Illegal Foreign Object

♫ Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker ♫

I am sure nothing has changed in the last 32 years, but when I was a teenager in East Texas, there wasn’t much of anything to do other than things you probably weren’t supposed to be doing.

There were sports, but the coaches were all sadists taking out the frustrations of their failed attempts to play professionally out of a new batch of dreamers.

There was the school band, but those hot-ass blacktop parking lot practices never looked fun.

No extracurriculars, plus busy and/or absent parents quickly turned dreamers into schemers. It’s not that we were looking for trouble, but you can only read so many books, listen to so many songs, and play so many games before you start looking for something else to goose those flagging dopamine levels.

 ♫ Suicide is slow with liquor ♫

Which is how, when you’re 14 and a complete idiot, you end up drunkenly tearing down the opposite lane of a moonlit highway in the passenger seat of a maroon Chrysler LeBaron with the headlights off and Ozzy Osbourne’s Blizzard Of Ozz very, VERY on.

Hours earlier, I had ended up at FUMP’s house. FUMP was a metalhead; he was a few years older than me and had a decent music collection. I was there because he was loaning me Kreator’s Coma Of Souls (which still has one of the wildest album covers of all time), and then we were headed over to another guy’s house to hang out. Before all that, though, FUMP decided it would be best to get half-blasted on the remaining contents of a Jack Daniels bottle he’d stolen from his stepdad’s liquor cabinet.

Since FUMP “drank all the time”, having a little taste before taking a drive wouldn’t be a problem. He could “hold his booze”. If you can’t smell the sarcasm in those previous two sentences, sniff again. Still, he was two years older than me, had a car, and worked in a pizza place. The guy clearly had life figured out! *sniff sniff*

♫ Take a bottle, drown your sorrows ♫

Suitably snookered, FUMP and I loaded up and headed off in search of further merriment. He popped Blizzard Of Ozz into the tape deck and tore off the gravel path in front of his double-wide.

After headbanging our way through the rifftastic classics “I Don’t Know” and “Crazy Train”, FUMP was lightning quick to fast forward through the beautiful “Goodbye To Romance” and guitarist Randy Rhoads’ instrumental tribute to his mom, “Dee”. “No pussy shit allowed” in his car, he said. As “Suicide Solution” oozed through the speakers, FUMP turned off the headlights and slid his car into the opposite lane. He stayed in that lane for the duration of the song. Without giving it too much thought, it’s one of the top ten dumbest things I’ve participated in during a lifetime filled with stupid moments.

♫ Then it floods away tomorrows ♫

That was such a weird time in my life — a transformative time in many ways. I was desperately searching for something — some meaning to anything. Age has taught me to keep the lock on that Pandora’s Box — searching for meaning in universal chaos is the fast track to insanity — but we’re all idealistic shits in our younger years. It takes a lifetime of compromises to unlock the real truth — there is no “black and white”, only varying shades of grey.

I look back at little moments like the one I’ve just imparted, and I’m happy I survived them (and I don’t just mean physically). I’m also happy that I mentally and emotionally grew beyond people hell-bent on self-destruction. FUMP wasn’t a bad guy, but he was doomed. I have a vague idea how things turned out for him — it wasn’t good. Escaping that small part of the world and those kinds of people opened the real world up to me. Whenever I’m forced back to East Texas for a visit, I am repeatedly bludgeoned in the face with images of how life could have turned out. That area is filled to the brim with FUMPs.

♫ Away tomorrows ♫

It’s wild to consider that Ozzy is really nothing more than a FUMP with better luck. This goes back to the universal chaos I mentioned earlier, but there’s some meat on this bone. I mean, Ozzy Osbourne is unquestionably a legendary figure in music, but find me a truthful person who says he was anything but one of the luckiest people in rock history. Ozzy is, without much sugarcoating, kind of a dimwit. Where fellow shock rocker Alice Cooper might give you a wink and a nod while welcoming you to his nightmare, farting and falling down seems to be the only kind of multitasking the Ozzman has ever been capable of pulling off. I know that reads as harsh, but history backs me up. It doesn’t make him a bad guy — just a dumb one. Without his wife, Sharon, guitarist Randy Rhoads, bassist Bob Daisley, and drummer Lee Kerslake, Blizzard Of Ozz likely never happens.

This belief makes it all the more disgusting that Daisley and Kerslake had to sue for royalties six years after its release, then had their playing disrespectfully removed from the ’02 reissue (replaced by Mike Bordin and Robert Trujillo). Fans of the original threw a fit, especially since the first pressings of the reissue didn’t indicate such a massive change. The 2010 reissue saw a return to the original recordings, a demand Ozzy made despite Sharon’s protest.

Blizzard Of Ozz isn’t sonically perfect, but its beauty is in the frantic way it sounds, not because of world-class musicianship. There’s a hunger to the sound that cannot be equaled in reissues and re-recordings — the first six tracks can go toe-to-toe with any metal album from any era.

History has positioned Randy Rhoads as a neoclassical guitar god, but in 1980, he was a gritty shredder who’d scuffled (and failed) to break into the big time with his first band, Quiet Riot. Daisley and Kerslake were competent but hardly elite. Ozzy was a fantastic character, but no one would call him a brilliant singer. The brilliance of that first band was in the sum of its parts — a brilliance that gave us one of the most important metal albums of all time.

Tracklist:

1. I Don’t Know 10/10
2. Crazy Train 10/10
3. Goodbye To Romance 10/10
4. Dee 10/10
5. Suicide Solution 10/10
6. Mr. Crowley 10/10
7. No Bones Movies 7/10
8. Revelation (Mother Earth) 7/10
9. Steal Away (The Night) 7/10

Grade: 90