(Credits: Rufus Publishing)
Thu 11 September 2025 14:30, UK
Ozzy Osbourne never forgot the fact that he struck gold with Randy Rhoads.
After Black Sabbath, there was always a question over whether ‘The Prince of Darkness’ was going to be able to live up to his living legend status, but with the right guitarist next to him, he managed to get one of the greatest creative second winds in rock and roll history. But it’s not like Rhoads was in love with the idea of working with Osbourne for the long term when he started making music with him.
Granted, it’s not like Rhoads didn’t have free rein to do whatever he wanted when he got to the studio. Both Osbourne and the producers knew the genius they had on their hands with him, so it made a lot more sense for him to be the musical Swiss army knife half the time. But when they got out on the road to start performing again, there was always something lacking when the band had to go back to Osbourne’s other band.
Despite being contractually obligated to play his fair share of Sabbath material, Rhoads was never as much of a fan of Osbourne’s old band. He never wanted to be the standard bluesy player that Tony Iommi was, which probably explains why Osbourne’s first two records sounded so different. Rhoads was more of a fan of genres like classical music, and looking at his own pieces, it’s clear that was his first love.
Even when working on tour, Rhoads would often find spots to take guitar lessons to practice his classical scales, usually wiping the floor with whomever was teaching him the ropes. But while he did get a handful of featured spots on the song ‘Dee’, there was a lot more music inside him that was never going to be filled if he kept playing heavy metal for the rest of his life.
According to his sister, Rhoads’s initial plan before his death was to come back to California after the tour for Diary of a Madman wrapped up to start studying music properly, saying, “My mom was at the beginning of the process to get him into UCLA for a master’s degree in classical music. Randy was really looking forward to that. Ozzy said, ‘Are you crazy? You’re a rockstar!’ Randy said, ‘That’s not what I want; this is what I want.’ Ozzy said – and I’ll quote him – ‘You could buy your own fucking college if you keep doing this!’ But for Randy, the biggest thing was to be a true musician.”
And it’s not like you couldn’t hear Rhoads going in that direction on Osbourne’s last album, either. ‘Over the Mountain’ is a great song that fits in line with Osbourne’s usual output, but the title track that ends the album has a lot more in common with classical pieces aside from the fact that it has a heavy metal lunatic singing over top of it half the time.
We’ll never know what Rhoads would have sounded like had he taken those classes and become a proper musician, but the influence of classical music he brought to metal was already etched in stone. Not even a decade later, Cliff Burton was already beginning to add mini symphonies to Metallica’s work, and while he was an avid classical fan, it’s hard to think of a song like ‘Orion’ being accepted had Rhoads not blown that door wide open.
While both Burton and Rhoads are classic examples of metal geniuses that passed away far too early, what they left the rest of us deserves to be studied by the best in the business. Because if anyone could be able to reach even a fraction of what they could before their passing, imagine what kind of music we could have heard had they made it to the age of 30.
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