Ronnie James Dio had some tough shoes to fill in 1980 when Black Sabbath asked him to be the singer to replace Ozzy Osbourne.
Both Sabbath and Ozzy had admittedly turned into sloppy, drunken, drug-using rock stars, but the difference was Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward had the upper hand on the insanity.
Ozzy, well, was a mess. And it was painfully obvious during Sabbath’s 1978 Never Say Die! Tour when openers, a new band called Van Halen, ran circles around them every night.
Even before the tour, while recording the album, the lovable but erratic singer would disappear for days and weeks at a time. “Ozzy was going to clubs and getting really out of it and not coming home,” Iommi said in the oral history book, Louder Than Hell. “It got to a stage where nothing was happening with him. He came apart on us.”
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