Duff McKagan reveals how Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne influenced his musical career

In a recent 19-minute video posted to his YouTube channel, bassist Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses responds to a variety of fan-submitted queries, including one concerning his involvement in the August 5 “Back To The Beginning” charity event at Birmingham, UK’s Villa Park. At the concert, Ozzy Osbourne will make his final solo appearance and Black Sabbath’s original lineup will play their final show ever. He was questioned about his feelings for Ozzy.

Well, that’s a pretty big question. Ozzy’s been a constant — I mean, since I was, I’m gonna say, about six years old, because when I was a little kid, FM radio started and I had all these older siblings. And we had a stereo in the living room of our house, and they would play FM radio. And what FM radio did then was play a whole side of a record, and it was rock — rock and roll music. So it’d be Hendrix and whatever. And I remember hearing ‘Iron Man’ for the first time, whatever year that was, and however old I was — young — thinking ‘Iron Man’ was, ‘Wow.’ It was like a cartoon thing. And ‘What is this song?’ And was kind of accessible for me. And a few years later when I started playing guitar, I could figure that song out. And Sabbath and Ozzy just remained a constant. I love the ‘Never Say Die!’ record, which is ’78. Some people kind of passed over that stuff. And Sabbath going with Dio was a really cool period. And Ozzy going on his own and doing his thing was… He became an icon, I think, when he went solo, whatever that means. But there’s certain… Iggy, Lemmy, Ozzy, Prince — there was these constants in rock and roll, and Ozzy remains that.

Over the course of four days more than five years ago, Duff contributed to the writing and recording of Ozzy‘s “Ordinary Man” album. “Straight To Hell,” “Under The Graveyard,” and the title track, which features a duet between Ozzy and Elton John, are among the songs that the Guns N’ Roses bassist worked on alongside guitarist-producer Andrew Watt and drummer Chad Smith of Red Hot Chill Peppers.

This guy Andrew Watt called. He said, ‘Do you have some days this week in the daytime? I need to write an Ozzy record. We have four days to do it.’ So we showed up at Andrew’s studio. Everything was kind of set up — Chad’s drum kit was set up — and it was basically one of those things: ‘Who’s got a riff?’ It was really inspired. … The three of us — Andrew Watt and Chad and myself — we’d never written together, and you know that can go sideways in a hot second. But it didn’t. Ozzy came, and Ozzy just loved it. He just came in and started writing words and laid down the vocals. And it was kind of like that. There was definitely urgency to the whole situation. We had so much time to do it, which was only four days. … I think the record is really, really good.