Amir Derakh may not be a household name, but the synth-guitar master isn’t as niche as he initially seems.

He replaced Craig Goldy (who replaced Jake E. Lee) in glam metal band Rough Cutt, lent his guitar synth chops to industrial rock band Orgy, and even backed Chester Bennington from Linkin Park.

The guitarist also nearly became Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, only to lose out to a certain Zakk Wylde…

“I think [bassist] Phil Soussan and [drummer] Randy Castillo championed me, so I was fast-tracked and avoided a lot of the B.S,” Derakh tells Guitar World when looking back on the audition process.

“They had already gone through a lot of guitar players, but there were only a few they liked. One of them was this kid, Zakk Wylde.”

During what must have been a very nerve-wracking audition, Derakh was asked to play “a few of the hits, pretty much what everybody knows – Crazy Train, Bark at the Moon, Shot in the Dark, Over the Mountain. I’m not a finger-tapper, so I thought, ‘I’ll do that stuff, but I’ll do it with one hand.’ Ozzy was really impressed with my playing.”

Derakh goes on to say that the whole thing felt quite surreal – especially since he was a huge Randy Rhoads fan. “I got my ear pierced when Randy died. I got a guitar like him. So to be playing with Ozzy, it was unreal.”

However, he also admits his gut feeling was telling him that “it wasn’t right for me. I remember they asked me to do a guitar solo on the spot – you know, an unaccompanied solo. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not really prepared for that.’”

So how did Ozzy and co. break the news? “It was kind of like, ‘Ozzy really likes you…’ I pretty much knew that Zakk had the gig. I saw him at the Rainbow [in West Hollywood, California], and I said, ‘You’re going to get it.’ He was like, ‘No, no, no…’”

Derakh points to a couple of reasons why he didn’t land the gig, despite ticking most of the boxes. “One, I was connected to Wendy Dio [who managed Rough Cutt], so they didn’t want to deal with that whole thing. Two, I wasn’t completely unknown. They preferred people who were new,” he says matter-of-factly.

For more from Derakh, plus new interviews with Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and Gus G, pick up issue 605 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.

In more Ozzy-related news, it seems like a biopic is well and truly happening – at least according to his son, Jack Osbourne.

Jack Osbourne has shared new updates about the rumored, long-awaited biopic on Ozzy Osbourne.

During a YouTube livestream on May 12, Ozzy’s son confirmed that the movie is well on its way to becoming a reality.

“I can tell you this: we are moving ahead,” he teased [transcribed by Blabbermouth]. “I was on calls today about it. The script is right there. We are good. This movie will absolutely happen.”

Osbourne goes on to say that realistically, “it probably won't come out until ’28”, but left the door open for an earlier release date.

“We're full steam ahead,” he continues. “We're about to start going out and getting a director attached. So, fingers crossed. I'm really excited. It's very much been a labor of love, of course… I'm excited for everyone to see this film.”

Plans for an Ozzy Osbourne biopic have been in place since 2021, with Oscar nominee Lee Hall, who wrote the script for Elton John’s Rocketman, attached to write the script. Sony Pictures and Polygram Entertainment are also confirmed to be involved.

Earlier this year, the younger Osbourne continued spilling the tea on whether we can expect a Hollywood version of Black Sabbath and the sorely missed Randy Rhoads on Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast .

“Initially, it was gonna go from my dad as a young man to kind of the mid-’90s, but we’re shrinking it down,” he revealed.

“We’re doing a rewrite right now. In my perfect vision of it, it would be kind of the tail end of Sabbath, him going solo. [Because] you gotta have the love story. And that’s kind of the main focus of the film, and all the craziness that happened in the early ’80s and Randy’s [Rhoads] tragic death. But, yeah, it’s an origin story.”

And while the supporting cast hasn’t been picked yet, Jack Osbourne did reveal that a “phenomenal actor” has been chosen to play his dad, though he declined to name the performer.

In more recent news, Joe Holmes – the Prince of Darkness' guitarist between 1995 and 2001 – spoke about how he landed the coveted Ozzy gig.

A campaign to memorialize Randy Rhoads with a statue at Stough Canyon Park in Burbank, California, has been launched.

The virtuoso shot to fame when he helped launched Ozzy Osbourne's solo career with two landmark albums, Blizzard of Ozz (1980) and Diary of a Madman (1981), masterminding some of the greatest guitar riffs and solos of all time.

A virtuoso whose skills were often pitted against Eddie Van Halen, and who's widely regarded as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, Rhoads' life was cut tragically short after a plane crash in 1982, while he was aged just 25.

As such, Bill Lonero, a lifelong musician and Randy Rhoads fan, has launched The Randy Rhoads Memorial Project, which is planning to erect a statue in Rhoads' honor in his hometown of Burbank.

Support for the statue is gaining traction through a global petition. Lonero decided to kickstart the campaign after a conversation with Randy's sister, Kathy Rhoads D’Argenzio, who has given it her backing.

Burbank Park was a key part of Rhoads' roots, with the project set to be funded through community support, donations, and fundraising initiatives. At this moment, the project is working to gather support and funds while preparing for approvals.

The memorial, Lonero says, aims to create a lasting tribute that reflects Rhoads' global impact and deep connection to the Los Angeles music scene. It has been described by the official Rhoads tribute website as “a growing global movement to ensure his legacy is never forgotten”.

The campaign also has the backing of former Ozzy bassist, Bob Daisley, esteemed music photographer Neil Zlozower, and original Quiet Riot bassist Kelly Garni.

“Randy Rhoads is widely regarded as one of the most influential guitarists in rock history,” Lonero states. “His groundbreaking work with Ozzy Osbourne and Quiet Riot reshaped heavy metal, inspired generations of musicians around the world, and set new standards for guitar performance and composition.”

“Randy was a special person and musician,” Daisley concurs. “May his likeness be immortalized in this Burbank statue.”

Supporters can head over to Change to sign the petition, and are encouraged to share the campaign with friends. More information can be found at the Randy Rhoads Memorial Project website.

Rhoads’ legacy has already been honored in a variety of ways, including the MXR Rhoads Distortion+, which was created after MXR’s pedal gurus were granted access to the guitarist’s famed “chip pan” pedalboard.

When Ozzy Osbourne launched his solo career in the early 1980s with the help of the late, great Randy Rhoads, he tracked and released two albums in an 18 month period: Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman.

Both records are widely considered to be some of the Prince of Darkness’s finest solo LPs – Classic Rock ranks the pair as the first and second best Ozzy albums – and while that sentiment remains steadfast today, it turns out that there were some minor reservations about Diary of a Madman at the time.

Those reservations came from none other than Rhoads himself, whose sister, Kathy, once revealed to Guitar World that the late virtuoso believed the whirlwind recording experience had ultimately hamstrung the tracks.

In early 1981, Ozzy and his newest guitar foil went back into the studio to track Diary of a Madman. According to Kathy, the desire to tour the US, coupled with the need to have enough material to sustain a live show, prompted a faster-than-usual recording process.

That didn’t sit easy with Rhoads – a virtuosic perfectionist. He thought he needed more time to craft his guitar parts, and the quick turnover time meant the final cut was submitted with Rhoads feeling like he had more to give.

“Randy finally had the professional-level platform he really needed,” Kathy explained. “Ozzy said, ‘Do your thing – just be you.’ He encouraged my brother to excel.

“Randy was a perfectionist. He was always criticizing his performance or worrying about his equipment. I could tell you stories about being in the limo when his pedalboard had gone out, and him being so upset about it. My mom would say, ‘They’ll get it to work; it’ll all work out, Randy,’ and calm him down...

“When they did Diary of a Madman over at Ridge Farm Studios... They put it together in literally six weeks, and Randy thought, ‘Oh, it’s not going to be good. It was too quick. I don’t feel I did my best.’ He was so worried about it – but what a freaking masterpiece that album is!”

Rhoads himself had previously spoken of his experiences recording Diary of a Madman, once going as far as admitting parts of his playing make him “cringe” during an interview with Guitar World.

“On Diary... we put a lot more energy into the songwriting,” he said in a 1982 interview. “So the songs are happening but my guitar playing isn't. We were in a hurry to get over to the States and tour behind Blizzard, so Diary was rushed. We only had time to get a song's basic form before we had to record it.

“What you hear on there is actually the guitar track. It's a dummy solo I laid down where I was later supposed to put down a real one. But I never got time to do it. “A lot of my things on Diary lack feeling,” he opined. “It sounds a bit ordinary to me, like just sort of play anything you can think of.”

Of course, it’s a lesson to every player that regardless of Rhoads’ excessive personal critique, Diary of a Madman ultimately far exceeded expectations. Indeed, his former bandmate, bassist Bob Daisley, considers it to be one of the best representations of Rhoads generational guitar talents.

Because of his contributions, Diary of a Madman is a landmark guitar album, one that cemented the young Rhoads' reputation as one of the most exciting up-and-coming guitar talents of his time – and, following his tragic death, eternalized his legacy as one of the greatest players to ever pick up the instrument.

When Ozzy Osbourne was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the second time in late 2024, Wolfgang Van Halen put years of virtuosic rivalry and shredded Crazy Train at the ceremony – but what did Ozzy make of the performance?

When the Prince of Darkness launched his post-Sabbath career with Blizzard of Ozz, Randy Rhoads became an immediate guitar hero, and to many, a worthy adversary to the incendiary talents of Eddie Van Halen at the time.

It seemed fitting, then, that Wolfgang would be the one to bring the two names together. On the night of Ozzy's induction, the Mammoth leader teamed up with Tool frontman James Maynard Keenan, Robert Trujillo, Chad Smith, and Andrew Watt to perform the track.

During his acceptance, Ozzy confessed, “If I hadn't met Randy Rhoads, I wouldn't be sitting here right now,” and it seems Wolfgang’s Rhoads impression received his seal of approval.

“At first I was like: ‘Was that good enough?!’’” Wolfgang, in a moment of self-reflection, says of his reaction to the performance in a new interview with Classic Rock. It turns out, any lingering self-doubt was unnecessary.

“His [Ozzy’s] exact words, I believe, were: ‘It was bloody brilliant,’” Wolfgang adds. “He gave me a hug. That meant everything. And I got him to laugh.”

Touring commitments with his band, Mammoth, forced him to pull out of his scheduled appearance at Ozzy's farewell show, Back to the Beginning. So when the legendary singer passed just weeks later, he produced a tear-jerking cover of Mama I’m Coming Home in his honor.

“It sucks that we are in a world that doesn't have Ozzy Osbourne anymore,” he said before playing the song. Wolfgang had heard of Ozzy's passing during soundcheck and knew that “just mentioning it wasn’t enough.”

Elsewhere, Wolfgang has discussed what he believes is an underrated aspect of his dad's playing, and explained why Allan Holdsworth's avant-garde approach to guitar has become an important pillar of his own six-string identity.

What do you say to the manager of the world’s most iconic metal frontman – the voice that breathed life into heavy metal – when they call you up and ask you to audition?

Picture the scene. It’s 1981, Blizzard of Ozz has just brought Ozzy Osbourne back from his post-Black Sabbath purgatory, introducing the world to a maverick new metal guitar talent, Randy Rhoads. And this band, the hottest band in town, need someone on bass guitar to replace the outgoing Bob Daisley. Oh, and there are tour dates coming up, so they need that bassist quick.

Rudy Sarzo, famously, got that call, and we know how the story ends, right? He joins the Ozzy Osbourne band, even receives credit for 1981’s Diary of a Madman even though Daisley played bass on it, and the rest is history. But that’s not the whole story.

Speaking to Billy Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast, Sarzo reveals how it all went down – and why he actually turned Ozzy down the first time. Not many musicians get to turn Sharon Osbourne down and enjoy a second chance. Clearly, someone was watching over Sarzo.

“I was playing in the band called Angel, too – the Punk Meadows’ Angel – but they had just lost their record deal to Casablanca. But I was happy. I loved the guys,” he says. “There were really nice. It was cool hang, and I was playing in Angel. I had an identity. They were a big band.”

Sarzo enjoyed playing in Angel so much that when the phone rang, and the late Quiet Riot frontman, Kevin DuBrow, answered, passing the phone to Sarzo and telling him Ozzy’s manager, Sharon, is on the line, he was not of a mood to say yes.

“She said, ‘Oh, hi, Rudy, this is Sharon, Ozzy’s manager, Randy tells me about you, and we want you to come out to audition,’” says Sarzo. “I was shooting from the hip. I didn’t think about it, I didn’t say, ‘Wow, that sounds great.’ My first reaction was, ‘No thanks’. No thank you. ‘No, thanks. I’m playing in Angel blah blah blah.’ She hangs up on me. I’m like, ‘Well, okay… Sorry.’”

Was Sarzo really that happy in Angel? They had lost their record deal. This was the opportunity of a lifetime. Sarzo tells Corgan that this was symptomatic of his decision making at the time. It was a dumb thing to do, especially seeing as he didn’t even think it over. DuBrow chewed him out. He knew he’d screwed up.

“Little did I know that the next day, I was going to get a call from Ozzy,” says Sarzo.

The following day, Ozzy took HR matters into his own hands. Sarzo wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice.

“I get the second call the next day, it was like, ‘Oh, yes!’” he recalls. “Ozzy himself called, ‘Yo, man, Randy tells me that you’re the guy, and we just auditioned a bunch of hacks…’ And I said, ‘Yes! I’ll be there.’ So Randy picks me up, because they were in a rush – they had to meet and do this whole thing really quickly. Because within 10 days, they were going on tour.”

There was no time to waste. Sarzo was whisked over to The Beverly Hilton, where he met up with Team Osbourne.

“There’s Sharon, Tommy Aldridge, and I’m sitting with Ozzy, and he’s telling me all about Randy and how much he appreciates him and loves him,” says Sarzo. “And I’m thinking, ‘This is this is a good place to be in. There’s a lot of gratitude, a lot appreciation going on.’ He just told me at the end of it, he says, ‘Man, I get a good vibe from you – just be able to play.’”

Sarzo could play all right. Rhoads could vouch for that. He and Sarzo were bandmates in Quiet Riot. Rhoads recommended him to the Osbourne camp. But what Sarzo couldn’t play was Ozzy Osbourne material.

“Nowadays, a 10-year-old or a fetus can actually play Crazy Train,” he says. “Back then, it’s like, ‘I never heard the song! [Laughs] I gotta learn this.”

He had help. Rhoads came by before the audition to work through Crazy Train and I Don’t Know. They worked fast. They had to. In an hour’s time they would be driving off to play it with Ozzy and the band.

“Those where the audition songs. So we go over, and I had to retain it, and then we drive over to rehearsal,” says Sarzo. “We do one pass with Tommy, and then Ozzy and Sharon show up, and they listen to us play the two songs with Ozzy looking at the band.

“Then Ozzy gets up on stage, we play the songs again, and Ozzy turns to me and says, ‘Hey, man, do you want the gig?’ I said, ‘Yes!’ [Laughs] And my life went into Panavision color at that. It was like, ‘Wow!’ I’m in this world now. I had a gig with the most amazing musicians that I ever played with.”

It was the gig of a lifetime. But after Rhoads’ death in a plane crash in 1982, Sarzo had seen enough. Ozzy was going off the rails. He wanted out, rejoining Quiet Riot after the Diary of a Madman Tour. Not that he was ever wholly divorced from the Ozzy camp.

Sarzo would be one among a cast of metal’s biggest names to perform at Villa Park, England, for Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s final show, Back to the Beginning.

Speaking to Guitar World in August, Sarzo said he remained ever grateful to Rhoads, Ozzy and Sharon and wanted to salute his old boss.

“I’ll never have enough time in my life to thank Randy Rhoads, Sharon and Ozzy for changing my life. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if not for them,” he said. “Ozzy, Randy and Sharon are the three main people who changed my life. I went from sleeping on the floor of Kevin DuBrow’s apartment to passing the audition with Ozzy and moving in with Sharon’s family.”

Jackson has brought the Rhoads V electric guitar shape home to its California factory with the unveiling of two high-end American Series Rhoads models.

Originally born out of a collaboration between the Ozzy Osbourne guitar icon and Grover Jackson in the early 1980s, the flagship Rhoads not only put a distinct Randy-designed spin on the V template, but helped launch the Jackson brand.

It has since become one of metal’s most enduring and beloved guitars. In recent years the firm’s various Rhoads variants have been exclusively made overseas in Indonesia, China and – for the more premium models – Japan.

Jackson has now added another tier to the Rhoads lineage, drafting in the former Quiet Riot guitar great’s visionary innovation to its American Series – a collection that was purpose-launched for this exact sort of thing.

Indeed, when the collection debuted in 2022, it marked the firm’s first crop of made-in-Corona guitars. Now, the Rhoads – which was once part of the USA Select Series, before that was discontinued – returns to join that elite crop of Jackson electrics.

“The American Series Rhoads was created to bring the legendary shape that metal guitarists have coveted for decades to a new generation,” says Jon Romanowski, VP of Product, Jackson.

“Built in the U.S., this premium guitar is engineered for players who demand uncompromising metal tone and performance.”

It’s a sizable move from Jackson, and the fact that the Rhoads V becomes only the third addition to the prestigious American Series line – which was launched with the Soloist and later expanded with the Virtuoso – is telling of just how the company values this particular metal template.

That much is even more apparent in the launch video: Jackson has tapped metal veterans Jeff Loomis and Brandon Ellis to put the new guitars through their paces.

Owing to its US heritage, the American Series Rhoads – available in RR24 and RR24HT formats – are said to be “built to devastating perfection”, and engineered to deliver “the ultimate shredding performance”.

Specs include USA-made Seymour Duncan JB and ’59 pickups, an offset V alder body, 12”-16” compound radius ebony fingerboard, and 24 jumbo stainless steel frets. The HT model, unsurprisingly, has a hardtail bridge – a Hipshot piece, specifically – while the regular version has a recessed 1500 Series Floyd Rose. Snow White, Matte Army Drab, and Satin Black finishes are available.

Other features include Luminlay side dots, Gotoh MG-T locking tuners, Sharkfin inlays and a through-piece design that comprises a graphite-reinforced three-piece maple neck.

The RR24HT is available now for $2,729, while the RR24 is priced at $2,849.

Head over to Jackson to find out more.

In related news, Jackson recently paid homage to the “golden era of guitar innovations” by launching the Pro Origins 1985 San Dimas range.

Shred legend Zakk Wylde was grabbing some downtime when GW connected with him at his home in California not long after he appeared at Ozzy Osbourne’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.

Only hours before we connected, he’d been busy tracking songs for the next Black Label Society album, before heading into six weeks of rehearsals for a Zakk Sabbath tour.

After that, he’s scheduled to start rehearsing for the Pantera celebration tour, followed by more Zakk Sabbath. He’s also already penciled in numerous BLS shows.

As Wylde says, “It’s just music, music, music as far as I can see, and that’s how I love it.” No matter how busy he is, Wylde is always ready to talk guitars, and the rock ’n’ roll viking was stoked to tell us why these are the three most important axes in his armory.

1. Gibson Firebrand SG (1981)

“This was the Firebrand SG in Pelham Blue, the first real ‘quality’ guitar I ever owned. I did so much of my learning on it. I bought it at Red Bank Music [in New Jersey] back in the day. There was a lot of publicity for these models at the time; I remember the Gibson ads saying, ‘A Firebrand for under a grand.’ It was a fantastic guitar, though, and a major step up for me.

“My guitar teacher at the time, Leroy, recommended it to me. He was a fan of SGs; he thought the double cutaways and access to the top frets would suit the stuff I wanted to play. I wasn’t really playing shows when I got it, more parties and jamming in the basement. I spent a ton of time woodshedding.

“I never changed a single thing on it – it’s completely stock. I still pull it out from time to time at home; it’s a bit of a lost classic in the Gibson range. Another thing about it was the color, which I liked so much that I’ve used it on a few guitars since then as well as on some of my own Wylde Audio fiddles.”

“I still have it. I sold it but managed to buy it back, which was an amazing feeling. Before I got it, I had a bunch of guitars that weren’t anywhere close to the SG. There was a copy of a Gibson L6 with action that was about 10 feet off the neck. I had a Fernandes and a couple of Electras in crazy shapes and some other stuff that was pretty crappy.

“The ones I didn’t hang on to, I tried to pick up in later years on eBay or Reverb; some I managed to buy back from the guys I’d sold them to, so I have all my childhood memory guitars one way or another. I think it’s important to keep your early gear if you can; there’s something special about picking up a guitar years later and thinking about the hours you put in.

“Those first guitars are what set you off on the path. I have friends who say they wish they still had some old toy or something, and I always say just go and hunt one down on the internet! Reconnect yourself, you know?”

2. Gibson Les Paul Custom (1985)

“I remember saving up for this guitar; it was a big deal. I bought it new, complete with the ‘chainsaw’ case. I still have the receipt – $800. Those models go for four grand now. This guitar is actually in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the moment.

“I graduated from high school in 1985, and I hadn’t saved enough money for it by that time, but my parents surprised me by adding the rest of the money to the pot. I think I needed about $300. I got home and they said something had come for me. I went into the room, and I freaked out because they’d got me the white Les Paul Custom. This is another one where I never changed a thing; it still has the original PAFs.

“I’d go and look at it all the time in the store – I wanted that guitar so badly, man. This guitar holds so much sentimental value because my parents got it for me. I used to take this and the Grail [see Number 3] on the road, which seems crazy now, given how precarious it is to travel with guitars on tour.

“After a few years I stopped doing that and started treating show guitars as exactly that; I wouldn’t touch them until I got on stage. I felt much happier leaving all the important guitars safely at home.”

“My first guitars were all fitted with humbuckers, and I know people don’t associate me with single coils, but I have quite a few Fenders. I’ve got a Tele I bought for $600 that I asked Bill Lawrence to paint to look like the one Jimmy Page had with the dragon on it. This was way before Fender brought out their Page model.

“I have a bunch of Strats, and I have a few guitars loaded with P-90s, including a ’65 SG and a ’58 Junior. It’s all about having tones to paint with when you’re in the studio. If you’re painting a picture, you’re going to want a whole palette of colors. If you can hear something in your head, you find the right tools to capture it.”

3. Gibson Les Paul Custom, “The Grail” (1981)

“A friend of mine, Scott Quinn, who used to work at Garden State Music in New Jersey, made a deal with me. I was endorsed by Gibson after I’d got the gig with Ozzy; Scott, a huge John McLaughlin fan, said that if I could get him a double-neck, he’d trade the Grail for it.

“Gibson hooked me up and I made the trade. I’d played this guitar and been knocked out by how amazing it sounded and how well it played. It was one of those moments where you just really connect with an instrument. It already had EMGs; I’d discovered them a little before I played the Grail.

“One of my students had a Fender Jaguar with EMGs. He was telling me you had to put a battery in the back for the pickups, which was a weird notion to me at the time. Anyway, when I plugged it into my Marshall combo I was astounded. The clarity, the depth, the glassy highs, the tightness and definition – I was amazed.

“I wrote my first Ozzy song, Miracle Man, on this one. Most of the records I did with Ozzy featured this guitar. After we’d recorded [1988’s] No Rest for the Wicked, I was gonna be shooting some photos and I realized I was gonna look like I was trying to be Randy [Rhoads] with the cream Les Paul, so I sent it to be refinished.

“It was meant to look like the poster for [1958 Alfred Hitchcock film] Vertigo, but it came back with the bullseye. I realized it was pretty cool anyway, and I made it a signature look ever since.

“I nearly lost it around 2000 when it fell out of our gear trailer. It came with one of those tough chainsaw cases, so it survived crashing onto the highway. It turned up in a pawn shop; someone bought it, realized it was mine and – three years after I’d lost it – contacted me and sold it back.

“I exclusively use Wylde Audio models on the road now; they’re exactly the same as the ones for sale. They’re already modded, because they’re built to my specs, with the Tone Pros hardware, the EMGs and everything.”

• This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.

Phil Demmel and Jackson have partnered for a new Polka Dot V that pays homage to Randy Rhoads – and serves as a full-circle reminder of the Machine Head guitarist’s first-ever Jackson guitar, which has a wild backstory.

After exploring the Fury body shape for his previous Jackson signature guitar, Demmel has now opted for a signature King V design inspired by Rhoads' legendary Sandoval Polka Dot V electric guitar.

It's a fitting tribute from Demmel, whose first-ever Jackson guitar was an early Randy Rhoads signature. As he explains in a new launch video, though, he acquired it under some rather shady circumstances.

“My first Jackson, I got it by some sketchy means,” he explains. “It was the Randy model, the first Randy Rhoads model, the white one, and there was one available. We did a trade, but evidently he owed some money or something.

“So I ended up [playing a] sold out show in Oakland [with] Vio-lence. I get called off the stage, and the guy whose guitar it was had the cops pull me off and get his guitar back.

“My dad, who was a cop back in the day, came up to see what had happened. The kid got his guitar back, they let me go, the band is already playing without me, they don’t care. I stage dive, get back on, grab a guitar and finish the set.

“I got a new one right after that. It was a RR1, black, still got it to this day. I’ll never forget my first Jackson.”

For his new signature, Demmel has opted for a mahogany body, three-piece through-body maple neck with graphite reinforcement, a 12”-16” compound radius ebony fingerboard, 24 jumbo frets, and a set of EMG 81 and EMG 60 humbuckers.

It also boasts a Floyd Rose double-locking bridge, pearloid sharkfin inlays and that Polka Dot design, which wraps its way around the entire surface area of the guitar – neck and headstock included.

“I’ve always been a King V guy,” he adds. “The departure into the Fury was something super cool. Creating the tribute to Randy Rhoads with the polka dots back in 2009 was something special, so it’s nice to be able to pay homage with this limited series to share that with everybody.”

The Pro Series Limited Edition signature Phil Demmel KV King V was available for $2,0999. We say was – it has already sold out.

Visit Jackson to find out more.

In related Randy Rhaods tribute news, MXR recently launched a new special edition version of the Quiet Riot and Ozzy guitarist's Distortion+ signature pedal.

When Gus G joined Ozzy’s band after Zakk Wylde left in 2009, at 29 years of age, he had been around the block a few times with his band Firewind, but admits that he was a “starving musician.”

“I'm from Greece, and that's not a country that's known for its metal scene or impact,” Gus tells Guitarist. Ozzy's music was like a gateway for me to escape from the small country I come from and allowed me to dream big.”

