Ozzy Osbourne

Ozzy Osbourne is no more.

When I was 16, my college band at Cathedrals played a song called Paranoid. We all head-banged to it. That was my introduction to Ozzy.

I loved Ozzy’s personality. There was a rumour going around that he was the Antichrist, so I hid in Ozzy’s music to balance out all the religion that was being shoved down my throat.

I even had a band with Joey that time. We covered Nativity in Black back when I was still playing bass in the band. We won all the college competitions (only coz Joey was amazing). The lyrics went “My name is Lucifer, please take my hand.”, that made us damn cool in the band circles. 

We talked about Ozzy often, inked his name on our knuckles with ball pens, and made fun of boy bands. I even bought a cheap Ozzy T-shirt from Shivajinagar and I lived in it.

My 6 foot tall friend and our band’s roadie, Avinash Nair, wrote down the tabs to Paranoid in his math notebook from an “Internet cafe” so I could learn the song. The math teacher, Anil Kumar, saw the “secret codes”, tore the page and threw us out of the class. We went straight to the auditorium and plugged in my guitar and jammed till evening. Avinash is MIA now. I’ve never been able to find him.

Ozzy introduced vibrato king Zakk Wylde to the world. I wanted to grow big and strong and chug beer like him before a guitar solo. Life had other plans! I never grew big and strong like him but I chugged beer and played many shows.

Rest in peace, Ozzy.
Your loss is personal.