Who's your favorite Ozzy Osbourne? Every generation of metalheads has its own. Seventies kids have the zonked-out frontman of the legendary Black Sabbath, the band who invented heavy metal. Eighties kids have the howling solo star who lost his favorite guitar player in a plane crash and courted controversy at every turn. Nineties kids have the shrewd ringleader of OzzFest, the blockbuster traveling circus that rejuvenated the career of its namesake by positioning him as the unholy godfather of an exciting new breed of metal bands.

This summer, Ozzy is headlining OzzFest 2002, which, featuring performances by System of a Down, Rob Zombie, and many more of rock's loudest, will rumble into the Tweeter Center on July 16 and 17. It's business as usual for the Ozzman, except for one crucial detail: OzzFest 2002 marks the concert debut of the new-millennial Ozzy, whose popularity has surged wildly with the runaway success of the MTV series The Osbournes. Metalheads young and old provided a built-in audience for the show, which recently finished its first season broadcasting the daily household antics of the 53-year-old rock icon and his equally zany family. But it ended up striking a much deeper chord, catching on with the unsuspecting youth of today as well as with older viewers who would ordinarily be indifferent to (or even offended by) heavy metal. In other words, The Osbournes captivated the sitcom audience, the rock audience, and pretty much everyone in between.

Long-time fans wouldn't expect Ozzy to get too excited about his new kinder, gentler celebrity -- and he's not. "Me and Sharon [his wife and manager] went out shopping in New York on Saint Patrick's Day," he recently told Blender magazine. "Usually, when I'm walking around, I can spot the old Ozzy freak a mile away, eyes burning fucking shafts of green light into me. But as I was walking past people, they're going, 'Ohmigod! It's Ozzy and Sharon!' I'm thinking, 'These aren't the Ozzy fans I've come to know.' The world has changed."

But dealing with dorky new fans is a small price to pay for the high brand-name recognition Ozzy is currently enjoying, and that's been a big part of his game plan since he and Sharon -- the brains behind her husband's operation for more than 20 years -- launched OzzFest in the mid '90s. Not content with initiating a new marketing push behind Ozzy's most recent album, last year's Down to Earth (Epic), they've just released two new discs of Ozzy-related material to capitalize on the popularity of The Osbournes: The Osbourne Family Album (Epic), which is meant to be a soundtrack for the TV show, and Ozzy's Live at Budokan (Epic), the fifth live album of his career. The first is aimed at the sit-com audience; the second is for the rock audience. And both deliver the goods.

The Osbourne Family Album is not your average TV soundtrack: there are snippets of dialogue from the show before every track, and few of the tunes here were actually played during the series. Instead, it's a collection of songs that mean a lot to the family, with personal liner notes tying each one to a particular moment in their tumultuous history. Ozzy goes for classic rock, Sharon for mushy love songs; teenage kids Jack and Kelly pick tracks by agitative metal freaks System of a Down and sub-Coldplay Brit-poppers Starsailor, respectively. Like the series, it shows the ordinary side of an extraordinary family: your clan's private compilation probably wouldn't feature dad singing "Crazy Train," but just about any family could be expected to suffer through mom picking Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight."

The album's biggest draw is also the freshest entry in the Osbournes' scrapbook: Kelly's hard-rock cover of Madonna's "Papa Don't Preach," an instant kitsch classic that marks the pink-haired middle sibling's debut as a recording artist. Imagine Kylie Minogue's "The Loco-Motion" crossed with Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl" in the hands of '80s Heart -- novelty hits just don't get any better than this. Originally recorded with Michael Einziger and Jose Pasillas of Epic labelmates Incubus, the song eventually made it onto the album credited only to the mysterious production team Kawcir & Valentine. Teen-metal OzzFest vets Pure Rubbish have accompanied Kelly at a couple of recent high-profile performances, but the true identity of her band is not as important as the cool fake-violin guitar line that leads off the song or the relentless cymbal crashing that powers it throughout. Kelly's vocal performance verges on karaoke for most of the tune, but she makes a convincing pop-star move when she lets out a big "I'm keeping my baby/Ooh-ooh, I'm gonna keep my baby, mmm . . . " at the end of the chorus. Poor Ozzy: he of all people knows the fatherly advice he gives Kelly at the beginning of the song doesn't stand a chance against her very hereditary wild streak.

