“The Rolling Stones were there to see it turn a lot darker than people thought it would, from the peace and love of the hippies, to Vietnam going wrong, the rise and birth of the serial killer and politicians being assassinated. “It reflected the times, the end of the 60s and the hippy-dippy idealism,” said author Ian Rankin. Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away “It reflected the end of the 60s” Ozzy Osbourne's Ordinary Man is out now (opens in new tab).The Stones’ singer Mick Jagger loved the melody and co-wrote lyrics for a song that seemed to capture the violence of the Vietnam War and American society in one dark piece of music, with its memorable opening: “Listening to this, it’s like going back to a good time, but a really horrible time at the same time.” “I remember the fun we had writing and making Crazy Train,” he says to the camera. More recently, its emotional wrench was painfully evident on a 2016 episode of the father-and-son journey Ozzy And Jack’s World Detour, with Ozzy sat shell-shocked as he listens to a long-lost and unmixed master tape of the song that saved him. Following the notorious plane crash in March 1982 that killed Rhoads and two others, the song became a bittersweet moment in the Osbourne catalogue. By the end I was like: ‘What just happened?’ Randy was the greatest hard rock guitar player of all time.”īut not for long. This blistering riff came at me, followed by an incredible solo, and of course there was Ozzy – I recognised his voice as the guy from Black Sabbath. “I was packed in the back of somebody’s mom’s hatchback in Libertyville, and Crazy Train came on. “I remember the moment I first heard Randy,” says Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello. But the song was a highlight of the Blizzard Of Ozz tour which lifted Ozzy out of the doldrums, and its influence on the guitar scene was inestimable. Released as a single in 1980, Crazy Train was only a minor hit (peaking at No.49 in the UK). Randy was the best guy at overdubbing solos and tracking them that I’ve ever seen. What happens is you don’t hear them, you just hear it as one guitar. “If you listen to Crazy Train real close,” Norman told Jas Obrecht, “you’ll hear there’s one main guitar around the centre, and two others playing exactly the same thing, panned to the left and right. “He’d be nipping away at the scotch as we were doing a song… If he wanted to take a piss in the middle of the take, he’d do it right there on the floor.”īy contrast, when it came to tracking the formidable Crazy Train solo, Rhoads was sober and laser-focused, playing and recording three near-identical passes of the tapping and dive-bomb-packed passage. “He’d start out pretty straight and sober, probably take a bottle of scotch in there with him,” engineer Max Norman told KNAC. While Daisley was given the nickname ‘Sid Serious’ for his perfectionism, Ozzy’s behaviour was harder to call. In echoes of Geezer Butler’s observations on Sabbath’s War Pigs, this new song carried an anti-conflict message, most notably in a final verse that referenced ‘ Heirs of a cold war, that’s what we’ve become/ Inheriting troubles, I’m mentally numb’.Īfter fruitful rehearsals at Gloucestershire’s Clearwell Castle, recording for Ozzy’s Blizzard Of Ozz album began at Surrey’s Ridge Farm studios in March 1980. Randy and I were train buffs, and I said: ‘That sounds like a crazy train.’ Ozzy had this saying ‘You’re off the rails!’ so I used that in the lyrics.”īeneath the verse’s piston-pump chug, however, the Crazy Train lyric tackled weightier themes than runaway locomotives. The title came because Randy had an effect that was making a psychedelic chugging sound through his amp. “I said: ‘Look what happens when you speed this riff up.’ We messed around, and the next thing I know he took it to a whole other level”).ĭaisley, however, is adamant that “that signature riff in F-sharp-minor from Crazy Train was Randy’s, then I wrote the part for him to solo over, and Ozzy had the vocal melody. Years later, questions would be raised over the authorship of the Crazy Train riff (“We were hanging out, and I showed Randy the riff to Steve Miller’s Swingtown,” said Quiet Riot’s Greg Leon. Randy was the first guy to make it comfortable for me.” “In Sabbath,” he noted, “they’d just write something and say, ‘Put a vocal on that’. Unusually, the Crazy Train lick was not in the standard metal keys of ‘A’ or ‘E’, marking the first time a guitarist had written to order for Ozzy’s doomy holler. Rhoads brought a ferocious neo-classical guitar technique – and an irresistible riff that lit up the band’s first writing sessions. Ozzy Osbourne and Randy Rhoads onstage (Image credit: Paul Natkin / Getty Images)
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