Which one The Beatles song that makes Ozzy Osbourne sad ?
In not much more than a handful of years, The Beatles had changed the world. When the news broke on April 10th, 1970, that the musical lightbulb that had turned the monochrome world multicoloured had suddenly blown a fuse, the mourning took to the streets. “Nobody will ever replace The Beatles,” one fan remarked, “It’s just one Beatles group. We grew up with them. They started when they were younger and we were younger, and they belong to us in a way. There could never be another Beatles, never!”
One youthful fan who was dragged up by the bootstraps into a new bohemian world by the Fab Four was none other than Ozzy Osbourne. The Black Sabbath frontman once proudly proclaimed, “When I heard the Beatles. I knew what I wanted to do,” when speaking to Blabbermouth in 2019. “My son says to me, Dad, I like the Beatles, but why do you go so crazy? The only way I can describe it, is like this, ‘Imagine you go to bed today and the world is black and white and then you wake up, and everything’s in colour. That’s what it was like!’ That’s the profound effect it had on me.”
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” the ‘War Pigs’ singer says, sharing the first time that his ears were greeted by the dulcet tones produced by the Fab Four. “I was walking around with a transistor radio on my shoulder. And ‘She Loves You’ came on. And I don’t know, it just went, ‘Bang! And that’s what I want to do! Wouldn’t it be great?’”
Then, in an odd kinship, The Prince of Darkness entered the music scene just when the kaleidoscopic blur of The Beatles faded out. Black Sabbath’s debut record was released in February 1970 and was just beginning to seep into public consciousness when news of The Beatles’ split broke. The dark supreme rawness of Sabbath seemed a befitting tonic for angry youths looking to vent. In fact, it quickly seemed like the natural evolution of music and the sixties dream rolled seamlessly towards the dirge of the 1970s.
The Promethean influence of The Beatles, however, remained a permanent fixture hidden in the sound of all music. It lurked underneath the dark swirling guizer of the surface with melodic intent and daring experimentation. “I feel so privileged to have been on this planet when the Beatles were born,” Ozzy once told Rolling Stone. “They are and will forever be the greatest band in the world. I remember talking to Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. He said, ‘I didn’t like the Beatles.’ I said, ‘There’s something fucking wrong with you.’”
Even though Black Sabbath may have been the benefactors of the Fab Four’s fracture, Ozzy still looked back on the split with supreme sadness, and he figured that the Let It Be classic ‘The Long and Winding Road’ embodied the brutal end.
McCartney described the inception of the song as follows: “I just sat down at my piano in Scotland, started playing and came up with that song, imagining it was going to be done by someone like Ray Charles. I have always found inspiration in the calm beauty of Scotland and again it proved the place where I found inspiration.” However, it was telling that he was hunkering away in the Scottish Highlands in the first place.
Burnt out and bewildered, he was retreating from the gaudy glow of showbiz, and he was reflecting this abject withdrawal in his songwriting. So, while his attempt to imitate Ray Charles might be a stunning success, it is laden with crushing depth. As Ozzy ventured to say: “It reminds me of winter in England. It’s cold, you’ve got fingerless gloves on. And it makes me sad, because it’s the end of the greatest movie I’d ever seen. You hear Paul going, ‘I’m out of steam. I can’t do this anymore.’”