Rollin' with Ozzy

80s Lemonheads was a Black Sabbath cover band.

The Tale of Hatin’ Spores

Somebody close to me told me I’m often too quick to post on social media about how I’m “gutted” or “devastated” by the passing of some public figure I may or may not have known. Point taken, they are probably right. I’m going to be more measured this time. I loved much of Ozzy Osbourne’s work, and his recent passing, just a couple weeks after his dramatic final performance has me reflecting on how much his work has meant to me.

I recently read Geezer Butler’s excellent memoir Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath-And Beyond. I listened to the audiobook on Spotify - it’s narrated by Butler and his narration absolutely improves the experience. He’s so dry and sharp, low-key hilarious. Reading the book led to my third lifetime rediscovery of the first four Black Sabbath albums, the ones I come back to again and again. It’s a run that I consider to be tied for the greatest four-album run of all time. Tied with The Stones, Beggars Banquet through Exile on Main Street.

I really enjoyed Butler’s description of Ozzy. According to Butler, Ozzy wouldn’t have functioned in any imaginable role in society other than rock star. He was too eccentric, too clueless, and probably too much of a genius. As a kid I imagined he was into witchcraft or something. Nah, just a brilliant goofball - a brilliance matched by his bandmates, all from blue collar Midlands, each member carrying his weight on his respective instrument, with Tony Iommi and Geezer being the MVPs as writers of riffs and lyrics, respectively. As a young drummer I idolized Bill Ward and spent countless hours playing along with his performances in the basement. Bill Ward and Topper Headon, those were my best drum teachers.

I remember the first time I heard Black Sabbath. I was in fifth or sixth grade, with friends on a Friday night at Western Skateland, a grungy roller rink on the west side of Bloomington where I grew up. I have a lot to say about Western, but I’m going to pick that up in the Epilogue below. I don’t want to get too far off the Ozzy topic, but I have more to say about Western…

That particular Friday night at Western I noticed this tough, skinny kid in his early teens with long, greasy black hair. He wearing a homemade Black Sabbath T-Shirt, apparently scrawled with a marker. The kid approached the DJ booth and had a quick exchange with the DJ. Then he quickly gathered up his longhaired buddies and skated onto the rink in a pack. The DJ lowered the lights and cranked up the volume for Iron Man. The burnout group skated in a cluster at top speed for the entire song, bombing around the rink in the dim light as everyone else cleared a path. I watched from the sidelines, captivated by the music.

My main sources for music discovery in those were radio, specifically WFBQ, “Q95” out of Indianapolis, an “album rock” station, and rock magazines I could get from the grocery store such as Creem and Circus. I heard a lot of great stuff on Q95 like Bowie, Mott the Hoople, Iggy, and Lou Reed, but I never heard Sabbath. The magazines covered the biggest or most interesting acts of the day; in the late 70s - before the early 80s rebirth - Sabbath was old news. I knew of the band but I’d never heard their music.

I saved up some lawn mowing money and took it to Karma Records, where I picked up a vinyl copy Paranoid.¹ I had to hear that song again. Within a year, I found used copies of the eponymous debut and Master of Reality. My friend Tom Barr had Volume 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and I think our friend Harry had one or two as well. We borrowed the ones we didn’t have from each other, heard them all. I considered those first four to be equally great and essential, with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage as great but second-tier. I purchased both Heaven and Hell (first with Dio) and Diary of a Madman by Ozzy when they came out, and I considered those to be very close to the standard of the first four.

My love of Sabbath was completely consistent with my hard rock and metal obsession at the time. From about nine til about fourteen, I listened exclusively to hard rock and metal. Eventually my steady diet of Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Skynyrd, ZZ Top, Sabbath, and Van Halen grew to include early punk rock such as the Pistols, Ramones, and The Clash before hardcore completely took over at age fifteen. A few “classic rock” acts made the cut. I never stopped listening to Black Sabbath. If the party was 100% punks, we listened to punk rock. If the party was a mix of punks, jocks, stoners, and normies, we’d play Van Halen, Pink Floyd, or Sabbath. Any of those worked every time, depending on the collective level of intoxication and the party favors of choice.

I saw Sabbath in 1981, at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis. They were touring the Mob Rules album, the first post-Ozzy album, with Ronny James Dio on vocals. I loved it. I remember at the very end the came out and took a bow with about a half-dozen obvious groupies, showing off the spoils. Then 6 months later I was Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman show in the same venue, with Randy Rhoads on lead guitar. Surprisingly at the time, it was a much better show. I saw a lot of arena shows between 1979 and 1982 before I pivoted to all-ages punk and hardcore shows. I never stopped loving - and listening to - my favorite Black Sabbath and Ozzy albums.

