RAMBLE ON: "Shot in the Dark" by Ozzy Osbourne

I had a conversation once with a friend about which pop stars would make it into the pop-averse Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Mariah Carey? Almost definitely – she’s a powerhouse vocalist, she wrote most of her songs, her music is enough in the soul/r&b tradition that the traditionalist rock hall writers would approve. George Michael? The fact that his legacy is split between Wham! and his solo career might be held against him, but he was also a great songwriter, he had some r&b roots, his gayness lends him some cred as a groundbreaker. Britney Spears? Definitely not. She’s not a technically virtuosic singer like Mariah, and she’s not ever seemed to have a strong hand in her own music (unlike other rock-respected pop stars like Madonna). The Rock Hall would have to be a completely different place with a completely different set of values before it gave any respect for Britney Spears and her strongest suits – having a killer catalog, putting on great live performances, and mainly, just being Britney Spears, a person who can pull attention at any moment.

You know who else isn’t in the Rock Hall of Fame? Ozzy Osbourne. That might be because he’s inducted as a member of Black Sabbath, but plenty of artists are in as both band and solo – the Beatles, for instance – while others have their solo careers neglected – Diana Ross, for instance, a big friend of the Rock Hall but only inducted as a member of the Supremes. I think Diana Ross might not be a solo inductee because her career was simply too pop, too gaudy, too Cher-ish. I think the same might be true for Ozzy. I looked up one of those old VH1 countdowns and the way people talk about the Blizzard is very interesting. “He’s a showman,” says Dave Mustaine. “He’s a legend, he’s bigger than life,” says Ozzy’s sometimes sideman Zakk Wylde. The most telling comment comes from Blackie Lawless of W.A.S.P., who says “Ozzy is respected for being Ozzy, Ozzy is worshipped for being Ozzy, but Ozzy will probably never get the respect as a musician that he deserves.” This all sounds to me like the way stans praise Britney (and this was all before he began his second career as a reality TV entertainer). I mean, what does Ozz do exactly? His success has always been contingent on his ability to attract strong collaborators. He’s not really a songwriter – he contributes the melodies to his songs (which is important!) but the lyrics and music are written by others. No one really talks about him as a vocalist (although, like Britney, he has one of the most immediately recognizable and arresting voices in music). Mostly what Ozzy does is be Ozzy Fucking Osbourne, the Madman, the Prince of Fucking Darkness, the guy who has a whole mess of fucking great songs, the man who ripped apart headlines for being a trainwreck you simply could not look away from (again, like Britney Spears). Ozzy Osbourne, first and foremost, is metal’s greatest pop star. And when metal went pop in the mid-‘80s, who else but Ozzy should have taken advantage.

In 1986, Ozzy got his first charting hit. It was not “Crazy Train” or “Bark at the Moon” or “Flying High Again” or any of the other earlier tracks which define him now; it was “Shot in the Dark,” peaking at #68. (Only four of his songs have ever made it to the Hot 100.) This came after years of being tabloid fodder, biting heads off bats, pissing on the Alamo, and generally writing his legend into rock history. He had just left the Betty Ford Clinic and was trying out sobriety. He had his reward with his (at the time) highest charting song and highest charting album. And yet, in the years since, his first real hit “Shot in the Dark” has been all but written out of Ozzy history, as has its parent album The Ultimate Sin. The official reason is that Ozzy hates that album – too flat, too samey. He would cut Jake E. Lee, his main collaborator at the time, from the picture shortly thereafter; Lee remains a distant third in prominence among Ozzy’s sidemen, well behind Randy Rhoads and Zakk Wylde. The truth of “Shot in the Dark”’s erasure is probably elsewhere; Ultimate Sin is not his strongest album but one would have to stretch to call it a bad album. Reportedly, the actual reason is cold hard cash; Lee has a long-standing dispute about writing most of Bark of the Moon but not getting any songwriting credits. More specifically, the skeleton of “Shot in the Dark” comes from one of bass player Phil Soussan's previous bands, meaning that Sharon Osbourne, the most coldly ruthless manager since Colonel Tom, has kept it the song off of compilations and live performances ever since to keep Lee’s former bandmates from tying them up in litigation. Soussan never worked with Ozzy again either. The video’s not even on Ozzy’s YouTube page.

This is a real shame because “Shot in the Dark” is probably my favorite Ozzy song, an instant classic. It is not surprising to me at all that this was his first crossover hit. It fucking rips. It kills. One wouldn’t mistake it for Def Leppard or anything, he still has his metal cred, but it is a great pop song, maybe his best. Jon Bon Jovi would kill for a hook that good.

Chuck Eddy called this kind of music “flashdance” -- the driving, minor key, synth-and-hard-rock guitar music of the ‘80s. (The song “Flashdance” is only questionably flashdance, but “Maniac” definitely is.) You can hear bits of that in the embryonic demo version of it by Soussan's former band Wildlife. Wildlife sounds like a wannabe Survivor (“Eye of the Tiger” is maybe the first flashdance song) but there’s something going in there. The best part is the stalking synth bass, sounding a bit like a slower version of “Another One Bites the Dust” (actually maybe that’s the first flashdance song).

Ozzy’s version is much different – much harder, much faster – but it keeps the haunted tone. I have no idea what the song is actually about, but the lyrics hint at Ozzy stalking someone like an assassin, despite being conflicted about something. The video gets a major thing right about the song – it’s about desperation and paranoia (as were all flashdance songs, basically). A bunch of girls are going to an Ozzy concert, but for some reason one of the girls is being haunted by Ozzy himself. She has visions, she gets headaches that seem supernatural; it’s shot like she’s turning into a werewolf or something, she flexes her long nails like claws and her eyes glow red. I’m not clear what’s happening there, but it’s the right tone for the song. This is a song where something is going wrong and it’s tearing Ozzy apart inside.

What isn’t right for the tone of the song: Ozzy’s glittery outfits. He’s wearing some kind of sparkly kimono that makes it look like the woman is being haunted by Liberace. The band is all wearing spangles too. This is a play to the ascendant hairspray-and-makeup metal scene, and even though Ozzy was not really separate from it, the look doesn’t fit him at all. (One of the kids in the audience is wearing a Metallica T-shirt, a band who was aesthetically representing the backlash to hair metal long before Nirvana.) By his next album, Ozzy was wearing the black suits and cross necklace that we associate with him now. If Ozzy should have any regrets about the Ultimate Sin era, it’s those silly outfits, and that as much as anything is why he abandoned it. He’s never had a song that could be called flashdance ever again. Perhaps Ozzy can only be metal’s pop star metaphorically; he’s not a person who has any desire to make pop-metal. Still, what a great experiment, and what a loss for the historical preservation of his greatest work. How can you release an Ozzy greatest hits album without his first big hit?