In an interview with Louder Sound, Black Label Society frontman Zakk Wylde revealed that Quiet Riot’s Randy Rhoads set Ozzy Osbourne’s framework.
Randy Rhoads contributed to the first two Ozzy Osbourne albums, besides being known as the founding member of Quiet Riot. Rhoads improved his guitar skills by being educated in classical guitar.
Later on, the guitarist combined these classical sounds with heavy metal. In this way, Rhoads became a pioneer of neoclassical metal’s emergence. Although he passed away at a very young age, the rocker laid fundamental foundations with his contributions to the first two albums of Osbourne and with Quiet Riot.
At the beginning of the 2000s, Zakk Wylde gained achievement as a lead guitarist and co-writer in the music scene by becoming a member of Ozzy Osbourne’s band. With these contributions to the music industry, he gained recognition by the Hollywood Rock Walk of Fame.
Wylde also established the group Pride & Glory as a side project with James LoMenzo and Greg D’Angelo. The band’s only self-titled album came out in the early ’90s. It included the singles, ‘Troubled Wine,’ ‘Losin’ Your Mind,’ and ‘Horse Called War.’
In a recent conversation, Zakk Wylde counted Pride & Glory’s ‘Losin’ Your Mind’ among the songs defining his career. While talking about the track, Wylde stated that Randy Rhoads entirely set Ozzy Osbourne’s first two albums’ framework. According to him, Rhoads put the building stones, and the following members made minor changes to the sound.
Zakk Wylde explained in his words:
“The framework of what Ozzy does was set by Randy Rhoads on those first two Ozzy albums. That’s the template for how an Ozzy car is made, but you can make tweaks on that design to do something different like what Jake E. Lee did with ‘Bark At The Moon.’
At the same time, that means something like the banjo intro to a song like ‘Losin’ Your Mind’ would never really fit into how an Ozzy record should look or sound. It’s too much of a southern rock flavoring, even if on a song like ‘Mama,’ I was putting a bit of a country spin on the guitars, bringing a bit of an Allman Brothers’ Melissa’-type thing into it.”
The rocker noted in the conversation that he created something different from what Ozzy did with his Pride & Glory bandmates. As the guitarist revealed, they had a chance to use other instruments like the mandolin, which he did not use in Osbourne’s group.
The guitarist continued:
“I ended up doing Pride & Glory up in Seattle with Rick Parashar, the three of us, me, James LoMenzo, and Brian Tichy living in a house he owned and used this rental car, so it was non-stop shenanigans the whole time we were there.
It was fun doing so much we didn’t have room to do in Ozzy’s stuff, like using the mandolin on ‘Lovin’ Woman.’ We didn’t double the guitars or anything either. It was a real power trio vibe, more like Cream approach as opposed to Ozzy where everything gets built from the ground up.”
You can listen to the song below.
