![Zakk Wylde [left] plays a lightning blue electric guitar live on the Pantera tribute tour. Randy Rhoads [right] plays his iconic polka-dot V.](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/VxG8nkYuwUSxReTVYbe4a9-1920-80.jpg.webp)
Every Ozzy Osbourne fan has their own favourite Randy Rhoads solo. Some might choose the crystalline perfection of Crazy Train, all composed order and narrative logic meets wild Friday night thrills, kind of like a rollercoaster with a first-class safety record.
Others might choose Suicide Solution, often augmented in concert with an extended guitar solo. That stately paean to an occultist, Mr Crowley, has to be in the conversation, too, and let us throw in a vote for the fretboard incandescence of Believer.
But Zakk Wylde, as the late Prince of Darkness long-standing guitarist – a player who had to succeed not only Rhoads but Jake E. Lee and Brad Gillis. too – brings us a unique perspective on things, and as we are sitting here with him on London’s Denmark Street, with Wylde in town to talk about the new Black Label Society album, Engines Of Demolition, we had to ask him.
First off. He had some thoughts on what it was like to perform Rhoads’ solos – to perform any of the recorded material from his predecessors in the Double-O’s band. You’ve got to be faithful to the source, and recognise that the solo is part of the song.
“Randy Roads’ Crazy Train, whether it’s me playing it, Jake playing it, Gus G, Joe Holmes, Brad Gillis. You gotta play Crazy Train the way Randy wrote it,” he says. “Because it’s part of the song. It’s like Ozzy has to sing the melody line, because otherwise it’s not the same and people are like, ‘What song is this!?’”
From stepping out in Quiet Riot to assuming his role as the Prince of Darkness’ hot-shot guitarist, Rhoads’ playing style underwent a radical transformation. He had a freedom to shape an all-new sound.
It is often said that Rhoads saved Ozzy’s career; the right man, the right time, with the sound that gave electric guitar its most exciting talent since Eddie Van Halen (with whom there became this tangible sense of rivalry, not least among their respective fanbases). And all that is true. Ozzy was at a low ebb. Out of Black Sabbath, running out of road. Enter, Randy Rhoads, and salvation.
But Wylde says it goes both ways. Ozzy’s burgeoning solo career teased the darkness out of Rhoads’ playing; it made him the player he was, and this new direction invited Rhoads to dig into his classical vocabulary to reinvent metal guitar, to be more out-there than he ever would have been in Quiet Riot.
“I mean, it’s incredible, him being in Quiet Riot, ‘cos they were more of like a pop-rock band,” says Wylde. “Without Ozzy as a foil, Randy would have never been able to do Diary Of A Madman, Revelation (Mother Earth), like, all that stuff. The classical elements in his playing would have never fit in Quiet Riot. It was not what that band was. And it worked perfect with Ozzy because of him coming from Black Sabbath. Perfect.”
So then, what was, or rather what is Wylde’s favourite Rhoads solo? He puffs out his cheeks but there’s little hesitation…
“I mean, I love them all, but the solo in S.A.T.O. is just amazing,” says Wylde. “Obviously, everyone gravitates towards Mr Crowley, and Crazy Train, and things like that, but, like, the solo to S.A.T.O. – and Diary [Of A Madman], Revelation (Mother Earth) – is lights out! It’s crazy. It is crazy, ambitious, and so out of the box. It’s like nothing you’d ever heard before.”
It was something that we would hear again, throughout the ‘80s – or at least we would hear players attempting to copy Rhoads’ style.
Rhoads left us all too soon, dying in a plane crash in 1982, aged just 25, but he inspired a subsequent generations of players who decided that it was maybe worthwhile sitting down to learn their scales after all – to think about modalities, and harmony, and the kinds of techniques that would be necessary to bring these highfalutin ideas to bear on the fretboard.
As Wylde says, Rhoads was not the first to introduce classical ideas to rock guitar. He simply took it further, and did something new with it.
“Obviously, Ritchie Blackmore and Uli Jon Roth were doing all the classical stuff, between [Deep Purple’s] Highway Star and [Scorpions’] Catch Your Train,” says Wylde. “Like, Randy’s influenced by Ritchie Blackmore, obviously, between all the stuff he did with Jon Lord in Deep Purple, all that classical stuff, and Ritchie Blackmore was killing it!
“Then Uli Jon Roth with the Scorpions? Forget about it! It’s classical, arpeggios, diminished – and he would use harmonic minor, too. But then Randy, it was that classical element in there as well.”
Wylde could appreciate it, he could play it, but the classical approach was not for Wylde. He just had to learn how to play the solos. As soon as he got the gig with Ozzy, he needed to be his own man and find his niche at a time when the world’s most high-profile players – e.g. Mr Yngwie Malmsteen – were turning on the neoclassical afterburners. It’s not like Wylde does not know which diatonic scale goes with what; it’s that he prefers the pentatonic.
“I mean, if a diatonic fits, I’ll throw it in there, but I try to base everything off of pentatonic, just ‘cos I like the sound of it,” he says. “When I first started with Ozzy, I was like, ‘Well, how am I gonna sound like me!?’ Because Yngwie was just... He was the last meteor to hit the planet, guitar-wise.
“He upped everybody’s technique, everybody in Berklee, they were opening up wings of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Paganini, all because of Yngwie! But I was like, ‘Oh, if you don’t want to sound like Yngwie, don’t do three-notes-a-string, and don’t do harmonic minor, and don’t do arpeggios, no sweep picking, and no diminished.”
And no tapping, either. That was Eddie Van Halen’s thing. Ditto stripes on the guitars. And no polka dots on the guitars – that was Rhoads’ thing. Wylde was searching for his own identity.
When he got his cream 1981 Les Paul Custom, aka “the Grail”after landing his gig with Ozzy, he took a look in the mirror and realised it was not that unlike the 1974 Alpine White Custom that Rhoads used to play.
He had an idea. He put it in for a custom graphic finish, wanting Saul Bass’ spiralised artwork for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. What he got was a bullseye. A happy accident all things considered, and though retired since 2016. The Grail would be brought out of retirement on Engines Of Demolition, with Wylde using it for the solo to his tribute to his old boss and friend, Ozzy’s Song.
“I used it for the last song. I ended up using it on the solo on Ozzy’s Song,” says Wylde. “Adam Fuller, who does the records with us, Adam was like, ‘Well, Zakk, for the solo, you should get the Grail and play it on this thing, man – ‘cause it’s Ozzy’s Song, so it makes sense.’ The first song I ever wrote with Ozzy is Miracle Man, and obviously, this is the last thing in tribute to him.”
Black Label Society’s Engines Of Demolition is available to pre-order, out 30 March via Napalm.
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