According to Kelly's official Web site, she's recording an album for release later this year -- and that signals the start of a friendly competition between her and big sister Aimee, who refused to participate in The Osbournes and is rumored to have pop-star ambitions of her own. During the series, Kelly famously got mad at Aimee for trying to get her to go to the gynecologist, but here she makes a point of thanking her sister for coming up with the idea to record "Papa Don't Preach." Aimee also plays a starring role in the disc's most memorable anecdote: the family includes the classic Cars ballad "Drive," Sharon explains, because she and Ozzy had to play it "at least 20 times a day" to keep Aimee happy as a baby.

Anyone who saw the episode where Jack blasted an album by Swedish metal fiends Meshuggah into the neighbors' back yard knows he didn't listen to soft rock in his crib, and he made sure to get his share of the hard stuff on disc. At 16, Jack is already a corporate-rock veteran: he's a talent scout at Epic, and he's been helping book the second stage at OzzFest for years. That's why he picked "Mirror Image" by Dillusion, a Hollywood band whom he's been "developing over at Epic for a year now" -- and who sound disappointingly flaccid on their major-label debut. The album's bonus track, by Chicago Tool disciples Chevelle, is a more effective corporate tie-in: the band are on OzzFest 2002, and their second album, Wonder What's Next, comes out on Epic in August.

Mom and dad don't get left out of the fun, either: Sharon gets in the best crack on the disc ("Martha Stewart can lick my scrotum"), and Ozzy stammers his way through several choice outbursts. His greatest hit, "Crazy Train," opens and closes the album. The kickoff is the amusing lounge rendition by Pat Boone (from his semi-legendary '97 collection of metal covers) that served as the show's themesong. And that's Ozzy singing on the original version that ends the disc -- but it's not actually the original version. To counter a royalty suit by the rhythm section who played on his classic '81 solo debut, Blizzard of Ozz (Epic), Ozzy removed their parts and had current players Robert Trujillo and Mike Bordin record new ones for a reissue that recently hit the shelves. Trujillo and Bordin duplicate the original parts, so the change won't sound drastic to the casual listener. But the altered version isn't being marketed as such, and that's been a matter of some controversy -- clearly Ozzy should have found a more fan-friendly way to deal with the lawsuit.

"Crazy Train" also appears on Live at Budokan, Ozzy's first live album with guitarist Zakk Wylde, bassist Trujillo, and drummer Bordin. Recorded this past February at the legendary Tokyo venue, it's a worthy companion to the classic '87 disc Tribute (Epic), which was recorded with legendary guitarist Randy Rhoads a year before his death in '82. The two discs even open with the same gothic intro to "I Don't Know," and three of the first five tracks are the same on both. "Let's go fuckin' crazy!" screams Ozzy at the outset of Live at Budokan -- and his patented pre-, mid-, and post-song yelling doesn't let up for the rest of the disc's 66 minutes.

Wylde has always been reverential in his treatment of the Rhoads material, and here he replicates the master's work on Tribute down to the very last lick. He gets his own chance to shine on his signature tune, the epic title track to the '91 Ozzy disc No More Tears (Epic). More than 10 years after their release, the four songs from that album hold up surprisingly well against the ones from Blizzard -- especially when Ozzy bites into the defiant "I Don't Want To Change the World" and "Mama, I'm Coming Home," both of which he wrote with Lemmy from Motörhead.

It's hard to believe that just a year ago, the big Ozzy news was the most recent Black Sabbath reunion tour, which rocked way harder than your average metal nostalgia trek and was supposed to be followed by the original line-up's first new album in more than 20 years. Whether that album will ever appear remains to be seen, but one thing's for sure: the almighty Sabbath are little more than a footnote in the current Ozzy renaissance. The only Sabbath song on The Osbourne Family Album is System of a Down's jittery cover of "Snowblind," and the only one on Live at Budokan is a rampaging performance of "Paranoid." Still, if Ozzy can become a television star, anything is possible -- even a Sabbath reunion album.

n

Ozzy Osbourne performs at OzzFest 2002 next Tuesday and Wednesday, July 16 and July 17, at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Call (617) 228-6000.

Issue Date: July 5 - 11, 2002