Gus was drafted into Ozzy’s ranks with the understanding that he’d tour the world and make an album, which ended up being 2010’s Scream. With that, he admits to having “doubts” about his performance and fearing the “hate” he might receive from the fans.

“I'm sure he knew it must've been nerve-racking for a kid like me to all of a sudden be filling in these big shoes of these legendary players,” Gus says of Ozzy’s view on his induction into his band.

Gus’s concern was ultimately for naught, as he stuck with Ozzy until old pal Zakk Wylde returned in 2017 for Ozzy’s No More Tours II, which was to be his final jaunt. Gus admits this was a blow, and save for an occasional email with Ozzy’s wife and manager, Sharon Osbourne, he lost contact with Ozzy thereafter.

However, he’s gained perspective since. “I look at my time with him as someone who helped fill a gap for a couple of years while Ozzy and Zakk needed some time off from each other,” he says. “I'm a fan just like everyone else.”

Like the rest of us, Gus was watching when Ozzy performed his final gig solo and with Black Sabbath in Birmingham, on July 5, 2025. “Ozzy was very strong,” he says of the performance. “I'm sure he gave everything he had and lived for the final gig in Birmingham.”

As for how he looks back on his time in Ozzy’s latter-day band, Gus shrugs, saying, “My deal was for one album and one tour, and they kept calling me to tour for a few more years. So, I must've done something right.”

“But most importantly,” he adds. “I had a lot of fan support throughout the years, and they're the final judge, as you know. So, if the majority of fans were pleased and enjoyed the shows, then we did a good job.”

What are your memories of first meeting Ozzy? Is it true that he invited you to audition for his band via email?

“Yes, that's right. In the summer of 2009, I got an email from management asking me if I'd be interested in auditioning for Ozzy's band. Of course, I was starstruck when I first met him. I couldn't believe I was in the same room as him.

“But he was very cool and broke the ice right away. When I landed in LA and checked in at my hotel, he called me and told me not to worry about it and that he had ‘a good feeling’ about me. He just encouraged me to play with my heart and not worry about mistakes.”

How important was Ozzy’s music to you growing up?

“I grew up listening to Black Sabbath's Ozzy-era records. Sabbath drew me to the heavy metal culture instantly and inspired me to want to start my own band. I remember daydreaming as a teenager and wandering the streets of my hometown [Thessaloniki, Greece], listening to Master of Reality on cassette.”

Coming in after heavy-hitting players like Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee, and Zakk Wylde, why do you think Ozzy chose you, a relative unknown, at the time?

“I have no clue, and I’ll never find out, I guess. I was told that someone showed him a video of me on YouTube, and he went, ‘That's the guy.’ He had a great musical ear, and he knew what he liked and what he didn't like. I guess that he heard my sound and felt it would fit right in. I can’t think of anything else.”

Generally, what did Ozzy expect from his guitar players? And underlying, what did you sense that he needed?

“He never came in with any demands. He was always polite and encouraging. So, he always told me to be myself and play with my heart. Nothing else was discussed, really. I tried to do the best job that I could do. I practiced a lot, showed up on time, and played like there was no tomorrow.”

After joining Ozzy’s band, what are your memories of the early rehearsals?

“We did long rehearsals for a month in LA. At some point, we rehearsed most of Sabbath’s catalogue from the ’70s. The band spent a lot of time rehearsing and getting tight together as a unit. I think it showed on the world tour that followed.”

What did you bring to Ozzy’s sound that was different than past players? Did you take influence from them?

“I want to think that I brought a new energy and my own vibe, which is more European, I guess? [Laughs] It’s hard to analyze it myself. And, of course, I'm a huge fan of Randy, Jake, and Zakk, and I've been heavily influenced by all three of them. They were my school of guitar playing; I grew up on them.”

What was it like learning Tony Iommi, Randy, Jake, and Zakk’s parts? And which of those players did you find to be the trickiest to emulate?

“I've been asked this a lot in the past years. It was very exciting to dig deep into each player's style and re-learn it, so to speak. I tried to keep close to the original recordings, but of course, with my own tone and sound. I think the hardest one to emulate must have been Tony Iommi.”

Is that because of the hyper-idiosyncratic nature of his playing and the disability associated with his fingers?

“Yes. His playing is so unconventional. Maybe cause he's missing the tips of two of his fingers. But he slightly bends strings, even when he plays riffs. Also, his sense of timing is unique. I could never sound like Tony Iommi; nobody can. But I loved playing the Sabbath stuff every night.”

Did you use similar gear or your own rig on tour and in the studio?

“I used my own gear completely. Around that time, I started using Blackstar amps, and the Series One 200 amp is the one you hear on the Scream album, but also on the world tour. Of course, I already had my own signature guitars back then with ESP, so I used those.”

How did you approach the making of Scream, and what was it like writing with Ozzy?

“It was a wonderful experience, and we recorded it at Ozzy's home studio. So, every morning, [producer] Kevin Churko would pick me up from the hotel, and we'd drive to Ozzy's house. We'd have coffee and breakfast and then head downstairs and start working on the songs.

“We took our time and made sure everything sounded right. Also, working with Kevin was a big experience for me. He's an excellent songwriter, besides being a producer and engineer. My approach was just to try to add guitars.

“It was an already recorded album, so I tried to give it that Ozzy stamp and vibe. And have a few bits here and there that were reminiscent of his classic players. But of course, I brought my own game when it came down to the solos.”

How do you feel Scream’s legacy has evolved with time, compared to other records with Randy, Jake, and Zakk?

“It’s hard for me to say. I still think Scream is a strong album overall and has some fantastic moments. It's more up to the fans to decide, but I do get a lot of comments still from the young generation of that time, who discovered Ozzy from the Scream album.

“They tell me how much it means to them. I guess it's partly a generational thing. On the other hand, the classics are the classics. His early albums are the staples of his career and of the heavy metal genre in general.”

You left Ozzy’s band after he reunited with Zakk Wylde in 2017. What was that like, and was it difficult news to take at the time?

“Of course, I was bummed ‘cause I knew I'd probably never see him or play with him again. On the other hand, it totally made sense. Ozzy and Zakk have so much history together; those guys had to get back at some point. It was inevitable.”

How did your relationship with Ozzy evolve after you left? Did you stay in touch? And did you get to talk with Zakk at all thereafter?

“I last saw Ozzy at Graspop Festival in Belgium in 2016; that was the last time. He was there with Sabbath, and Firewind was playing that day as well. Honestly, we didn't stay in touch after I left. There was an occasional email to Sharon just to see how Ozzy's doing after his [quadbike] accident [which damaged his neck].

“But nothing besides that. He was always in my thoughts, and I hoped he'd get through this. As for Zakk, I bumped into him at a festival in France a couple of years ago and we spoke a bit. He's always been very nice to me.”

There’s no denying that Ozzy was special. He is beloved worldwide. But for you, someone who played with him, how will you remember the man and the musician?

“Ozzy was everything you imagined him to be. Proper rock royalty, very caring for those around him, big-hearted, generous, and super-funny. He was the funniest guy I've ever met. His aura was so strong that when he walked into a room, everyone stopped immediately and looked at him.”

Where do you think your career might have gone if you’d never met or played with Ozzy?

“I owe so much to Ozzy and Sharon for giving me that opportunity. It changed my life forever. Sure, I had my band before I met the Osbournes and made records, but I was a starving musician. Everything changed after I worked with him. So many opportunities and doors opened for me, and of course, playing with Ozzy has been such a huge part of my music career.”

How do you look back on your place within the canon of Ozzy’s players?

“I remember at some point, while recording Scream, I was having doubts about myself and my abilities, and I said to Kevin Churko, Ozzy's producer, ‘I'll probably get a lot of hate when the new album comes out, and people will think I'm the worst guitarist he's ever had.’

“And Kevin said to me, ‘I don't think so. But even if that happens, at least you were one of them, and how many people can say that?’ But all things considered, I think I did well during a transitional phase for Ozzy.”

After the tragic death of Randy Rhoads in 1982 – and after Bernie Tormé very briefly stepped in to join Ozzy Osbourne’s band on tour – Brad Gillis found himself being recruited as the Prince of Darkness’ new electric guitar player.

Though he wouldn’t stay with Ozzy for long, Gillis proved to be a foundational figure in the pantheon of Osbourne’s guitar greats. Not only did he help the late vocalist finish his tour commitments that year, he also featured on the Speak of the Devil live release.

Gillis’ recruitment came at a crucial time for Osbourne, and after he received a call from the Ozzy camp asking him to fly to New York, the wheels for his ascension to the band were set in motion.

“I told Ozzy I only knew a few songs but would learn them ASAP,” Gillis remembers in the new issue of Guitar World. “I got my first guitar when I was eight and learned by ear, and I could emulate Randy’s awesome solos after a bit.”

Upon arriving in New York, Gillis attended a de facto initiation party at a flash hotel, during which Ozzy – who was still officially playing with Tormé at the time – inspected his guitar chops up close and personal for the first time.

“After flying to New York, I had a casual introduction to Ozzy at a large private party in Ozzy’s Helmsley Palace Hotel Presidential Suite,” Gillies continues. “Earlier that night, Ozzy had played Madison Square Garden with Bernie Tormé.

“Ozzy told me to go grab my guitar. I ran down the stairwell to my room – I was too excited to take the elevator – grabbed my 1962 red Strat and ran back up to the suite. He had me follow him up the stairway to the master bedroom to play for him. I sat on the edge of the bed while he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of me.”

Gillis ripped through Flying High Again, solo and all, and Ozzy clearly liked what he saw. His hunt for a new guitar player had come to an end.

“He jumped up after I finished the solo and gave me a hug,” Gillis remembers. “He cried out, ‘I love you, Bradley – pull me through.’ I told him I was there for him and would do my best to help finish the tour. He opened up the master-bedroom-suite door and yelled down to the crowd, ‘I’ve got a new fucking guitar player!’

“It was crazy and surreal. Me, a 24-year-old newbie about to join the Ozzy Osbourne band! The next day, I was given two live board cassette tapes with Randy, a boombox and small amp to start learning all the material. I gave them the green light four days later.”

Back in 2021, Gillis discussed his first gig with Ozzy, which he said was "horrendous".

To read the full interview with Brad Gillis, pick up the newest issue of Guitar World at Magazines Direct – which also includes features with Jake E. Lee and Nigel Tufnel.

MXR has launched the latest iteration of Randy Rhoads’ signature distortion pedal, which this time takes its aesthetic cues from another of the late guitar god’s iconic electric guitars.

For its previous Rhoads-honoring stompbox – the eagerly awaited, limited-edition Randy Rhoads Distortion+ – MXR elected to give it an appropriate polka dot chassis in the style of the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist’s Polka Dot V.

That pedal, first teased in 2022, had been in the works for quite some time, eventually overcoming lengthy production delays that pushed the final release date back an entire year. A collaboration between MXR and Rhoads’ family, the pedal was produced after the latter unveiled Randy’s pedalboard for the firm’s design team to inspect.

The result was a Rhoads-honoring drive pedal, built with the exact replication of parts, which promised the distinct tone of the guitarist’s own MXR Distortion box. It launched to much fanfare, though swiftly sold out.

Now, the pedal is back, but with a new look, this time taking on the appearance of Rhoads’ iconic Jackson Concorde V – a sleek, angular, asymmetric build inspired by a shark fin design that was first produced as a custom model in 1980.

“I’m always working on something, though I don’t talk about it,” Rhoads’ sister, Kathy, had teased to Guitar World a few weeks back. “We’re about to release a second MXR pedal.

“I met with Jimmy Dunlop about two years ago, and we took Randy’s pedalboard out for the first time and did the first pedal with the polka dots. In September we’re releasing a second one designed after the Jackson Concorde.”

Rhoads’ Concorde is up there as one of the most iconic metal guitars ever made. As the story goes, it was designed in direct collaboration with Grover Jackson, after Rhoads paid him a visit at his workshop in Charvel HQ during some time off after the Blizzard of Ozz tour.

It launched the Jackson brand, ushered in a new era of pointy metal axes, and became Rhoads’ go-to guitar on the road, and would later receive a few tweaks following rigorous road-testing.

That guitar – and its master – has been honored with the new MXR Randy Rhoads Distortion+, which ups the ante with gold knurled control knobs for its Output and Distortion parameters.

As per Dunlop, it has been "painstakingly spec'd from Randy's own MXR Distortion+", and comes accompanied by an exclusive collector's booklet.

The Randy Rhoads MXR Special Edition Distortion+ is available now for $189. Pre-order from Guitar Center (US) and Thomann (UK/Europe).

For more, head over to Dunlop.

Read the tributes to Ozzy Osbourne since his death in July at the age of 76, and you’ll hear salutes to every side of his considerable skill set. The flesh-creeping feline yowl. The underrated ear for a melody. The knack for turning a macabre lyric. The madhouse stage presence.

But whatever else he was in life – heavy-metal icon, reality TV pioneer, berserker, survivor – Osbourne was no guitarist. As the Black Sabbath and solo star readily admitted, to cast him as a ‘musician’ in the traditional sense – or as an ‘instrumentalist’ in any sense – was off the mark.

“I don’t play an instrument, I don’t understand music, I can’t even play chords on a guitar,” Osbourne insisted in one video interview with his son, Jack. During a separate 2017 encounter with Rolling Stone, a rueful note crept into the frontman’s voice. “That’s one of my biggest regrets. I can play a little bit of harmonica, and that’s about it. It’s been interesting, because I can’t communicate on a musical level with other musicians.”

Unlike other figures we have bade farewell to in 2025 – among them Mick Ralphs, Brian James and Joe Louis Walker – Osbourne never put fingers to fretboard to play a single classic riff, much less an essential solo or trailblazing technique. And yet, his impact and influence on the guitar scene over the past half-century is deep, profound and undeniable.

Remove the singer from the narrative and some of the rock era’s greatest six-string moments would either never have existed or else gone down in a drabber, much-diluted fashion. Lift him from the timeline – were such a thing even possible – and a fistful of hungry young rough diamonds might never have caught their break or blossomed into all-time greats.

It feels a little glib to cast him as ‘the heavy-metal John Mayall’, but perhaps there’s something in the comparison. Like the Brit-blues godfather – or, indeed, that other supreme talent-spotter, David Bowie – Osbourne had an eye for untapped genius and the ability to ignite it.

Time and again, he drew hard-rock and metal’s most promising gunslingers to him like an industrial magnet, then lit the fuse that turned base metal into gold.

“It’s like shopping for a new suit,” Osbourne told Guitar World’s Brad Tolinski of his recruitment policy. “There may be a whole rack of blue suits, but only one will grab you. There’s no ritual, there’s no formula. I’ve just been lucky that everybody’s liked my taste in guitar players.”

Osbourne’s first guitar foil, of course, does not belong in this category. Even in his early 20s, Tony Iommi was no ingénue in need of a guiding hand.

Rightly recognised as the chief architect of Sabbath’s thunderous, industrial shudder, his steely de facto leadership meant the Birmingham band would likely have gained a level of notice with or without Ozzy onboard.

Yet the best rock ’n’ roll has counterpoint, and it is hopefully not sacrilege to argue that Iommi’s pulverising SG grooves – especially after he began drop-tuning for songs like Children Of The Grave – might have been too torpid, too sludgy, too heavy without Osbourne’s insistent, agonised upper-register vocal as a catalyst.

From Paranoid to Iron Man, the riffs landed so hard precisely because of that tension between razor’s edge and blunt instrumentation.

His firing from Sabbath in ’79 should have been the end of Ozzy. But while future wife Sharon Arden must take credit for pulling the drug-wrecked singer out of the dirt, his nascent solo career only flew thanks to him identifying the neo-classical wizard Randy Rhoads as a breath of fresh air among the Iommi clones lining the corridor to audition.

“I was all over the fucking place,” Osbourne told this writer in 2011. “But fucking hell, when I first heard Randy play, it was poetry in motion. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m onto a good thing here.’ Who knows why we worked so well. Who knows the answer to anything. But sometimes you’ll meet a girlfriend and it’s more than just a night in the sack.”

Osbourne and Rhoads – with vital input from bassist Bob Daisley and drummer Lee Kerslake – were a true creative team, fixing each other’s holes, working nose-to-nose and exploring tone and pitch to ensure both vocals and guitars exploded from the mix on standouts like Crazy Train and Mr Crowley.

“I’d give him a melody, and he’d work a riff around it,” the frontman told journalist Jas Obrecht. “What we both worked out [was], every heavy metal band sticks to one key. So we made a rule that every number we recorded was never played in the same key.”

The magnanimous singer even defied record label bosses to let his then-unknown junior partner perform an unaccompanied classical vignette, Dee, on 1980’s Blizzard Of Ozz.

In hindsight, it was an unprecedented and ballsy move for a make-or-break debut solo album.

“For me,” Osbourne told this writer, “if it’s just fucking headbanging from start to finish, that’s not an album, it’s just a fucking racket. So when Randy says to me, ‘Do you mind if I put this classical instrumental piece on?’, I said, ‘What are you fucking asking me for? It’s your album as well. Just go for it, y’know?’”

Two years later, Rhoads’ death at 25 in a stupid, senseless prank-gone-wrong might have put Osbourne back to square one. Yet the singer somehow managed to replace the irreplaceable, unearthing a volley of stellar players and urging them to contribute.

Some were dazzling-but-transient placeholders, like Brad Gillis or Bernie Tormé. Others, though, stuck around to become part of the mythology. Jake E Lee proved a tough and fiery sideman when he joined for 1983’s Bark At The Moon.

Later that decade, a Viking-haired Rhoads acolyte named Zakk Wylde was pumping gas until divine intervention (or glorious dumb luck, you decide) led Ozzy’s hand to his audition tape.

“You can imagine how many guitarists sent in their résumés – it was fucking mind-boggling,” recalled the frontman in an interview with Joe Bosso.

“So after a while, Sharon started bugging me – ‘When are you gonna listen to these tapes?’ I just didn’t want to deal with it. So one morning I decided, ‘I gotta do this.’ I stuck my hand in a bag and pulled out a tape, and Zakk’s tape was the first and only one I listened to.”

Once again, Osbourne and Wylde’s partnership bore instant fruit (“Back then it was just us in a room jamming,” the guitarist told Andrew Daly. “We’d be blasting it out in a room. The first song we worked on was Miracle Man…”).

And even when Wylde stepped away from the line-up in the post-millennium to tend to Black Label Society, the ripples kept spreading, with one Osbourne Band axeman informing the next.

“I grew up on Ozzy and Sabbath – if you’re into heavy metal, that’s your father,” late-period sideman Gus G told That Metal Interview podcast, adding in a separate interview with Rob Laing that “the first Ozzy album I got on cassette was Diary of a Madman. When I first heard Randy, I thought, ‘Whoa, who is this guy…?’”

No guitarist, then. But Osbourne’s passing marks the exit of both metal’s most captivating frontman and a lightning rod for the genre’s towering players.

Perhaps Wylde spoke most succinctly for the long line of Osbourne alumni – not to mention the wider hard-rock guitar scene – when he laid it on the line in a 2015 interview with Australia’s Heavy magazine.

“Without Ozzy, I wouldn’t be talking here with you right now. The thing is, with Ozzy, he introduces you to the world, and whatever you want to do is up to you…”

• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.

Since the tragic passing of Ozzy Osbourne, countless guitarists have taken to the stage to honor the Prince of Darkness. Grace Bowers is the latest big name to do so with a scintillating cover of Crazy Train.

Nuno Bettencourt and Extreme have dropped a thrilling Ozzy medley into their current live show, and Wolfgang Van Halen played a tear-jerking rendition of Mama I’m Coming Home shortly after the news of the metal legend's death broke, to name just two.

Teen guitar star Bowers has followed in their wake, shredding through one of Randy Rhoads’ classic guitar solos at a recent show with her band, Grace Bowers and the Hodge Podge. Donning one of her Cherry Red Gibson SGs for the performance, the fast-rising guitarist showed her tapping skills, and she handled it with aplomb.

“Honoring Ozzy and Randy last night,” she wrote on Instagram, sharing a clip of her solo. “Learned the solo the other day, so it’s not perfect, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t fun to play.”

She plays the solo flawlessly, and with a guitar tone that would impress even the snobbiest of guitarists, to boot.

“Are we just going to graze over [that you learned it the other day]?” one viewer said. “Like, are you kidding me? Incredible.”

Having impressed many veteran players in recent years, the young guitarist has started to show what she can do outside of the blues-rock realm in 2025.

Earlier this year, she joined the All-American Rejects at a house party show and shredded in ways she’d never done before. She also traded licks with Peter Frampton and Trey Anastasio on a solo-laden cover of a Beatles classic in March, and played with Coldplay’s Chris Martin at the Grammys, much to her surprise.

That, she says, is by design as she looks to unshackle herself with that stylistic tag.

“I get the label as a blues rock artist a lot, and I hate that,” she said in February. “That's not the type of music I make, nor is it the kind of music I listen to.”

Yet, despite the brightness of her rising star, which has seen her play Jimmy Kimmel Live! and numerous legendary players championing her craft, she has, sadly, also faced sexism in the industry.

“I get disrespected before I even play,” she told Guitar World last year. But she's been making them look stupid one lick at a time, and this latest guitar solo has further staked her claim as one of the best new guitarists around.

It’s not a stretch to say that if Randy Rhoads were alive today, the music world would be a better place. His sister Kathy certainly thinks so. “He was just a one of a kind. Anyone who ever played with him would tell you, ‘He’s probably the best musician that I ever worked with.’”

Kathy has understandably been feeling a bit raw since Ozzy Osbourne’s passing in July. Her family had known the Prince of Darkness since ’79 when Randy first hooked up with him, leading to the formation of a band with bassist Bob Daisley and drummer Lee Kerslake, and their two beloved records, 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz and 1981’s Diary of a Madman.

Randy may have been in his early 20s at the time, but Kathy recalls the rapid evolution of his craft. “It wasn’t like he changed, over years or months – he could improve literally in days.”

His solos on Crazy Train, Mr. Crowley and Over the Mountain are evidence of his unreal talent. But it that wasn’t all: “There was a charisma about Randy,” she says. “He had the looks and everybody just gravitated toward him. There was a charm that seemed to glow.”

The guitar prodigy was just 25 years old when he died in a plane crash in 1982. “He was only beginning,” she says. “Ozzy once said Randy was somebody that comes to this planet and bursts off like a shooting star. Here we are, 43 years later, still talking about this little kid from Burbank.

“The impact he still has on kids playing his music – when I see that it puts a smile on my face. They carry his memory to this day.”

We know a lot about Randy the guitar player. But what motivated him behind the scenes when he was very young?

“Randy and I are only a year apart and as kids we were really close. We were always playing around. My mom owned a music school – we still own it – and it was kind of like our second home.

“Instead of saying, ‘Do you want to take up any instruments?’ it was, ‘What would you like to play?’ Taking lessons was a huge part of our upbringing. Years later, Randy was an incredible guitar teacher at the school. He had like 60 students towards the end. They loved him and he really liked doing it. If he’d lived he’d still be teaching.”

When did the family realize he was gifted?

“When we started, my older brother Kelle picked drums, and Randy and I picked guitar. We started lessons on acoustic together. There’s a misconception that Randy was classically trained – but he wasn’t. What is true is that we learned how to read music properly.

“He started on acoustic and went over to electric around 14 years old. He took lessons from a teacher called Scott Shelly. Scott came up to my mom and said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t teach him anymore – he knows exactly as much as I do.’

“I’ll never forget the day I was in the kitchen with my mom and Randy, at this dining-height bar. He was 15, and my mom said, ‘Randy, you have a God-given talent.’ I just froze. I thought, ‘What is he going to say?’ Tears just started streaming down his cheeks – he was so happy that my mom had told him that.”

What are your memories of Randy once he got rolling with Quiet Riot in the ’70s?

“When he was trying to get Quiet Riot to work, he beat that to a pulp and tried so hard. That was his hope and goal, but it just never happened. My mom said one day, ‘You know, Randy, the reason that Quiet Riot never took off is the music is just not that great.’”

It must have been gratifying when things took off with Ozzy.

“Randy finally had the professional-level platform he really needed. Ozzy said, ‘Do your thing - just be you.’ He encouraged my brother to excel.

“Randy was a perfectionist. He was always criticizing his performance or worrying about his equipment. I could tell you stories about being in the limo when his pedalboard had gone out, and him being so upset about it. My mom would say, ‘They’ll get it to work; it’ll all work out, Randy,’ and calm him down.

“Another story is when they did Diary of a Madman over at Ridge Farm Studios. They wanted to tour the US, and they had to put together a second album so they’d have enough material to perform.

“They put it together in literally six weeks, and Randy thought, ‘Oh, it’s not going to be good. It was too quick. I don’t feel I did my best.’ He was so worried about it – but what a freaking masterpiece that album is!”

How did his success with Ozzy impact him personally?

“He was a very humble, almost shy person. He never let professional success get to his head. Never. People were starting to come up to him for an autograph, and he’d literally blush, like, ‘Are you kidding me? Do you really want this?’

“But once he got on stage he was like a beast. A different person emerged, larger than life. But he was always very quiet, humble, and he had little hobbies that grounded him.

“He only listened to classical music when he was home; he loved classical music. Toward the end of his life his passion became great for classical music. And when he was on the road he’d find a professor at a university from the Yellow Pages, call them up, and take a lesson as they toured in different places.

“He also grounded himself at home by collecting miniature trains. He had a set and buildings that went with them. He’d spend hours putting them together. We have all this stuff, by the way. For his last Christmas my husband built a big board for him, so he could put this whole set together. Sadly, he never got to.”

What do you remember about Randy and Ozzy’s relationship?

“It’s well-known that Ozzy was at the party stage of his life. That was a little hard for Randy, who’d never been away from home. He still lived with my mom and I was starting a family. It was hard for him being thrust into Ozzy’s partying.

“But they liked each other a great deal. I have a diary Randy kept from when he first got with Ozzy. He actually lived at Ozzy’s home; Ozzy was married to Thelma at the time, but was going through the divorce. That kind of upset Randy because we came from a divorced family. He felt bad for the kids.

“In the diary he said, ‘Ozzy really likes me. He’s afraid I might leave. But he’s a really good guy. I really like him.’ Ozzy was just one in a million. You could sit down with him and it felt like you knew him. He was very relatable, kind, funny, and definitely a character.

“But we were raised in a Christian school and attended church. To be thrust into the Ozzy Osbourne world was an eye-opener. I think that’s why Randy picked up classical guitar; you know, to ground himself. He was homesick a lot, especially around the holidays.”

