Ozzy Osbourne Courted Darkness and Outlived It
By the time we heard of Ozzy Osbourne’s passing at seventy-six, it felt less like the end of a life than the closing of a parable we’d been reading out loud for decades, unsure whether it was tragedy, farce, or miracle. His death on July 22nd was met with the kind of double take that only Ozzy could provoke: not he’s gone, but he wasn’t already? For most of his public existence, Osbourne seemed to teeter in a permanent twilight between collapse and comeback, a man whose biography was written in tabloid headlines and guitar feedback. That he lived as long as he did felt less like good fortune than a cosmic clerical error.
Osbourne’s improbable journey began in the soot-colored cradle of Aston, a working-class district in postwar Birmingham where the air smelled of iron and prospects were measured in shifts. From this gray terrain, he and his bandmates, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward, conjured a sound that mirrored the environment: Black Sabbath’s music was loud, lumbering, and claustrophobically heavy. It wasn’t just rock; it was doom with a backbeat. Where the Beatles (Ozzy cheered Paul McCartney as an influence) had sung of submarines and revolutions, Osbourne intoned about war, madness, and Lucifer himself. If the hippies promised transcendence, Sabbath warned of what lay beneath the acid dream once it curdled.
Ozzy’s voice, piercing, nasal, untrained, unforgettable, became a clarion for the disenchanted. When WKNR-FM listeners discovered, Black Sabbath, it wasn’t the prettiest sound in rock, but it might have been one of the most honest. Ozzy’s vocals didn’t soar so much as haunt, like something channeled rather than sung. It was the voice of someone who’d seen too much and somehow lived to talk about it, though barely.
Offstage, Osbourne was often a contradiction wrapped in chaos. He could be feral, ridiculous, sometimes terrifying, and yet curiously innocent. Stories of his debauchery read like apocrypha, snorting ants, decapitating bats, urinating on the Alamo, yet the man himself rarely seemed malevolent. Instead, he often resembled a child who’d wandered into a horror movie and decided to stay. The world called him the Prince of Darkness, but anyone paying attention could see the fragility under the theatrics. He wasn’t the devil; he was the boy in his thrall.
The solo years, improbably, gave us the most refined version of the Ozzy myth. Teaming with guitarist Randy Rhoads, whose virtuosity elevated Osbourne’s raw power, he released Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, records that not only cemented his legacy but also redefined what metal could be: grand, melodic, even beautiful in its brutality. These were not the desperate gasps of a fired frontman but the confident roars of an artist in full voice.
Then came the turn no one saw coming. In 2002, MTV’s The Osbournes reframed the singer’s life as sitcom. Here was Ozzy, not summoning Satan but mumbling through domesticity, mystified by technology and ankle-deep in dog waste. If Sabbath was an exorcism of industrial despair, The Osbournes was a meditation on entropy, what happens when the monster grows up and settles into a gated community. It was either the death of mystery or its next incarnation.
In his later years, Osbourne’s body betrayed him. A near-fatal ATV crash in 2003, followed by a Parkinson’s diagnosis and multiple surgeries, turned the once-indestructible rocker into a cautionary tale about gravity. And yet, he persisted. He kept showing up, on red carpets, in recording studios, occasionally on stage. Even when his spine seemed to fold under the weight of decades, he refused to bow. His final performance, a July 5th reunion with the original Black Sabbath in Birmingham, was a gesture of defiant symmetry: the beginning and the end, fused in one last ritual. He sang from a throne, regal and wrecked, a monarch of mayhem making peace with his kingdom.
Ozzy Osbourne’s legacy is inseparable from the contradictions he embodied. He was a carnival and a confessional, a terror and a teddy bear. He gave us music that made darkness a thing and showed us, through bumbling vulnerability, that monsters can be human, too. In the end, he didn’t just survive the wreckage of metal rock and roll, he became its patron saint, burned and bent but never buried.
