The story of Randy Rhoads and Blizzard Of Ozz: "He was the best guy at overdubbing solos and tracking them that I’ve ever seen. I mean, he used to blow me away"

We revisit this 2011 Total Guitar feature on Randy Rhoads and Ozzy Osbourne with input from Ozzy himself and bassist / songwriter Bob Daisley. 

The Prince Of Darkness is on the ropes. It’s 1979, and at Le Parc Hotel in LA, Ozzy Osbourne is a madman lost in a blizzard of cocaine. Bandless, friendless, bloated and living in squalor, he has been fired from Black Sabbath and is now in free-fall. He never leaves his room, never opens the curtains, and never sees anyone except for the roadie tasked with suicide watch and babysitting. In short, Ozzy does not look like a man on the cusp of solo glory, but an obituary waiting to happen. He needs a miracle. 

It took several hands to pull It took several hands to pull Ozzy out of the mud. First, the singer credits the tough love of Sharon Arden (soon to be Osbourne), the daughter of ball-busting Sabbath manager Don Arden. It was she who galvanised the washed-up frontman into forming a new band. Then came former Rainbow bassist Bob Daisley, who was the first musician to join the new Osbourne fold, despite what you might have read elsewhere. “Ozzy and I started the band,” the Australian veteran told Total Guitar. “They’ve tried their best to rewrite history, but it’s all bulls***.”

Nobody is denying the epiphany of Randy Rhoads’ arrival, though. The 22-year-old Quiet Riot guitarist was no Sabbath fan and almost bunked his audition slot, but he only had to doodle a few harmonics through a practice amp for Ozzy to promise him a call-back. “I’d never auditioned anyone, and I was all over the f***ing place,” the singer told TG. “But f***ing hell, when I first heard Randy play, it was poetry in motion. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m onto a great thing here.’ Who knows why we worked so well. Who knows the answer to anything? But sometimes you’ll meet a girlfriend and it’s more than just a f***ing night in the sack.”

“Ozzy said all he’d heard all day was guys trying to play like Tony Iommi,” Randy once noted. “He appreciated that I was playing my own style.” There is a romantic notion that Osbourne and Rhoads shook on their partnership right here. Actually, says Daisley – who kept a diary from 1976 and wrote a tell-all autobiography called For Facts Sake! – the singer then left LA for his home in Stafford, England, and Rhoads only re-entered the frame after another guitarist was fired.

“That’s when Ozzy said, ‘Well, I met this great guitar player in LA,’” Daisley explains. “The management wanted to keep it as a UK-based band, but no guitarists were that interested, because Ozzy didn’t have the best reputation.”

Reluctantly, the management flew Rhoads to London, continues Daisley. “Ozzy and I went into Jet Records in about October 1979, and Randy was already there. Now Ozzy had told me [that] Randy was a guitar teacher at his mum’s school in LA, so I anticipated a guy with a pipe slippers, cardigan and glasses. I walk in and see this young guy; his clothes were very fitted, his hair was perfect, his nails were manicured. I actually said to Ozzy: ‘D’you think he’s gay?’”

But when Rhoads plugged in, the planets aligned. “When we finished our first jam,” recalls Daisley, “we said at the same time, ‘I like the way you play.’ He was confident and precise; he had the influence of bluesy players like Hendrix, Blackmore and Jeff Beck, but the classical side gave him another dimension.” So after a decade spent cowering beneath Iommi’s iron fist, Ozzy was back from the dead with a band that nurtured his talent, rebuilt his confidence, and even transposed keys to suit his doomy bark.

“In Sabbath,” Ozzy says, “I’d have to put my vocals on whatever key they put the song in, and sometimes I couldn’t reproduce it onstage. But Randy was like, ‘Come on, maybe you should try it in this key.’”

“It really was a band,” agrees Daisley. “We were meant to come together. We fed off each other. The music side was more me and Randy: we’d sit on chairs opposite each other, playing the instruments and putting the songs together. I wrote the lyrics. Ozzy was very good at the vocal melodies. The first songs we wrote were Goodbye To Romance, I Don’t Know and Crazy Train.

"That signature riff [for Crazy Train] in F# minor 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 sorta psychedelic chugging sound through his amp. Randy and I were train buffs, we collected model trains, 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.”

Joining the dots

The truth behind Randy's iconic V… 

Axes don’t get much more iconic than Randy Rhoads’ polka dot V. Widely assumed to be a Charvel, it was actually commissioned from the LA luthier Karl Sandoval in 1979, who charged $738 and delivered the model shortly before Rhoads left Quiet Riot.

The spec was half metal, half rock, with a mahogany body and dual-humbucker configuration of DiMarzio PAF (neck) and Super Distortion (bridge) hinting at Randy’s taste for Les Pauls. Meanwhile, a super-flat Danelectro neck and Strat tremolo gave his virtuosity free reign.

The V looked cool, played fast and the top end made it the primary choice for both Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary Of A Madman, scorching through an old-school 100-watt Marshall stack with no preamp. Another vital ingredient of the Rhoads sound was an AMS 15-80 delay, used with a voltage-controlled oscillator. The best examples, says Max Norman, are he rhythms on Crazy Train: “You’ll hear there’s a real grind to them. That particular sound comes from the AMS. It’s almost like a flange, but not quite…”

Mr Crowley, meanwhile, was built on Randy’s chord structure and blown skywards by a precocious lead starburst of legato and alternate picking. As for the funereal organ, says Daisley, you can thank a prematurely aged synth player for that: “It was about Aleister Crowley, which was Ozzy’s idea, but that little intro came from a keyboard player who was sent down [later recorded by current Deep Purple keysman Don Airey]. Ozzy and I called him Grecian 2000, which was an over-the-counter hair treatment, ’cos he had grey hair!”

When drummer Lee Kerslake came onboard, the band was complete, and in March 1980 the Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey trembled as the Blizzard Of Ozz crew rolled in. Ozzy’s dwindling fortune only stretched to a four-week booking, and he wasn’t wasting time. “He’d start out pretty straight and sober, probably take a bottle of Scotch in there with him,” engineer Max Norman said in an interview with KNAC. “He’d be nipping away at the Scotch as we were doing a song… If he wanted to take a p*** in the middle of the take, he’d do it right there on the floor.”

“Ozzy would go over the top”, confirms Daisley, “with both albums for different reasons. With Blizzard, he was getting over being fired from Black Sabbath – he told me it felt like a divorce – and having doubts about the future of his career, because the stuff we were doing was almost considered ‘old hat’ or ‘dinosaur’. He was the one who drank most, smoked the most pot. I think Randy did coke a few times, but he wasn’t really one for drugs. Sometimes we’d smoke pot in the studio, have a joint and work on a new part of a song.”

The recording method was also old school, if highly effective, with the basic rhythm guitar, bass and drums all captured live. “If anybody f***ed up, we started again,” grins Daisley. “There were no drop-ins or repairs like you can do now.”

Despite his casual claim that “the first album was just turn it up to 11 and if it feels good just play it”, Rhoads was chasing perfection. He worked 12-hour shifts in the control room, overdubbing rhythms and painstakingly chasing down solo ideas over a looped backing track. Once a solo was written, he would double- or triple-track it. And not via copy-and-paste technology, but by playing it identically multiple times (a mind-bending feat, given the speed of his leads).