Do you remember when Randy told Ozzy he was leaving to go back to school?

“It’s known he’d told Ozzy just a few days before he passed that he was done with touring and wanted to come home. My mom was at the beginning of the process to get him into UCLA for a master’s degree in classical music. Randy was really looking forward to that.

“Ozzy said, ‘Are you crazy? You’re a rockstar!’ Randy said, ‘That’s not what I want; this is what I want.’ Ozzy said – and I’ll quote him – ‘You could buy your own fucking college if you keep doing this!’ But for Randy, the biggest thing was to be a true musician.”

What can you say about the aftermath of Randy's passing?

“Ozzy’s passing brought that all back. It was such a dark, horrible time. I’ve never been able to say what happened in the household that day. It’s so gut-wrenching and so horrific that I can’t even put it into words.

“Here was this rising star who’d just started. To be cut down like that was just so tragic, and it was such a silly, unnecessary situation. The fact that he got on that plane – and Randy hated flying – is just shocking to me.”

Why do you think he did it?

“He probably went up to take pictures. He loved taking pictures, and he probably wanted to show my mom because it was a beautiful area where they’d stopped the bus. I guess Randy thought, ‘Okay, I could do this.’

“That’ll be the first question I ask him when I see him – ‘Why did you go on that plane, Randy?’ But yeah, it was just a horrific time, and it was so horrific for my mother too. It almost killed her.

“My husband had to get on a plane that night to represent the family and bring him home. To this day, he won’t tell me some of the things that he witnessed.”

On the flip side of that darkness, Randy’s impact and influence seem boundless.

“Nobody would be more shocked than Randy himself! When he recorded those albums he was 21 or 22. And he triple-tracked his solos – Ozzy told him, ‘Nobody can do that!’ Well, Randy could. That was just the genius of Randy.”

You’ve been keeping Randy’s legacy alive in many ways. One of those was the MXR Randy Rhoads Distortion pedal. Are there more things like that in the works?

“I’m always working on something, though I don’t talk about it. My brother Kelle had a stroke last year, so he can’t help anymore, but I have a lot of support from my husband. We’re about to release a second MXR pedal.

“I met with Jimmy Dunlop about two years ago, and we took Randy’s pedalboard out for the first time and did the first pedal with the polka dots. In September we’re releasing a second one designed after the Jackson Concorde.”

Elsewhere, the Randy versus Eddie Van Halen debate rages on. Does that have you rolling your eyes?

“I’ll tell you two things and they’re from Randy. He would always say, ‘It’s not fair to compare us. We have a different style.’ Randy had classical influences – you could take his music and play it with an orchestra. He sometimes sounded like he was playing a violin. Eddie had a different style.

“Randy would say, ‘It’s like comparing apples to oranges.’ And Eddie got to live until he was 65. Had Randy lived until he was 65, I think we’d have a whole different story here. I can 100 percent guarantee you of that.”

If Randy were alive today, what might he be doing?

“I think he’d have combined rock and classical music, and come up with something that would have seriously – and I’m not kidding – blown us out of the water.

“And he loved teaching, so he’d have wanted to have a little bit of that in his life, and helping kids with music. And I could see him writing music for movies or something.”

What do you think he’d have thought of Ozzy’s last stand at the Back to the Beginning show?

“I think Randy’s spirit was there, and they did an amazing tribute to him. Ozzy had always given Randy credit for his career and life. When Ozzy got inducted into the Hall of Fame – he doesn’t like long speeches – he said, ‘I owe my life and career to Randy Rhoads.’ It blew me away when I heard him say that.

“It was a gut-punching feeling when Ozzy passed so shortly after that concert. But he probably put his all into that and then he thought, ‘Okay, I got what I wanted. I accomplished my goal. I’m good.’

“But who knows? I absolutely know that Randy would have been there performing with him. And I think that they would have remained really good friends.”

• Kathy Rhoads continues to honor Randy on Instagram.

In his tragically short yet impactful life, Randy Rhoads managed to build a legacy that continues to impact electric guitar players around the world to this very day. His spirit was palpable at Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath's final show, Back to the Beginning, while the Prince of Darkness remained grateful for what Rhoads and his playing did for his solo career.

Yet, it's not a well-known fact that, toward the end of his life, Rhoads was more than ready to leave the rock star life behind and embark on a new – and more low-key – chapter.

“It’s known that he had told Ozzy just a few short days before he passed that he was done with touring and wanted to come back home,” his sister, Kathy Rhoads, tells Guitar World in a new extensive interview.

“And my mom went to UCLA, my dad, too, so my mom was at the beginning of the process to get him into the school and get his master’s degree in classical music. She was starting the process and contacting the school. And he was really looking forward to that.”

As for Ozzy, well, it’s safe to say he was far from overjoyed at losing his star guitarist.

“Ozzy said to him, ‘Are you crazy? You’re a rock star.’ Randy said, ‘That’s just not what I want right now. This is what I want to do.’”

She continues, “And Ozzy said, and I’ll quote him, ‘Okay, you could buy your own fucking college by the time you’re done if you keep doing this!’ But for Randy, the biggest key [thing] was that he was a true musician. It was always about the music for him.”

Alas, Rhoads would never manage to go to UCLA and fulfill his classical music ambitions. After playing his last show on March 18, 1982, he died in a freak plane crash at just 25 years of age.

In recent Randy Rhoads news, his Quiet Riot Les Paul – which features on the back cover of their debut record – expected to sell for up to $200,000 at auction.

Rudy Sarzo remains justifiably proud of the music he made with Ozzy Osbourne in the early ‘80s – but equally important is the kindness he received at the time from Ozzy and wife Sharon.

Taking part in Black Sabbath’s Back to the Beginning farewell show in July was, of course, a no-brainer. But Sarzo says he couldn’t have predicted how special the experience would be. “I was just watching and listening – it was a miracle,” he tells Bass Player.

“My purpose in going was to have a few minutes of face-to-face with Ozzy and Sharon, and to thank them. When I got there I realized that everybody else was there for the same purpose.

“There was so much complete gratitude. I’ll never have enough time in my life to thank Randy Rhoads, Sharon and Ozzy for changing my life. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if not for them.”

What was the Back to the Beginning show like?

“I gotta tell you: Ozzy looked well. He did not look like he was two weeks away from passing. In medical terms there’s this thing called ‘the gift,’ where, when people are about to pass, they get lucid. It’s like, ‘Oh, they’re okay,’ and then they pass away.”

Is that how Ozzy was?

“I think the whole world witnessed the gift. He was fine. Then a couple of weeks later I received a text from a friend sending me condolences. I replied, ‘What happened?’ And my friend goes, ‘He died. He passed.’

“The feeling was similar to when Randy passed away – that dead void; that emptiness. It took me a few days to analyze what I was feeling. Since Randy’s passing in 1982 I’ve had family members who passed, but those was natural causes and expected. Randy and Ozzy had a different effect on me.

“Ozzy, Randy and Sharon are the three main people who changed my life. I went from sleeping on the floor of Kevin DuBrow’s apartment to passing the audition with Ozzy and moving in with Sharon’s family.”

You’ve often talked about how welcoming Ozzy was.

“He opened up his suitcase because I didn’t have any clothes to wear, and said, ‘Take whatever you want.’ The kindness never stopped.”

You hadn’t seen him for some time before the Birmingham show. Was there time to reconnect?

“He was busy rehearsing when we arrived; the following day we all had soundcheck, then it was show day. It was jam-packed. So the only time I got to spend with Ozzy was at the big photoshoot with Ross Halfin. And everybody was there, so time was limited.

“It was basically having a little face-to-face and thanking him for everything he did for me. I got to spend more time with Sharon because she didn’t have to deal with rehearsals. We got to reminisce.

“And the soundcheck day, July 4, was their wedding anniversary. My wife and I, I think, were the only people there who were also at Ozzy and Sharon’s wedding in Maui. So we were reminiscing about that, the big stadium shows we did with Randy, and all the wonderful times that we had together.”

How did your all-star jam with Nuno Bettencourt go?

“There were no egos, no drama, just a lot of love. We played as a celebration. Tom Morello did a wonderful job putting the bands together. I am so glad to have represented the Randy era of Ozzy’s band.”

What did you think of the Ozzy and Sabbath sets?

“I was waiting for his solo set. It was the first time he showed up on stage. And let me put it this way: I got it. I understood it. The whole event was a celebration of Ozzy and Black Sabbath – a celebration of our generation of music. I understood Ozzy’s condition, but when he opened his mouth and started singing, I was in awe. I told my wife, ‘We’re witnessing a miracle here.’

“He wasn’t well, you know? For him to sing at that level and sound so great – I got chills. I couldn’t believe it. And as he kept going he got a bit stronger, and the audience carried him. You could feel the love from everybody in the stadium.

“When he did the Black Sabbath set, I knew it was a moment that would never recreate itself again. I’m so glad that it’s been captured. And there’s a lot of fan footage on YouTube, so no one can claim anyone fixed the sound. That’s Ozzy singing right there on the spot.”

Did it surprise you that he was able to rise to the occasion?

“Having been on the road with Ozzy for two tours, I understand what motivated him. When he had to do something, he always worked himself up to the moment and then delivered beyond expectation.

“I got the text for this event back in October 2024. By the time the show was performed, it had been two years in the making. I knew that, so I knew Ozzy was gonna make it. I felt like, ‘He’s gonna work himself up to it, just like he did when I was in the band.’ I was not surprised when he did it.”

After having some time to reflect, how are you feeling now?

“We experienced the gift, which gave us hope. It was like, ‘Look what Ozzy did. Maybe this is a turning point in his health.’ And then, boom, he passes.

“It took me a few days of soul searching to realize, ‘This is pretty much how I felt with Randy.’ The difference is that, with Randy, it was a traumatic experience with the plane crash. With Ozzy it was a bit different – we knew he had Parkinson’s and that he wasn’t doing well.”

Ozzy’s death, if only for a moment, gave the world pause. Why do you think that happened?

“While I was on tour with him, I witnessed how he remained a common man. He was a bit low – he told Sharon, ‘I’m missing home and my friends.’

“Sharon goes, ‘Okay, let me bring one of your friends over, and have him on the bus with us.’ He was a very nice guy. After a couple of days I asked, ‘What do you do for a living?’ He says, ‘I sell vegetables on the side of the road.’

“I was thinking, ‘This is Ozzy Osbourne. He’s been with Black Sabbath. He could have his pick of friends – but his best friend sells vegetables.’ That gave me the whole picture of Ozzy’s humanity.

“It wasn’t about what you do, but who you are as a human being that he gravitated to. No matter how famous he got, he was still just Ozzy.”

Randy Rhoads' Quiet Riot Gibson Les Paul has gone up for auction with an upper sale estimate of $200,000. The 1974 build was played on stage during his pre-Ozzy days, and can also be spotted on the back of Quiet Riot's 1977 self-titled debut album.

The all-black Les Paul, listed on the auction website Gotta Have Rock and Roll, features a maple-topped mahogany body, a mahogany neck, and an Indian rosewood fretboard with trapezoid inlays. It has the serial number 101797 and shows clear signs of where Rhoads weathered the guitar on stages and in the studio.

Intriguingly, however, the guitar didn't actually belong to Rhoads. It was originally bought by Paul Raskin, the brother of Jodi Raskin, Rhoads' then-girlfriend and later fiancée, and was frequently loaned out to the fast-rising virtuoso.

The auctioneer also states it's believed to be the first time that a Rhoads-played guitar has been made available to the public. There was a long-lost Rhoads prototype that surfaced a few years back, but that particular guitar was mistakenly sold to the public at NAMM.

“This instrument bears a clear indication of its historical significance,” says Gotta Have Rock and Roll.

Rhoads had formed Quiet Riot at the age of 16. The group's live shows, with Rhoads' talents at the forefront, established them as one of the most popular acts on the L.A. circuit in the late '70s. But his time in the band was marked with tension, which came to a head in a drunken fight, during which shots were fired.

He was soon snapped up by Ozzy Osbourne, who was looking to launch a solo career following his dismissal from Black Sabbath. Bassist Bob Daisley says he had a premonition about Rhoads' impending greatness after his Ozzy audition, and the rest, as they say, was history.

The Les Paul is expected to sell for around $200,000. The auction is running online until August 8th, 2025.

Head to Gotta Have Rock and Roll for more.

Yesterday (July 22, 2025), it was announced that Ozzy Osbourne – the Prince of Darkness, who had helped forge the very sound of heavy metal – had passed away at the age of 76.

The news came mere weeks after the Black Sabbath singer had reunited with his old bandmates – and made his highly anticipated return to the stage – for the Back to the Beginning farewell show.

For his final send-off, it was fitting that Ozzy would line up alongside both Tony Iommi, the player with whom he revolutionized heavy music, and Zakk Wylde, who ended up becoming his longest-serving six-string sidemen.

But between those two players, Ozzy partnered with a long line of guitar players, collaborating with big-name artists and lesser-known talents over the course of his prolific career. Indeed, his impeccable taste in guitarists is almost as legendary as the man himself, with Ozzy turning aspiring artists into household names, and giving big breaks to those who have since become heroes in their own right.

From the virtuosic Randy Rhoads, who helped shaped Ozzy's early post-Sabbath days, to the likes of Brad Gillis, who served small-yet-crucial roles in the larger Osbourne ecosystem, the Prince of Darkness's list of collaborators isn't short of top tier players.

Below, you can find the guitarists who wrote and played on Ozzy’s classic albums and took part in his legendary tours.

Following the announcement that Ozzy Osbourne has died at the age of 76, we're revisiting the Guitar World archives to look back on the life and legacy of the legendary Black Sabbath singer.

The following interview is taken from Guitar World's June 1990 issue. The original headline was "The Good, The Bad & The Ozzy: Or How to Become a Heavy Metal Guitar Hero in One E-Z Lesson."

If only half the rumors about him are true, Ozzy Osbourne should be dead. Yet, after 21 years of twisted public behavior, the man who brought you songs like Paranoid, Bark at the Moon and Children of the Grave looks incredibly healthy and ready to take on the world.

Ozzy recently celebrated more than 20 years in the business by polishing off a live greatest hits EP, Just Say Ozzy, and is currently at work on his next studio metal masterpiece.

In the conversation that follows, Ozzy thoughtfully recalls what made each of his great guitarists special, and elaborates his criteria for choosing a guitarist, his audition process, and his theory on why it's good to be bad.

Let’s start by looking at your past guitarists. How did you find Randy Rhoads?

"Thinking back, it was quite extraordinary. I had been in Black Sabbath since high school, and suddenly Tony Iommi fired me from the band. It was a shock because Sabbath had always been there. I was out of my brain on drugs and alcohol and I was stuck in the position of getting a band together. I had never auditioned anyone before and I was petrified.

"The auditioning process was so embarrassing. How do you tell someone that they’re not what you’re looking for? Back then, everyone was trying to clone Jimi Hendrix. I heard nothing but Purple Haze and Foxy Lady riffs. One guy even hooked up several tape recorders and echo units so he could play both the lead and rhythms to Hendrix tunes simultaneously. It was a nightmare!

"I had almost given up when somebody told Sharon [Osbourne, Ozzy’s wife and personal manager] about this great guitar player in town named Randy Rhoads. Shortly afterward, Randy came over to my Los Angeles apartment. He was so frail, tiny and effeminate that I thought, 'Oh no, oh hell.' But out of politeness, I invited him to play the next day.

"Unfortunately, when he turned up, I was stoned out of my mind. I mean, I was on another planet. Some guy woke me up and said, 'He’s here!' I looked up and Randy started playing from this tiny amp. Even in my semiconsciousness he blew my mind. I told him to come by the next day and that he had the gig.

"The next day I told someone I dreamed that I hired a guitar player. They told me I didn’t dream it and that he was coming that day. I thought, 'Oh god, what have I done? I hope he can play!'"

How do you know when a guitarist is right or wrong?

"It’s like shopping for a new suit: there may be a whole rack of blue suits, but only one will grab you. There’s no ritual, there’s no formula. I’ve just been lucky that everybody’s liked my taste in guitar players."

What were Randy’s weaknesses as a player? Was there any aspect you had to help him with?

"He didn’t really have any weaknesses. I was the one that needed work. I had just come from Sabbath and Tony Iommi was a bit of a tyrant. His attitude was that I was the singer, I was allocated a space, and if I couldn’t come up with anything then I was screwed.

"Whereas Randy would work with me. Randy had patience because he was a guitar teacher. It was potentially a very frustrating situation for him because I couldn’t play a musical instrument. But he was always supportive and would say things like, 'Try bending a note here,' or 'Try this key.'

"It was a bit like going to music school. Randy was very instrumental in bringing me out of me. The first two Ozzy albums are by far the greatest things I’ve ever done. He was too good to last."

You and Randy had chemistry.

"Yeah, and now I think it’s gone, but you never know. I was never sure whether my work with Sabbath was any good. I used to think it was all too ordinary, but it seems to have stood the test of time. You never know what you got till it’s gone."

You must have had more confidence when you found Jake E. Lee.

"Not really. I knew a guitarist had to look good and have a good attitude, but other than that… Randy was the exception. He was from somewhere else.

"Randy came to me one day and said, 'I’ve had enough of this rock and roll stuff, I want to get a degree in music from UCLA.' I said to him, 'Why don’t you wait a few years and get some money and success behind you. You can always get a degree when you’re 90, if you want.' But he wanted to study right then and there.

"He started spending hours practicing and writing out his own formulas – diads or niads or whatever you call them. Day in and day out, whatever spare time he had was spent plucking on his flamenco guitar. He was a musician in the true sense. The instrument was an extension of his personality.

"When we were recording Diary of a Madman he would disappear into the studio for days. I’d ask him what he was doing and he would say, 'I’m working on this solo and I still can’t get it.' Finally, it would come to him and he would call me and say, 'Listen to this.' It would always tear my head off.

"That’s the difference between guitar players: there are guys who’ll go wingly-wangly up and down the fretboard, and some have emotions and others don’t. Randy and Eddie Van Halen were at the winning post, and everyone else is a close second.

"I mean, this Yngwie Malmsteen guy must have the capability to do some amazing things, but it’s too cold; it’s too much for the mind to take in. And watching Steve Vai is like watching a good mechanic strip down an engine in three seconds and rebuild it. He makes things run perfectly, but there’s no nice little errors that make things sound human."

Okay, but what about Jake?

"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.

"We lived together in a house in Beverly Hills and we never spoke! It wasn’t because we didn’t like each other. We just didn’t have anything to say.

"It was similar to the relationship I had with Tony Iommi. We’d get together to rehearse, write a mediocre song and then go our own way. It’s not the relationship I wanted with Jake, but a festering cancer set in. I wouldn’t have it. If I ask, 'What do you think of that?' I want a reaction. If it’s negative we’ll try something else, that’s not a problem. But Jake would shrug his shoulders, raise an eyebrow and walk away.

"The word 'band' means a band of men – an army, a platoon, a unit. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If there is a communication breakdown – hey, that’s a great name for a song – you’ve got no unit.

"To be fair, Jake did have a fantastic presence and he was a great guitar player."

What made Zakk stand out?

"This is a bizarre story, but it’s the God’s honest truth. It was a bad period for me because I was sick of auditioning people – drummers, bass players, keyboard players, you name it. Now it was time to audition yet another guitar player. The spark had gone out of it, probably due to my various battles with drugs and alcohol. I had a lot of personal hang-ups about a lot of things, plus I was tired.

"I asked the guys who were in the band at the time to put out the word that I needed somebody and to have people send me résumés. I auditioned about 50 guys. Some of them were hilarious. I asked one guy to play something in a specific key. He said, 'I think it would be better in another key.' I said, 'No it wouldn’t. Just play it in the key it was written in.' He protested again and I just thought, What the hell am I doing here? I’m jet-lagged to the max, arguing with some idiot guitar player.

"Then there were all these Eddie Van Halen clones on steroids. They played like Van Halen while standing on their heads and hopping on one leg. One guy even played like Eddie while eating a fucking sword!

"One morning I was confronted with a mound of tapes and I remember picking one up out of thousands and saying, 'Look here, a Randy Rhoads clone.' It was a picture of some guy with long blonde hair playing a Les Paul Custom. I couldn’t even bring myself to listen to his tape. I tossed it back in the pile and forgot about it.

"Then about six months later, my drummer, Randy Castillo, walks in and says, 'I found this great guitarist from New Jersey, and his name is Zakk.' I walked into the audition and I knew I had seen him before, but I couldn’t remember where. He plugs in and plays my whole catalog, note for note.

"I then asked him to play something of his own and he played some acoustic stuff and some classical stuff. He had a bounce and a spark about him. Then I realized where I saw Zakk before: he was the Randy Rhoads clone in the photo, the one tape I had picked out of thousands. Only it turned out that he wasn’t a Randy clone at all. Randy would’ve looked like an ant next to Zakk.

"There were lots of benefits to choosing Zakk. He had followed my career and he knew my songs better than I knew them myself. We knew it wouldn’t be hard to break him in."

Now that you’ve worked with Zakk for a while, what do you think his strengths are?

"That’s a difficult question. He’s still very young and still very impressionable. I think he’s still finding his own feet."

What are the drawbacks to working with young players?

"I keep thinking I would love to work on a project with musicians my own age. I guess I’d better do it quick because with each passing year the number of people my age gets smaller. I’m starting to feel like a daddy or something. I don’t want to be the wild man of rock and roll for too much longer."

You could go the David Coverdale route and hire established guitarists, yet you seem to prefer to discover new talent.

"I want someone that’s hungry. I want someone who wants to go out and kick Eddie Van Halen’s ass. I look for that hunger, that ability to succeed."

What was your most bizarre auditioning experience?

"There’s been thousands of them. One guy did a break dance and spun around on his back on the floor while playing wild guitar licks. There were lots of guys who were great but horrible to look at. I mean, there’s always cosmetic surgery, I suppose. Besides being a great guitarist you’ve got to look the part; you’ve got to be able to attract people. Some of the people I’ve auditioned looked like they should’ve been in a sideshow at the circus.

"I’m never worried about finding players, though. If Zakk walked through the door and said, 'I’m leaving,' I’d say, 'God bless you, goodbye.' There’s an abundance of guitar players jamming in their rooms who are brilliant. In fact, I often wonder why they aren’t out doing something.

You’ve got to have an interesting frontman.

"Yeah, you’re right. There is a lack of good frontmen. Axl Rose is the best I’ve seen in many years. I appeared in a movie called The Decline and Fall of Western Civilization, Part II: The Heavy Metal Years, along with a number of bands. I couldn’t believe the horseshit in that film. It seemed that all anyone talked about was partying and getting laid. What about being in a band and playing music?

"Guns N’ Roses is a great name for a band and they seem committed. I’m not trying to be trendy, but that’s what I think. I think they’ve got a great image, as well. Everybody likes the bad guys.

"Take that band Stryper – that’s the highest form of hypocrisy. They wear the same clothes as me, but they carry crucifixes and Bibles. The difference is, nobody likes to hear a good person. I discovered that many years ago."

What’s your assessment of Tony Iommi? He’s left-handed, his fingers are chopped off, he had to detune his guitar three steps, yet he ended up defining a genre.

"In the beginning he was brilliant – he was the master of heavy metal riffs. He was very clever. But I never really knew Tony; we rarely spoke. He was the god-almighty figure in the band and verged on being a bully. I must have learned something from him, though, because when I left I did pretty well on my own. I still keep in touch with the rest of the band, but I don’t speak with Tony because we never talked when I was in the band.

"He’s very intimidating. To be honest, toward the end his playing bored me, because everyone else was progressing and he wasn’t. That’s probably not fair, given his problems with his fingers. I should be grateful for Black Sabbath. But Tony needs to stop writing about devils and bullshit – it’s already been done.

"Ultimately, I think it was good that I moved on when I did. It was starting to get frustrating, because Tony would get a good headbanger going, then he’d start doing all this weird stuff. It started getting too complicated."

Except for Shot in the Dark, your live versions of songs stay pretty close to the originals.

"I’ve seen bands who’ve played endings that are longer than the actual song. I always think, Jeez, c’mon! End it already! I’m old-fashioned in the sense that I like the song to sound like the song. I don’t even like live records; I haven’t really acknowledged the release of Just Say Ozzy. Those songs have already been done. Why do them again?"

Aren’t you ever tempted to rework songs to keep them from getting boring?

"No. If I don’t get off on something, I just drop the song from the set. I’ve got enough tunes in the pipeline."

Millions of bands have tried to cop your formula, yet you endure. What is it about your songs that make them stand the test of time?

"God only knows. I was touring with Metallica a couple of years ago and I went backstage to talk with them. They were hanging out, and all of them were staring at me in a very strange manner. Then a couple weeks later I wandered backstage and they were playing Sabbath tunes.

"I asked ’em if they were trying to give me a hard time. And they said 'No, we’re mad for Sabbath.' They were big fans. I thought, What, Sabbath-mad? It’s incredible to me that people still like the music.

"Sabbath was a band that used to pull into an arena, play and never see a fan on the street. We came, we saw, we conquered and went home. I’d see an occasional acid freak wandering around San Francisco like a zombie mumbling 'Black Sabbath.' But we had no real contact with the fans, and we had no idea of the extent of our impact.

Of your albums, which are your favorites?

"Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman. I relate more to the period of time than to the actual album. If I was having fun, then it was a good album. If I wasn’t, then the album was crap. We had a blast making Blizzard and Diary – screwed-up and always laughing.

"Those first two albums were my revenge because I was fired from Sabbath. I thought, Man, I’ll show them what it’s about! I always come out with my best when my back’s against the wall. It’s always when the luxury and financial rewards come piling in that I begin to lose it."

What would make you hungry again?

"I am, in a way. This is the first record I’ve ever done sober. I’m five months sober, and it’s very difficult. I don’t know whether it’s good or not. I’m writing mellower songs. Not to say the album will be mellow. Zakk will make sure it’s not. He’s crazy. In fact, he reminds me of me.

"During rehearsal, I’ll sit down with the road crew and have a can of Coke. Geezer [Butler] will walk in and quietly join us, then Randy [Castillo, drums]. But Zakk, you hear him from a mile away, screaming or whatever. He’s like a circus coming to town. Geezer cowers when he hears Zakk coming. There are so many cool-guy guitar players with their sunglasses and all that, but Zakk is one of the boys.

