We know he was off the rails, but where did the idea for OZZY’S Crazy Train come from?
Despite going off the rails after his firing from Black Sabbath, Ozzy rallied, gathered a squad and unleashed one of metal’s all-time anthems… SUMMER ’79, AND
West Hollywood’s glitzy Le Parc Hotel has a nuisance guest. In the months since his ejection from Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne has holed up in a suite he can scarcely afford, nursing “boxes of beer” and feeling “unhappy as fuck”. Reports of the singer’s state are sketchy – his most regular visitor is his dealer – but the rumour is that he’s not long for the music industry, nor for this world. “I really did think: ‘This is the fucking end for me’,” he told Classic Rock in 2010. “I’d been booted out. I just got fucked up every day. Never went outside. Never even opened the drapes.”
There is some debate over the roots of the band that resurrected Ozzy. His own recollection is that “One morning, Sharon just came round and told me: ‘Get your shit together, I’ll manage you.’ Once she was in the picture, things got rolling.” But bassist and co-writer Bob Daisley recalls the timeline differently, insisting that Ozzy’s future wife “had fuck-all to do with it when it started”, and that he co-founded a line-up that was originally planned as an egalitarian band, not a star vehicle (“It wasn’t ‘the Ozzy Osbourne solo record,” he told this writer. “That’s absolute bollocks.”).
Neither side, however, denies the impact of Californian guitarist Randy Rhoads. Ozzy had already been wowed by the former Quiet Riot virtuoso at an informal audition in Los Angeles (“Like God entering my life,” as the singer would later describe it). At his own first meeting with Randy, at the London offices of Jet Records in late 1979, Bob
Daisley was bemused by the new arrival. “Ozzy told me that Randy was a guitar teacher in a music school in LA. I sorta anticipated a guy with pipe and slippers, a cardigan and glasses. I walk in and see this young guy. Randy was only about 22. His clothes were very fitted, his hair was perfect, his nails were manicured.”
Yet looks deceived. Plugging in, Randy announced himself with a ferocious neo-classical guitar technique. “He had the influence of guitar players that had been influenced by blues players like Hendrix, Ritchie Blackmore, Jeff Beck and people like that,” noted Bob, “but he had another dimension, which was the classical side. He was very confident and precise, even when jamming. We all just fed off each other.”
Crazy Train was perhaps the flagship example of the nascent band’s early synergy, rising to the top at their first writing sessions. Unusually, the irresistible guitar lick was not in the standard metal keys of ‘A’ or ‘E’, marking the first time a guitarist had written to order for Ozzy’s doomy holler. “In Sabbath,” he noted, “they would just write something and say, ‘Put a vocal on that.’ Randy was the first guy to make it comfortable for me.”
YEARS LATER, QUESTIONS
would be raised over the authorship of that Crazy Train riff (“We were hanging out, and I showed Randy the riff to Steve Miller’s Swingtown,” said Quiet Riot’s Greg Leon. “I said, ‘Look what happens when you speed this riff up.’
We messed around, and the next thing I know he took it to a whole other level.”) Bob, however, is adamant that “that signature riff in F-sharp-minor from Crazy Train was Randy’s, then I wrote the part for him to solo over, and Ozzy had the vocal melody. The title came because Randy had an effect that was making a psychedelic chugging sound through his amp. Randy and I were train buffs, and I said, ‘That sounds like a crazy train.’ Ozzy had this saying ‘You’re off the rails!’ so I used that in the lyrics.”
Beneath the verse’s piston-pump chug, however, the Crazy Train lyric tackled weightier themes than runaway locomotives. In echoes of Geezer Butler’s observations on Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, this new song carried an anti-conflict message, most notably in a final verse that referenced ‘Heirs of a cold war, that’s what we’ve become / Inheriting troubles, I’m mentally numb’.
After fruitful rehearsals at Gloucestershire’s Clearwell Castle,
Bob was still scribbling the final Crazy Train lyrics as recording for the Blizzard Of Ozz album began at Surrey’s Ridge Farm in March 1980. While the bassist was given the nickname ‘Sid Serious’ for his perfectionism, Ozzy’s behaviour was harder to call. “He’d start out pretty straight and sober, probably take a bottle of scotch in there with him,” engineer Max Norman told KNAC. “He’d be nipping away at the scotch as we were doing a song… If he wanted to take a piss in the middle of the take, he’d do it right there on the floor.”