When I met Evan Dando and the Lemonheads gang in 1986 in Boston, we bonded over a lot of different music. It’s uncanny how much we had in common, having grown up in very different worlds. We all had hardcore and punk in common, including British post-punk and hippy stuff. We quickly realized that we all loved Black Sabbath, especially the first four albums. I spent a lot of time at Evan and Ben Deily’s North Cambridge apartment in Ben’s parents’ house. The band practiced in the basement, and we’d often spend long afternoons in that incredibly loud, reflective room jamming at full volume. If we weren’t exploring, we were probably playing Sabbath songs.

Evan’s girlfriend Emily went to Vassar, as did some of the Lemonheads’ high school buddies. We used to play there pretty often so Evan could spend time with Emily. He’d drag us all down there and we’d find somewhere to sleep in the dorms. One time we went down there unannounced on a Friday and made arrangements to set up and play in the performance space. Evan announced to the 100 or so attendees that we were called The Hatin’ Spores, then we played nine or ten Black Sabbath songs.

Another time I’ve previously written about, our buddy Billy Ruane booked us to play a maximum security prison outside Boston. The opening band, The Lifers, consisted of guys with life sentences who played metal covers. They did a version of Mr. Crowley, which inspired Evan to ask their singer to join us onstage to sing a Black Sabbath medley. The other Lifers joined us, and you couldn’t miss the joy on their faces.

I thought our Sabbath cover band, The Hatin’ Spores (which isn’t some obscure Sabbath reference - it’s just a goofy name we made up on the spot) was lost to time. Then I took a listen to the album If Only You Were Dead, which features two performances on the Emerson College radio station, WERS. The first performance is a month or so before I joined the band in 1987. The second performance, over a year later, is after we released Creator. The entire set is like our basement jam come to life, including a cover of N.I.B. It’s my tribute to a hero, Bill Ward. I wish I could hear the performance better in that mix, but the energy is definitely there, along with our collective love of that music.

The most surprising track on the session is titled Instrumental, with Evan on drums and me on guitar. It’s the guitar part that became Take Me by Blake Babies, off the Rosy Jack World EP. Then, uncredited, Juliana Hatfield joins to sing From Here to Burma, from Blake Babies’ Earwig album. Here we were playing on the radio, probably a little messed up, and just unapologetically amusing ourselves on the air. It’s a fun memory, and I’m so glad the Sabbath cover thing is documented.

I’ll confess I felt annoyed by Ozzy’s reality show self-reinvention. I wanted to think of Ozzy as a dark, brooding presence, not this goofball puttering around his suburban mansion amid family hijinks. I willfully avoided those shows (was it one show or a bunch of them? It was hard to avoid). I wanted to keep intact my characterization of Ozzy as a drug-gobbling, Satan-worshipping madman, not some bumbling family man.

Now I accept that Ozzy’s media persona was a window into his life as a funny, big-hearted family guy. In retrospect, his venture into reality show unreality gave us all a window into Ozzy’s private charm, as if his charming cameo in The Metal Years (above) wasn’t enough. Now that I want to be remembered as a big-hearted family guy, I’m glad he was able to broaden his image from the Prince of Darkness, bat-eating, ant-snorting maniac.

Rather than saying I’m gutted or devastated, I’ll just say I’m sorry for anyone who feels a personal loss. He’s lived an epic, heroic life. It’s sad to lose a beloved public figure, and it’s clear from the reaction that he meant a lot to a lot of people. As for me, I can still crank up Volume 4 whenever I want, and it'll give me that jolt of adrenaline as always. I’m sorry for the loss; I’m forever grateful for the work.

Epilogue - Western Skateland

To my great surprise, Western Skateland, on West 17th Street in Bloomington, Indiana, is still there. Nearly 50 years since my heyday, the party rolls on. Judging from their socials, they’re doing quite well. There’s a hint of nostalgia in their branding, and a general vibe of inclusivity. I don’t know how much of their business consists of nostalgia-seekers, but it’s encouraged. I love that their nostalgia is largely for this exact time period - late 70s and early 80s - when I haunted the place. I feel validated.

Western Skateland loomed large in my adolescence, something to look forward to asa well as something to dread. I wasn’t especially popular in middle school. I had no idea how to be popular; I tried to make myself invisible. I had a few close friends, but no confidence whatsoever around girls. As I privately built my identity and sense of self around my music obsession, I kept myself pretty much isolated and I suppose I didn’t make much of an impression with my classmates. I longed for a do-over, a way to start to reinvent myself as someone who could, say, have a girlfriend someday. Western Skateland was just such an opportunity to begin to re-write my story.

I grew up on the South Side near the I.U. campus, while Western was north side establishment. Kids from my school didn’t usually venture that far (a couple miles and a world away), which was a good thing. If I didn’t go to Western every weekend, then every visit was essentially tabala rasa, a fresh start.

Western was a a bit of a rough crowd of adolescents and teens, peppered with random adults you barely noticed. Kids discretely smoked and drank in the parking lot, and occasional fistfight or boyfriend/girlfriend drama broke out. Western was more of a melting pot than you’d expect for such a homogenous town. You’d have kids like me, University parents living close to downtown or in subdivisions. Adolescent and teen regulars came both from the one Black neighborhood in Bloomington just a few blocks away, and from more rural parts and less affluent white kids we called “grits.” It surprised me that grit is a term that seems only to have been used in Southern Indiana. Can anyone speak to this? Did you call country kids grits where you grew up?