"He’s a real shitkicker. He always says hi to people and takes the time to talk to the fans – he’s always on. One of the key things about him is that he’s always got some time for the people. That’s a big asset. When people find success, they tend to get big heads and 18 bodyguards. They forget that without the fans they wouldn’t have a flash limousine and the money to pay for the bodyguards.

"You shouldn’t make yourself over-available, but you shouldn’t make yourself invisible either. I have to be careful because, in a lot of areas, not only are there a lot of people who like me but also a lot of people who hate me. I don’t want to be the next John Lennon.

"Trying to clean my act up was a major step in my life. I’m suddenly stone-cold sober in this zoo and the lions are trying to pick the lock. I was stoned for 21 years. Most rockers get stoned to break down the inhibitions, paranoia and shyness that stem from personal hang-ups we’ve carried around since we were kids. We all want to communicate with our fellow man, but we’re too frightened to try.

"Getting drunk allowed me to relax. But after a period of years, that stopped working for me. So I had a real dilemma. I was getting high and it was killing me. Yet, I was afraid of being sober. Things began going drastically wrong for me in my personal life. I had hit the bottom, and all that was left was death or insanity. Now with the grace of God, I’ve kept my sobriety, but I still take it one day at a time.

"On the next studio record I’ve decided to take a whack at writing a love song and things I actually feel. I may also write a song called, 'Son of a Bitch, Everything’s Real.' [laughs]

Someone once described you as a “nuclear bluesman.” The analogy fits – you often write simple, guitar-oriented songs about the woes of the modern man.

"Just the other day I was watching an old video of me singing Paranoid. I listened to the lyrics and thought, Hell, where were we when we wrote that? It was really strange because I had this smile on my face while I was singing this heavy, heavy song.

"I mean, Sabbath grew up in Birmingham, England, which was in an industrialized pit. That was a billion light years from San Francisco’s hippified flower power, where you’d hear some guy singing about wearing flowers in your hair. Meanwhile, my life was shit. I was frightened by fear. Fear has been my closest friend throughout my life. That’s why we drank. That’s why we’re all fucked up.

"But I have no real regrets, except that I wasn't up to keeping Randy Rhoads from getting on that plane. I'm no superman, no person from another planet – I'm just a lucky guy."

Kelly Garni grew up with Randy Rhoads and formed Quiet Riot with him in 1975. The bassist was fired three years later after a drunken brawl with the guitarist – whose promising career ended in a plane crash seven years later.

“I was inconsolable,” Garni tells Bass Player. “I couldn’t even go to the funeral. I just didn’t want to see that reality.”

He’d already given up playing and begun a new life as a paramedic. It took him years to get back to bass.

“I started playing again in my early 50s; I’m 68 now,” he says. “I got a call from Todd Kerns, who wanted me to come play with his band.

“I said, ‘I don’t own a bass – I haven’t played in 25 years. I don’t think I can do it.’ Todd convinced me, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I’m getting offers to play in bands, and I could; but I don’t want to.”

He continues: “People still have a lot of respect for Randy. They have high regard for what we did, so I play those old songs. I’m the last man standing; Drew Forsyth [drummer] is still alive, but he wants nothing to do with it. So I’m all you got.”

How did you and Randy meet?

“He was a guy I noticed in high school who seemed very interesting. We were both in a new school, sort of outcasts, so we gravitated together. I went to his house and he told me he played guitar.

“He didn’t know how to play lead, but I thought he was pretty good. He was taking lessons from Scott Shelly at his mother’s music school. From there, it turned into him needing a bass player, so he turned me into a bass player!”

Did Randy teach you how to play bass?

“He began to teach me basslines. As he was learning his leads, he’d practice over my basslines. I’d play for four or five hours straight, and he’d just do the same things over and over until he had them perfected.

“From there we got good enough to where we could establish little bands that played at backyard keggers. When I was about 15 we formed Quiet Riot. We found Kevin DuBrow and Drew Forsyth, who we’d used in previous bands.”

What was your and Randy’s vision for Quiet Riot?

“We just kind of made it up as we went along. We tried to stick with trends that were popular. This was 1976, so Randy and I were heavily influenced by Alice Cooper, David Bowie and Black Oak Arkansas – the first concert we went to together.

“Kevin was heavily influenced by British music, like Slade and flashier bands. That clashed a bit with what me and Randy wanted, but we made it work. That’s the reason our first two albums have sort of a poppy sound: there was a lot of Kevin's involvement there.”

Is it true that management steered you in a lighter direction?

“The management wanted us to be the next Bay City Rollers, and we didn’t. When the time came to write songs, they were telling us, ‘It needs to be more pop.’ Randy and I thought it was horrible – but Kevin was all in.

“At that point he’d kind of taken over the band. I didn’t feel that Randy and I were playing in a style we wanted, but Kevin insisted that if we wanted to make it, it’s what we had to do. So we went along with it.”

When did Randy’s beloved cream-colored Les Paul come into the picture?

“He got that guitar from our first manager, who we both adored. He didn’t have any experience and only a little bit of money, but he put a lot into the band. To me and Randy, he was a great friend.

“Randy had talked about the guitar, and the manager had an extra cabinet lying around, so he traded it and got that guitar. Many people think Randy paid him back, but we didn’t have that kind of money. I never saw Randy give him any money, and I would have, because we were always around each other.”

Were you able to afford decent amps?

“Randy had a Peavey Standard head, which I thought sounded great for bass. But he made it sound great for guitar, and he had an Ampeg 4x12 cabinet that was oversized. I was using two Acoustic 370s.

“Most people looked at Randy’s equipment and said, ‘How did he get that sound out of that?’ But it didn’t come out of the amps – it literally came out of his fingers. It’s a strange thing; the tone was in his fingertips.”

Even though it was early on, could you tell that Randy was a great player?

“There was no doubt about it. He wasn’t a guy who got better every six months, or every month, or every week; he got better every 60 seconds. Literally, he’d play one thing, and 60 seconds later he would play it amazingly. And 60 seconds after that, he’d play it like only he could.”

You and Kevin weren’t getting along by the time the second record came, leading to a drunken fistfight between you and Randy involving a gun.

“Yeah. I was unhappy for quite a while. The band as we were had stalled; we weren’t going anywhere and weren’t doing anything. It seemed like rinse and repeat; there was no progress. We weren’t making any money and management gave us an allowance, which in my case was $40 a week to live on.

“It was frustrating. I was getting older – I was 20, and we still hadn’t gotten anywhere. We seemed to have some success in Japan, and the management kept saying we’d go there, but we never did. This all came to a very drunken conclusion. The night before it happened I’d gone to a club called the Cabaret, and it caught on fire.

“Everyone ran out of the building, leaving me sitting there with these two girls. It was starting to look like, ‘Well, maybe we should leave, too,” but I was having a beer and a cigarette and I didn’t want to leave yet. I thought, ‘So what if there’s a fire?’ That’s the stupidity of youth; the invincibility of youth!

“On the way out the door we saw the bar had been abandoned, so I hopped over and started handing these girls bottles of booze. I grabbed a whole bunch of bottles, and the girls were stuffing bottles into their bras, down their pants and into their purses!

“As we walked out there was a big crowd, and a fire truck pulled up and blocked the view of us. So we went to my car, opened the trunk and put it all in there. I had about 25 bottles of liquor. The next day I called up Randy and said, ‘Hey, the Cabaret caught fire and I robbed the bar. I got all this booze over here. Come over and party!’

“After four or five hours of drinking, we started discussing the Kevin problem. It got out of hand. I told Randy to leave; he refused. And I lived in the Barrio in Van Nuys, a pretty dangerous place, so I kept a gun hidden in the couch.

“I pulled the gun and fired it into the ceiling, thinking that would make Randy leave. But he was fearless – he didn’t leave, he charged right at me. The gun was automatic, so it reloaded and cocked itself. I chucked it aside to get it out of the mix, and the fight was on.”

Had you and Randy gotten into fights before?

“It certainly wasn’t the first time we’d been in a fist fight. We grew just like brothers, had squabbles and rolled on the ground; and that’s basically what this amounted to, though it was a bit more serious. It was also terrible how drunk we were, particularly me, and I wasn’t done.”

Is that when you hatched the plan to find, and possibly kill, Kevin?

“I was going to finish this job; I thought I’d kill Kevin. I don’t think I actually would have – that’s just not in me. But I certainly would have scared him, and I probably would’ve gotten the cops called on me.

“When I got in my car and tried to drive, I could not. I had to go around the block to re-park the car, and I blew a turn right in front of an LAPD cop. They pulled me over in front of my house; I had a gun in a shoulder holster under my jacket, and off to jail I went.

“Once Kevin and management heard about the episode, they said, ‘Okay, that’s it. He’s got to go – he’s too big of a problem.’ That was it.”

How did Randy feel about that?

“I spoke to Randy the next day, after I got out of jail. We were laughing about the whole thing. Any fights we had, we always quickly made up and they became funny. Most people don’t think this sounds funny, but we did, because nobody really got hurt.

“Well, there was some blood – Randy raked his famous long fingernail across my forehead and opened it up pretty good. But nobody was hospitalized or anything.”

Was Randy okay with you being ousted?

“He volunteered to go with me. I said, ‘No, you stay. I’ll go. I’ll be fine; I’ll do something else. You believe it, so you continue.’ We were still friends. But he was in the band and I was not. I did a total 180, cut off all my hair, enrolled in paramedic school, and had a job waiting for me when I graduated. I worked and ran calls in the back of an ambulance for the next 10 years in LA.”

Do you have any regrets about how things ended?

“I don’t. I thought about this a while back; I was always trying to think of the perfect way to say what I meant, and I finally came up with the feelings that seemed to justify everything that happened. I don’t have any regrets because Randy needed to be with better musicians than me and the other guys in Quiet Riot.”

Like the guys he ended up with in Ozzy’s band.

“No matter how you slice it, at some point, me and Randy – still as best friends – were going to have to part ways. If I’d stayed in music it would have been a lot harder. It was never, ever gonna be pretty. But at least we laughed about it, though nobody else did!”

You’ve taken a lot of heat from people who have a different perspective.

“I get fingers pointed at me. I get my story convoluted. I get told, ‘You’re the guy who tried to kill Randy Rhoads.’ I laugh it off and say, ‘You weren’t there; you don’t know.’ Randy needed to be with better people. After nine years of playing together, how could it ever be a friendly thing?”

Did you ever make amends with Kevin DuBrow?

“That did happen. A mutual friend of ours came to me and said, ‘You and Kevin have too much history together. It’s a shame you aren’t friends. You need to get in a room together and work it out.’ And that’s basically what we did.

“It took about three seconds for me and him to start hugging each other and crying. Not long after that, he moved to Las Vegas, and we were great friends. He was always there for me and I was always there for him. And, of course, we talked about Randy a lot.”

Growing up – and standing side by side on stage – with Randy Rhoads taught bass guitar player Kelly Garni a thing or two about the guitar player, who would later help define the sound of Ozzy Osbourne’s solo era and become a legend in his own right.

“He was a guy I noticed in high school. I thought he was very interesting, and I wanted to get to know him, ” Garni tells Guitar World in a new interview. “We were in a new school, and we were sort of outcasts, so we gravitated together. And I went to his house, he told me he played guitar, and I had a slight interest in that.

“He didn’t know how to play lead, but I thought he was pretty good. He was taking lessons from Scott Shelly at his mother’s music school. From there, it turned into him needing a bass player, so he turned me into a bass player.”

The pair would eventually found Quiet Riot in 1973 – hiring Drew Forsyth as their drummer and Kevin DuBrow, originally a photographer, as their lead vocalist – and hustled their way through L.A.’s bustling music scene. Rhoads would continue improving his craft despite the more typically bass-leaning equipment available to him at the time: a Peavey Standard head and an Ampeg 4x12 cabinet.

“Most people looked at Randy’s equipment back then and said, ‘How in the world did that guy get that sound out of that?’” Garni recalls. “But it didn’t come out of the amps; it literally came out of his fingers. It’s a strange thing… I have seen other guitar players do that to the extent that Randy did. The tone really was in his fingertips.”

As the bassist aptly puts it, “This wasn’t a guy who got better every six months, or every month, or every week; this was a guy who got better every 60 seconds.”

Disillusioned with Quiet Riot’s inability to land a record deal in the States, Rhoads ended up answering the call to audition for Ozzy in September 1979 – coincidentally, right before his final show with the band he started with Garni. Despite his obvious talent, Jet Records’ founder, David Arden, thought he was too young to join the Ozzy circus. He eventually relented – and the rest, as they say, is history.

Guitar World's full interview with Kelly Garni will be published in the coming weeks.

Growing up with an absolute electric guitar icon like Randy Rhoads inevitably results in an anecdote or two, especially if you also happened to be in a band with him – and Kelly Garni, the bassist who formed Quiet Riot with Rhoads, has his fair share of spicy stories.

The pair's longstanding collaboration, coupled with the drama associated with band life, as well as the infamous tension between Garni and vocalist Kevin DuBrow, ultimately spelled the end of the bassist's music career – at least for a couple of decades or so.

“I was unhappy for quite a while,” Garni ponders in a new interview with Guitar World as he looks back on that period of his life. “We [referring to the band] were stalled... we weren’t going anywhere, and weren’t doing anything. It just seemed like rinse and repeat. There was no progress. We weren’t making any money, and management gave us an allowance every week, which, in my case, was forty bucks a week to live on.

“This all finally came to a very drunken conclusion, where the night before it happened, I’d gone to a club called the Cabaret, and while I was there, it caught on fire.”

Long story short, as flames engulfed the L.A. club, Garni decided to make the most of the chaos and rob “about 25 bottles of liquor”.

“The next day, I called up Randy and said, ‘Hey, the Cabaret caught fire, and I robbed the bar. I got all this booze over here. Come over and party.’ And he did.”

However, what started as a friendly meet-up soon turned into “a good four or five hours of drinking”, during which all of Garni's problems with the band came to a head.

“We started discussing the Kevin problem. It got out of hand,” he admits. “I told Randy to leave. He refused. And I lived in the Barrio in Van Nuys, a pretty dangerous place, and kept a gun hidden in the couch cushion.

“So, to scare Randy, I pulled the gun and fired it into the ceiling, thinking that would make him leave. But Randy was fearless. He didn’t leave. He charged right at me. The gun was automatic, so it reloaded and cocked itself. So, I chucked that aside to get it out of the mix, and the fight was on.”

Garni's drunken reverie had a target: DuBrow.

“I was going to finish this job. I was going to go, well, I thought I’d kill Kevin. I don’t think I actually would have; that’s just not in me. But I certainly would have scared him, and I probably would’ve gotten the cops called on me there.

“They pulled me over in front of my house, I had a gun in a shoulder holster under my jacket, and off to jail I went. Once Kevin and management heard about the whole episode, they said, ‘Okay, that’s it. He’s got to go. He’s too big of a problem.’ That was it.”

Leaving Quiet Riot would open up a very different chapter in Garni's life. While Rhoads ended up joining Ozzy's crew, the bassist did a “total 180”, cutting off his hair, enrolling in paramedic school, and working in the back of an ambulance for the next decade or so.

“I get my story convoluted. I get told, ‘You’re the guy who tried to kill Randy Rhoads.’ I get all kinds of stuff. I laugh it off and say, ‘You weren’t there. You don’t know.’ So, Randy needed to be with better people. It was never going to be pretty, but after nine years of playing together, how could it ever be a friendly thing?” he concludes.

Guitar World's full interview with Quiet Riot's Kelly Garni will be published in the coming weeks.

Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong is better known for power chords and pop punk anthems than he is for shredding, but that doesn’t mean he can’t bust out the occasional guitar solo. He's done just that at a recent show with the Coverups, tackling Randy Rhoads' iconic Crazy Train solo complete with tapping.

The guitarist’s side-project includes Green Day bass player Mike Dirnt and touring foil Jason White and sees the collective taking on cover songs from Led Zeppelin and David Bowie to the Ramones and Poison.

The inclusion of the Ozzy Osbourne classic at Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown, California will come as a surprise to many. It shows that just because guitar solos are a rare breed in Green Day’s music, doesn’t mean the guitarist is capable of letting fly.

Granted, there are elements of the solo that have been simplified, and he wears a look of pure concentration on his face throughout. Nevertheless, the way he moves through the early tapping passages is very impressive, and it's made even more so considering he’s doing it on a big-body, semi-hollow Gibson.

“It’s metal hour, isn’t it?” he asks White, with the guitarist responding with “it’s your turn,” before they get the train a’ rollin’, with Armstrong having soloed his way through Whole Lotta Love earlier in the night.

And it wasn’t just during the solo that he showed off his tapping skills, as he channeled Rhoads’ chorus tapping licks too. However, aware of how challenging the solo is, he can be seen readjusting his guitar strap as the spot draws ever closer, switching from his usual low-slung look to a more shred-friendly hip height. All while still singing. Hats off.

Armstrong rekindled his love for guitar solos on Green Day's latest album, 2024's Saviors, so the Rhoads love-in feels very much like an extension of that. Speaking to Guitar World about the record, two hotshot shredders are quick off his lips.

“When I was a kid, I loved Eddie Van Halen and Randy Rhoads. And then something happened where it was like you had to be in the guitar Olympics,” he had said. “If you wanted to play, you had to be as good as those guys and be able to play as fast as Yngwie Malmsteen.

“That’s when my tastes started changing and I started getting more into punk music and alternative, where it was more about rhythm playing. I got more into being an anti-solo guitar player, especially for [1994's] Dookie.”

The Coverups show comes after Armstrong joined the Goo-Goo Dolls at Coachella, proving something of a bucketlist moment for the guitarist, and took Steve Jones' Sex Pistols Les Paul Custom for a spin in Paris.

A trip to Liverpool earlier this year saw him taking in a show at the Cavern Club, the music venue made famous by the Beatles. There, he watched a guitarist play a Green Day song, who was completely unaware who was looking on from the crowd.

A lot of people have played guitar with Ozzy Osbourne. They are not all here. In the interests of keeping this list shorter than a book, we’ve restricted it to people who were hired, however briefly, for Osbourne’s solo band.

That means there’s no Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath’s towering God of Riff. Nor are any of the superstars who guested on Ozzy's last two studio albums: Slash, Tom Morello, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Mike McCready are all guitar giants in their own right, but only footnotes in the Osbourne story.

There are three guitarists who also missed out on being here by the narrowest of margins. Robert Sarzo, brother of Ozzy bassist Rudy, was hired by Ozzy and Sharon to replace Randy Rhoads. Unfortunately for Sarzo, Sharon’s dad and Ozzy’s label boss, Don Arden, had already offered the gig to Bernie Tormé.

Dokken guitarist George Lynch was hired in 1982 and got as far as traveling with the band and performing at soundchecks. He was unceremoniously dumped in front of Jake E. Lee.

Steve Vai, meanwhile, was hired in 1995 to co-write one song. He ended up getting on so well with Ozzy that the two schemed to make a full record, making an album’s worth of demos that were ultimately shelved.

These, then, are the guitarists who wrote and played on Ozzy’s classic albums and took part in his legendary tours.

Randy Rhoads – (1979–1982)

In just two albums, 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz and 1981’s Diary of a Madman, plus the posthumous live album Tribute (1987), Randy Rhoads set the bar for every subsequent Ozzy guitarist.

His combination of two-hand tapping, blazing legato, savage pinched harmonics, and demonic blues licks became essential vocabulary for shredders. He took the classic rock combo of a Les Paul and Marshall into the 80s, boosting it with the new MXR Distortion+ pedal, and modding the amp with cascading gain stages.

Rhoads’ last days with Ozzy were fraught. He was allegedly vehemently opposed to plans to record the live Sabbath covers album Speak of the Devil.

Ozzy drank heavily, and tensions became so bad that Rhoads had allegedly made plans to leave the band once the album was released. Whether this rift between Osbourne and his guitarist would have been healed can never be known. A plane crash ended Randy’s life on March 19, 1982. He was 25.

In a Guitar World interview conducted shortly before his death, Rhoads said that he felt his guitar journey was far from complete, opining, “For me, it's just flash that impresses the kids. I'm trying to make a name for myself as fast as I can.

“I wish I could take time and come up with something that nobody else has done. But that's gonna take a few years yet.”

In his brief career, though, Rhoads exerted a towering influence on metal guitar, neo-classical guitar, and on Osbourne’s sound. Alongside Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads defined the sound of metal guitar for the 1980s.

Bernie Tormé – (1982)

While Ozzy and Sharon were making plans with Robert Sarzo, Don Arden (Ozzy’s former manager and owner of Jet Records, Ozzy’s label; also Sharon Osbourne’s father) had offered the gig to Gillan guitarist Bernie Tormé.

Quite why Arden’s choice overruled Ozzy’s is unclear. Perhaps inevitably, this was a brief union.

According to Rudy Sarzo’s memoir, Off the Rails, Tormé announced after a handful of shows that he would be returning to England to work on his solo album.

While Tormé’s tenure in the band was brief, it was impactful. A 15-year-old Zakk Wylde witnessed Ozzy with Tormé at Madison Square Garden. Of that experience, Wylde later wrote, “I told him how amazing his playing was that night and how he made everybody in the building feel as if Randy’s presence was with all of us.”

After Ozzy, Tormé formed a solo band, and went on to collaborate with Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider in Desperado. Tormé died in 2019, aged 66.

Brad Gillis – (1982)

Under pressure to find a replacement, Ozzy auditioned Night Ranger guitarist Brad Gillis in a hotel room and enlisted him to complete the Diary of a Madman tour.

“I first met Ozzy in the master suite at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York,” Gillis told Guitar World in a 2021 interview. “I had my red Strat, no amp, and played him Flying High Again.

“How surreal to be sitting at the edge of his bed, with him cross-legged on the floor singing up to me while I played the song! Once I got through the solo he jumped up, gave me a big hug, and said, ‘Brad, I love you. Pull me through.’”

Gillis shadowed Tormé on the tour until he was ready to take over. His performances on the tour were recorded for Speak of the Devil (released as Talk of the Devil in the UK), a live album released under duress and consisting entirely of old Black Sabbath material.

Despite its unpromising origins, Speak of the Devil won Gillis a lot of fans. He put his own stamp on the songs with an impressive tone from a stereo chorus and a pair of Mesa/Boogie Mark IIB amps.

After the tour, Gillis returned to Night Ranger, with whom he's released 13 studio albums to date.

Jake E. Lee – (1982–1987)

Lee was a former member of Ratt and Rough Cutt, as well as a glam metal band with possibly the most on-the-nose name of all time, Sexist. He had also auditioned unsuccessfully to join Dio when former Ozzy bassist Dana Strum recommended him to audition for Osbourne’s band.

Lee has said that Ozzy was unhappy with George Lynch’s performances in rehearsals, and Lee pipped him to the gig.

Lee recorded two albums, Bark at the Moon (1983) and The Ultimate Sin (1986), with Osbourne. The former's title track was Lee’s standout Ozzy performance, with its jet-fuelled riff and fearsome alternate-picked solo.

Lee claimed he had written much of the album and was unfairly denied songwriting credits. He refused to work on The Ultimate Sin until he had a contract guaranteeing him songwriting royalties.

Of Lee’s dismissal in 1987, Osbourne told Stereogum in a 2022 interview: “The way it went was, Randy Castillo, my old drummer, had started to turn me against him. It was very sad because I had no qualms with the guy. He was a great guitar player.”

Lee, meanwhile, said in a 2018 interview that bassist Phil Soussan was “partly instrumental in getting me fired,” claiming that Soussan wanted to be Ozzy’s main songwriter, at Lee’s expense.

“I didn’t see it coming at all,” Lee told Guitar World in 2013. “In fact, it was my roommate, who was my tech at the time, who told me I was out of the band.

“He came back from the Rainbow [in Los Angeles] one night and he said, ‘Everybody’s talking about how you just got fired,’ So I called up Sharon [Osbourne], and I was like, ‘I just heard the weirdest rumor.’ She said, ‘Oh, my god. It’s true, it’s true.’ I went, ‘I’m fired?’ And she said, ‘Yes.’ My whole world got turned upside down.”

Lee went on to form Badlands. Since then, he has only sporadically released music with his bands Wicked Alliance and Red Dragon Cartel, whose last album dropped in 2018.

He has recently suffered from a complete lack of cartilage in his right hand, which has limited his ability to play. In October 2024, he said he was playing again and wanted to tour. Just days later, however, he was shot multiple times while walking his dog.

Though Lee is recovering well, understandably, there has not been much talk of new music from him.

Zakk Wylde – (1987–1993, 2001–2009, 2017–present)

Although Randy Rhoads is usually considered the greatest Osbourne guitarist, Zakk Wylde is in many ways the definitive one.

Wylde has spent so many years with Ozzy that his unmistakable sound has become the one audiences expect from Osbourne’s band. And though many capable players have tried to fill his shoes, his larger than life persona and continued visibility on the metal scene has tended to overshadow his replacements.

Wylde’s initial run produced No Rest for the Wicked and No More Tears. These albums marked a strong return to form for Ozzy, earning multi-platinum awards and that mark of any great metal album, one-star reviews in Rolling Stone.

Speaking about how he was selected for the much-coveted role, Wylde told Guitar World in 1989, “When [Ozzy] auditioned guitar players, his big gripe was that most everyone played like Yngwie Malmsteen on acid, and that wasn’t what he wanted.”

After the live album Live & Loud, Wylde left to pursue solo projects Pride & Glory and Black Label Society. Wylde was never fully gone though, as he played the guitars on Ozzmosis, the one studio album Ozzy wrote and released between his first two stints in his band.

Alex Skolnick – (1995)

Skolnick managed a whopping one (1) concert with Ozzy during his tenure, making him the shortest-lived touring guitarist Ozzy ever had. Still, that’s one better than Robert Sarzo, George Lynch, or Steve Vai managed.

Skolnick had already left Bay Area thrashers Testament when he got the Ozzy audition. His Ozzy gig was an intimate one at the legendary Rock City club in Nottingham, England. Geezer Butler was the bassist.

“It was really cool,” Skolnick recounted to Guitar World in 2012. “It was one of these periods where Ozzy and Zakk Wylde had temporarily parted ways. He tried out a few different people, and I think I was the only one who made it as far as doing an unannounced show with him in England, and he told me I was hired.

“But, I later found out from Sharon Osbourne that they had also been looking at another guy, Joe Holmes, who ended up doing the tour. Then they brought Zakk back.”

