Crazy Train

Ozzy Osbourne had been fired from Black Sabbath in 1979 for being too far gone to work with, and the reasonable expectation was that he was finished. What he did instead was hire a young guitar teacher from Los Angeles who had been giving classical lessons in the afternoons and intended to go back for a degree he never got the chance to take.

Randy Rhoads did not play like a Sabbath guitarist. The riff that opens “Crazy Train” moves in a way blues-rooted metal riffs generally don’t — scalar, sequenced, closer to an étude than a shuffle — and it is, crucially, cheerful. A major-key sprint has no business under lyrics about Cold War annihilation and inherited hatred, which Bob Daisley wrote while Rhoads and Osbourne built the music around him. Everything on the record is a little too bright for its subject.

That mismatch is why it outlived the year it came from. Thousands of metal songs recorded in 1980 sound like 1980; this one sounds like a rollercoaster. The “all aboard” holler, the pinched harmonic squeal, Lee Kerslake’s drums pushing instead of pounding, a solo that climbs rather than grinds — it has since been absorbed into general-purpose American noise, playing in arenas and commercials and parking lots to people who have never once considered that the lyric is about mass death. Metal rarely gets to be that portable.

Rhoads died in a plane crash in 1982, two albums into the partnership. Osbourne died in July 2025, weeks after a farewell Black Sabbath show in Birmingham.

Greatest of All Time. The sound of a career that was supposed to be over, restarting on a riff nobody else in that genre would have written.

Hero image: Ozzy Osbourne performing in Cardiff, 1981, by Andrew King, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.