(Credits: Paramount Plus)
Sat 21 February 2026 14:00, UK
The fact that Ozzy Osbourne was able to do anything after Black Sabbath is miraculous.
There wasn’t a soul on this Earth that wasn’t convinced that he was going to become a rock and roll casualty, but after his wife, Sharon, ended up getting him off his ass, he turned in one of the greatest redemption stories that any musician has ever pulled off. But that wouldn’t have happened without some massive help from the other musicians that he surrounded himself with on every record.
Because, really, the story of Osbourne’s revival doesn’t happen if Randy Rhoads didn’t enter the picture. He was the epitome of a guitar hero before Osbourne was even conscious of what was going on, and when he started to veer off in his own direction on the record, he was the one stretching ‘The Prince of Darkness’s musical vocabulary, like throwing in the strange medieval sounding harmonies that come in at the beginning of ‘Diary of a Madman’ or the acoustic interlude ‘Dee’.
Osbourne couldn’t have been happier when crisscrossing the country with Rhoads in tow, but no one could have anticipated the guitar legend to be taken so quickly. It’s bad enough that the band members were into some misbehaviour on the road but after Rhoads went down in a plane crash while they were screwing around, Osbourne was mortified. He knew that if he was conscious, he would have been on the plane with his friend, but if he was going to carry on, he was going to keep his memory alive everywhere he went.
Then again, it’s hard to think of anyone properly “replacing” Rhoads. He was a once-in-a-generation talent, and even if the other guitarists that he hired could fill in decently, it wasn’t exactly a perfect fit. Brad Gillis was always going to be heading back to Night Ranger back in Los Angeles, and while Bernie Torme should be given his flowers for helping Osbourne through a run of American shows, his schtick was a lot more indebted to players like Jimi Hendrix than anything remotely metal.
For a brief time, though, Jake E Lee did feel like the next best thing after Rhoads. Bark at the Moon is still one of the most solid records Osbourne ever made, and even if Osbourne doesn’t look back all that fondly on this era, he still had some fantastic songs coming through. But the real trouble with Lee had more to do with the way he interacted with the band than with any of his playing.
He was a guitar hero in every sense of the word, but Osbourne felt that he never properly clicked with him like he should have, saying, “Well, Jake was fine for the first three days; then he wanted to take over. Randy wasn’t like that; he was one of the cool guys. I wouldn’t say Jake and I got along, but I wouldn’t say we didn’t get along. But in the last few years he became very reserved and it was hard to communicate with him.”
Granted, it’s not a rule that every band member needs to be on speaking terms with all of their bandmates, but when you’re writing music together, it tends to be a bit more difficult when someone is so standoffish. But the truth was that Lee was always pushing himself forward, and when he started his own solo projects, he felt much more at home playing his own brand of hard rock than trying to shoehorn himself into hard rock.
And since Zakk Wylde became the perfect middle ground between Tony Iommi and Rhoads when he joined Osbourne, it wasn’t like either party was losing sleep, either. Lee might be seen now as a stop gap in between some of Osbourne’s better albums, but if you take him out of the equation, you’re missing an important piece of Osbourne’s history.