The Great and Powerful Ozz is Dead

 Art via Evan Solano 

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People think Copper Green is insane because he’s frowning all the time. 

The great and powerful Ozz is dead. I’d wager you don’t have to squint to see our Ozz clutching cruciform, hunchbacked with shit-your-pants madness, a fanged mouthful of strawberry jam, framed by runes real as horse feathers. There was the Madman and his Diary. Lording over troupes of gunslingers who made songs for kids to fuck to. To get fucked up to. To fuck their heads up enough into thinking said songs meant more than pussy or potables. That they hinted at something beyond Beyond. Or bore standards for Black Arts need not be fucked with.

Not easy to forget Ozz at his apex, especially now, in memory mucking about like blind, post-menopausal granny on MTV or curtain-called whilst open-casketed in his black leather high-back chair. Easier to forget Heavy Metal like this could be so “dangerous” and suggestive—a bona fides ride off the hot rails to hell, scaring mom into burglar barring rooms as black-eyed youth gobbled blotter acid and turned that cross upside fuckin’ down.

Coke squalls and vodka baths that defined the run with Black Sabbath gave way to Blizzard, which Priest’s Rob Halford celebrated as “great” for “saying so much.” Like nothing else, it means more than it means; says less that it says. One of those amp wall monoliths for armchair semioticians to clean their taints off on. Lest ye forget the bird ‘n’ bat, remember all too easily the aforementioned turned Ozz into white America’s bad boy boogeyman overnight, mom’s aghast at the bloke wildly unmoored from the tyranny of decorum. And still he endured. Surviving reality TV’s farce, “So Tired,” and Sharon’s power of attorney.

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Always the soggiest donut in the box, Ozz slipped into the frontman role without ever having to be one. Either standing stoically still, or running to ‘n’ fro asking audience members if they were high, Ozz was the Gong Show crasher judges couldn’t bring themselves to send packing as his fingers-in-the-ears recitation induced some strange, gummy indifference. Unequal parts pity and punch-drunkenness. And, still, what’s left to wax continues to work for personal Magellan pothead, circumnavigating sure stations of stonedness.

Even at his worst, waddling offstage to stick his schnoz in the mirror, and returning, eventually, to the duct-taped X marks the spot, to speak-sing, thumbs jammed knuckle-deep into his ears, that voice at once dry and shrill, then wet and dull, stretched like hot plastic and shaped into a blobby, flaccid cock of ignominy, what could go wrong? “Geezah” may have writ them lyrics, but Ozz believed ‘em, screaming about war machines and witches as if he’d mucked about with ‘em, gazing forever forward to the time when he’d succumb to Parkinson’s and simply transubstantiate, fall into feedback, fog machine mist, back behind the wall of Spock for some mass social media séance. Too late, folks. Lightning flashes. Candles lit. Whistle sounds. All aboard. – Copper Green, St. Simons Island, GA

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