September 20, 1980, marked the release of Ozzy Osbourne’s debut solo album Blizzard of Ozz, a hard-rock recording that introduced Randy Rhoads to the world. In the 43 years since, Rhoads’ credentials have become inarguable, his sphere of influence powerful.
John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne was, with his Birmingham cohorts in Black Sabbath, an early architect of British heavy metal. Reaching beyond the light/dark implications of Led Zeppelin’s blues-tinged metal and the progressive/classical/metal fusion of Deep Purple, Sabbath cultivated occult themes, exotic sounds, and dungeons-and-dragons imagery beginning with its eponymous 1970 debut album. The “diabolus in musica” factor was evident from its spooky opening notes, and appropriately, Ozzy adopted the name “Prince of Darkness.”
Sabbath enjoyed a decade of prominence with a string of influential records until Osbourne’s excesses forced the band to replace him in 1979. Though he’d previously entertained the notion of a solo band (tentatively titled Blizzard of Ozz), after his unceremonious dismissal, Ozzy considered reveling in prolonged substance abuse before returning to the government dole. Instead, he was signed by Don Arden (Sabbath’s manager) to Jet Records, started collaborating with bassist Bob Daisley, and proceeded to form a new group.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, a new breed of guitarslinger was captivating a burgeoning hard-rock audience. Rhoads and Eddie Van Halen defined the movement with elevated technique, daring sounds, and unique songwriting. Both plied their wares on the Hollywood club circuit; Ed with Van Halen, Randy in Quiet Riot. The explosion heard on Van Halen in ’78 officially ushered in a new era, and the city became a fountainhead of metal guitar. Under the management of Sharon Arden (Don’s daughter), Osbourne moved to L.A. to work with Gary Moore, then assemble his own band. Bassist Dana Strum, cognoscente of the L.A. scene, arranged an audition for Rhoads, who was disenchanted with Quiet Riot’s personal problems. Hired in September of ’79 while merely warming up with his Les Paul and practice amp, an inebriated Osbourne (cloistered in the control room) didn’t meet him until the next day. Osbourne then returned to England, worked briefly with Daisley and an unnamed guitarist, then sent for Rhoads, who arrived in London on November 27. Ozzy, Rhoads, Daisley and Lee Kerslake (Uriah Heep) began assembling material at Ozzy’s home; Blizzard of Ozz was recorded in six weeks in March and April, then released in September of ’80. Diary of a Madman (October ’81) was recorded a few months later, in only three weeks.
For many listeners, Rhoads’ live solo spot was a revelation. Those who hadn’t seen the Blizzard band only heard accounts from fellow fans about his showcase or possibly listened to a low-quality bootleg cassette. It was never committed to record – or even hinted at – on the Ozzy albums. Tribute corrected that. The lengthy cadenza, comparable to Van Halen’s “Eruption,” was an apex in concert. A treasure trove of Rhoads-isms, it affirmed his status as towering guitar hero from its first barrage of notes. This excerpt of his opening phrase (0:06-0:15) is a prime example of his technique and imagination. It begins with a series of pentatonic cells moved through an A minor tonal center in measures 1-2. He expounds on high-velocity blues-rock lines in 2-3 before completing his thoughts in Am (Aeolian mode) with scalar sequential runs in 3-4. Note his signature use of the operative F tone on beat 3; this was a staple of his style and added a neoclassic element to his blues-rock vernacular.
In the wake of those groundbreaking efforts, Rhoads received accolades from guitar magazines and compelled detractors in the press to re-think their opinions of heavy metal. However, the promise made on the first two albums was never fulfilled; Rhoads was just 25 when he died in a private-plane crash in Leesburg, Florida on March 19, 1982. Mid-tour, a grief-stricken Osbourne persevered with the Blizzard band, then recorded the live Speak of the Devil to satisfy his Jet contract with guitarist Brad Gillis, who afterward left to re-join his band, Night Ranger.
Osbourne again dipped into the L.A. well to recruit Jake E. Lee for Bark at the Moon (’83) and The Ultimate Sin (’86). After Lee’s departure, he lifted a self-imposed moratorium and released Tribute in the spring of ’87.