After joining the elite group of musicians to have been fired over the telephone by Sharon Osbourne, Skolnick then formed a successful jazz trio and later rejoined Testament.

Joe Holmes – (1995–2001)

Holmes had experience filling big shoes. His first gig had been replacing Jason Becker in David Lee Roth’s touring band after Becker’s diagnosis with ALS. Prior to that, he had played with LA shock rockers Lizzy Borden.

Although Holmes never recorded an album with Ozzy, his stint with the band coincided with the rise of Ozzy’s mammoth Ozzfest tours. As a result, he has probably performed to more people with Ozzy than any guitarist besides Zakk Wylde and Tony Iommi.

Despite appearing in the video for Perry Mason, he did not perform on the original recording. Still, his punishing delivery of that song for the Ozzfest 1996 live video is a testament to his fiery playing.

Holmes’ only Ozzy studio recording is the 1996 single Walk on Water, from the Beavis and Butthead Do America soundtrack. He co-wrote three tracks on the 2001 album Down to Earth, but the returning Zakk Wylde recorded them.

Since leaving Ozzy, Holmes has been relatively quiet, releasing only one album with his band Farmikos, in 2015. Still, he dropped a video for a new solo song, The Deadfall, in January 2025, so we may be seeing much more of him in future. The recording features his former Ozzy bandmates Mike Bordin and Robert Trujillo.

Gus G – (2009–2017)

Much fanfare greeted the arrival of then-29-year-old Gus G in Ozzy’s band. The hype was that Ozzy had discovered yet another young talent comparable to Randy Rhoads or Zakk Wylde.

In fact, Gus was hardly unknown, having released 13 albums with four different bands, and temporarily replaced Michael Amott in Arch Enemy for Ozzfest 2005.

Reflecting on his audition for Ozzy in a 2015 interview with Guitar World, Gus said, “We did six songs – six of the ‘must haves’ on his setlist. Ozzy came in the room and we played them all back to back with no breaks. The second that one song ended he would just call out the next one. It was like ‘Oh, shit!’ But it was cool.

“At the end of it he turned around and said, ‘You’re fuckin’ great!’ Then they all went into a room next door for a few minutes, and I was sitting there all alone like, ‘What’s going on now?’ Finally everybody came back in and they were all smiling. They asked if I wanted to come play a gig.”

The hype never quite materialized, largely because Gus never got the chance to write with Ozzy. Although he played on 2010’s Scream, Gus never quite put his stamp on the Osbourne sound like Rhoads, Lee, or Wylde had. That’s not to say he wasn’t good: Let Me Hear You Scream remains a big solo.

“I’m really proud of that,” he said in a recent interview. It was the one solo on the album he was asked to re-do.

“This is gonna be the first song that people will hear you on,” Sharon reportedly told him. “You're gonna be the new guy and people will be checking you out on that one. I just think you can do better.” Gus raised his game, and the solo smoked.

Gus was somewhat pushed aside in favor of a returning Zakk Wylde in 2017. Gus, who had kept his band Firewind active between commitments with Osbourne, simply returned to business as usual with Firewind and his solo work.

Looking back on the rock world 45, 50, or 60 years ago, it's remarkable how prolific acts of every sonic persuasion were expected to be.

There are more examples than can be easily listed here of bands or solo artists releasing, in their early days, albums every 9-10 months; a clip that's almost unthinkable now.

Even at the dawn of the '80s, this pace – or something close to it – was still de rigueur, even for someone as big as Ozzy Osbourne.

Osbourne's post-Black Sabbath career, against any and all odds, took like off a rocket upon the release of his solo debut, 1980's Blizzard of Ozz. A huge part of this success can be chalked up to Osbourne's prodigal six-string sidekick, Randy Rhoads.

With that success, however, inevitably came pressure from the powers that be for a quick follow-up. Though said follow-up, 1981's Diary of a Madman, is, like its predecessor, rightfully regarded as a landmark guitar album, Rhoads wasn't exactly thrilled with the final result.

The classically trained guitarist revealed to Guitar World in a 1982 interview, conducted not long before his tragic death in a plane crash in March of that year, that he wished he had much more time to work on his contributions to the album.

In one particular instance, he said, a solo he laid down merely as a guide of sorts inadvertently ended up on the final product.

“On the first album [Blizzard of Ozz] none of us had played together, so it was everything at once,” Rhoads said. “We were putting the band together, writing the songs, and being in the studio all at the same time.

“There was an exciting energy on Blizzard of Ozz. We turned everything up to 10 and if it felt good we'd play it. We also had time to choose the best parts and record when it felt right.”

As was the case with just about all but the biggest acts in rock – all of music, really – at the time, Osbourne and co's pace was breakneck.

“Directly after making Blizzard, we did a European tour, came back and did Diary [of a Madman]. There was no break,” Rhoads said. “I didn't have time to sit back and think, ‘What do I want to do? What do I want to accomplish?’ Therefore, I was really short of ideas that I was interested in pursuing.

“On Diary we put a lot more energy into the songwriting. So the songs are happening but my guitar playing isn't. We were in a hurry to get over to the States and tour behind Blizzard, so Diary was rushed. We only had time to get a song's basic form before we had to record it.”

Case in point, Rhoads said, was the fact that one particular solo that he never intended to see the light of day ended up getting pressed onto vinyl.

“Some parts of this record make me cringe from a guitar standpoint. In fact, on Little Dolls I never got to take a real solo,” he recalled to Guitar World.

“What you hear on there is actually the guitar track. It's a dummy solo I laid down where I was later supposed to put down a real one. But I never got time to do it.

“A lot of my things on Diary lack feeling,” he opined. “It sounds a bit ordinary to me, like just sort of play anything you can think of.”

Rhoads did, however, take care to mention in the chat the pride he felt in his contributions to Diary of a Madman's title track, Over the Mountain, and You Can't Kill Rock and Roll.

You can read the full interview here.

Earlier this year, the heavy metal world was sent into a tailspin when it was announced that Ozzy Osbourne would be performing his last-ever live show as part of a historic event that would also see the OG Black Sabbath reunite.

Scheduled for this July, the ‘Back to the Beginning’ concert will feature a solo set by Osborne, as well as special guest performances from a huge bevy of big names, from Metallica, Pantera and Anthrax to Slayer, Alice in Chains, Halestorm and many more.

The entire day is being masterminded by Tom Morello, after the Rage Against the Machine hero was handpicked by the Osbourne camp to serve as musical director for the historic gig.

For Morello, a Sabbath superfan and devout follower of all things heavy metal, it is the MD gig of a lifetime. And as he explains in a new interview with Guitar Player, he’s taking a history-spanning approach to organizing the day – which will also pay tribute to one of Osbourne’s guitarists.

One of the biggest names attached to star in the show is Jake E. Lee – the electric guitar virtuoso who joined Osbourne’s solo band in the early 1980s following the tragic death of Randy Rhoads in 1982.

And, when asked about Lee’s involvement, Morello says he views the event as a tribute to Ozzy’s entire musical lineage – and as such will take the opportunity to honor the memory of Rhoads.

“Yes! Jake E. Lee is going to be there, too, dude! It’s historic on a lot of levels for someone who is a big fan of the Ozzy records,” Morello notes.

“We’re celebrating Black Sabbath, but it’s Ozzy Osbourne’s final show, too,” he continues. “It is, in some ways, also a tribute to the great Randy Rhoads, who was on a poster on my wall when I was practicing eight hours a day.

“That was the musician’s musician. Like, I take the job of curating this day very, very seriously. Not just to honor the living members of Black Sabbath but also Randy Rhoads, who is so important to me personally, and to the genre. To have that be a part of the day, too, is pretty special.”

The Back to the Beginning show is set to take place at Villa Park, Birmingham, UK, on Saturday July 5. Other confirmed guests include Billy Corgan, Duff McKagan, Slash, Sammy Hagar, Wolfgang Van Halen, KK Downing and more.

In related news, Ozzy recently downplayed the role he’ll have during the Sabbath set, saying he’ll only be on hand to do “little bits and pieces” with Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward.

Elsewhere, it was confirmed that the show will play host to a surprise supergroup comprising members of Tool, Rage Against the Machine and Smashing Pumpkins.

Visit Live Nation for tickets.

Bob Daisley believes he was always destined to play bass. “When I saw an actual bass guitar in the flesh in front of me, it was just… wow,” he says. “I thought, ‘This is the heartbeat. This is the backbone. This is the pulse of the song.’ That’s all I wanted to do.”

With a recording career including records Rainbow’s Long Live ‘n’ Roll (1978), Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard of Ozz (1980) and Diary of a Madman (1981), along with loads of others, Daisley has made his mark. Few bassists could handle the temperament of Ritchie Blackmore or the whirlwind classical chops of Randy Rhoads – but he did just fine.

But a falling out with Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne overhangs his career. Nasty legal battles have him fighting not only for his money but also his legacy. He wishes things were simpler: “It’s not about ‘this one doing that’ or ‘these two did that’ – it was a chemistry and a coming together of energies.”

He argues: “It was meant to happen; it affected a lot of lives in a positive way. I’d like people to know that the music and the band were four people, not one. A band called The Blizzard of Ozz came along and did a couple of albums. Then, there was no more.”

When you first joined Rainbow, what gear did you bring, and what approach did you use?

“I had a ’61 Fender Precision bass. That was my workhorse. It did most of the live stuff, most of the writing, most of the recording. It was just a great bass to play and had a great sound. I played with a pick and I was very precise with my playing.”

Was that what Ritchie was looking for?

“Yes – he wanted someone who played with a pick. When I went for the audition, he put me through my paces. He got me to play certain things, and I had to keep on playing them for quite some time to see if I could cut it using the pick, playing eights, sixteenths, and that sort of thing. He was happy with what I did at the audition.”

What amps were you using?

“I used the gear that was supplied – Crown amps, which I didn’t really like, but I had to use them. It was their stage gear. I’d been using an Acoustic with two cabs, which sounded great. It had that lovely, warm, thumpy sound. But the stuff with Rainbow was supplied, so I used it.”

Ritchie is a notoriously tough guy to work with. Were you worried about getting on with him?

“What helped a little bit was that when I went for the audition, they’d already auditioned about 40 different bass players. They couldn’t find anyone they liked because you had to look the part and you also had to be the sort of person who got on with them all.

“We’re talking about Cozy Powell, Ronnie Jame Dio and Ritchie Blackmore here. At the end of my audition – I’d played for an hour and a half or so – they went off into an office somewhere and had a little chat. They came back out and said, ‘You’ve got the gig if you want it.’

“I didn’t do it to be cheeky, but I just said, ‘I’ll think about it.’ I was serious; I had my own band, Windowmaker, and people had warned me, ‘If you work with Ritchie, you could last five minutes. He could chew you up, spit you out. You could end up with nothing.’ So I did have to think about it.”

What led you to accept?

“I was doing a show at the Whisky with Widowmaker, and Ritchie and Cozy came along. I saw them before I went on, and he said, ‘Look, I’ll be at the Rainbow just up the road. Come see me after you’ve finished.’ I hadn’t joined the band at that point; I was still thinking about it. But Ritchie had sort of got it in his head that I’d accepted the offer.

“He stayed for the show and. At the end I went upstairs and a squabble broke out with Widowmaker. I thought, ‘Fuck this!’ I packed up my stuff and said, ‘I’m going to meet with Ritchie, and I’m joining Rainbow.’

“I stormed off. As I walked into the Rainbow, Ritchie was sitting at one of the tables. He started clapping, and I thought, ‘Wow… Ritchie doesn’t give praise easily.’ I thought, ‘I must have done something right.’ I told him, ‘Count me in.’ We started rehearsals the next day.”

What was the process of recording Long Live Rock ‘n’ Roll like?

“I just put my head down and got on with it. I tried to be as reliable and professional as I could be. I got on well with Ritchie; he could be – well, he knew what he wanted. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. He was also a very aware sort of person. Working with somebody like that, I actually enjoyed it. It was a good learning curve for me.”

Why did Ritchie replace you with Roger Glover?

“It kind of fizzled out. There was never any sort of definite phone call from Ritchie or management. We’d done a long US tour and a world tour that went through Europe, Scandinavia, Japan, and Canada. At the end we came home, and I was waiting to hear back, and nothing happened.”

You were talking to Ronnie about branching off with him, right?

“There was a point where I was waiting with Ronnie in a hotel lobby and he said, ‘If this band finishes, or if I’m not in the band, would you consider being in a band with me?’ I thought, ‘Does he know something that I don’t?’

“I said, ‘Well, yeah, of course. If this band’s not going, or I’m not in it, yeah, of course, I’d work with you, Ron.’ He must have had an inkling then of what was coming. I didn’t.”

Ronnie joined Sabbath not that long after. What happened there?

“I was in London and I got a call from Ronnie. He said, ‘It looks like the band’s not going to continue as it is. Would you be interested in putting a band together with me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ He said, ‘Okay, don’t do anything. Hang in there. I’m going to start looking for a guitarist and line up record companies.’

“A few weeks would pass, and he’d phone again and say, ‘I’m still working on it. Hang in there.’ After a while, I went for a stroll and bought a music paper. On the front page, it said, ‘Ronnie James Dio joins Black Sabbath.’ I thought, ‘Oh, thanks for telling me, Ron.’ But it was meant to happen as it did; everyone ended up in the best possible situation.”

Ironically, you joined Ozzy Osbourne’s solo group after Ronnie replaced him in Sabbath.

“Ozzy had just come back from LA been fired. People warned me against working with him because he didn’t have the best reputation. He’d been getting out of it, been unprofessional, unreliable and all the rest of it. But I had a feeling of: ‘I’ve got to do this.’

“He asked me to go up to his house and play, saying, ‘I’ve you got a first-class rail ticket.’ I jumped on a train in London, went up to Stratford, and Ozzy met me at the station. I went to his place and he had a guitarist and a drummer there.”

What did you think of them?

“They were okay guys and nice enough. But when Ozzy and I had a tea break, he said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ I really did like Ozzy, and we got on together, so I said, ‘I’d like to work with you, but I’m not sure about these other two guys.’

“I said, ‘They’re okay; but I don’t think they’re world-class.’ He said, ‘Oh, hang on a minute…’ He went into the rehearsal room and I heard him say, ‘Okay, fellas, you can pack up. It’s not working out. You can go home.’ That was them gone, dismissed.”

How did Randy Rhoads enter the picture?

“It was just me and Ozzy to start with. He told me about this young guitar player in LA who was a teacher at a music school. Ozzy said, ‘His name is Randy Rhoads.’ I sort of envisioned an older bloke with slippers, a cardigan and glasses! ‘I said, ‘Well, let’s get him over.’ Randy wouldn’t have been brought over if I hadn’t said ‘no’ to the other two guys.”

Ozzy was signed to Jet Records, and the story goes that Jet's founder said Randy was too young. Is that true?

“David Arden [son of Jet founder Don Arden] said, ‘No, he’s too young. He’s unknown. He’s got no reputation. He’s not a name.’ But eventually – and I remember his words – he said, ‘Against my better judgment, I will bring him over.’”

“Ozzy, Randy and I met up at Jet Records. It would have been towards the end of ’79. We all took the train up to Ozzy’s place in Stratford and played; after maybe 20 minutes or half an hour, Randy and I looked at each other at the same time and said the same thing: ‘I like the way you play.’ I knew right away that this would work; that this was good.”

Once the sessions for the Blizzard of Ozz got rolling, was your gear different from your Rainbow days?

“I had my ’61 Precision and the Acoustic stack, which, for some reason, worked very well. We made lots of recordings of our rehearsals and writing sessions, which people now refer to as the ‘Holy Grail,’ because they were the reference tapes to those songs so we wouldn’t forget our parts.

“When we got to the studio, I wasn’t really happy with the sound I had, so I began using a Gibson EB-3 bass. It did the job, and the best match amp-wise was a Marshall. I said to Randy, ‘Can I use one of yours?’ So I used a Gibson EB-3 through one of Randy’s Marshall stacks, which was a 100-watt head driven hard by a 4x12 cab.”

For a long time, most people have assumed those recordings were strictly the brainchild of Ozzy and Randy. But your involvement was deep, right?

“They were trying to get rid of Lee Kerslake while we were on tour. I just couldn’t agree with something I thought was wrong – I said, ‘Look, it’s not broken. Stop trying to fix it.’ Eventually they got rid of both of us; but after six weeks, I got a call saying, ‘Will you come back?’

“I said, ‘I’ll record, I’ll co-write, but I’m not going on the road with you, and I’m not coming back into the band.’ I remember during one of the writing sessions for Bark at the Moon, Ozzy said, ‘I’d forgotten how much you had to do with writing the songs.’

“They’ve promoted the Ozzy/Randy-only thing and it’s inaccurate. People thought that because we used to come out at shows to Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, a classic piece, it was Randy’s idea because he was into classical. No, it was mine. I came up with that idea.

“I was pissed off with the whole thing, and I remember that someone at Jet Records phoned me up and said, ‘Sharon and Ozzy want to know what that piece of music that you used to come on stage to is called.’ I said, ‘Oh, well, tell them it’s called ‘Go Fuck Yourself,’ and I hung up.”

You composed and wrote the lyrics for songs like Crazy Train and Mr. Crowley.

“I wouldn’t want to take away from anyone, but I wouldn’t give anybody more praise than they earn. It took the three of us to do that – Ozzy’s vocal melodies were very important, and Randy’s guitar riffs and play were phenomenal.

“It was brilliant and I loved it. But Randy wasn’t a lyricist, and neither was Ozzy; Geezer Butler used to write lyrics in Sabbath. So, between the three of us it was a joint effort. The pieces of the puzzle were as important as each other.”

What was it like working out parts with Randy?

“A lot of the songs were based on riffs that Randy had. We’d sit on chairs opposite each other; I’d make suggestions, we’d put things together, arrange things and try new bits. We’d take one piece out, put another in, and that would go on for weeks.

“Once we had the basic structure, Ozzy would sing his melody on it. It would start with words that came into his head that often didn’t make sense. I’d take the tape of us playing with Ozzy’s melody and phrasing and write lyrics to it.

“By the end of it all, you had proper songs. It was certainly not the Ozzy/Randy show, which is how it’s been promoted. That’s not accurate at all.”

It must have been painful when Randy passed in the plane crash.

“I was in Uriah Heep and we were flying to America. We landed in Houston, Texas, checked into our hotel and had a night off. As we were walking into a club we were supposed to play to check it out, a girl walked up to me and Lee, and said, ‘Aren’t you the guys from Ozzy’s band?’

“We said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘I think some of them got killed in a plane crash this morning.’ At first, I had thoughts of a commercial airliner going down, but then I was told it was just the pilot and Randy that had been killed in a small plane.

“That blew me away. I was speechless. Lee and I went back to the hotel and just drank toasts to Randy with all his favorite drinks. He used to drink these exotic drinks. We drank those to Randy and cried. It was awful.”

You’ve played with Ritchie Blackmore, Randy Rhoads, Jake E. Lee and Gary Moore. Who’s the greatest guitarist you’ve played with?

“They’re all different. I’ve been fortunate in working with so many wonderful players. Gary Moore, I’d say, is probably one of the best ever. Randy Rhoads was a phenomenal player. Ritchie Blackmore was just mind-blowing. He was superb. And Jake is a great, wonderful player.

“They were all perfect for what they were doing at the time. There is no best. I would never say, ‘I prefer this one over that one’ or, ‘One is better than the other.’”

In recent years, you’ve fought hard to highlight your legacy within Ozzy’s early solo era.

“It’s been an uphill battle – and, I’ve always thought, an unnecessary one. It didn’t have to be like that. I had no personal vendetta with them. I don’t like any of it. I don’t like conflict. There was plenty of money to go around.

“I’ve always been one to accept that it is what it is, you know? It would be nice to think that if Randy hadn’t been killed, the original band would have made that third album. The word ‘if’ is such a little word with a big meaning. But all the conflict and lawsuits were unnecessary. It didn’t have to be like that.”

When was the last time you spoke with Ozzy?

“I haven’t had contact with Ozzy for many years. During the lawsuit, when I went to New York and we were doing depositions, I didn’t see Ozzy, but I saw Sharon. She said to me, ‘He misses you.’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice. I miss him, too.’

“We’d been mates. We could have created more good stuff together. But, you know, I just wish it hadn’t been like it was. We’re both getting old now. We’re both going to go out sooner than later. It would have been nice to go out on a brighter note. Such is life, I suppose.”

How do you hope to be remembered?

“I just hope I made a difference while I was here. That would mean I’d achieved the object of the exercise – satisfaction within itself. If I inspired people to play or write, if I can get them to emote, I’ve done the job. Whether it’s sadness or happiness, that’s the idea of music.”

Born in Santa Monica California in 1956, Randy Rhoads was tragically killed in a plane crash in 1982 at the age of 25. Despite his young years, Randy had recorded four studio albums.

He appeared on the first two Quiet Riot albums and two Ozzy Osbourne albums; Blizzard Of Ozz which was Ozzy’s 1980 debut solo release, and the follow-up, Diary Of A Madman released in 1981.

Randy’s mother Delores was a professional pianist and ran a music school at which he was a student of classical guitar from a young age. This musical sensibility and theoretical knowledge undoubtedly permeated his heavy metal playing. This, along with his fiery technique, meant that his contributions continue to be an inspiration to guitarists.

"Leslie West was one of my favorites because he used classical ideas with feeling,” Rhoads told Guitar World in May, 1982. “He was melodic but mean. My solos are more like rolling scales than the call-and-response of blues riffs.

“Quiet Riot played songs with a lot of changes. I used to analyze the progression and look over my possibilities. If I didn’t like what was available, I’d play as weird as possible.”

In this lesson we’ll look at some of the approaches Randy used during his time with Ozzy, from alternate picking to legato and tapping styles, performed at a level of proficiency rarely seen or heard in the early 80s and even more impressive considering the limitations in the equipment of the time.

Randy possessed fantastic alternate picking and Example 1 is a Rhoads-style picked lick based in the F# Blues scale. Make the string changes easier by using just the tip of the pick to glide across the strings, rather than digging in too much as this will result in getting caught between the strings.

Our second example uses pull-offs for a classical style lick, which was later utilised by players like Yngwie Malmsteen and Randy’s Ozzy successor Zakk Wylde.

The lick uses a mixture of Major, Minor and Diminished triads that exist within the key of A Minor. The root notes are placed on the second string with second finger, while the 3rd and 5th intervals are played on the first string using first and fourth fingers.

Example 3 is a trilling lick mainly using semitone intervals to hammer-on and pull-off in the context of an A Major triad. Either use your first and second fingers, or you can use different pairs of fingers and maintain your hand in the same position.

Our fourth example ascends the neck using legato through the A Minor scale while position shifting on each pair of strings to create a diagonal path across the the neck from a low A root to a high one. The lick finishes with fast tremolo picking which is best performed with a relaxed, rotating wrist motion similar to turning a key.

Last comes a tapping lick in E Minor. For each group of six notes, tap the top melody on the 19th, 20th and 17th frets twice each. Play each example slowly at first. Focus on accuracy, counting, timing and economy of motion. Gradually increase the tempo until you can comfortably play each section up to speed with the backing tracks.

Get the tone

Amp Settings: Gain 7, Middle 5, Treble 6, Reverb 1

Randy’s tone was provided by a Marshall 1959 100 -watt head with an MXR Distortion Plus pedal, which added gain and tightened the low end. Randy used a Seymour Duncan humbucker pickup in his Jackson guitars. Randy designed his own offset V shape, which is still known as the Randy Rhoads. Aim for a classic heavy metal tone without too much gain saturation.

Example 1.

This lick is based in F# Blues scale (F#-A-B-C-C#-E) and uses a descending sequence of three to descend from the first string to the sixth. Focus on the first six notes and practise using strict alternate picking.

Once you can comfortably play these two strings, the same technique can be applied to the other pairs of strings.

Example 2.

This lick uses triad arpeggios within the key of A Minor (A-B-C-D-E-F-G). The ascending arpeggios are: Am-Bdim-C-Dm-Em with the root note on the second string. The lick is played with repeating three-note phrasing throughout. Play each triplet with a downstroke on the first string, followed by a pull-off then an upstroke.

Example 3.

You can think of this lick as A Phrygian Dominant (A-Bb-C#-D-E-F-G) scale, or as an A Major triad (A-C#-E) with a semitone trill added above each note. Pick each downbeat with a downstroke then hammer-on and pull-off twice for each beat while maintaining constant 16th-note phrasing.

Example 4.

Use legato to ascend through positions of A Aeolian mode (A-B-C-D-E-F-G) starting with the root on the 5th fret and ending on a high root on the 17th fret. Finish the lick with fast tremolo picking on the first string and a final tone bend at the 22nd fret.

Example 5.

This tapping lick is based in E Aeolian mode (E-F#-G-A-B-C-D). It is played in a repeating six-note phrase, with two tapped notes followed by a fretting-hand pull-off and hammer-on. The descending string transitions are played with fretting-hand taps, shown as squared notes and fret numbers.

Former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee has discussed the decades-long debate that has pitted him against his Prince of Darkness predecessor, Randy Rhoads.

Osbourne hired and fired a number of different electric guitar players between Rhoads’ untimely death in March 1982 and the end of the year, with Jake E. Lee’s eventual arrival providing much-needed stability for the band.

As a young guitar prodigy, Rhoads had helped launch Ozzy’s solo career with some world-beating guitar acrobatics, resulting in the rock community hailing him alongside Eddie Van Halen as one of the best guitar players in the world.

So, when Jake E. Lee was announced as his permanent successor, the guitar world naturally started pitting his skills against the man who came before him.

Guesting on the Tone-Talk YouTube channel, Lee has now weighed in on such comparisons, discussing how the two players differed from one another – and praising the “unparalleled” aspect of Rhoads’ legacy that no one has come close to rivaling.

“Still to this day there’s people that like my playing, and like it better than Randy’s,” says Lee. “And then there’s always the people that say, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ like it’s written somewhere that, ‘No, Randy is just better. Anybody who thinks differently is an idiot.’

“We're different,” he goes on. “I’m not saying I’m better than Randy, but I don’t think Randy’s better than me, either. And I don't think it’s wrong for certain people to like my style of playing better.”

Lee’s two Ozzy albums – 1983’s Bark at the Moon and 1986’s The Ultimate Sin – matched Rhoads’ studio tally with Osbourne. Musically, though, Lee believes there are clear differences between them.

