Yesterday I watched Ozzy’s final concert in Birmingham, where—alongside 40,000 fans—many icons of rock music came to pay tribute. From Guns N’ Roses, through Metallica, Anthrax, Pantera, and Slayer, to Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones.
It hit me yesterday just how much Ozzy and Black Sabbath influenced me too. For example, when we were kids during the depths of totalitarianism, we used to quietly chant among ourselves:
“We are Black Sabbath, escaping from Russia to the West, we don’t want kopecks, we’ll wipe our asses with them.”
I also remember the “somráci” of the time—drifters who, aside from their long greasy hair, beer-and-cigarette stench, and crumbling denim outfits, were known for carrying khaki canvas satchels slung over their shoulders. I believe they were originally meant for gas masks. On them, you’d always find the words BLACK SABBATH scrawled in marker, along with a hand-drawn cross. A nightmare for the communist regime. The polar opposite of the tidy, ever-smiling socialist youth.
Black Sabbath records like those of other Western rock bands couldn’t be sold in Czechoslovakia, of course, as they were seen as symbols of capitalist cultural decay. They were smuggled in from the West or from Hungary (where the regime was a bit more lenient) and then sold on the black market. Owning one was like possessing a small treasure.
A classmate’s older brother had one. It was sometime in the early ’80s, and when he played it for me, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. It sounded like it came from another planet. The album cover too—it radiated darkness and mystery. Holding it in my hands felt like clutching a sacred artifact.
Today’s press is calling yesterday’s concert one of the greatest events in the history of heavy metal. It also mentions the generations of bands that Black Sabbath and Ozzy inspired. But it wasn’t just musicians and metalheads in the West. It was also hundreds of thousands of young people behind the Iron Curtain, for whom their style and music offered a way—if only for a moment—to step outside the uniform, soulless world of totalitarian society.
Thank you for that.
THANK YOU BLACK SABBATH! THANK YOU OZZY! ♥