What had been missing in history’s playlist was a definitive document of Rhoads’ live performances with Ozzy. Tribute filled the void with more than a simple set of routine concert tracks. Originally a vinyl double album of 14 songs, it highlighted Blizzard staples (“I Don’t Know,” “Crazy Train,” “Believer,” “Mr. Crowley,” “Flying High Again,” “Revelation,” “Steal Away”, and “Suicide Solution”) with the first eight tracks. The live renditions are fascinating and instructive when compared to their studio counterparts on the first two Ozzy albums. The next three tunes were Sabbath covers (“Iron Man,” “Children of the Grave,” and “Paranoid”) likely intended for Speak of the Devil but held back. Jet’s original plan to record a full program of Sabbath material in ’82 as the band’s third album was met with resistance from Rhoads and drummer Tommy Aldridge, who’d raised their artistic profiles and felt it was a step backward. Nonetheless, the songs were included. Again, it’s enlightening to examine the updated reinterpretations of familiar Tony Iommi mannerisms through the prism of Randy’s next-generation neoclassical style. Those 11 tracks were recorded at a May 11, 1981, concert in Cleveland while “Goodbye to Romance” and “No Bone Movies” are from an earlier gig, possibly the Southampton concert on October 2, 1980.
The album closes with studio outtakes of “Dee.” Recorded in 1980 for Blizzard, the solo acoustic-guitar composition was written for Rhoads’ mother, Delores. Enlivened with endearing false starts and self-effacing commentary, the two complete takes provide an intimate look at his procedure in preparing a basic track over which to overdub parts. They further remind us of his love of classical music and guitarists like John Williams, whom he praised, and how he was poised to leave the metal scene for a few years to earn a degree in the form at UCLA, his mother’s alma mater. While on tour, he practiced fingerstyle diligently and regularly contacted local classical teachers in various cities for private lessons. His evolution from “Dee” (with its slight references to Bach’s “Bourrée in E minor”) to “Diary of a Madman” (its intro arpeggiation based on Leo Brouwer’s “Etude No. 6”) reveals his progress and growing interest in 20th-century modernism and dissonance as well as stereotypical baroque, renaissance, romantic, and classical borrow ings extant in hard rock and Eurometal.
Rhoads gained tremendous notoriety as a pioneer of neoclassical metal guitar. This antecedent phrase (0:41-0:50) highlights his use of the diminished chord sound endemic to classical music and often played in virtuoso violin passages, and echoed in the solos of many later practitioners. Check out his sequential arpeggio descent in measure 1 and use of heavy palm-muting to provide extra punch to the line. His answer in 3-4 is an ascending variation employing ornamented arpeggios which climb in minor thirds to emphasize the diminished sound. Note his cadence on an G-C# tritone dyad, which is given an aggressive vibrato shaking with the whammy bar.
The “neoclassic” influence exerted by Rhoads caused a tsunami in rock. His sense of advanced harmony informed the Blizzard repertoire, resulting in songs with unprecedented chord progressions like “Revelation (Mother Earth),” “Mr. Crowley,” “Diary of a Madman,” “Flying High Again,” “Believer,” “S.A.T.O.,” and “Over the Mountain” wherein various epochs of classical music seemed to converge and meld into metal. While he applied some of the same guitaristic devices as Van Halen, his environment was considerably different – which suited his use of dissonance, uncommon chromaticism, intervallic melody, diminished chords, diatonic modes, and harmonic-minor scales to underscore Ozzy’s eerie, mystical subject matter. Flaunting his technique, he developed a unique guitar voice and presaged the neoclassic shred school of the ’80s with lightning-fast scalar flurries straight out of the fusion camp and players like McLaughlin, DiMeola, and Holdsworth. Many of his florid runs and machine-gun ostinato riffs were alternate-picked and palm-muted in the DiMeola style, but thickened and made metallic with heavy distortion, while others were played in a flowing legato fashion.
Rhoads’ virtuosity was crystallized and displayed prominently in his solo spot, which served as a face-melting showcase and instrumental interlude in “Suicide Solution” onstage. Despite his technical abilities and the potential for histrionics in metal stagecraft, his strategy reflected a classical mindset with fixed melodic and rhythmic elements that were only slightly reinterpreted themes, such as the second solo in “Mr. Crowley” with its specific arpeggio sequences. On Tribute, Rhoads’ improvised fills were more plentiful and omnipresent. He seemed to cram every available sonic space with sustaining string bends, pinch harmonics, toggle-switch tremolo effects, pick slides and scrapes, long portamento slurs, pull-off flurries, trills, octave motifs, and whammy-bar manipulations.
Hardly a one-trick metallic pony, Rhoads could step effortlessly into the role of a grooving straightforward rocker – a given considering the influences of Leslie West, Michael Schenker, Ritchie Blackmore, Steve Lukather, Ronnie Montrose, and Jeff Beck in his background. In his reinterpretations of Sabbath’s “Iron Man” and “Children of the Grave,” he retained their original flavor while adding personal expansions and technical refinements; in “No Bone Movies” and “Paranoid,” he was equally convincing in channeling blues-rock mannerisms – he even alluded to the almighty Chuck Berry influence in the latter. Though little video documentation was done during his short tenure with Osbourne, “Mr. Crowley,” “I Don’t Know,” “Crazy Train” and “Suicide Solution” from the “After Hours” TV show in ’81 remain invaluable remembrances of Rhoads’ live persona and performance.
