Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne remember Randy Rhodes

Songwriting for the album that became Blizzard of Ozz began at Ozzy’s home in the north of England. Shortly after being recruited for Ozzy’s band, Rhoads went to stay with the singer, who was still married to his first wife at the time, although the relationship was quite rocky.

The first piece of music that came together was “Goodbye to Romance.”

“I was walking around my house singing, ‘Yesterday has been and gone…,’ just humming the melody.” Ozzy recalls. “And Randy said to me one day, ‘Is that a song I know? It seems familiar, like a Beatles thing.’ I said, ‘No, it’s just something I have in my head.’ He said, ‘It’s very good. Why don’t we work on it? Just show me the melody.’ And we sat down to work on it.

"Randy said, ‘Maybe it would be better if you sang it in this key.’ That was very important, because it was the first time any musician had made anything easier for me, rather than just making me put a vocal to something they’d done before, which is how things worked in Sabbath. But Randy worked with me. He was a teacher in his mother’s music school, so he knew how to do that. It was very special. And the songs started coming together.”

Sharon Osbourne can still remember the first time she heard “Crazy Train,” a song destined to become Blizzard’s most popular track.

“Ozzy was singing the chorus on the phone to me when we first started to work on it. I was in L.A. and he was up north in England. It’s one of those songs that are just so instant. You get the goose bumps. It was like, ‘What the fuck was that?’ And it was great to hear the song develop in writing sessions and on rough demos. It went through three different things before it ended up as ‘Crazy Train.’ But when you heard the solo and that sing-along chorus, it was just so instant.”

Read the rest of this story in the July issue of Guitar World magazine, on newsstands now!