10 Musicians Who Came Back From Huge Band Breakups
Back with a Vengeance.
Whenever you have a band fall out, you’re starting from ground zero all over again. For all of the time that you spent cutting your teeth in clubs across the world, it’s not going to matter once your band of brothers decide that it’s time to pack it in. Any band can only dream of capturing the magic once, but it takes a special kind of musician to be able to pull it off twice.
Regardless of the circumstances that they left, every one of these musicians were able to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and create an entire career outside of their band, often going off in an entirely new direction. Whereas they might have been looked at as the problem in their respective acts the first time around, there was something else at work when they decided to go solo, being left to their own devices and reaching inside themselves to find their true potential, making songs that could stand on their own outside of their old band’s shadow.
And the audience listened as well, sending these artists back into the charts once again as solo artists, with some of their hits even eclipsing some of the best work they had done with their previous bands. It might hurt to see your old bandmates moving on with their lives, but living well always will be the best revenge.
10. Ozzy Osbourne - Black Sabbath
In the waning days of Black Sabbath, it was becoming more of a possibility that Ozzy Osbourne would have become a rock and roll casualty. The rest of Sabbath were usually making their albums without his involvement most of the time and even with his wildman persona, Ozzy was forced to sit on the side of the stage and sing while Tony Iommi took most of the spotlight. Just when Sabbath seemed to move on with Ronnie James Dio though, Ozzy reclaimed that Prince of Darkness moniker with Blizzard of Ozz.
With the help of his wife Sharon, Ozzy's first solo outing put him right back on top with metal fans, having a slightly more optimistic sound than the gloom you were getting on Sabbath's later records like Never Say Die. Then again, there's a good chance that Ozzy owes the second half of his career to Randy Rhoads, injecting him with more musical energy and playing his onstage foil, incorporating the kind of shred that you weren't going to see coming out of Iommi.
Being much more influenced by classical music, there's almost a bit of a hopeful quality to Rhoads' licks on this record, knowing when to bring the thunder on a song like I Don't Know and making something sound much more grandiose like on Mr. Crowley. Ozzy may have been down for the count and burying his problems at the bottom of a liquor bottle, but once you heard a song like Crazy Train, you realized there was life after death.