Rhoads’ orchestrations, replete with thoughtful overdubs and multi-guitar layerings in studio arrangements, were significant aspects of his style. Reducing and recomposing these orchestrations for live settings would be daunting for most, but feel instinctive on Tribute. Check out the rhythm parts in the bridge of “I Don’t Know,” reharmonized verses in “Goodbye to Romance,” or the combination of individual parts for the pre-chorus of “Flying High Again.” Often, his arranging led to the types of reimagined chordal passages found in the bridge of “Revelation.” Another example of his editing for live performance is found in “Steal Away,” where he omits the final measures of the guitar solo line to play the stronger, more-identifiable rhythm riff with the group. In “Crazy Train,” he elaborated on the song structure itself by adding two brief solos to the form which act as intro and outro.
The melody that follows (1:00-1:13) is one of Rhoads’ most ear-catching moments in the solo. Here, he breaks free of pyrotechnics (what he called requisite “flash playing”) to render a beautiful and singable theme that likely would’ve wound up on an Ozzy record. Note the fluid harmonic motion through various tonalities with modal lines and arpeggio figures. These move through the keys of F# minor (note the use of Harmonic Minor with an E# note implying C#7), D and A major (hitting secondary dominants along the way) much like classical compositions of Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven.
Rhoads relied on a Gibson Les Paul a decade before it was reintroduced to hard rock by Slash and his minions, and he was almost quaint with his ’74 Alpine White Custom (with replaced pickguard and Schaller tuners) in the era of flamboyant superstrats and pointy metal guitars. However, the latter were foreshadowed by his Karl Sandoval Flying V-copy and asymmetric Jackson V prototype. The Sandoval sported a black-and-white polka-dot finish with bowtie inlays, mahogany body, Strat vibrato, DiMarzio PAF neck and Super Distortion bridge pickups, arrow headstock with six-in-line tuners, and modified ’60s Danelectro neck. His first Jackson (also the first official Jackson guitar) was a white Concorde with black pinstripes, maple body, Charvel whammy bar, and block inlays. In December of ’81, he received a black Rhoads signature model with a sleeker body, fixed bridge, through-body V tailpiece, and sharkfin inlays. Both had a neck-through construction, flatter 12″-16″-radius ebony fretboards, sharp Explorer-style headstocks (that became the trademark shape of Jackson guitars), 25.5″ scale, Duncan SH-2N Jazz neck and SH-6B (later TB-4) Distortion bridge pickups. All four were seen in Ozzy concerts. Randy preferred small frets on his guitars and Gibson-style wiring on the Sandoval and Concorde, and used GHS .010 or .011 sets and Picato or Fender 351 white celluloid medium-gauge picks. On stage, he favored 100-watt Marshall stacks (with white and black Master and non-Master JMP 1959 Super Lead heads) feeding a wall of 4×12 1960 Marshall cabinets with Altec 417C speakers. Throughout live performances, he employed processing from his large pedalboard to add greater colorations to pieces, notably using the wah to produce filter sweeps in the final chorus of “I Don’t Know” or modulation colorations for arpeggiated rhythm parts in “Revelation” and “Goodbye to Romance.” His arsenal of effects included a Cry Baby wah and MXR Distortion+ fuzz plus various stompboxes – an MXR 10-band EQ set for midrange boost, Echoplex (to fatten the sound), MXR M117R Flanger, and MXR M134 Stereo Chorus. The chorus (used for modulation effects as well as to emulate his multi-tracked solos) sent a stereo signal to delay units housed in a rack case – a Korg or Roland RE-201 Space Echo tape units and a Yamaha or MXR analog delay. He controlled overall level with a Roland FV 2 volume pedal.
In 1981, Rhoads told Guitar Player, “Five years from now I’d love to have people know me as a guitar hero.” He didn’t live to see that moment, but Tribute has proved transcendent. Revered and recognized as an important record capturing the evolution of a musical form in ascendance at the hands of a master, it has rightfully taken its place alongside definitive live rock-guitar classics like Live Cream, Band of Gypsys, Tokyo Tapes, and Strangers in the Night.
Wolf Marshall is the founder and original Editor-In-Chief of GuitarOne magazine. A respected author and columnist, he has been influential in contemporary music education since the early 1980s. His new book, Jazz Guitar Course: Mastering the Jazz Language, will be released this winter. Others include 101 Must-Know Rock Licks, B.B. King: the Definitive Collection, and Best of Jazz Guitar, and a list credits can be found at wolfmarshall.com.
This article originally appeared in VG’s December 2023 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