I wasn’t much of an athlete back then, except that I was a decent hockey player from about age 10 through 14. I got good enough to play on the travel team for a couple years before punk rock completely took over my life. Being decent at hockey means you’re very comfortable on skates, including roller skates. I felt more self-confident on skates than anywhere else, except behind the drum set.

I’d begin to feel anxious a couple days before a night at Western. The big event each night, the adrenaline overload, was the “snowball” skate: boys on one side, girls on the other. The boys skated up to the line of girls and held out their hand to show that they wanted to skate with a girl. The girl would (you pray) take your hand and then you’d skate together, holding hands.

Naturally, outright rejection would be humiliating. I made sure that never happened, started learning how to pick up cues. If your snowball partner bailed after one lap, that’s a gentler version of rejection, accounting for the vast majority of times. You’d pick yourself up and try again. If she skated two or three laps, you knew she was interested and you might feel encouraged to strike up a conversation or offer to buy them some Lifesavers or some such baller move. If she held to your hand for the entire song, then you were, as they say, In like Flynn. Well, not quite like Flynn…but you’d expect the next step is asking her to “go with” you. If she was a total fox, that meant you hit the jackpot.

One time a few years after the Sabbath incident, age 14, I went to Western with my best friend, DD. DD was from a blue collar mega-Christian family of eight (Brady Bunch style) who lived in a cramped house a couple blocks from me. DD was a wild kid, an early partier and rock n’ roller who spent his time around a bunch of older relatives who taught him everything about how to be cool - what bands to like, what rules to break, how to handle yourself in a fight, etc. DD was cool and I felt cool around him. His unshakeable confidence gave me confidence.²

That night my hair was as long as I could get away with and I wore my AC/DC 3/4 sleeve baseball jersey and jeans. I looked as cool as I could manage. There was a girl named Tammy I met early that night who was a year ahead of us, I guess a Freshman at Bloomington North high school. She was pretty and blonde, dressed in a crop top and bandannas like an extra in a Van Halen video. I made up my mind and psyched myself to level up and ask Tammy to skate the snowball.

I skated right up to Tammy in my first loop without hesitation and held out my hand, which she accepted. We skated one lap, then another, and another, stealing glances at each other. Time by The Alan Parsons Project played as the mirror ball reflected beams of light across the wooden floor. It was a magical moment. The song ended and there we were, still holding hands and rolling together towards the snack bar. A triumph.

Later that evening Tammy sat together in a booth with some kids I didn’t know, sneaking Seagram’s Seven into our Cokes. We held hands and kissed. I made a joke that didn’t land. Then she slid away from me in the booth and told me I had a big nose. She asked if I was Jewish or something.³ That broke the spell as I closed the book on Tammy. I took it pretty hard, but in retrospect she did me a favor by showing her true colors.

Freda from Blake Babies - a North side kid - used to hang out at Western Skateland too. We didn’t know each other in middle school; we met and immediately became sweethearts sophomore year, age 15. We used to strain in an attempt to recall those snowball skates to remember if we picked each other. I’d say it’s about 50/50 odds that Freda and I skated together at Western, years before we came into each other’s lives. The thing we wanted to know was did she hold on for more than one loop. We’ll never know.

Hey, if things had worked out with Tammy, there’d be no Blake Babies…or anything that followed. To 14-year-old me in the words of a sage: your age is the hardest age, everything drags and drags. Hang in there another year, everything’s gonna work out fine.

1. I’m clarifying “vinyl copy” for the young folks - of course it was a vinyl copy, there wasn’t another option. Albums in the late 70s came out on LP, 8-track, and cassette…but in the age of “album rock” serious listeners bought LPs. Most people’s parents had a turntable, some kids had their own, and I can’t remember any of my peers purchasing cassettes. In the 80s we (illegally) taped albums for each other, but I only remember buying cassettes while on tour because we could listen in the van.

2. At the risk of turning DD (David Huffman) into a footnote as I am literally doing, DD was my best friend from age 11-15, basically until I met Freda. He had a huge influence on my life in both positive and negative ways. DD had some deep childhood trauma I witnessed, and after we fell out of touch his life went in a dark direction. He passed away in his early 30s from an overdose. Another close friend of mine, my Berklee roommate, died from an overdose around the same time. Losing friends to addiction and overdose has been a heartbreaking theme in my life. I’m setting a goal to write tributes to these departed friends at some point when I can find the words to pay my respects. In the meantime, rest easy DD. You helped me through a tough time of my life, and I’m forever grateful.

3. I’m not Jewish, but many of my neighborhood friends were. I think Tammy realized pretty quickly we weren’t from the same tribe.