By contrast, when it came to tracking the formidable Crazy Train solo, Randy was sober and laser-focused, playing and recording three near-identical passes of the tapping and dive-bombpacked passage. “If you listen to Crazy Train real close,” Norman told Jas Obrecht, “you’ll hear there’s one main guitar around the centre, and two others playing exactly the same thing, panned to the left and right. What happens is you don’t hear them, you just hear it as one guitar. Randy was the best guy at overdubbing solos and tracking them that I’ve ever seen. I mean, he used to blow me away.”
Released as a single in 1980, Crazy Train was only a minor commercial hit (peaking at No.49 in the UK charts). “Don’t forget,” Bob pointed out, “that
“OZZY WAS JUST PISSING ON THE STUDIO FLOOR”
MAX NORMAN, BLIZZARD OF OZZ ENGINEER
at the end of ’79 into ’80, when we started recording, the musical climate, all the stuff that was in vogue, was disco-dance stuff. The punk thing was very big, the so-called new wave – and anything hard-rock and the kind of stuff we were doing was almost considered old-hat or dinosaur, you know?”
Despite that backdrop, Crazy Train gathered momentum. The song was a highlight of the Blizzard Of Ozz tour, which lifted Ozzy out of the doldrums, and its influence on the guitar scene was inestimable. “I remember the moment I first heard Randy,” says
Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello. “I was packed in the back of somebody’s mom’s hatchback in Libertyville, and Crazy Train came on. This blistering riff came at me, followed by an incredible solo, and
of course there was Ozzy – I recognised his voice as the guy from Black Sabbath. By the end I was like, ‘What just happened?’ Randy was the greatest hard rock guitar player of all time.”
BUT NOT FOR LONG. Following the tragic plane crash of March 1982 that killed Randy along with stylist Rachel Youngblood and tour bus driver Andrew Aycock, Crazy Train became a bittersweet moment in Ozzy’s catalogue, its four-decade legacy both glorious and contentious. There’s no doubting the numbers (at time of writing, the song has clocked up almost 250 million Spotify plays), nor its cultural thumbprint (you’ll hear it in media spanning from Dreamworks’ Megamind to the US version of The Office, not to mention leading out Boston’s New England Patriots for NFL home games). The enduring affection for Crazy Train was underlined when
The Osbournes TV show ram-raided the mainstream in 2002, the intro credits accompanied by Lewis Lamedica’s swing rendition that brought out the song’s latent bonhomie.
And yet, Crazy Train has never been far from controversy, with frequent battles over credits and royalties since 1980, and the Osbournes notably stepping in twice over its unauthorised use since the millennium. In 2010, the couple denounced the far-right Westboro Church from picketing funerals with an alternative version (“You’re going straight to hell on your crazy train”). And last summer, they blasted Donald Trump’s use of the song on a Twitter video: “We are sending notice to the Trump campaign that they are forbidden from using any of Ozzy Osbourne’s music in political ads or in any political campaigns. Perhaps [Trump] should reach out to some of his musician friends. Maybe Kanye West, Kid Rock or Ted Nugent will allow use of their music…”
As for Ozzy himself, the song will always be a double-edged sword, taking him back to the dizziest peaks and lowest ebbs of his career. Its emotional wrench was most painfully evident on a 2016 episode of the father-and-son TV travelogue Ozzy And Jack’s World Detour, with the singer sat shell-shocked as he listens to a long-lost and unmixed master tape of the song that saved him. “I remember the fun we had writing and making Crazy Train,” he says to the camera. “Listening to this, it’s like going back to a good time, but a really horrible time at the same time.”
THE LATEST OZZY OSBOURNE ALBUM, ORDINARY MAN, IS OUT NOW VIA SONY
“I HEARD THE SONG AND THOUGHT, ‘WHAT JUST HAPPENED?’”
TOM MORELLO