Of all the made-for-teen-boy heavy metal anthems that might’ve caught my young, soon-to-be-irreparably-damaged ears, there’s a big part of me who will be forever glad it was Ozzy Osbourne‘s “I Don’t Know” that epitomized and expressed that particular life-moment of disgruntled confusion at facing the big world. And this version of it, no less. The tension in Randy Rhoads‘ guitar, the so, so many ace solos slicing out from the recorded-in-1981 live tracks throughout Randy Rhoads Tribute — a setlist of actual classics: “I Don’t Know” into “Crazy Train” into the best version of “Believer” and “Mr. Crowley” before “Flying High Again,” hell, even “No Bone Movies” wants you to sing along — and Ozzy‘s simple but relatable lyrics, “What’s the future of mankind?/How should I know? I got left behind,” in hindsight I seemed to be hearing it all the way it was meant to be heard. By a kid willing to be awed.

So be it. I hope you’ll indulge the nostalgia. A good friend lost his mother this week and I remember riding to and from their house, before I had a license with an older friend (who did), listening to this record. It was how I learned these songs. It wasn’t 1987, when Randy Rhoads Tribute came out — about a decade later, give or take — but I can still hear every second of this album without actually hearing it. Some things just imprint themselves on you. That time was certainly not unalloyed in terms of my experience — I’ve been a miserable shit for most of my life — but I count maybe-three people from that time among my current relationships and one is my wife, so to deny that there was joy would be ridiculous.

It’s long enough ago now that time seems flat in terms of how much it matters, but Randy Rhoads Tribute was released some five years after Rhoads actually passed away — and it’s worth noting that Lee Kerslake, who plays drums on “Goodbye to Romance” and the aforementioned “No Bone Movies,” died in 2020 — in between the studio albums The Ultimate Sin (1986) and No Rest for the Wicked (1988). 1982’s Speak of the Devil was also a live record, but without Rhoads and all Black Sabbath covers, a contract thing, so not quite the same.

The intention behind Randy Rhoads Tribute is right there in the title of the record, and it’s difficult to argue with the vitality in the Ozzy Osbourne band at that point in time. The live tracks were recorded in May and July of 1981, when they were coming off 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz and heralding Fall 1981’s Diary of a Madman by featuring “Believer” and “Flying High Again,” and Osbourne‘s history in Black Sabbath is acknowledged in “Iron Man,” “Children of the Grave” and “Paranoid,” which are gracefully led into by Rhoads‘ guitar solo during “Suicide Solution” and followed by “Goodbye to Romance” and “No Bone Movies” to close out — those two after “Paranoid” and “Crazy Train” and “Mr. Crowley?” The ’80s really were insane.

That’s the other thing here, the stories have all been told. All the Behind the Music stuff and tell-all ghost-written autobiographies, documentaries, and so on. I don’t expect to sit here and enlighten anyone on the righteousness of Randy Rhoads Tribute, or to craft some insight about the Rhoads/Ozzy dynamic that hasn’t been said probably 1,500 times before, probably more efficiently. But what I’m most reminded of in listening to it now, aside from how incredible these versions of “Revelation (Mother Earth)” and “Steal Away (The Night)” are, is how so much of our experience is related to the stories we tell ourselves, the connections our minds make with something, whether it’s time, a sound, a song, a color or a smell, whatever, and how that comes to define the thing.

Maybe you have a story with this record and maybe you don’t. I’m not about to presume our lives are the same, but I’m willing to bet that if you’re reading this sentence you have a story about something else. Maybe you have a bunch. Maybe you can look back and organize the events in your life around the music you were hearing at the time. It becomes part of your life’s story, even if it’s not always central to it or the defining feature. In this way, living with art can enhance your life. I go around every single day listening to people tell me things only to have my mind fly off to some usually-half-remembered line from some song. A phrase or even just a word can do it. I remember listening to nothing but The Beatles for like a year and a half. There’s power in that.

Randy Rhoads was a great guitar player, and he was the model for just about every other guitarist Osbourne has had since, from Jake E. Lee to Zakk Wylde to Gus G., and part of remembering somebody after they’re gone is thinking about how they affected your life. At the same time Rhoads was teaching me heavy metal history class, my friend’s mom was welcoming into her home, with kindness, this weird, perpetually-out-of-place stranger kid her son brought around. There’s a reason they call these things ‘formative.’ They help make you who you are.

So yeah, maybe I’ll forgive myself the lack of hard-hitting critique and leave the context as it is. Life affords you precious few opportunities to know truly good people, who don’t want something from you or expect you to be someone other than yourself. People willing to meet you on your level. I will miss Lisa Shohen. Thinking about that led me to this organically enough that I rolled with it. As always, I hope you enjoy and I thank you for reading.

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Please note as regards the above: if you’re reading this, you’re under no obligation to offer condolences or sympathies, love and strength, or anything like that. It’s not even my loss, at least not in comparison to my friend and his family. So yeah, I appreciate the thought if you had it, but it doesn’t need to go any further than that.

And I’m going to leave it there for the week. There’s a lot more going on, we’re having our kitchen floor done as I write this and I hurt my back like three weeks ago and reinjured it moving the fridge the other day — not my brightest move, but necessary — and I’m posting from a movie theater while The Pecan watches her first theater-movie, The Little Mermaid, on and on, but that’s enough for now.

Have a great and safe weekend. Watch your head, hydrate, tell someone you love them. One more time, thanks for reading. Back Monday with more.

FRM.

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Tags: California, CBS Records, Los Angeles, Ozzy Osbourne, Ozzy Osbourne Randy Rhoads Tribute, Randy Rhoads Tribute

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2023 at 9:57 am and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.