Rocktober Hair Band Song #19: "Bark at the Moon" by Ozzy Osbourne

You can't have a hair band Rocktober Halloween week without the Prince of Darkness, can you?  No, no you can't.  In 1983, Ozzy Osbourne released his third solo album, Bark at the Moon.  It was the first album to feature lead guitarist Jake E. Lee, who joined Ozzy's band after Randy Rhoads's death the previous year.  Like the prior two albums (Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman), Bark at the Moon went platinum several times over in the U.S. (three, exact), and the cover featured Ozzy in a horror-themed get-up.  Let's take a quick look at the progression.

On the Blizzard of Ozz album cover, he was dressed in a red robe -- likely silk -- kneeling on the floor of what might be a church, holding a cross up, with a black cat to his right and an animal skull and some sort of horned animal skull to his left.  Is it a wild goat or some sort of ibex?  I'm not sure we want to find out.

On the Diary of a Madman cover, we see Ozzy looking like an extra from Scarface Meets Elvira -- a movie that should have been greenlit -- wearing bloody and tattered clothes, including a shirt with tassels on the arms, looking like he's coked out of his mind (which he probably was), smiling like a jackal in a medieval castle.  Behind him, his son reads a book -- presumably one of those "How To Talk To Daddy About His Substance Abuse and Necromancy Addiction" books -- under an upside-down cross.  That black cat is still there, perched in the window and ready to pounce, or perhaps the dead bird on the table was his or her doing.  "I'm ever so hungry, papa.  What's for dinner?" "Dove!" (snort) "But we had that last night."  "Sharon!"

Finally, on the Bark at the Moon album cover, Ozzy is in the throes of lycanthropy, ravenously sexually assaulting a tree limb as a full moon shines overhead.

The title track to Bark at the Moon is a great song with a great riff, about some soulless monster -- likely a ghoul -- who has returned from the grave to seek vengeance upon the very humans who buried him in the first place.  The video features a Jekyll and Hyde theme, wherein Ozzy is an alchemist in Victorian England who drinks a potion that looks an awful lot like a castrated minotaur's urine, which turns him into a werewolf.  I've seen enough True Blood to know that's not quite how it works, but then again, this was probably just a metaphor for his crippling addiction to cocaine and alcohol.