His life was a noise, a spectacle, a sigh. And now, finally, a silence.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ringo
On the seventh of July, a Monday, amidst the unassuming hum of a world carrying on, Richard Starkey, saw his eighty-fifth year. The name he would later adopt—Ringo Starr—needs, of course, no introduction, yet it is the given name that feels more appropriate for the quietude of the occasion. If the Beatles were a singular, four-headed marvel of the twentieth century, then Ringo was its circulatory system—unshowy, indispensable, and possessed of a swing that was as intuitive as a heartbeat. Continue reading “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ringo”
AT 40 at 55
On the Fourth of July weekend in 1970, America was still catching its breath from the cultural detonation of the previous decade. A new program came to life on just seven radio stations. “Here we go with the Top 40 hits of the nation this week on American Top 40,” the voice intoned. “The best-selling and most-played songs from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico.” It didn’t sound like revolution. It sounded like reassurance. Continue reading “AT 40 at 55”
Bobby Sherman – A Quiet Finale
By June 24, 2025, the world had fallen silent—not with the frenzy that once trailed him, but with a gentle stillness. Bobby Sherman, the sweet-faced teen idol of the late 1960s, died at 81, his final days marked by the same modest grace that shaped his life. Continue reading “Bobby Sherman – A Quiet Finale”
Lou Christie – The Voice That Pierced the Sky
To hear a Lou Christie song on Keener for the first time was to experience something more than sound—a kind of pop exclamation mark hurled through a world of four-part harmonies and teenage platitudes. In a musical landscape dominated by the earnest chin-stroking of folk singers and the tight, syncopated machinery of Detroit’s Motown, Christie’s voice arrived like a lightning strike, cutting clean through the Keener airwaves. It was a helium-soaked, heaven-scraping falsetto that didn’t so much sing as spiral—vertiginous, improbable, and entirely unafraid of absurdity. It sounded less like a young man’s croon than the internal monologue of adolescence itself: dramatic, operatic, always on the verge of a glorious crack-up. Continue reading “Lou Christie – The Voice That Pierced the Sky”
The Beatles’ EMI vs. Capitol Albums: How America Remixed the British Invasion
When Beatlemania exploded on Keener, it wasn’t just a cultural phenomenon, it was a marketing war. On one side of the Atlantic stood EMI’s Parlophone label, helmed by producer George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick, who shaped the Beatles’ artistic journey with a balance of studio innovation and British sensibility. On the other, Capitol Records, EMI’s American subsidiary, played the hits game with a nose for profit. The result? Two Beatles discographies: one curated by the band and their producer, the other chopped, shuffled, and rebranded for U.S. ears.
And those differences? They tell a deeper story about the transatlantic tug-of-war between artistry and commerce. Continue reading “The Beatles’ EMI vs. Capitol Albums: How America Remixed the British Invasion”
Remembering Brian Wilson
There was always a peculiar geometry to the music of Brian Wilson, a sense of vast, sun-bleached space being meticulously organized inside the four walls of a recording studio. To hear of his passing at eighty-two is to imagine the door to that studio finally closing, a quiet click after decades of miraculous, agonizing noise. Continue reading “Remembering Brian Wilson”
Keener Today – June 3
It was a rare moment in time when Steve Schram and I were in the same place without anyone demanding our time. We were both independent agents with a lot more resume paragraphs ahead of us. As was our practice during the days when we roomed together in college, we were sifting through my collection of 45s and reel to reel tapes. Around 3am on June 3, 2002, I threaded the PAMS Clyde jingle demo into the machine and turned up the volume. Continue reading “Keener Today – June 3”
Keener Today – May 24
Today in History:
- 1844 – Samuel F.B. Morse gave the first public demonstration of his telegraph by sending a message from the Supreme Court Chamber in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to the B&O Railroad “outer depot” (now the B&O Railroad Museum) in Baltimore. The famous message was, “What hath God wrought?” Continue reading “Keener Today – May 24”
Keener Today – May 23
What’s happening:
Billy Joel has canceled all upcoming concerts, including a major stadium tour, due to a brain condition called normal pressure hydrocephalus, which has affected his hearing, vision, and balance. The 76-year-old singer is undergoing physical therapy and says he’s “sincerely sorry” to disappoint fans. More. Continue reading “Keener Today – May 23”
Keener Today – May 22
Did You Know:
The Stanley Hotel — famous for inspiring Stephen King’s The Shining — is set to undergo a change in management as Sage Hospitality Group partners with the Colorado Educational and Cultural Facilities Authority to oversee the historic property. The collaboration aims to preserve the landmark’s legacy while generating $45 million over 36 years to support cultural initiatives. Continue reading “Keener Today – May 22”
Keener Today – May 21
Did You Know:
Memory can start to decline as early as your 30s, but simple, science-backed techniques can help keep your mind sharp. From paying closer attention and saying things out loud to creating associations and challenging your brain daily, there are effective ways to strengthen recall and boost long-term memory. Here are some more helpful tips. Continue reading “Keener Today – May 21”
