The Ozzy Osbourne that the world received is a specific and carefully constructed thing. The Prince of Darkness. The bat-biter. The man who bit the head off a dove in a record label meeting and off a bat onstage in Des Moines. The television persona of The Osbournes who shuffled through his own house in confusion and produced some of the most unexpectedly warm television of the early 2000s. The survivor — of addiction, of near-death, of the specific accumulated physical damage of a life lived at extreme volume for fifty years.
All of these things are real. They are also the surface layer of a person who has consistently surprised the people who look beneath the surface. The intelligence. The self-awareness. The specific quality of someone who has been everywhere that excess leads and has come back from it with a clearer understanding of what actually matters than most people achieve through more conventional routes.
What actually matters, for Ozzy Osbourne, is Sharon.
This is not a surprise to anyone who has watched them for forty years. The relationship between Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Osbourne is one of the most extraordinary partnerships in the music industry — not despite its complications but partly because of them. She has managed him, married him, supported him through addiction and recovery and relapse and recovery again, left him and returned, been injured by him and forgiven him and remained. He has not deserved all of it. He has known he has not deserved all of it. The knowing has been part of what has held it together.
The nightly call has been documented by tour managers and road crew across forty years of Ozzy’s touring life. It does not vary for time zones. It does not vary for the specific circumstances of the night — whether the show went well or went badly, whether he is exhausted or exhilarated, whether the hour is convenient for anyone on either end of the call. He calls.
He told one journalist — in a specific interview that he gave during a period of unusual candor, which those who know him well associate with specific phases of his sobriety — why he started doing it and why he has never stopped.
He said that there was a night very early in their marriage when he was on tour and he did not call. Not deliberately — through the specific chaos of the road in the early days, when the chaos was total and the systems that would eventually manage it were not yet in place. He did not call and Sharon spent the night not knowing if he was alive.
When he reached her the next day he heard in her voice what the night had cost her. Not anger — the fear underneath the anger. The specific fear of someone who loves a person who has demonstrated their own capacity for self-destruction and who had spent a night without any evidence that the self-destruction had not, this time, been final.
He said he understood in that moment what he was to her. Not just the husband. The proof of life. The call that confirmed he was still there.
He has called every night since. For forty years. No matter what country. No matter what time. He finds Sharon wherever she is and he tells her: I am here. I am still here.
She answers. She always answers.
He says it every night because she spent one night not knowing and that one night was enough for both of them to understand what the call is actually for.
It is not a phone call. It is proof of life. Delivered nightly. For forty years.
That is the most romantic thing in rock and roll.