I don’t know if faith really can move mountains, but Ozzy Osbourne’s songs got Fernando ‘Politra’, a tremendously thin old man and with a spectacular difficulty to move, he got up from the chair to applaud while shouting with emotion with a telted smile. Before knowing us, Politra, a painter of a fat brush and a precision stirr of Casar de Cáceres, had never gone from the instrumental hardness of the Tabajas Indians. Nor did I know a word of English and much less an idea of who Black Sabbath was when my colleagues and I tried to explain. We dug with what was going through those moments: “Who the hell is Ozzy? Will it be of the town?” Politra only repeated the same phrase when my band dedicated him to him in the Test premises Paranoid o Crazy Train: “Good people!” That’s all. And he left home. That’s what more than 15 years ago, an era where there was nothing more revolutionary than an elderly man who lived in the neighborhood of Eras left every night full of illusion for discovering new music.
The songs are like empty jars in which without realizing it over the years memories, smells, sensations … for lovers of the heavy metal, Ozzy had opened many of those boats, from his stage as a singer in Black Sabbath to the end of the solo race. With his march this Wednesday, at 76, he leaves a multitude of hymns: Changes, Iron Man, War Pigs, Goodbye to Romance, I’ Don’t Know, Over the Mountain, Mr. Crowley, No More Tears… A long list of genius where this English of Birmingham showed that in addition to being one of the parents of heavy metal could be the godfather, grandfather and drunk uncle who lies the liquor on Christmas dinners.
And it is that part of the attraction he gave off in his self -destructive personality, which covered both the prototype of rockstar of the seventies like the meat of Tiktok and Instagram Meme. To the great drunkenness and kilometric stripes of cocaine (and ants) have added the Dalinian anecdotes, such as tear off a bat to a bat or petar it in the MTV with a reality-show of Your family in mansion. And despite that rosary of eccentricities that would end the career of any musician, the prince of the darkness periodically took out an album with songs that made tremble to any musician with decades of experience. More than 40 platinum records in almost 60 years of career. A more heavy guy than the doors of hell, but who melted listening to John Lennon and wrote the most beautiful lyrics of the genre.
Its essence has crossed the globe to sound both in the pubs more select from Los Angeles even in the summer verbenas of emptied Spain. Therefore, two weeks ago during his farewell concert, the tears of his attendees (and of the viewers in the networks) mixed with the cold sweats: “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” said the singer sitting on a leather throne, suffering from Parkinson’s.
Behind that dark voice and its demonic aesthetics, Ozzy’s songs have projected a ray of light for many people who have suffered (and suffer) rejection and loneliness. For many others, he has accompanied the parties in remote places or has served to strengthen links with people who, otherwise, would never have crossed a word. Behind those melodies there is a path that takes them to the same place: home. Ozzy has returned there, but has left the jars open so that those who are still alive continue to fill them.