Best known for his time in Ozzy Osbournes‘ classic solo line up, bassist Bob Daisley talked about the often difficult dynamics between Ozzy and the original members of his band.
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“The Blizzard of Ozz was supposed to be in big writing. And we said, ‘We don’t mind if you want to put something on the album cover that says ‘Featuring the voice of Black Sabbath’ or ‘Featuring Ozzy Osbourne’ or whatever.’
“But instead they put Ozzy Osbourne in big writing and ‘Blizzard of Ozz’ in small writing, which made it look like an Ozzy Osbourne album called ‘Blizzard of Ozz.’ But it wasn’t.
“Randy and I had meeting with Jet Records a few times about the band name because they were talking about just calling it Ozzy Osbourne, or just Ozzy.
“And we said no. Because we were doing way too much. We weren’t side men, we weren’t sort of hired to do somebody’s solo album. We were writing everything and putting everything together.
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“We were part of the band and we said, ‘No, it’s gotta be a band name.’ Randy and I were adamant about that. And when Lee joined he was as well. So when that first album came out it was a bit of a double-cross, really.”
On Ozzy’s public knowledge substance abuse issues, Daisley added
“He did get quite drunk and stoned and… And a lot of the time when we were writing the stuff for that album, he wasn’t even there! It was just Lee and Randy and me. Ozzy did have a contribution a lot of the times. But on ‘Diary of a Madman’ – nothing! On the song ‘”Diary of a Madman”, nothing!”
On the title track for the album, he said “Ozzy had been away for a couple of days and he came into rehearsal one day and we said, ‘We’ve got a new idea.’ I came up with the title of the album months earlier and Ozzy loved the title. But we didn’t have a song for a title song. When Ozzy came back and we just played him the backing track, Ozzy couldn’t get it. He couldn’t quite understand because it was weird timings. His words were – and I still remember like it was yesterday – ‘Who the fuck do you think I am, Frank Zappa?!’ That’s what he said. And once we showed him where the vocal melody would fall, where it would sit in between these weird bits of music and timing, it was alright. Then I wrote lyrics to it.”
