By Stuart Mitchner
On July 29, 1965, 60 years ago this Tuesday, I was in London, walking through Soho surrounded by smiling faces. Thousands had gathered in Piccadilly Circus to watch the Beatles arrive for the World Premiere of their second film Help and I’d landed there at the exact moment the limousine pulled up and the four of them tumbled out and loped into the London Pavilion, mop tops bouncing. There’s a blend of wonder and mindless amusement in the Beatles-are-here smiles that can also be seen in the faces of the crowds when the Fab Four landed in New York on February 7, 1964.
Faces in the Crowd
Now it’s late July 2025 and I’m seeing handheld camera shots of faces on New York streets, some smiling, some curious, some fascinated, all ages, as if a Beatles-level legend-in-the-making were passing by when in fact it’s the “Prince of Darkness” in a video filmed for John Lennon’s 70th birthday, October 9, 2010. That’s John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne, shaggy and shambling in his long black coat, more Chaplinesque than Black Sabbath satanic, with a telltale glimmer of John Lennon in the shades he’s wearing, a pair of granny glasses with dark blue lenses. And there’s more than a touch of Lennon in “How?” the song Ozzy’s singing on the soundtrack, though it takes a while to recognize this understandably neglected track from Imagine, an album exalted by the title track but marred by “How Do You Sleep,” John’s crude, petty put down of Paul McCartney.
“How?”
It’s no coincidence that this nakedly vulnerable, deeply personal song directly follows the nasty dig at McCartney on Imagine, and it makes beautiful sense that the lifelong Lennon fan who died last week is the black-clad messenger bringing “How” back from the dead. Humbly submitting himself to the spirit of the lyric, facing the camera looking profoundly puzzled, one hand grasping his chin, Ozzy haltingly puts John’s words together in a lean and hungry voice with a half-hidden hint of Lennon you can hear as he bends and draws out the words “turn” and “of” in the lines “How can I go forward when I don’t know which way to turn? … How can I go forward into something I’m not sure of?”
“Oh no….”
That the man in the long back coat knows where he’s going becomes evident as soon as he emerges from a midtown florist shop holding a bouquet. Passing through the neighborhood where the crowds gathered to see John, Paul, George, and Ringo wave from the windows of the Plaza Hotel that long-ago February day, he heads for Central Park. At one point, the crowd seems to be following him, the Pied Piper of Birmingham. But he’s on his own as he enters the park, the song rounding back to the first verse as he approaches his goal, giving that Lennonesque turn to the last word of the last question: “How can I go forward into something I’m not sure of?” — a simplified version of Hamlet’s “what dreams may come must give us pause.” Then, as he lays the bouquet of purple flowers next to the word IMAGINE in the center of the Strawberry Fields mosaic, the voice on the soundtrack, his voice, echoing John’s, saying-singing the mysterious, ominous, lost last words that follow each verse, “oh no….oh no….”
Here’s where my emotions surprised me, not with a sob so much as a laugh at my own folly, since it was not only as if Ozzy and John together had bestowed the flowers, both now inhabiting Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country,” it was the absurd fact that I’d stumbled on that stunning moment unprepared, having forgotten the existence of the Central Park memorial (“a living landscape that changes and grows over time”) and of the massive mosaic donated by the city of Naples and installed on John Lennon’s birthday, October 9, 1985.
John Speaking
In “Strawberry Fields Forever” John first consciously merged spoken conversation with a melodic line, the life of a thought expressed in “Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see,” then “It’s getting hard to be someone, but it all works out, it doesn’t matter much to me.” Which in turn reminds me of “Help,” the song John wrote for that hastily titled movie, and which I had doubts about at first; it was months before I appreciated how brilliantly the musical energy matched conversational lines like “When I was younger, so much younger than today,” and “now those days are gone I’m not so self-assured,” and especially, the lift into the chorus with “Now I find I’ve changed my mind and opened up the door.” Years later John made it clear: “Most people think it’s just a fast rock-’n’-roll song. I didn’t realize it at the time — I really was crying out for help. I was fat and depressed, and I was crying out for help.”
John Osbourne
It’s been a long, strange trip, from Ringo to Brian to Ozzy in a six-week span of columns. Five issues ago I’m quoting from I Am Brian Wilson, now it’s I Am Ozzy (Grand Central 2011), with its Dickensian opening: “My father always said I would do something big one day. ‘I’ve got a feeling about you, John Osbourne,’ he’d tell me. ‘You’re either going to do something very special, or you’re going to go to prison.’ And he was right, my old man.”
In describing his absurd history as a “crap burglar,” Ozzy becomes his own slapstick foil, “nicking a 24-inch telly” that’s too heavy for him to carry, “and when I was climbing over the back wall it fell on my chest and I couldn’t move for about an hour. I was just lying there in this ditch full of nettles, feeling like a twat.”
Ozzy and Randy
A few weeks ago I started a column about the late Alfred Brendel, who died at 93 on June 17, after spending the better part of an hour face to face with him as he played and talked about Franz Schubert’s posthumous C-Minor piano sonata. As happens in this date-driven fandango, Henry James and J.D. Salinger, then Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe, crashed that party. Now it’s Ozzy Osbourne, John Lennon, along with a guitar virtuoso who died too young. Reading an online sample of Ozzy’s memoir, I was struck by the dedication page, first to his fans, but more important, to “one special guy who meant so much to me, Mr. Randy Rhoads, R.I.P.
I will never forget you and I hope we meet again somewhere, somehow.” I discovered this incredible musician thanks to my son, who, after a brief fling with Black Sabbath, enjoyed a more sustained relationship with Ozzy’s solo albums, Diary of a Madman and Blizzard of Oz. Based on my limited knowledge of Ozzy as a singer, he’s at his very best on songs like “Over the Mountain,” “Mr. Crowley,” and, especially, “Revelation,” where the incredible cadenzas of the 25-year-old guitarist who always seems to enter in mid-flight only to soar higher, transcending himself time and again — until March 19, 1982 when he was killed in a plane flown by a pilot who had promised “no stunts” buzzed the tour bus where Ozzy was sleeping, breaking one wing in half and crashing in flames. A July 26 article in themirror.com, quotes an interview in which Osbourne said, “Randy was very instrumental in bringing me out of me. The first two Ozzy albums are by far the greatest things I’ve ever done.”
Finding Purpose
After referring to the way Ozzy’s “How?” video coincided with “his late hero’s 70th birthday,” plus raising funds for Amnesty International USA, a July 24 article in Guitar Player quotes a 2017 interview in which Ozzy says that when he heard the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” he suddenly found purpose: “ I remember exactly where I was. I was walking down a road called Whitten Road in Aston. I had a blue transistor radio, and when it came on, I knew from then on what I wanted to do in my life.”