“If anything, my shit’s a little bit harder to play than Randy’s,” he continues. “So the whole, ‘Randy is better, period,’ is just wrong. You have a preference. Once you get to a certain level, it’s not that ‘this guy is better’. It's [about] who speaks to you.'

“How he used classical styles into the rock thing was unparalleled. I don't think anybody’s done it better since. I’ve gotta take my hat off to him. The stuff he did was awesome.”

Speaking to Guitar World in 1986, Lee had said Randy “was the best new guitar player post-Eddie”. But there were points during his time in the band that he felt the fan-powered rivalry got out of hand.

“There was one show [with Ozzy] where there were these kids off to the side, so I went over to see what they were doing,” he recalls. “They all had Randy Rhoads T-shirts, and they kept pointing at the shirts and going ‘Number One,’ and then they’d point at me and flip me off.

“I went over there after the show and I said, ‘Wearing a Randy Rhoads T-shirt only reminds Ozzy that he’s lost a friend. Randy is not around to appreciate it, and I don’t appreciate it. I’m glad you liked Randy but you don’t have to shove him in my face.’”

Elsewhere in his Tone-Talk chat, Lee also discusses his experiences of tracking Bark at the Moon, recalling how he hated the record – which he wanted to remix – when he first heard it.

“I said, ‘I hate it. Keyboards are loud. Guitars – they're not driving the songs anymore. They're too low,’” he recalls admitting after listening to the record.

While Ozzy was eager to take on board his new guitarist’s comments, Lee says Sharon Osbourne told him to “get used to it”. “Sharon said, ‘No. We're already way too late giving them the album. We can't remix it. We have to send this in now,’” Lee recounts.

Jake E. Lee is currently recovering after he was shot multiple times in Las Vegas earlier this year. His Tone-Talk interview was captured before the incident.

Bob Daisley has enjoyed an illustrious career, holding his own on bass alongside a list of legendary guitarists, including Ritchie Blackmore, Randy Rhoads, and Gary Moore. One of his most notable contributions to rock 'n' roll history, however, is his stint in Ozzy Osbourne's post-Sabbath solo career and his low-end work on Blizzard of Ozz (1980) and Diary of a Madman (1981).

Joining Osbourne was far from a straightforward decision, however. After being fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, the Prince of Darkness’s career and personal life took a downward spiral, reportedly spending three months locked in his hotel room in a drug- and alcohol-fueled haze.

Despite this, music mogul Don Arden signed him to Jet Records and sent his daughter (and Osbourne’s future wife) Sharon to Los Angeles to protect “his investment.”

When Osbourne returned to England in the second half of 1979, Daisley – who had just been unceremoniously replaced in Ritchie Blackmore's band, Rainbow – got introduced to Ozzy.

“Ozzy has just come back from LA and been fired from Black Sabbath. People warned me against working with Ozzy because he didn’t have the best reputation,” Daisley tells Guitar World.

“He’d been getting out of it, being drunk, unprofessional, unreliable, and all the rest of it. But I had a feeling of: ‘I’ve got to do this.’”

So what compelled Daisley to jump aboard the Ozzy’s crazy train, given his less-than-ideal state at the time?

“For some reason, I thought, ‘I have to do this.’ When he asked me to go up to his house and play, he said, ‘I’ve got a first-class rail ticket,’ I jumped on a train in London, went up to Stratford, and Ozzy met me at the station. I went to his place and had a guitarist and a drummer there,” he recalls.

“They were okay. They were okay guys and nice enough. But when Ozzy and I had a tea break, we went to the kitchen, and Ozzy said, ‘Well, what do you think?’ I really did like Ozzy, and we got on together, so I said, ‘I’d like to work with you, but I’m not sure about these other two guys.’”

Daisley noted that while the other musicians were “nice enough blokes,” they weren’t “world-class” players, which he felt Osbourne needed. Ozzy took Daisley's advice and fired them on the spot.

“He said, ‘Oh, hang on a minute…’ He went into the rehearsal room, and I heard him say, ‘It’s okay, fellas, you can pack up. It’s not working out. You can go home.’ That was them gone, dismissed.”

In addition to believing in Osbourne from the get-go and recognizing who he needed to work with, Daisley was instrumental in spotting future guitar icon Randy Rhoads’ talent and massive potential.

Guitar World's full interview with Bob Daisley will be published later this month.

Bob Daisley's bass playing has left a significant mark on rock and metal history, with bands like Rainbow, Uriah Heep, Gary Moore, and Chicken Shack all benefiting from his low-end mastery. However, it’s perhaps his work with Ozzy Osbourne – after the Prince of Darkness was fired from Black Sabbath – that he’s best known for.

In an upcoming career-spanning interview with Guitar World, Daisley reflects on this pivotal phase in his life, which also included meeting and playing with a young guitarist who would later become the Randy Rhoads.

“It was just me and Ozzy to start the band. Ozzy told me about this young guitar player in LA who was a teacher and worked at a music school. I sort of envisioned an older bloke with slippers, a cardigan, and glasses, but Ozzy said, ‘No, his name is Randy Rhoads.’ I said, ‘Okay, well, let’s get him over,’” he recalls.

The head of Osbourne's label, Jet Records, wasn't particularly keen on recruiting Rhoads, stating that he was too young. However, Daisley was determined to take a chance on the guitarist and have him as part of the band.

“If you look at it that way, if I hadn’t gone along with getting the band going and said that, Randy wouldn’t have been brought over. It was because I said ‘no’ to the other two guys.”

After some back-and-forth with the label, Osbourne, Rhoads, and Daisley finally met at Jet Records toward the end of '79 – a meeting that would forever change all three of their careers.

“We all caught the train up to Ozzy’s place in Stratford and played for the first time together,” Daisley recalls.

“I remember that after we finished, after maybe 20 minutes or half an hour, Randy and I looked at each other at the same time and more or less said the same thing: ‘I like the way you play.’ I knew right away that this would work and that this was good.”

Osbourne was recently inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and took the opportunity to credit Rhoads for the success of his solo career.

Guitar World's full interview with Bob Daisley will be published next month.

Ozzy Osbourne was honored with a star-studded second induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame over the weekend, this time for his work as a solo artist.

Ever humble, the singer took the opportunity to pay tribute to his former guitarist, admitting, “If I hadn't met Randy Rhoads, I wouldn't be sat here right now,” during a brief but heartfelt speech.

The Prince of Darkness’ contributions to the festivities were few and far between, with the singer remaining on his bat-adorned throne for much of the evening, having recently retired from touring due to his deteriorating health.

So it was up to a few familiar faces from across Ozzy's storied career to provide the sparkle and entertainment, with Jack Black delivering a passionate speech before a revolving all-star band took to the stage for a handful of knockout performances.

Guest instrumentalists for the ceremony included Wolfgang Van Halen, Zakk Wylde, Billy Idol guitarist Steve Stevens, and Metallica and former Ozzy bass player, Robert Trujillo.

Red Hot Chili Peppers’ drummer Chad Smith was behind the kit, while Adam Wakeman and producer Andrew Watt were also called into action.

Vocal duties for the evening were delivered by Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, who gave Crazy Train a signature twist. Country Star Jelly Roll sang Mama I’m Coming Home, while Billy Idol crooned his way through a suitably dark No More Tears.

But it was Wolfgang’s contributions that were perhaps the most poignant. The Eddie Van Halen versus Randy Rhoads rivalry is one of the most debated in shred history, with the pair both at the peak of their powers in the early '80s.

As such, watching Wolfgang weave and tap his way through the Crazy Train solo on his EVH signature was a notable footnote to the festivities. It also nicely set the Van Halen/Rhoads rivalry aside and emphasized the legacy that both guitarists have created, and the influence they've since had on the world that adores them.

In truth, both virtuosos were guilty of fanning the flames that licked their rivalry. Eddie once said “everything he [Randy] did he learned from me,” while Ozzy claimed that “Randy didn't have a nice thing to say about Eddie”.

Despite a fleeting career in music, Randy Rhoads had a huge impact on the guitar as we know it today. His technical prowess, influenced by his early days in classical guitar made him a defining figure of shred guitar, helping to massively influence the genre alongside contemporaries like EVH.

The original Jackson Rhoads was actually the first guitar sold under the Jackson name but was still in the prototype stage when Rhoads died, so he never got to give his feedback on it. His idea for the elongated, ‘shark fin’ top horn of the V-shape remains and the overall design is his, but the regular humbuckers have been changed and there's now a locking tremolo where Randy had a vintage-style tremolo, or just a plain hardtail.

The Jackson X Series Rhoads RRX24, which retains those features initially proposed by Randy himself, but is very much geared for the modern metal player. It looks like a Rhoads guitar but has a swathe of futuristic appointments that would've been on the fringe of guitar design when the idea for the Rhoads first came about.

Jackson X Series Rhoads RRX24 review: Features

The RRX24 has a lightweight Poplar body with colored bevels. Our review model combines a satin battleship grey finish with black accents, although at first glance there’s an almost purplish hue to it. This particular color softens the guitar's sharp edges, giving it a rather distinguished look that belies its all-out metal nature.

The maple neck joins through the body with a scarf joint at the headstock end and graphite reinforcement running the length of the neck. Not that you can see any of this as it’s all covered by the satin grey finish. 

The Laurel fretboard features a compound radius for extra shred credibility, running from 12 to 16 inches as it moves closer to the body. 24 jumbo frets are marked by grey ‘sharkfin’ markers and white side dots to guide your way. A black neck binding adds another touch of distinction to its rather brash aesthetic.

Moving onto the hardware we’ve got a Floyd Rose Special double-locking tremolo that’s recessed into the body, with a Floyd Rose Special locking nut at the opposite end. The whammy bar is the screw-in type so you can set it to stay in one position or have it dangling loose if you prefer. Jackson sealed die-cast tuners complete the set, with everything finished in black, of course.

The electronics feature two Seymour Duncan Blackouts, which are active humbuckers so you’ve got a 9V battery compartment on the reverse of the guitar to accommodate them. Three knobs control volume for each pickup, as well as a master tone knob for tone tweaking. A three-way selector gives you your pickup selection with bridge, both, or neck available to be chosen.

Jackson X Series Rhoads RRX24 review: Playability

With sitting down to play with this guitar being quite awkward, I opted to begin testing with a strap attached and standing. Its unique shape definitely takes some getting used to, as does the weight balance of it. It’s not quite neck diving but it definitely feels like it leans a little bit that way.

There are no comfort contours on the body either, so you’ve got a relatively harsh edge poking into your ribcage, which can be remedied by having the guitar strapped a little lower. If you prefer your guitar higher up you might find that it takes a little getting used to.

Those who are aficionados of this type of guitar like to say it’s possible to play it sitting down, but it really isn’t. Even with a strap on it just doesn’t sit right on your knee due to the shape, with the guitar feeling like it wants to tilt in the headstock direction due to the angle of the body.

If you put your knee in between the two horns and hold it up in a more classical style then it is possible to play it sitting, but you're then having to support the neck whilst you play, which always felt a little awkward to me. It kind of works with a guitar strap, but you have to set it really high, and then adjust it again for when you want to stand up again. It's honestly one of the most awkward guitars I've ever played.

That said, once you’ve gotten over the initially weird feel of the body, the neck is a decidedly more normal experience for a metal guitar. It’s sleek and slick, with fantastic upper fret access. Jackson doesn't specify the profile on its website, but it feels like a slim 'C' or 'D' to my hand. The jumbo frets are lovely to bend against and it’s not long before I was shredding some three-note-per-string legato licks and huge bends.

The Floyd Rose puts up with abuse admirably too. I tried all my usual tricks like diving til the strings are slack, hitting a pinch harmonic and raising the bar back up again, my personal favorite the trem flutter, and using the bar to bend solo notes too. It held its tuning without fail, occasionally pitching everything slightly flat or sharp under heavy load, but keeping everything in relative pitch string to string.

Jackson X Series Rhoads RRX24 review: Sounds

The sound of the Seymour Duncan Blackouts is exactly as you’d expect too. The sustain on them is absolutely ridiculous, ringing out forever with the slightest touch of your guitar pick. It’s that high-output metal sound to a tee, with plenty of heft for chugging low-tuned riffs and leads that cut through the mix with ease.

I tried it through various modeled amps including classics like the 5150 and my favorite Orange Rocker and the RRX24 delivered on all fronts. It’s got nice clean tones too if you fancy taking a break from the metal mayhem to play something a little more nuanced. They’re not the most dynamic due to their design, but can certainly cover more ground than just heavy music.

The separate volumes for each pickup is really handy too, it means you can have a less intense setting on your neck pickup for switching your sounds or vice versa. Some might bemoan the lack of a dedicated tone knob for each pickup, but to be completely honest I can’t imagine most players of this ilk finding much use for the one that’s already there. I left it on max the entire time I tested it and found no need to adjust it from that point.

Jackson X Series Rhoads RRX24 review: Final verdict

If you want a metal guitar for pure performance, the Jackson X Series Rhoads RRX24 makes a great case. Coming in at under $1,000 its excellent value with its Seymour Duncan pickups and Floyd Rose tremolo. It delivers on all fronts heavy and looks phenomenal whilst doing so.

Ergonomically this guitar isn’t great. It’s nigh on impossible to get a comfortable position sitting down, and even when stood up on a strap it can feel a little awkward at first. If you can get over these points then you’re going to catch a lot of attention with one of these at a gig, and the rapid-fire playability, excellent upper fret access, and fantastic pickups will make it a dream for shred-lovers.

Jackson X Series Rhoads RRX24 review: Specs

• Body: Poplar 
• Neck: Maple 
• Scale length: 25.5” 
• Nut width: 1.6875" (42.86 mm) 
• Fingerboard material: Laurel 
• Fingerboard radius: 12"-16" Compound radius (304.8 mm to 406.4 mm) 
• Fingerboard inlays: Gray sharkfins 
• Frets: 24, Jumbo 
• Bridge: Floyd Rose Special double-locking tremolo 
• Tuning machines: Jackson sealed die-cast 
• Pickups: Seymour Duncan Blackouts AHB-1B, Seymour Duncan Blackouts AHB-1N 
• Controls: Volume 1. (Neck Pickup), Volume 2. (Bridge Pickup), Tone 
• Finish: Battleship Gray with Black Bevels (as reviewed), Black, Matte Army Drab with Black Bevels, Purple Metallic with Black Bevels, Black with Yellow Bevels, Red with Black Bevels 
• Contact: Jackson

The highly anticipated MXR Randy Rhoads Distortion+ has finally been released, and it pays tribute to the revolutionary electric guitar player who merged classical-inspired pieces with super-saturated riffs.

The distortion pedal finally arrives after months of anticipation and a series of lengthy delays that pushed back its originally forecasted release date by a year.

First teased in December 2022, the Distortion+ fell into obscurity until January this year, when it was announced the pedal was still in the pipeline. A further development earlier this month finally gave it its long-awaited release date.

At the time, Kathy Rhoads D’Argenzio – Randy’s sister, who was closely involved in the project – called the process “a long journey and a labor of love”, with the stompbox now finally coming to fruition after years of development.

The pedal was crafted after the late guitarist's family unveiled Randy’s pedalboard for the MXR design team to inspect. This in-depth analysis took place at the Musonia School of Music – the family’s music school in Los Angeles – and lead to the exact replication of the parts that could be found in Rhoads' original Distortion+.

It was there that “the engineers painstakingly spec'd Randy’s vintage Distortion+” to reproduce Rhoads' signature tone, collaborating with Rhoads' sister on the design.

In terms of the specs, the small-footprint pedal features two knobs – output and distortion – and a true bypass footswitch.

Despite its outward simplicity, it promises to recreate “the overdriven tube-like tones” associated with Rhoads. As fitting for such a pedal, the custom finish is inspired by the guitarist's black and white polka dot Flying V.

“I was really blown away by how Randy Rhoads' guitar sounded, how great of a guitar player was. [With Ozzy] I was expecting someone like Tony Iommi, more traditional, more like Black Sabbath,” comments Kirk Hammett in a Dunlop interview accompanying the release.

“But he had had this classically-influenced style that wasn't overtly classical. He was using all the latest guitar techniques, and he was able to incorporate all this into his sound and really just make it his own.”

The Ozzy Osbourne guitarist's “chip pan” pedalboard was stored in a flight case and featured at least eight switches and nine control knobs, but what they exactly controlled remained an enigma. However, the MXR Distortion+ was key to his tone and remained one of his staples throughout his career.

42 years after his passing, the MXR team was granted access to the pedalboard, after which it was returned to a secure location. These extra measures were taken because Musonia was broken into in 2019, with several of Rhoads' instruments and memorabilia stolen.

MXR Randy Rhoads Distortion+ is now available for $169.99.

For more information, head to Dunlop.

Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osbourne, and Whitesnake bassist Rudy Sarzo has revealed the crucial role Osbourne played in unleashing Randy Rhoads' true potential, after Rhoads had become dissatisfied with Quiet Riot's career trajectory.

“Randy did not become the Randy Rhoads, as in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame [guitarist], until he joined Ozzy,” Sarzo says on the Jay Jay French Connection podcast.

“I know this because I asked him, ‘How did this happen?’ And he says, ‘Well, I asked Ozzy, what do you want me to write?’ And Ozzy said, ‘Be yourself.’ And that's when he felt safe to, all of a sudden, put classical influences into his compositions.

“We never had that before, and Randy had it inside of him, but it would not fit with what Quiet Riot was as a band. It fit with Ozzy, but not with that version of Quiet Riot.”

Former Ozzy Osbourne bass player Bob Daisley recently talked about Rhoads' passion for incorporating more classical-leaning flavors into his compositions.

“Diary of a Madman came about because everywhere we went, he'd find a classical guitar teacher, and he was practicing a piece called Etude that his tutor had given him," Daisley said in an interview with Johnny Beane.

“He was turning that into an intro for a song. It was an embellishment, or an elaboration, of the exercise that he was doing.”

Elsewhere in the podcast, Sarzo confirms Daisley’s story of Rhoads frantically looking for teachers at every tour stop. “Once he got the Guitar Player Magazine 'New Best Guitar Player' [vote in December 1981] he said, ‘I got to take this to the next level.’

“He started taking guitar lessons in every city that we played at. We'd check in early at the hotel and Randy's with the Yellow Pages, looking for ads for a music school and a guitar store or something like that. And then he would go.

“Usually he would end up giving the lesson to whoever was teaching because it is Randy Rhoads, but he never lost that [drive]. It became his mission. How can I be the best guitar player, the best composer, the best Randy Rhoads?”

Former Ozzy Osbourne bass player Bob Daisley – who was a key part in establishing the Prince of Darkness' solo career – believes Diary of a Madman is one of the best representations of Randy Rhoads' electric guitar talents.

The title track to Osbourne's second solo record – and the last to feature Rhoads' dazzling chops before his untimely passing in 1982 – combined the guitar icon's well-documented love for classical guitar with a suitably maddening musical complexity. Randy's playing, as Daisley says, is at the heart of the song.

Daisley's CV is vast: away from Ozzy, he's shared studios and stages with Uriah Heep, Gary Moore, and Black Sabbath. As such, he knows what it's like to work with a great guitarist.

When asked to pick the definitive Randy Rhoads guitar song during a conversation with YouTuber Johnny Beane, Daisley quickly highlighted Diary of a Madman – which was apparently inspired by a piece of classical music.

“Crazy Train is a great radio-friendly song,” Daisley says of Rhoads' guitar talents. “It was a great riff, Randy and I put that together. But Diary of a Madman came about because everywhere we went, he'd find a classical guitar teacher, and he was practicing a piece called Etude that his tutor had given him.

“He was turning that into an intro for a song. It was an embellishment, or an elaboration, of the exercise that he was doing.”

Indeed, those influences can be clearly heard in the finished version, which would eventually go on to become the title track of Osbourne's ’81 LP – but not before the classically-informed guitar showcase received some initial pushback from the vocalist.

“Because it had a lot of time changes and was a bit nuts, we thought it would be great for the title track,” Daisley adds. “[But] Ozzy didn’t like what we’d done. I don’t think he understood it musically. I remember his exact words: ‘Who do you think I am, Frank fucking Zappa?’

“It was an ideal title track because it has that air about it being a little bit nuts; it’s a good example of Randy’s approach to writing and playing.”

Interestingly, very early into his relationship with Rhoads, Daisley knew the burgeoning guitar hero would go down in history.

“When I first saw Randy he had perfect hair and fitted clothes. He had style and class,” Daisley goes on. “We got on great. It just clicked. As soon as we finished the first stint of jamming together we looked at each other and almost simultaneously said, 'I like your playing'.

“The next day, Randy and I were stood at Stafford train station and I had a premonition of, 'One day, people will ask me what it was like to play with Randy Rhoads.' I remember it like it was yesterday.”

In related news, MXR's new Randy Rhoads Distortion+ pedal – created after MXR's pedal boffins inspected the guts of Rhoads' famed chip pan pedalboard for the first time in 40 years – is due for release later this year.

An August 20 release date has been set for the eagerly awaited release of the new Randy Rhoads signature MXR Distortion+ pedal.

The pedal, created after Rhoads' legendary “chip pan” pedalboard was opened for the first time in 40 years and dissected by the MXR boffins, has faced a series of delays since it was announced in December '22.

It was in January this year, after an initial 2023 launch date was slated, that we got a further update. Kathy Rhoads D’Argenzio, Randy’s sister, had asked fans to “hang on tight”, with the pedal delayed until late spring, which has since come and gone.

At long last, then, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

“I am so excited about this project from Dunlop,” Kathy says in a fresh Instagram post. “It was a ‘hands-on’ project for me as I was able to personally help [the] design. It’s been a long journey and a labor of love. I can’t wait to hear everyone’s reaction. I think you will all be amazed.”

She added that there will be “some surprises as well”, with a pedal that former Machine head guitarist and Rhoads devotee Phil Demmel also had a hand in crafting.

In terms of new information beyond the release date, there isn’t anything to get too excited about – save the tease of surprises – but having that alone feels triumphant.

How long the project has been in the works by this point is hard to say, with Kathy saying she'd been collaborating with MXR "for quite some time" back in 2022. But if the MXR tone gurus have been able to carefully prise the secrets out of Rhoads' mystical pedalboard and recreate it for a production pedal, it will be worth the wait.

The Ozzy Osbourne guitarist is known for his signature Jackson V and love of Marshall amps, but his chip pan ’board is arguably just as notorious.

An MXR Distortion+ sat at the heart of the chip pan’s signal chain and was a key player in sculpting his hugely influential guitar tone.

The ’board was stored in a flight case and featured, at the very least, eight switches and nine control knobs, but what exactly they all operated has forever been a mystery.

Four decades after the guitarist’s passing, MXR was granted a peek behind the tonal iron curtain to aid the genesis of the new pedal.

Rhoads D’Argenzio says the pedalboard was returned to a "secured location," after its scrupulous inspection, rather than its former Musonia home.

Musonia, the North Hollywood, California music school, and Randy Rhoads museum founded by the guitarist's mother, Delores, was broken into in 2019. Several of Rhoads' instruments, plus photos and memorabilia were stolen, prompting the pedalboard’s new, hush-hush location.

Thankfully, all the missing items were eventually retrieved and returned to Rhoads' family.

Stay tuned for more updates about the long-awaited MXR Distortion+ over the next few weeks.

As one of the early comers to the buzzing hair metal scene, Carlos Cavazo assumed the role of lead guitarist for a reformed Quiet Riot, setting off a chain reaction of glammed-out excess.

Stepping out of the shadow of Randy Rhoads and into the spotlight, Cavazo – like many of his contemporaries would do later – infused classical and flamenco touches to Quiet Riot’s mix. The result was a torrent of madness on the backside of Quiet Riot’s 1983 smash success, Metal Health, skyrocketing the unassuming six-stringer.

“A lot of people ask me if I had any idea that Metal Health would be as big as it was,” Cavazo says. “People assume I knew we had this winner on our hands, but honestly, I didn’t. I’m still somewhat shocked that people love it.”

Quiet Riot laid the blueprint for ’80s glam excess, and Cavazo agrees. “I’ve heard people say that we kicked it off, and yeah, we probably did. We were there initially and played a huge role.

“But there were some other bands before us, like Van Halen and Def Leppard. Still, I think Quiet Riot pushed it over the edge,” Cavazo says. “I didn’t think of it back then; we were just doing what we normally would, but looking back, I would agree.”

Quiet Riot’s post-Rhoads era got off to a hot start, but dysfunction undermined them. By the time the ’90s rolled around, Cavazo had departed for a spot alongside Warren DeMartini in Ratt.

“I loved sharing space with Warren,” Cavazo says. “Our styles worked well together, and our songwriting and influences were similar. I’m probably more of a speedy player, while Warren is a more methodical, thought-out kind of guy. Those differing styles gave us fresh textures.”

Things with Ratt fell apart, too. But Cavazo is at peace, having left the dysfunction behind. After laying low for years, Cavazo joined King Kobra and recorded an album in 2023’s We Are Warriors. Things are calmer now, the expectations are lower and the pressures of personality disorders are in the past. But considering his hired-gun status, one wonders if Cavazo will stick around.

“I think so,” he says. “I’d keep working with King Kobra. The biggest thing is their egos aren’t out of control. They’re not ‘problem’ people, and they don’t make life harder. That goes a long way. But it depends on how well accepted we are. King Kobra have been around for a long time, but this is a new lineup. You never know how people will react.”

What sparked your interest in the guitar?

“Two words: the Beatles. When they came out with [1964’s] A Hard Day’s Night, my dad got me and my brother that record. I was only eight. We were really knocked out by it. I just loved the music they were playing, what they did and all the adventures they seemed to have. I knew I wanted to do that, somehow, some way. The Beatles are what led me to where I am now.”

How did Snow, your pre-Quiet Riot band, get together?

“Snow formed around 1976. It went through a bunch of lineups, and several members filtered out before we ended up with Doug Ellison on vocals and Stephen Quadros on drums, along with my brother Tony and me.

“By 1977, we had that lineup set, and that’s when we started playing around the Hollywood scene and making a name for ourselves. Then, around 1978, we started playing original music, which was the first time I was involved in something like that. Before that, we mostly played covers, so writing my own music was an education.

“We achieved some pretty good success in the L.A. area and were happy with that when it ended. We didn’t get a record deal, but we did manage to do a self-titled EP, which we were proud of.”

What were your main takeaways from that experience?

