After the tragic death of Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne was in deep mourning, but him and Sharon had to find a replacement. After taking a two-week break supporting Diary Of A Madman, the tour continued with guitarist Bernie Tormé before being replaced by Brad Gillis, who ended up on Speak Of The Devil. A luck would have it, Jake E. Lee walked into his life and Ozzy rebounded with the Top 20 album, Bark At The Moon and his most successful solo release at the time, The Ultimate Sin, which hit the Billboard charts at #6! Then he was booted from the band.
In a BraveWords flashback interview by Martin Popoff, at one point, around what has so far turned out to be Ozzy Osbourne’s last album, Scream from back in 2010, it looked like Jake might have found himself bounced back into the band.
Asked why we didn’t see him on Scream, Jake explains, “Well, I’d gotten a call from Sharon, and being Sharon, she actually managed to find me. She tracked my phone number because I swear there were maybe a handful of people that had my phone number. Somehow she called me at home and she told me that Ozzy was having problems with Zakk and they were looking to replace him and if I’d be interested in doing some festivals and quite possibly the next record. And I said, yeah. I mean, I haven’t done anything like that in a long time. I’m interested, but I can’t let sleeping dogs lie. I said if we’re going to go forward, I want to fix the one problem I’ve had since the very beginning. I said I would like my name on the songwriting credits for Bark At The Moon.”
Just that song or the whole record?
“No, the album. Yeah, I wrote everything except for ‘So Tired.’ I didn’t have anything to do with that song. I always hated that song because I didn’t write it; it’s just, I dunno, I didn’t think it was very good. But yeah, I just want my name on the credits. I don’t want any retroactive payment. I don’t want any future payment. I don’t want to make a penny off of it. I just… it would just be nice to have my name on this stuff that I wrote. And I said if we can get past that, I’ll sign an agreement where I don’t ever make a penny on any of it. I just want my name on it. I said if we can get past that, then we can talk further about whether or not I can do this or not. And she said she’d call me back the next day and she didn’t. So I took that as a no.”
Yet oddly, Jake is generously credited across his second and last Ozzy record, The Ultimate Sin. Why the change of attitude there? “Because I refused to do anything until I had a contract in front of me. I wasn’t smart enough to do that the first time around. The first time around, I trusted them. They said that yeah, I would get songwriting credits and get publishing and everything that was coming to me and I believed them. So the first one, I had to sign it, and after that I learned my lesson for The Ultimate Sin and I said, okay, I want to see a contract first.”
All photos courtesy of Mark "Weissguy" Weiss. Check out his best-selling new book, The Decade That Rocked, now at this location!
