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Ozzy Osbourne passed away earlier today, July 22, 2025, at age 76, just a few scant weeks removed from the triumphant Back to the Beginning celebration of Ozzy and Black Sabbath’s storied and eternally influential respective legacies at the already legendary all-day event that took place at Villa Park on July 5, 2025, in their hometown of Birmingham, England.

As I posted over on my own personal FB page just a few short hours ago, Ozzy (second from left in the vintage Sabbath photo above) is a true Prince of Melody, not just of Darkness. Much more will be written about him and his legacy with Black Sabbath, as a solo artist, reality TV star, and staunch family man, but he also left us all a quite rich musical legacy on vinyl that buoys an inherent talent for songwriting and understanding of melody that far, far surpasses the typical metal genre tropes we’re all beyond familiar with by now.

When I had the honor of sitting down with Ozzy at Sony’s then-HQ in New York City a decade-and-a-half ago on May 20, 2010, he shared the secret to their success. “The Beatles gave me the gift of melody, you know,” Ozzy told me. “You’ll hear The Beatles in a lot of other things of mine. They had great harmonies, great melodies. I’ve met [Sir Paul] McCartney a few times, and he's a f---ing great guy. I have such great respect.” (The feeling is very much mutual, Ozzy, in terms of our respect for you — and, at the very end of this story, you can see a photo of the two of us together that was taken during that Q&A sitdown session.)

Of course, we’ve reviewed a number of Ozzy- and Sabbath-related releases here on AP over the years, most recently via our ace LP reviewer Mark Smotroff covering the top-shelf Rhino High Fidelity Series 180g 1LP reissue of Sabbath’s undisputed September 1970 masterpiece Paranoid, which posted here on May 2, 2025.

In the footnote I added after Mark’s spot-on review text, I noted that “I happen to have too many LP pressings of Paranoid to count, but I can jump in at this point and say the Rhino Hi Fi edition is crisp, clean, and as powerful as you’d want, and expect. I’d rate it as a 9.5 for Music and an 8.5 for Sound, and might eventually go higher on the latter, the more I live with it. Now, if you like your Sabbath to sound muddy/muddier on wax, by all means, seek out one of those decades-earlier UK Vertigo pressings. But this 2025 edition beats [Kevin] Gray’s 2006 cut and the 2023 reissue, imo.”

Finally, I noted that “if you can’t get enough of listening to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, check out my August 2022 Remaster Class assessment of its myriad of format options here on our sister site, Sound & Vision.”

Rather than essentially rehash what everyone else is already doing, Mark made a brilliant suggestion for us to take a different approach with our next Ozzy-centric post, so stay tuned for that. In the meantime, let me just say this . . . sail on and on through those endless skies, dearest John Michael.