“Honestly, with the EP, I probably evolved more as a writer. The original version of Metal Health was on that Snow EP, but it was called No More Booze. Me and my brother originally wrote the song, and later on, when I was in Quiet Riot, Kevin [DuBrow] loved it when he heard it, leading to us redoing it on Metal Health.

“The music, lyrics and melodies were changed, but the roots of it came from the Snow EP. So, if anything, I became a better songwriter through being part of Snow. I learned a lot about the business side of things, how things worked and what it took to make it on the L.A. club scene.”

What led you to join a reformed Quiet Riot?

“Snow had just broken up, and we were moving all our shit out of our house, trying to figure out what to do. As that was happening, out of nowhere, I got a call from Kevin, and he said, 'Hey, man, we’re looking for a new guitar player for Quiet Riot. Would you be interested?' I thought about it for a second and said, 'Sure. I can come down and see about it.'

“I went down, met the guys and rehearsed six or seven songs, eventually morphing into tracks appearing on Metal Health. The chemistry was cool immediately, and things between us were great early on. Things changed, but in those early days, everything was great.”

Did you feel pressure to match what Randy Rhoads had done?

“I was definitely comfortable doing what I did best. People have to remember that at the time, Randy’s work with Quiet Riot was pretty unknown. As far as I was concerned, I only knew Randy as the guitar player for Ozzy [Osbourne]. So I never felt any pressure to be or play like Randy; I felt comfortable doing what I had been doing on the club scene with Snow. 

“It seemed to work, and I think my not being influenced by Randy was good for the band and the record. But you know, in a way, Randy indirectly got me the gig; apparently, Randy was the one who told Kevin, 'Hey, you should check out this guy Carlos. A lot of my students are talking about him and saying he’s really good. Give him a call for Quiet Riot.' Kevin got a hold of me through that grapevine. Thanks, Randy!”

What are your memories of putting Metal Health together?

“I remember working on a lot of different stuff early on. We had a lot of material; it took time to get it all together and make it what it is now. Before the album came out in ’83, we recorded a lot of stuff. We had a lot of battles with Spencer Proffer, the producer, about the album’s direction. He’s the one who wanted us to record [Slade’s] Cum on Feel the Noize because he thought Kevin had a similar voice to Noddy Holder. 

“That song became a big hit, but we were very against it early on. We didn’t want any cover tunes on Metal Health, so that was a huge battle. But Spencer’s idea was obviously a good one, considering it became such a big hit. Who knows what the record would have done without that song in the charts?”

How about the solo for Metal Health?

“After we reworked the Snow song No More Booze and the lyrics and melodies worked out, I tackled the solo. I used Marshall amps and a combination of Jackson, Charvel and Gibson guitars. I think I used my Flying V for most of it. I probably wasn’t the greatest guitar player back then. I was comfortable playing live, but being good in the studio is a whole different game than being good live. 

“Now I had to try and do what I was used to doing on stage in a studio, which was hard because there was no crowd to inspire me. It took a lot of takes, but I did the best I could with it. As a guitar player, I feel you need a good producer to help get the best out of you, which Spencer did with me. It wasn’t one inspired moment but a lot of hard work and collaboration with Spencer.”

Why did Quiet Riot falter after Metal Health?

“That was the high point, and it was a lot of pressure to keep up with Metal Health. But I don’t think it was the band’s fault; our producers and record label always tried to push us in certain directions that didn’t make sense. For instance, the QR III record [1986] had many songs that weren’t metal at all. We should have stuck to our guns and stayed true to what we were about. 

“If we had, we could have come up with way better songs than what ended up on that album. And it wasn’t for lack of trying; we’d submit songs, and they’d say, 'No, we don’t like those. Go back to the drawing board and write some more.' They were always trying to push us into a more radio-friendly space, and that was never the type of band Quiet Riot was.”

Was it challenging to stay relevant?

“Oh, it definitely was. There was such a groundswell of incredible players, and you had to always stay on top of things. The good thing was that I read music, so I was constantly learning licks from books. I liked to read music and always wanted to improve my playing. I play classical, flamenco, Spanish guitar and stuff like that, adding a new flavor. It was a time when you had to constantly try to improve yourself. 

“At the same time, you had to keep your songwriting good, too, because a lot of it is songwriting. The truth is you can be a poor guitar player but a great songwriter, make great money and have a great career. You could also be a great guitar player without a career because you can’t write songs. I found that the important thing was to find a balance between both. I worked to be a great guitar player and songwriter, which is very hard.”

Did interjecting classical and flamenco touches help?

“I hoped it would set me apart from a lot of people. But I think a lot of the guys from that era, like Randy Rhoads, Yngwie Malmsteen and even Eddie Van Halen, were classically trained to some degree. That style of music started to wash over the entire era in the ’80s; it was everywhere.

”Still, I always tried to interject classical and Spanish-flavored things into my playing whenever possible. I’d go with it if I felt it fit well with the song. It had to fit the mood, but some songs lend themselves to that, which is good because I was so influenced by them.”

Did being labeled a “shredder” bother you?

“No, because I feel any label can be a good thing. The way I look at it is if they’re acknowledging you, you must be doing something noteworthy. But I couldn’t control any of that; I just tried to focus on improving.

”I had good and bad points and worked to highlight the good ones and fix the bad ones. Plus, if you were a good shredder, it was a good idea to go for it and shred; it could be what got you a career.

”As a guitar player, you must focus on doing what you’re good at and highlighting that. So if someone wanted to give the label of 'shredder' or 'melodic guitar player', that’s not something that ever bothered me. I’d happily accept it.”

Do you have any regrets from your time with Quiet Riot?

“Just the way the band basically fell apart. We were up there with Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe and Bon Jovi, but we dropped off the face of the Earth because of certain behaviors by certain members of the band, leading to our demise. I wish there was 'celebrity control' back then to help people with bad behavior problems. I don’t want to mention any names or specific people; I think everyone knows who I’m talking about.”

Was Quiet Riot a case of missed opportunity?

“That band was definitely a missed opportunity. We could have done much more, like, way more, and it’s unfortunate. I was one of the primary songwriters in Quiet Riot, and it got to the point where I didn’t want to bring my best ideas to the table anymore because any idea I brought into the band would be ripped apart and end up being something I never intended it to be. I started holding back my best songs and saving them.

“What ended up happening was, when I joined Ratt, a lot of the songs I held back from Quiet Riot ended up being on Ratt’s Infestation [2010]. I brought them to the guys in Ratt, and they didn’t rip it apart at all; they loved my songs. It was great, like a whole different thing. At least, that’s how it was at first. There are some personality problems in Ratt, but the ones in Quiet Riot were worse and screwed things up badly.”

How did you end up in Ratt?

“I got a call from Warren [DeMartini]; he left a message. I missed the call, and when I saw it was Warren, I was like, 'Oh, what does he want? There must be some big party he wants to invite me to.' But when I called him back, he told me Ratt was looking for another guitar player and was wondering if I’d want to come down and hang out with them. I went down, rehearsed and checked it out. 

“Things felt good between us, and it ended up working out. I brought some songs, they had some songs, and we recorded Infestation. I liked working with those guys, and honestly, it was more fun playing with Ratt than playing with Quiet Riot. I know the guys in Ratt have their set of problems, but they have a whole different set of problems from Quiet Riot.”

So why join Ratt if they also were dysfunctional? 

“Yes, they were and are dysfunctional, and I’m sure Ratt will never happen again because of everything that has gone on. There’s too much water under that bridge, and I guess too many bad things happened. But you know, Ratt’s dysfunction isn’t so much about ego; it’s more business-related. Whereas Quiet Riot is all ego-driven stuff. There was a lot of one-upmanship, betrayal and dark stuff that happened within that bad. 

“So in that way, Ratt is very different. They had their own differences with each other because they’ve been together longer, but I got along with each of the guys in Ratt. But without going into too much detail, things within Ratt were definitely weird.”

What would you say was the final nail in the coffin?

“When they decided to fire Warren for whatever reason. I’m sure it was about business, but that was not a great business move. Once Warren was fired, I didn’t see myself being in Ratt anymore.

”I already went through situations in Quiet Riot where they were dumping people left and right, and I didn’t want to deal with that again. I don’t want to be in a band where the lineup is a revolving door. I wanted to be the way we were, but it got to the point where that was no longer possible. So, I didn’t want to do it anymore, and I told them I was done.”

How did you end up with King Kobra?

“Carmine [Appice] called and asked me to record a song or two on the new record. I said, 'Sure. Why not?' I guess they liked what I did because they asked me, 'Can you just do the whole record?' Once again, I said, 'Yeah, why not?' It’s refreshing, and I like working with those guys. I’ve worked with Carmine before on past projects and with Paul [Shortino] many times over the years, too.”

What guitars are you using these days? 

“I’ve been using Gibson a lot. I still use Jackson and Charvel but mainly Gibson Flying Vs. I love them, and I’ve been recording with them for a long time. I still have the V that I got in the very early ’80s, and that’s mainly what I used on the new King Kobra record. I love the sound of them and the way they play. I don’t overthink it beyond that. They fit what I’m doing, and I like how they feel. They’re great guitars.”

Do you keep your pickups stock, or do you upgrade?

“With the Gibson guitars, I leave the stock pickups in there. I think they’re humbuckers in there these days. But with the Flying V that I got in the early ’80s, I put DiMarzio pickups in there. But their new ones sound so good that I don’t feel I need to change them. So the Gibson pickups are great, but as far as the Jackson and Charvel guitars, I still put DiMarzios in those guitars.”

And what combination of amps are you plugging into now? 

“I am all about traditional tube amps. I’ve been using Soldano amps for the last 10 or 15 years, and they’re great. Aside from that, I like Marshalls because it’s hard to get rental Soldano amps when you’re on the road. I’d like to take them out or rent them, but they’re pretty rare custom amps, so I don’t always have that option. I usually go with Marshall JCM900s because they’re the most readily available; they sound good and are super-consistent in terms of what you’ll get.”

Does being lumped in with hair metal bother you?

“No, I don’t think it’s derogatory. Back then, everybody went crazy with their hairstyles. It really is true that it was a competition to see who could have the biggest hairstyle. [Laughs] We really were hair metal bands, so no, it doesn’t bother me. If anything, it’s a funny term that maybe makes you giggle.

”If anything, I’m proud of my hair metal heritage. I’m glad I still have my hair! [Laughs] It’s a memory of a certain time, and I guess that decade will never go away. People seem to love it, which is not bad for those of us who were there.”

If Quiet Riot were to call out of the blue, do you think you would ever consider rejoining?

“Oh, I don’t know. I try not to think too much about it. I guess if they want to continue, then that’s fine. One way to look at it is that the current lineup continuing only helps the brand and helps the name. But I don’t see myself doing that anymore… I can’t imagine doing it. I closed that chapter in my life and moved on.

”It was so long ago, and so much has happened. Going back seems out of the question for the most part. I jumped off that crazy train, and I don’t know if I can get back on it.”

Where do you go from here?

“Truthfully, sometimes I don’t even care about being in a band and touring anymore. At this point in my life, I’m sure I will probably be doing something with music, but exactly what that might be isn’t clear. I don’t mind recording records with people at this stage, but as far as heavy touring, I don’t know if I could do that anymore. I guess it depends on who it’s with. 

“Beyond that, I’m sure I’ll make more music, play more Spanish and classical guitar, focus on making some interesting Latin music, and keep teaching guitar to my few students. It’s a lot of work to go out there and fly around these days. I’m still passionate about guitar, but interested in winding down rather than ratcheting up.”

In 1982, only a couple of years after they first disbanded, Quiet Riot reformed with a reshuffled lineup.

Headed up by original vocalist Kevin DuBrow, the new-look Quiet Riot featured drummer Frankie Banali, bassist Chuck Wright, and former Snow electric guitar player Carlos Cavazo, who was recruited to replace Randy Rhoads.

With Rhoads’ blessing, the group got to work recording new material under the Quiet Riot banner, and Cavazo set about filling the six-string shoes recently vacated by one of the fastest rising guitar stars of the ‘70s.

While many would find the prospect intimidating, Cavazo, it turns out, was surprisingly nonplussed: the pressure didn’t get to him one bit.

Speaking in the current issue of Guitar World, Cavazo retraced his Quiet Riot ride, and explained both how he managed to face up to the pressure that came with the role, and ended up replacing Randy Rhoads with the help of Rhoads himself.

“Snow had just broken up, and we were moving all our shit out of our house, trying to figure out what to do,” Cavazo begins. “As that was happening, out of nowhere, I got a call from Kevin, and he said, ‘Hey, man, we’re looking for a new guitar player for Quiet Riot. Would you be interested?’”

Cavazo was keen. Soon after the call, he was rehearsing with his future bandmates, already forming songs that would feature on their Metal Health album. According to the guitarist, “The chemistry was cool immediately, and things between us were great early on.”

But what put DuBrow on the path to Cavazo in the first place? Well, that was apparently down to Rhoads, who apparently name dropped the outgoing Snow guitarist as his potential replacement.

“In a way, Randy indirectly got me the gig,” Cavazo continues. “Apparently, Randy was the one who told Kevin, ‘Hey, you should check out this guy Carlos. A lot of my students are talking about him and saying he’s really good. Give him a call for Quiet Riot.’ Kevin got a hold of me through that grapevine.”

Once he joined the band, Cavazo quickly felt comfortable. The thought of replacing Rhoads didn't phase him.

Rhoads may have been a rapidly rising guitar star who'd go on to become one the most influential trailblazers of his time, but Cavazo concedes he wasn't too familiar with his playing in the early '80s – something that ultimately worked in his favor.

“I was definitely comfortable doing what I did best. People have to remember that at the time, Randy’s work with Quiet Riot was pretty unknown,” he concludes. “As far as I was concerned, I only knew Randy as the guitar player for Ozzy [Osbourne]. 

“So I never felt any pressure to be or play like Randy; I felt comfortable doing what I had been doing on the club scene with Snow. It seemed to work, and I think my not being influenced by Randy was good for the band and the record.”

Head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitar World, which features the full interview with Cavazo and an exclusive cover feature on Steve Vai and Joe Satriani.

Rudy Sarzo is a hero of no fewer than six decades of bass guitar. In the 1960s, as a Cuban refugee living variously in New Jersey and Florida, he plucked the bass in garage-rock bands. In the ‘70s, he made his bones with Quiet Riot, pioneers of Hollywood's hair-metal scene. Catapulted to fame in Ozzy Osbourne's band in the ‘80s, courtesy of a recommendation from his erstwhile Quiet Riot colleague Randy Rhoads, Sarzo toured the planet with bands such as Whitesnake.

By the mid-‘90s he was a classic rock bassist who commanded enormous respect, laying down lines with Yngwie Malmsteen, Dio and Blue Oyster Cult in the decade that followed. In recent years Sarzo has also trodden the boards with Geoff Tate's version of Queensryche, Animetal, and the Guess Who. 

He's a bassist with much wisdom to impart, and where better to share it? Read on as he talks essential gear, professional attitudes, dealing with the still-shocking tragedy of Rhoads' death in a plane crash in 1982, and the skills you need to take the big sounds to the big stages...

The late '70s in Hollywood sound like an amazing era.

“Back then, if you were from the Sunset Strip, you weren't really labelled as a metal band. You were just a rock band – hard rock, like Van Halen. By the time that I joined Quiet Riot in '78, we were going through the rock versus new wave and punk period. As I learned when I joined Ozzy and started spending time in England. Bands like Iron Maiden, Saxon, Motörhead, and so on were already making their statement in the late '70s in England, whereas that was not really the case in Los Angeles.”

What were the basses you were playing back then?

“Washburn and Music Man, and I also carried with me a practice bass, which happened to be a Roland GR. You remember the first Roland synthesiser bass? You could actually go through a big synthesiser, or you could go out analogue and use the pickup.”

What happened to that really cool black-and-white Washburn you had?

“It's somewhere in Japan. I sold it to a Japanese collector back in the '90s. I look back and I think I should have kept it, but we entered the grunge period in the '90s and that was not a grunge bass, if you know what I mean. It had a certain tone, with original Bill Bartolini handwired pickups. Bill used to wire everything for me personally, so it's definitely a collectable. Actually, I used that bass on Speak Of The Devil, Ozzy's re-recordings of Black Sabbath songs.”

I always wondered how you approached Geezer Butler's bass parts on those Sabbath songs. Did you deliver them as they were originally, or did you add your own spin?

“I played exactly what was on the records, which was very challenging because there were a lot of really cool riffs that are very exclusive. It's a very original style of bass playing, very stylised, so when I played on the record I was just trying to do justice to Geezer's blueprint of what the song is.”

What kind of guy was Randy Rhoads?

“If it wasn't for Randy, I would have never had the career that I've had, because he trusted me. This was the scenario: Ozzy was about 10 days away from going on the road, and they were in Los Angeles looking for a bass player. Not only a person that could play those songs, because there were many qualified musicians who could do that, but they needed somebody they could trust. 

“I had already worked with Randy in Quiet Riot, so he told Sharon, ‘Listen, Rudy is the perfect guy because he's not going to be a bad influence on Ozzy. He looks good, he's reliable, and he's going to be somebody to hang with on the bus!’”

Randy knew you well, of course.

“He trusted me. He put his reputation with Sharon and Ozzy on the line to bring me in. That's how I got in, because I had no track record. And then, in addition, I am a thousand percent convinced that Randy saved everybody in Ozzy's tourbus, keeping the plane from crashing into us. It clipped the bus, but it did not crash directly into the bus, and if that had happened, we would all have perished along with Randy and the others in the plane.”

Jumping from one massive band to another, did you just slot right in with Whitesnake when you joined them in '87?

“One of the blessings in my career is that I get to play with musicians and bands that I am a fan of. That's very rare, especially for some kid from Miami. At the time I wasn't an American citizen yet. I was just an immigrant, a permanent resident, basically – a Cuban refugee that became an American citizen. So for me to go and play with Ozzy and with Tommy Aldridge, whose playing I loved in Black Oak Arkansas, and Randy in Quiet Riot... it was incredible.

”Now, one of the bands that supported Quiet Riot on the 1984 Condition Critical tour was Whitesnake. That's how I got to know David Coverdale and Neil Murray, and of course John Sykes and Cozy Powell. I recalled the last night of the tour, as we were saying our goodbyes, David said, ‘Someday we're going to play together!’ I had already given notice to Quiet Riot that it was going to be my last tour with the band. So I was wondering, ‘How does David know that I'm leaving?’”

”As soon as I finished my commitment with Quiet Riot and was a free agent, I got a call from Whitesnake's management, and we met. David and John were working in the south of France, writing the new record, and Tommy and I went into the office. I was witness to internal conflict within Whitesnake during that tour, and I thought that it would not be wise for me to leave one situation for another situation, so I passed on the opportunity to make a record.

”A couple of years later, in '87, when David was ready for the 1987 record to be released and for the tour to start, I got the call to do the Still Of The Night video, along with Vivian Campbell and Adrian Vandenberg. So we all met at that video shoot and it was instant chemistry. We were like, ‘Oh wow, if you're doing this, I guess I'm doing this too.’ The chemistry was right and it just felt perfect. It was a great combination of people.”

You had a bass back then that I absolutely loved, an Aria Pro II.

“Yeah, it was a custom. I asked them to put Alembic pickups in some of them and Bartolinis in others. I really had to reshape my tone for Whitesnake, because it was the first time I ever played with two guitar players. Vivian was on my side of the stage, and his sound at the time was huge. It almost went into my bass frequency, so I had to really change my tone.”

You played Peavey basses for a long time.

“I was with Peavey up until Mike Powers, the master luthier that I worked with for so many years, passed away in 2013, but I'm very proud of that Peavey. It's gotten so many great reviews, all five-star reviews. When I first sat down with them to design the bass, I was thinking about my first real working bass, a Jazz that I bought in ‘67 for maybe $300 or $400.”

Are you equally happy with five strings as well as four?

“I play four, I play five, and I also play six. They're all tools for the job, you know. I mean, you can't show up for a job with just a Phillips screwdriver.”

What was your first bass?

“My first original four-string was a Kingston bass. I sold it to a kid in Miami and then I bought a Gibson EB. Mine was just a single pickup model with volume and tone. It was headstock-heavy, so I got rid of it. My next bass was a Rickenbacker.”

What advice can you give kids buying their first bass?

“I do these events called Rock and Roll Fantasy Camps, and we get a lot of beginners. They come to me with their instruments and say, ‘Can you tune my bass?’ So I wind up tweaking their basses, spending about half an hour fixing it for them. Then I talk to their parents and I say, ‘I know that you don't know if your son or daughter is going to stick with playing this instrument, but try to give them something that inspires them to get up every morning and want to improve and learn. That's the most important thing.‘”

Any other tips for readers who would like to make a career as a bass player?

“I would say that the key element to a sustained career would be trust. That is something that you can only build by experience, from gig to gig. Be the first guy that everybody's going to call because they know that you're going to be professional, you're going to learn the songs, and you're going to add something to the band that would help them get to the next level. And I'm just being superficial here; I'm not even getting in deep, because I can spend hours talking about the importance of this.

“The other important thing is to learn. It's always about improving. A musician never stops learning and progressing. And never set limitations. I've come to the realisation that I'm never going to be the bass player that I aspire to be, because I really don't want to do that. I never want to get to the point that I say, ‘Okay, I'm done. I've learned everything.‘ There's always more to learn.”

A lot of musicians think of music as a job, but of course it's bigger than that.

“It is way bigger than that. I think I can say this for every musician: we were fans before we were professional musicians. And we must always remain fans of music, of what we do, of the bands that we play with, and of the legacy of the bands. At the end of the day,  the audience comes to watch our show to reconnect with a certain moment in time, and we bring that joy to them again. It's a celebration, what we do on stage.”

Are you still improving as a bass player?

“Oh my God, yeah – which is a problem, because I hear my old recordings and I go, ‘I wish I could re-record this now!‘ It's a journey, though. I play more bass now than I ever have. The bass is always in my hands. When I'm on tour, it sleeps next to me, in bed – because I keep playing until I'm too tired to play, then I just lay it down next to me, and then I wake up in the morning and pick it up again.”

This week, Fender and the brands under its umbrella pulled the covers off a host of new products. One of the FMIC branches with new wares to show is Jackson, who has brought the still-futuristic Randy Rhoads signature electric guitar to its mid-price Pro Plus series. 

Jackson says that the Pro Plus Series Rhoads RR24 is “engineered for blazing guitar work,” and with the legacy of its namesake and that easy upper-fret access, we don't doubt it. 

Price-wise, the Pro Plus models fall in between the MJ Rhoads and Pro Series Rhoads six-strings, with a handful of similarities – and differences – to the latter.

Both Pro Plus models are built with okoume bodies and three-piece maple/walnut/maple necks – as opposed to the Pro Series' mahogany bodies and simple maple necks – though the Pro Plus models do retain the latter's ebony fingerboard (with an upgrade to stainless steel frets, mind.)

Like its Pro Series siblings, the Pro Plus RR24s feature a Seymour Duncan Distortion SH-6N humbucker in the neck, but they swap out the former's Duncan Distortion SH-6 bridge 'bucker for a Duncan Distortion TB-6. These can be adjusted by individual volume and tone knobs, and a three-way pickup switch.

The Pro Plus RR24's other fixings are also fairly similar to those found on the standard Pro models – dome-style Jackson Sealed Die-Cast tuners, a Floyd Rose 1000 Series double-locking tremolo, and those unmistakable sharkfin inlays.

It's the finishes, though, that really make the Pro Plus Rhoads RR24s worth a look. Option one is an arena-ready Mirror finish, with a Firestorm-finished guitar (which comes with a pomelle sapele top) also available, at a slightly lower price.

Speaking of, the Mirror-finished Pro Plus Series Rhoads RR24 rings up at $1,699, with its Firestorm-finished counterpart coming in at $1,599 – a few hundred dollars north of the Pro Series Rhoads models, but almost a thousand south of those found in the more upscale MJ Series. 

In our book, the affordable X Series Rhoads is one of the best metal guitars out there today, so we can't wait to get our hands on the Pro Plus variation of the model.

For more on these, and Jackson's other new releases, visit Jackson Guitars.

Michael Schenker has opened up about the time he was approached by Ozzy Osbourne to “help him out” following the death of the late Randy Rhoads – and revealed why he tactically turned down the invitation to become his new electric guitar player.

In a sprawling new interview with Classic Rock, the UFO and Scorpion virtuoso reflected on some key milestones from his guitar playing career – one of which occurred in the early ‘80s when he received a call from the Black Sabbath legend.

At the time, Schenker had just set the wheels in motion for the Michael Schenker Group, having left UFO and Scorpions to embark on a solo career in 1979. In 1981, he released MSG, which scored success in the UK and Japan.

But as Schenker was building the MSG repertoire, he was contacted by Osbourne: Randy Rhoads tragically died in a plane crash in 1982, and the Prince of Darkness was asking whether Schenker would “help him out” and become the band’s new guitar player.

“I got a phone call from Ozzy Osbourne in the middle of the night, stuttering, asking me to help him out because Randy Rhoads had died in that plane crash,” he explained. “I loved Sabbath, and I should have been delighted to join – I instantly had visions of Ozzy dragging me across the stage by my hair.”

But, as the German virtuoso recalls to Classic Rock, the timing of the offer wasn’t right, and the prospect of joining Osbourne’s band was not as appealing as it once might have been.

He explained, “A voice in my head said, ‘Michael, follow your vision.’ I’d left UFO and Scorpions because I didn’t want to go any further with the fame thing, and I wanted freedom and peace, so I felt it would be crazy to join. 

“Ozzy knew that I was Randy’s favorite guitar player, so he thought I’d be the perfect fit, but it wasn’t the right time: we were already rehearsing the Assault Attack album with Graham Bonnet.” 

However, rather than flat-out rejecting the proposition, Schenker claims he indirectly turned down the opportunity to join Osbourne’s band by tactically “making outrageous demands”.

“The only way I could think of getting out of the Ozzy gig was by making outrageous demands, so that’s what I did,” he admitted. “In his book [I Am Ozzy] Ozzy said I asked for a private jet, and that’s true, but it was only so that he’d turn me down.”

Ozzy Osbourne isn’t the only person Schenker has turned down during his career. Over the years, he’s rejected chances to become the guitarist of Motörhead, Thin Lizzy and more.

In an interview with Louder conducted back in 2021, Schenker elaborated on the list of job offers he’s rejected over the years, and doubled down on his stance that he did so in order to avoid fame and focus on his own material.

