all its controversy and lawsuits is an absolute rager of a song, and has some of the album’s best lyrics which only an idiot would think is a call to actually commit suicide as opposed to the obvious song about the dangers and sorrow of alcohol addiction.

Like Ozzy said, “Don’t you know what it’s really about?”

With such a killer Side A, how could I say that Diary of a Madman is a better, stronger album? Well, have a look at listen to Side B. There’s no denying “Mr. Crowley” is a monster song, this time Airey’s keyboards working perfectly, whole integrated into the track. But what the hell, “No Bone Movies”? It sound like a relic from the late 70s, its boogie vibes completely at odds with everything that came before. I get that (according to Wikipedia at least) they added it to throw Kerslake a writing credit, but it’s an ugly bruise on Blizzard Of Ozz, and I never liked it even as a kid. “Revelation (Mother Earth)” fares much better – it also feels like a throwback, but at least this sounds like a throwback to classic Black Sabbath as opposed to Little Feat (that’s not a slam on Little Feat, whose Waiting For Columbus is an all-timer of a live album). It drags on a little too long, particularly its middle section with the piano and synth strings, but it’s all worth it for that final minute when Rhodes rights the ship with quite possibly the best moment on all of Blizzard Of Ozz. Goddamn but I went crazy for that part as a kid, and listening to it again now, 24 hours away from being 52 and sitting with a sore back and cup of coffee at 6am it’s hard not to shake along to it.

I’m not the biggest fan of closer “Steal Away (The Night)” although Daisley’s bass is ferocious and it’s great to hear the band sound like a band. If I were sequencing the album now maybe that would have been a good Side B opener, followed by “Mr. Crowley” and letting the album end with “Revelation (Mother Earth)”, though I have no idea what to do with “No Bone Movies” except to put it down like a lame horse and bury it in the woods. That being said, I wouldn’t replace it with the AOR sheen of “You Lookin’ at Me Lookin’ at You”, which sounds like it was rightfully left off the album, despite my penchant for more cowbell.

But as I look back, none of the bruises and blemishes make a difference when weighed against the road the album set me on. So thank you Blizzard Of Ozz for being there, for the gift of the almighty riff, the desire to eventually pick up a guitar and create my own racket.