Songoftheday 4/18/18 - You took me in and you drove me out yeah you had me hypnotized, lost and found and turned around by the fire in your eyes...
from the album No More Tears (1991)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #28 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 7
Today's song of the day comes from heavy metal god Ozzy Osbourne, who had fronted the seminal goth hard rock band Black Sabbath from 1967 to his firing from the band in 1979. Recruiting a new band originally to be the Blizzard Of Ozz which ended up being just the title of his first solo album, Osbourne found a new collaborator in guitarist Randy Rhoads, who anchored the sound of that first disc, with touches of Boston-like arena rock and Scorpions-ish metal. The lead single from the set, "Crazy Train", went to #49 in Ozzy's native home of Britain, while climbing to #9 on the newly-created Rock Radio Tracks chart in Billboard in the U.S. in the spring of 1981. Later that year, Osbourne returned (with Rhoads) for his sophomore solo set, Diary Of A Madman, and went all the way to #2 on the Mainstream Rock chart with "Flying High Again" (it also hit the Canadian singles chart at #33. However, that song would prove ominously prophetic, as Rhoads would die in a horrible and completely ridiculous airplane accident in the spring of 1982. Osbourne would take a while to recover from this loss, waiting out over a year (with the release of live Sabbath-song set Speak Of The Devil filling time) until he returned in 1983 with Bark At The Moon, with new guitarist Jake E. Lee, who would be with Ozzy for the next four years. The title track became his first solo top-40 hit in the UK at #21, followed by rather lovely orchestral-pop of "So Tired" which inched a notch higher to place him in the top-20 at #20. (Both had "bubbled under" the American pop chart.)
Osbourne finally landed his first solo minor pop hit in America when his The Ultimate Sin album came out in 1986. The lead track "Shot In The Dark" hit #68 on the pop Hot 100 and #10 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock radio list. That record was Ozzy's first outside of Sabbath to reach the top ten on the albums chart in the U.S. While it was followed by a live album (his Tribute set dedicated to Rhoads) that also made the top ten, his sobriety was declining again and his next studio record, No Rest For The Wicked in 1988, failed to make a big impact, with no radio hits in America at all. However at that time he did score a big win by collaborating with metal vixen/former Runaway Lita Ford (whom wife Sharon managed), and the result, "Close My Eyes Forever", got Ozzy his biggest pop success of his career, reaching #8. He also found a new guitarist with Zack Wylde, who would guide Ozzy through the 90s.
The first album of that decade for him would be No More Tears, released in 1991. The title track, released as the first single, landed on the Mainstream Rock chart at #10, and slipped on to the pop Hot 100 in America at #71. It also returned Ozzy to the British pop top-40 at #32. The song that followed would become Ozzy's biggest solo single. "Mama, I'm Coming Home", written by Osbourne and Wylde with help from Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead, was a power-ballad in the same vein as "Close Your Eyes Forever", with his fatalistic lyrics and close to countrified instrumentation...
"Mama, I'm Coming Home" became Ozzy's second and so-far final top-40 pop hit in April of 1992. The single spent three weeks at #2 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart. Internationally, the single also hit the top-40 in Germany (#27), and peaked right under the top-40 in the UK at #46. Three more tracks from No More Tears appeared on the rock radio chart: "Road To Nowhere" spent three weeks at #3, while "Time After Time" hit #6 and "Mr. Tinkertrain" got to #34. It's telling that the others that made the top ten were softer numbers. Meanwhile, another song from the album, "I Don't Want To Change The World", would end up earning Osbourne a Grammy Award for Metal Performance when it was on his subsequent Live & Loud concert album in 1994. Also in 1992, Ozzy sang on a re-release of alt-dance act Was (Not Was)'s house music excursion "Shake Your Head", which went to #4 in the UK.
Meaning to retire after the live record, he nonetheless returned in 1994 with his seventh studio set Ozzmosis. Lead single "Perry Mason" stayed at #3 on the rock radio chart for two weeks in the U.S. while peaking at #23 in the UK. In 1997, with his retrospective The Ozzman Cometh, Ozzy again scaled to #3 for five weeks with "Back On Earth", but Wylde would leave Ozzy to join Guns N' Roses post-Slash. When the new millenium dawned in 2000, Primus featured Osbourne on their cover of Black Sabbath's classic "N.I.B." from 1970, and spent two weeks in the runner-up spot on the rock chart.
After six years from the release of Ozzmosis, Ozzy re-emerged (again with Wylde) in 2001 with Down To Earth, whose first single "Gets Me Through" stayed at #2 on the Mainstream Rock chart for six weeks. "Dreamer", also from that record, was a worldwide success, hitting the top ten in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Two years later, Ozzy ended up having his first and only #1 hit in his native Britain when he teamed up with daughter Kelly Osbourne for an off-base ballad cover of his 1972 Black Sabbath song "Changes". In 2007, Osbourne would have his first solo #1 Mainstream Rock hit with "I Don't Wanna Stop", which stayed there for five weeks. That came from his Black Rain album, so far his highest charting at #3. His second #1 rock radio hit came in 2010, when his "Let Me Hear You Scream", from his most recent solo album Scream, spent four weeks at the top. A year later, he reunited with Black Sabbath for their hugely successful 13 album. However, most of his notoriety (or infamy) to the new generation had come from his reality show days as the head of household on The Osbournes, along with his relapses that make the tabloids.
(Click below to see the rest of the post)
Here's Ozzy performing the song live (ish) in 1992 in concert. Man, he is wasted...
And finally, along with "Paranoid" with Wylde, in 2017...
Up tomorrow: Irish legends are singularly successful.
Comments