“Every generation, I have given something that was fresh. If everybody takes from the trend, it will eventually burn out, it will be dead,” he asserted. “Most people are after fame, money, success, instant gratification. It was never important for me. 

“What was important was the now, the moment, and to be happy as an artist. I couldn’t have done that with Ozzy Osbourne. I had to decline Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy and Phil Lynott, Ian Hunter, Motörhead. 

“So many asked me to join them as their number-one choice. I was tempted. But I always have to remember: Michael, you left the Scorpions and UFO because you had your own vision.”

After Schenker turned down the role, Brad Gillis was drafted in for a short period of time, before Jake E. Lee took the reins – despite almost costing himself the gig by rocking up 45 minutes to the audition.

The eagerly awaited release of the new Randy Rhoads signature MXR Distortion+ pedal has been delayed until mid-spring. That means the pedal won’t be present at NAMM 2024, but Kathy Rhoads assures fans it will “be worth the wait.”

News of the delay was revealed by Rhoads' sister via an Instagram post, but she's softened the blow by offering our first glimpse at the pedal. It sees the iconic black and white polka dot design synonymous with the late Ozzy Osbourne guitarist making a return on both the pedal's enclosure and box, while his signature appears on the pedal itself.

It was revealed in 2022 that Kathy Rhoads and MXR had been working together on the pedal "for quite some time". The project has seen MXR's pedal surgeons dissecting the guitarist's legendary "chip pan" pedalboard for the first time in 40 years as part of the pedal's research and development. 

Now Kathy has unveiled the design of the distortion pedal for the first time. Posting on Instagram, she says: “I personally got to design and choose every detail alongside Jimi Dunlop. I can honestly say how proud I am of the finished results!

“I am sad it wasn’t released at NAMM this year,” she adds, “but know it will be worth the wait.”

Her post also includes a statement from Jim Dunlop on the pedal’s delay, which reads: “Due to unforeseen circumstances the MXR Distribution+ is delayed until mid-spring. We know a lot of you are excited about this release and wanted to keep you updated. We want to dial it in just right, and we appreciate your patience for just a bit longer.”

Of MXR’s time with the pedalboard, a post from Kathy Rhoads on back in December 2022 stated: “Jimmy [Dunlop] and his team recently came down to check out Randy’s pedalboard. For the first time in over 40 years it was intricately examined, filmed, recorded and documented at Musonia. They have patiently awaited its return from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Randy always referred to it as 'the chip pan!')"

Central to the freshly-inspected pedalboard was an MXR Distortion+ pedal, which played a pivotal role in shaping his iconic sound, heard across Randy's much-too-short Ozzy Osbourne discography.

Much about the 'board has been shrouded in mystery. After it was ogled by MXR's researchers, Kathy Rhoads said it was returned to a "secured location," and not the music school and Randy Rhoads museum, Musonia, located in North Hollywood, California. Musonia was founded by the guitarist's mother, Delores. 

The change of tact is likely to have been made in light of a 2019 robbery, when thieves broke into Musonia and stole several instruments, photos and memorabilia. Thankfully, all the missing items were eventually retrieved and returned to the Rhoads family. 

A nosey in the comments section of Kathy Rhoads’ latest post also reveals that former Machine Head guitarist and Randy Rhoads fanatic Phil Demmel was involved in the pedal’s creation. His comment reads: “Proud to have played a very small part in this. So happy to see it happening.”

It’s unknown what role exactly he played, but we’ll now have to wait until mid-spring to find out the full story, as well as finally getting to see what footage of the 'board was captured on the day.

Jackson has launched its latest Made in Japan model – the MJ Series RR24MG, which once again pays tribute to the legacy of the late electric guitar legend, Randy Rhoads.

Joining the brand’s existing collection of Rhoads V models, this latest entry arrives in two new finishes, and ushers in a handful of appointments that won’t be found on the two existing Japanese-made Rhoads models.

The key differences are in the hardware and pickup departments. The previously released flagship Rhoads RRT – which was treated to a Snow White finish earlier this year – came equipped with Seymour Duncan pickups and an anchored tailpiece.

Here, though, the souped up RR24MG swaps out those Seymours for a set of EMGs – 81 bridge and 85 neck – and drops the tailpiece in favor of a more metal Gotoh GE1996T Series double-locking tremolo.

It goes without saying that these new specs will open up a whole array of sounds and playing styles previously unavailable to the MJ Rhoads range – ones that are closely associated with the late guitar hero.

A word on those new finishes, too, because they also seek to channel authentic Rhoads aesthetics. The first is a Gloss Black with Yellow Pinstripes variant – a classy combo of colors indeed – but Jackson has also paid homage to Rhoad's iconic Concorde model by way of an additional Snow White with Black Pinstripes iteration.

Indeed, the latter has turned out looking remarkably similar to Rhoads’ first-generation Jackson Concorde – which too featured a white with black pinstripe finish and a tremolo system – minus the pinstripes that ran inline with the neck.

Electronics, hardware and appearances aside, the RR24MG features an alder offset V body, a through-body three-piece maple neck with graphite reinforcement, and a 12”-16” compound radius ebony fingerboard.

24 jumbo frets, pearloid sharkfin inlays and Luminlay side dots can also be found, as can Gotoh die-cast tuners and Dunlop dual-locking strap buttons. As for controls, master volume and tone parameters are joined by a standard three-way selector switch.

The RR24MG is available now for $2,999.

Head over to Jackson for more information.

The Rhoads model received its most radical makeover earlier this year, when Suicide Silence’s Mark Heylmun partnered with Jackson to create a brutal seven-string metal machine.

The latest episode of the Osbournes’ podcast sees the family briefly discuss the existence of former Ozzy bassist Bob Daisley’s so-called ‘Holy Grail’ demos – said to document some seven hours of sessions with Randy Rhoads.

“Someone commented on a post someone and it was like,‘Oh when's Ozzy going to let Bob Daisley release the recordings of Randy Rhoads writing in the studio?’” reports Jack Osbourne [around 13.15, below].

“Supposedly – I don't know if it exists – but there's audio recordings of Randy, Dad and Daisley writing stuff for Blizzard… or Diary… and Daisley's gone out and said, ‘Oh Ozzy’s not letting me release it.’

“I turned around and said, ‘Why should he release it? He should give it to Randy's family and it should be up to them if they release it or not.’”

“Exactly,” chimes in Sharon.

Daisley has previously confirmed the existence of the recordings and even shared snippets of them alongside an interview on his website in 2014. 

The bassist maintains he has around seven hours’ worth of material recorded during the writing sessions for Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman sessions between December 8, 1979 and March 23, 1981 and dubs them the ‘Holy Grail’ tapes.

He has previously insisted the block on their release has come from the Osbourne camp, alleging to Rock Cellar in 2012 that the reason they were missing from the 2010 album reissues was due to a disagreement over royalties. 

He also commented in the aforementioned 2014 interview that “Kelle Rhoads has heard snippets that I played him over the phone, and he loved what he heard, he'd love to see the ‘Grail’ released.”

In this instance, though, it seems the Osbournes are clearly deferring to Rhoads’ estate when it comes to the fate of the demos – though Osbourne does pour cold water on the idea in his conversation.

“The quality sucks,” comments Ozzy [around 34.15] “[He’d record] everything we ever did. He would record the fucking milkman… The quality was fucking dreadful.”

“[He recorded] on a cassette machine,” says Sharon. “A tiny little cassette machine. And it’s not for us to do anything with.”

Last year, Ozzy Osbourne’s producer during that period, Max Norman, discussed Rhoads’ fastidious approach to taping his lead work.

“Randy had a very clear vision of what he wanted to achieve,” Norman told Guitar World last year. “To this end, he’d often play what most people would consider to be a perfect take and say, ‘No, that doesn’t feel quite right – let’s redo it.’ 

“Other times he’d say something like, ‘Goddamn, that felt really good, but I didn’t catch the harmonic I wanted on one note, and it’s got to be there.’ I’d look at him in astonishment, thinking, ‘Are we really gonna blow off this great take and record over it?’ He’d say, ‘I’ve got this,’ and then, sure enough, he’d play it again and nail that missing harmonic perfectly!”

Arguably the most disastrous tribute to Ozzy Osbourne ever conceived has been discovered in a British pub – and it includes one of the most bizarre Photoshop gaffes you’re likely to come across.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but every word of it is true: a branch of Wetherspoons opened in Birmingham pays tribute to the legendary vocalist, noting that it was in Birmingham in 1968 that Osbourne helped form Black Sabbath.

That’s all well and good, but the photo accompanying the nod is another matter altogether. For reasons we can’t quite wrap our heads around, the tribute inexplicably alters a famous live shot of both Osbourne and Randy Rhoads, omitting the late guitar hero entirely and instead making it seem as though Osbourne himself is playing electric guitar.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the original shot, the picture – which you can see below – depicts Osbourne lifting Rhoads in the air by his leg while the polka dot V-wielding guitar hero navigates the fretboard.

The picture found in the pub, though, is a butchered manipulation of the iconic shot, amalgamating the limbs of the two musicians to form one Frankenstein'd being that features the arms of Rhoads and body of Osbourne.

Not only is it an egregious Photoshop fail of incalculable proportions, it’s also a wholly unsuitable picture to use to commemorate the founding of Black Sabbath. Snapped in 1982 by Paul Natkin, it's a photograph of Osborne taken after he left the band, and depicts him at the start of his solo career.

Even if you’re willing to look past the historical inaccuracy and borderline disrespectful Photoshop fail – which, if you’re like us, you probably aren’t – there’s still one glaring, one stupendously outrageous mistake yet to be mentioned: Osbourne doesn’t even play guitar.

Famously a vocalist, Osbourne has never been a guitar player in his life, even once going as far to say that failing to learn the guitar was one of the biggest regrets of his life.

“That’s one of my biggest regrets. I can play a little bit of harmonica, and that’s about it,” he told Rolling Stone back in 2017. “But I have an ear for melody.”

Quite why those in charge of the project thought this approach would be a good idea will probably remain a mystery, but this will no doubt go down as perhaps the most hamfisted attempt at a musical tribute to the heavy metal icon ever.

For his last studio album, Ozzy Osbourne assembled a who’s who of electric guitar heroes, calling upon the likes of Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Zakk Wylde and many more for one of 2022’s biggest blockbuster records.

If he were forced to refine his six-string selection, though – as he was made to do in the new issue of Metal Hammer – which guitarists would the Prince of Darkness choose for his dream supergroup?

That was the question put to Osbourne by Metal Hammer Guest Editors Jack Black and Kyle Gass, who quizzed the Black Sabbath icon over who – alive or dead – he would want to collaborate with.

“I’d love to do something with John Lennon or Hendrix," he answered. “I’d love to do something with Randy Rhoads again. I’d love Paul McCartney to play on one of my albums. He’s a great bass player.”

As for drums, the sticks were given to Osbourne’s current drummer Tommy Clufetos, who has been working with the vocalist since 2010.

We know we’re not the only ones thinking that a supergroup comprising Osbourne, Hendrix, Lennon, Rhoads, McCartney and Clufetos would have made for one ridiculous link-up, not least in part because of the eclectic styles each party would bring.

Hendrix’s blues-y pentatonic licks and Rhoads’ virtuosic solos over a Beatles-based backline delivered by Lennon’s pop progressions and McCartney’s melodic low-end lines? All underneath Osbourne’s mountainous metal vocals?! You’d have to have a wild imagination to even comprehend what that would sound like.

Elsewhere in his conversation with Black and Gass, Osbourne gave further credit to the Beatles by name dropping She Loves You as the song that inspired him to pursue a career in music.

“The song that made me decide what I want to do in my life was She Loves You by The Beatles," Osbourne reflected. “I had this blue transistor radio – I remember it like it was yesterday – and I went, ‘Fuck... what is this?’ It was so profound! 

“They just fired my imagination. I wanted to be a Beatle. I wanted Paul McCartney to marry my sister! My bedroom wall was covered in fucking Beatles pictures.”

Head over to Magazines Direct to pick up the Tenacious D takeover edition of Metal Hammer.

Some 40 years after its initial release, Quiet Riot's Metal Health is still raging through the hallowed halls of heavy metal's sacred history.

As a precursor of Sunset Strip excess, Metal Health set the template for glam metal just a few short years – if not months – after its 1983 release. But the lead-up to the recording wasn't easy and involved significant levels of tragedy and personal exploration through music to reach the finish line.

Quiet Riot's then, and once again current bass player, Rudy Sarzo, reflects on reentering the fold: 'I came back to Quiet Riot not long after Randy [Rhoads] had passed away. My first show with Quiet Riot after I returned was at the Roxy, maybe a year after Randy had passed. He passed in '82, so this would have been in '83.

"I returned because I had recorded some tracks on the record, and it felt right. I wanted to honor the legacy of Randy and see it through; in my heart, it felt like the right thing to do, and I loved the music, too. We did four shows in two nights at the Roxy that weekend and sold them all out. From there, things began to blow up."

Indeed, Sarzo was left reeling after the passing of his close friend Randy Rhoads. As brothers bonded through music, Sarzo and Rhoads shared the stage in Quiet Riot's earliest incarnation before coming together once more in Ozzy Osbourne's solo group.

Like many who shared space in Rhoads' inner circle, Sarzo was devastated. Moreover, his passion for music had waned. But reclaiming his spot as a member of Quiet Riot reinvigorated him, and the recording of Metal Health – one of the era's seminal records – paved the way towards healing.

"Of course, Metal Health opened the door for us," Sarzo recalls. "It helped put a huge focus on the Sunset Strip and gave other bands playing the same type of music as we were an opportunity to go out there and be on MTV. But at the core of it, making Randy proud and preserving the legacy was the motivation.

"The reason why I first went in there to record Thunderbird and Slick Black Cadillac in the first place was for Randy. I did that as a tribute to him. That was it. That was the first step. Everything after that was just a natural progression."

These days, Sarzo is once again back 'home', and his energy is effervescent. With more and more tracks being lifted from their mothballs and Quiet Riot's current incarnation – which remains polarizing – continuing to tour, it appears that for now at least, Quiet Riot has not yet met the end of its ever-winding road. And for Sarzo, that's just fine.

"People can say what they like," Sarzo scoffs. "We're out there playing this music because it's what we love to do. I enjoy getting on stage with these guys. This isn't a cover band. This is Quiet Riot. I've been in and out of this band for a long time, and I always seem to come back. I feel it's my duty to help preserve the legacy. I do this for Frankie, Kevin, and Randy. They're always in my heart; this music means a lot to me. We'll keep going for as long as people will have us."

Nostalgic as he recounts years spent with fallen friends, Rudy Sarzo dialed in with Guitar World to discuss the 40th anniversary of Metal Health, as well as the enduring legacy of his old friend, and bandmate, Randy Rhoads.

What are your memories of Quiet Riot's early days?

"My history with this band goes way back. I've said this before, but Quiet Riot is like home for me. I first joined the band in 1978, which was the Randy Rhoads version of Quiet Riot. Prior to that, I had begun to make money playing music, but there were a lot of dead ends.

"So, Frankie Banali, who I had known since '72, and I decided to leave Florida – where we were – and head up to Chicago. We played that circuit and eventually made our way to L.A. This kept growing from there, and before we knew it, we were getting bigger and making a name for ourselves."

A lot of focus tends to center around the Metal Health era of the band, but how do you measure the importance of the Randy Rhoads era?

"It's just as important. Going back to '78, when I first joined Quiet Riot, all of our energy and focus went into getting a record deal. We wanted to record that album so that we could get out on tour and play shows as professional musicians. Before Quiet Riot, the bands I had been in were focused on the top-40, so this was the first time everyone in a band I was in focused on the same concept and goals. But, of course, having Randy in the band was a huge part of that."

What was it about Randy that moved the needle?

"The reason why, in my opinion, is that Randy had the highest musical integrity of any musician I've ever met or played with. When it comes to Randy, there are many facets to it, but one is that he was born into a musical family and academia. His parents were both professors, and his mom opened a music school in North Hollywood, California. So, Randy started reading music, studying harmonies and composition, and playing classical acoustic guitar before he picked up an electric guitar.

"Most kids were into rock 'n' roll, going to parties, and picking up girls, which was great. But the impression I got when I met Randy Rhoads was that he was slightly different. That was the first time that I truly experienced musical integrity.

"With Randy, it was all about the music, nothing else. There was no focus on what party we were going to or what girl we were seeing; the music was front and center. So, I met him and immediately knew, 'Okay, I want to be a part of this.' I've taken those basic things I learned from Randy early on into every band I've been in since."

How had Randy evolved by the time you joined him in Ozzy Osbourne's band?

"Oh, man. He was incredible, man. By that point, he had even more musical dexterity. Being able to play with Randy in both bands was incredible. I'm the only musician that was blessed to be able to do that. I played with him in Quiet Riot, so being able to join him in Ozzy's band was a whole new animal.

"In many ways, Randy was a totally different musician by that point. So, now, there was musical integrity, but with Ozzy, he was carrying a different sort of load. With Quiet Riot, the band was his baby, and we were fighting for a record deal. But with Ozzy, there was a deal, and now he was being asked to help someone who had established write music after he had left Black Sabbath."

Did Randy seem to feel any pressure when tasked with writing for Ozzy?

"That's hard to say. I do know that Randy asked Ozzy, 'How and what do you want me to write?' And Ozzy basically told him, 'Just be yourself. That's why you're here.' And that's where that classical musical influence we saw from the beginning came out; it was so natural for him. Not only was it natural, but he began to pursue it harder after that. That's where he saw himself as he began to lean into classical music, leading him to a new level of musicianship.

"But with Ozzy, I have to go back to the integrity thing again. Randy refused to record the Speak of the Devil record, which we eventually did with Brad Gillis. When this happened, Ozzy went off the rails and fired the band, which he later took back. He gave Randy a tough time, but Randy wanted to go back to school and get his master's. That's all he cared about. Ultimately, he agreed to do it and do one more tour, but it never happened because he passed away.

"Randy was a rock star, and he became the biggest guitarist in the world. But he didn't care; he was the only person I ever saw who would turn their back on stardom just to go back to school to pursue what they felt would bring their musicianship to the highest level."

Do you feel the trajectory of guitar-driven music would have been significantly altered had Randy survived?

"I think Randy would have taken metal to a new dimension because it was natural for him to do things like that. He was such a passionate musician, and if you see images of him playing with Quiet Riot and then Ozzy, the passion was always the same. That passion would have been there no matter where he played or how many people he played in front of.

"His personality never changed, even as his skills and stardom rose. People became aware of what he was doing, followed it, and believed in it. That alone would have altered the way guitar music went because I don't think that would have changed. To this day, even though he left us so young, his music still influences everything. It's still everywhere. If he had the chance to do more, forget about it."

Invariably, people compare Randy to Eddie Van Halen. Who do you feel had the edge?

"People need to remember that Randy did not live long enough to be the best Randy Rhoads. There was so much more inside of him that we never got to see. So, to me, it's apples and oranges. If you're asking who my favorite is, again, I like to drink apple and orange juice [Laughs]. But I played with Randy, and I know how great he was because I saw it firsthand on stage.

"As for Eddie, I jammed with him at a NAMM show one time in the '80s. But that's not the same as getting up on stage and playing live on the road. It's not the same as collaborating and creating; it's completely different. They're entirely different musicians and both utterly unique and transcendent. They both changed music forever and have changed the lives of many guitarists. To me, there is no debate. I enjoy them both."

Circling back to the Metal Health era, what was it about that lineup that bred such unique chemistry?

"That is a really good question. Of course, this is my perception of being there. In the years after Randy had left Quiet Riot, Kevin DuBrow had worked very hard to get better and better as a songwriter. When Randy was in the band, the focus was on him – as it should have been. But after he left, and once Kevin got Quiet Riot going again, he became the ringmaster. So I can give you some references. But the old Quiet Riot ceased when Randy left to join Ozzy in 1979. After that, Kevin Dubrow put his own band together called Dubrow. With Randy gone, the main attraction was now Kevin, and he gained a lot of charisma, which came out on the record.

"A lot of that material, like Thunderbird, was written after Randy left when Kevin was calling his band DuBrow instead of Quiet Riot, and Slick Black Cadillac was written with Randy still in the band. But once we all got back together, you had Frankie Banali, a great arranger. He could take parts, put them together, and make them make sense. And I had learned a lot playing with Ozzy, and my musicianship had elevated. And then, of course, Carlos Cavazo was a great guitar player with his own style; he's all over that record. We had grown as musicians, and once we all came together, it was the perfect storm."

What are your most poignant memories of Metal Health's recording?

"When it first happened, I was still a member of Ozzy's band and was getting ready to leave town to record the Speak of the Devil album live at the Ritz. So, a few days before I left, I got a phone call from Kevin, and he said, 'Hey, do you want to come down to the studio we're working at? I've got a possible record deal, and we want to lay down some demos.' Well, the song he wanted to do was Thunderbird, which is a song that I used to play with Kevin when I was a member of DuBrow before I joined Ozzy's band, so I said, 'Sure. I know the song; that's easy.'

"Once I got down there, the guys asked me, 'Hey, do you remember Slick Black Cadillac?' I said, 'Yeah, I used to do that with Quiet Riot with Randy, too. I can do it.' It kept going like that, and by the time I had left the session, I had done maybe four or five songs, all of which ended up on the record. So, what ended up happening was that I played on the whole Metal Health record, except for Metal Health and Don't Wanna Let You Go, which Chuck Wright played on."

What led to you officially rejoining Quiet Riot?

"Like I said, I was still a member of Ozzy when I did the demos and then the actual recording of Metal Health. I don't know… I loved the idea of playing with Frankie and Kevin again, especially Frankie, who I'd known since '72. And Kevin was my good friend, too. I would hang out with him whenever I got off the road with Ozzy.

"I guess I hoped that rejoining Quiet Riot would get me out of the funk that I was in. When Randy passed, I lost the joy associated with playing music. It became a job and was never the same for me. It was never the same going on stage and playing those Ozzy songs without Randy. Sure, we had the same clothes, and it was the same songs, but there was no Randy. The show would begin, and I'd think, 'God, what is this? It's all wrong.' It became about surviving the grief, and the pain, you know."

So, going back to Quiet Riot was more about healing, then?

"In a way, I think it was. Randy's death still felt fresh. But going back to Quiet Riot, I think it brought me back to what I had lost in some ways. When Randy passed away, one of the many things that I lost was my brotherhood with him. But being back in the band, there I was with Frankie and Kevin. Frankie and I had a brotherhood even before Quiet Riot, and playing with Kevin, meant so much. I left Ozzy's band – one of the biggest in the world – for Quiet Riot, which was essentially a complete unknown. I did that because I needed the joy of playing music again."

40 years on, how do you measure the importance of Metal Health?

"Well, its importance on my journey is probably even more meaningful than the overarching impact on metal. Because you're talking about something that I recorded on how it affects me versus something that I recorded and how it affects the rest of the world, which is hard for me to measure, it will have a way bigger impact on me than overall, I think.

"If you look at the back of Metal Health's cover, you'll see it's dedicated to Randy Rhoads. When we talk about Metal Health, we're talking about a record that, in many ways, symbolizes me, Frankie, and Kevin's connection with Randy. Randy taught by example; he knew the importance of being clear and pure with his actions. You'd have to be in a coma not to understand that dedication and purity of actions were ingrained in us, and it's all over that record.

"So, we made Metal Health, and we had this wonderful piece of music that truly celebrates his legacy. And 40 years later, we can celebrate that and the band's legacy. To me, Randy will always be a member of Quiet Riot, and that never goes away. So, how do we celebrate that legacy? What we did was go out and make a record worth remembering. That's what Metal Health means to me."

And when you look back on Randy Rhoads, how do you measure his importance?

"Well, it's different from the average person listening to his music, because I got to know him as a person. I got to live with him on a tour bus. I got to be with him on stage. I got to watch him compose with Quiet Riot. So, my answer is going to come from that reference point. But I think what's really a shame is that if he had survived and were still with us today, everything would have been different. Randy's level of importance is measured by what he did, but it would be different if he had had the chance to live on.

"From the time he left Quiet Riot to those two Ozzy records, the growth musically and the diversity of the music just exploded. I think that, in a way, his importance is to inspire others. Randy inspires me daily in many ways, and I know he still inspires guitar players and musicians. That would not have changed if he were alive today. 

"What I'm trying to say is he already did that, with just two albums and two tours. He didn't have much time to go out there and present himself to the masses, and there's very little video footage of him doing so, but he still did that. The simple fact that kids today can hear something that he recorded 40 years ago and still be influenced by it shows that through his music, he will never be gone. He's timeless."

A new Randy Rhoads signature MXR Distortion+ pedal will be released next year, according to the late electric guitar legend's family.

In a new Instagram post, Rhoads' sister, Kathy Rhoads D’Argenzio, revealed that – for the first time in 40 years – the guitarist's legendary “chip pan” pedalboard was opened and dissected by the MXR team as part of the pedal's research and development.

"We’ve been working with Jimi Dunlap [Jimmy Dunlop] and his team for quite some time now and we are happy to officially announce a future Randy Rhoads Distortion Plus pedal,” Rhoads D’Argenzio wrote on Instagram earlier this week (December 6.)

"Jimmy and his team recently came down to check out Randy’s pedalboard. For the first time in over 40 years it was intricately examined, filmed, recorded and documented at Musonia. They have patiently awaited its return from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Randy always referred to it as 'the chip pan!')

"Today [December 6, Rhoads' birthday]," she continued, "seemed like the perfect day to celebrate all Randy did for rock 'n' roll and guitar players around the world. Be on the lookout for this pedal, upcoming in 2023! His music lives on."

Dubbed, as Rhoads D’Argenzio pointed out, "the chip pan," Rhoads' pedalboard is almost as legendary as any of his Gibson, Jackson, and Sandoval guitars or Marshall guitar amps.

An MXR Distortion+ was a central feature of the pedalboard, and played a significant role in the guitarist's hugely influential sound.

Stored in a flight case, the 'board featured at least eight switches and nine control knobs, and has long been shrouded in mystery. 

Rhoads D’Argenzio also said that after the MXR team completed its examination of the pedalboard, it was returned to a "secured location," not Musonia, the North Hollywood, California music school and Randy Rhoads museum founded by the guitarist's mother, Delores.  

In 2019, thieves broke into Musonia and stole a number of Rhoads' instruments, plus photos and memorabilia. All the missing items were eventually retrieved, and returned to Rhoads' family.