Black Label Society and Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde wasn’t always the bearded Viking berserker he is today - he was once a fresh-faced, clean-shaven kid from New Jersey. In 2014, as BLS prepared to release their ninth studio album, Catacombs Of The Black Vatican, he sat down with Metal Hammer to talk embarrassing old photos, trying to reunite Guns N’ Roses and praying with Dave Mustaine.
The last time Zakk Wylde looked at a photo of himself as a 21-year-old, he pissed himself laughing. In fact, every time he looks at a photo of himself as a 21-year-old, he pisses himself laughing.
Back then, in 1988, he was still a kid. The year before, he’d been plain ol’ Jeffrey Phillip Wielandt, raised in the blue-collar town of Jackson, New Jersey, where he worshipped at the altars of Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix and Randy Rhoads. All that changed when he was plucked from obscurity to play guitar in Ozzy Osbourne’s band, replacing Jake E Lee, who himself had replaced the godlike Randy Rhoads. He was hardly a greenhorn, but his experience stretched no further than such dead-end local bands as Zyris and Stone Henge.
Joining Ozzy’s band would turn the boy into a man. But first, a couple of things needed sorting. Firstly, the name: rock stars aren’t called Jeffrey. Ozzy and his wife Sharon decreed that their newest recruit would henceforth be called Zakk Wylde. Then there was the image. The North New Jersey uniform of tattered denim ’n’ scraggy leather wouldn’t cut it in the MTV era. A veritable phalanx of stylists, hairdressers and wardrobe assistants were called in to turn the newly christened Zakk into a tight-trousered, bouffant-permed, dimple-chinned 80s rock god. If they’d made a TV show of his transformation, it would’ve been called ‘Pimp My Guitarist’.
Today, more than a quarter of a century and a thicket of facial hair down the line, Zakk Wylde laughs once again at the thought of it.
“Brother, what you gonna do about it?” says the man who is more Viking marauder than pretty-boy pin-up these days. “Some guys, they see an old picture of themselves and go, ‘I can’t sign that. I can’t even look at it!’ For me, it’s like looking at yearbook photos – you take the piss out of it. I take the piss out of myself, and the rest of the guys in the band take the piss out of me. Any of that stuff you read on the internet is fuckin’ tame compared to the stuff we say about each other.”
And with the benefit of hindsight, would he have chosen a name that might, 25 years on, make him sound less like an aging porn star?
“Oh man, that’s nothing,” he says. “I was originally Shirley Temple.”
And he roars with laughter once more.
Talking to Zakk is like having a conversation with an especially garrulous taxi driver. One who spends his time twisted round to face the back seat, letting rip with his views on everything and anything that crosses his mind, while not really giving much of a shit about what’s going on the road in front of him. And, bizarrely, just like a taxi driver, he’ll bang on about football given half a chance.
“I always call Ozzy’s band The House That Randy Built,” he says in a gruff but friendly Noo Joisey accent that’s only slightly diluted by years of living in California. “It all started with Randy. It’s like if you’re talking about Manchester United players, you’re gonna start with Georgie Best and then you end up getting to David Beckham.”
Unexpected ‘soccer’ references aside, the image of Black Label Society’s leader as a beer-snortin’, bear-wrestling 21st-century Viking marauder is as enshrined in the public consciousness as his bullseye guitar. But it’s also not quite the full measure of the man. For starters, as many folks know, he hasn’t drunk alcohol for five years. Where once he’d go to bed at 6am after hours of partying in the remote, 10-acre San Fernando Valley compound he calls home, that’s when he gets up these days. This morning, he fired up a cup of his own-brand Valhalla Java coffee, drove his kids to school and spent a few hours learning scales and practising. Later today, he’ll hit the gym for what he calls some “iron therapy” in readiness for his band’s upcoming “Canadian Crusade” (a ‘tour’, to you and me).
Making a BLS album sober is, he says, no easier or harder than it is drunk. His wife, Barbaranne (“the Immortal Beloved”, in Zakk-speak) gives him a schedule, and he goes to work. “She goes, ‘You’ve got 25 days’,” he says with a shrug. “So I spend 25 days writing a record.”
It’s an MO that works, if BLS’s ninth album, Catacombs Of The Black Vatican (named after his home studio-cum-mancave), is anything to go by. More focused than many of the band’s recent records, it touches on all the regular reference points: Sabbath, Zeppelin, Alice In Chains. But as always with BLS, it’s the songs that deviate most from the template that are most revealing: here, it’s Scars and Angel Of Mercy that stand out from the thud and blunder. They’re low-key, intro- spective tracks that find this bearded behemoth tapping into his inner Elton John, something which he did for the first time with his Pride And Glory side-project, whose ’94 release remains a cult classic.
“It’s funny you mention Elton!” he erupts. “He was my first guy. Before Sabbath, Zeppelin and all that, I remember seeing him doin’ Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds on The Sonny & Cher Show. I got chills as a kid seeing that, and I went out and got as many Elton John records as I could.”
That apparent dichotomy between the big guy banging out biker anthems and the sensitive dude paying tribute to a dead friend on Scars isn’t actually seen as such to the man himself. And here Zakk Wylde outs himself as an unlikely feminist. Of sorts.
“The whole Black Label mindset is about strength, about being who you really are. About rolling up your sleeves, hiking up your skirt and letting your vagina hang down.”
Pardon?
“Brother, the vagina is tough. [Late Golden Girls actress] Betty White said it best: ‘Why does everyone say: grow a set of balls? Balls aren’t tough. You hit a guy in the balls, he falls down. The vagina, it can take a beating like nobody’s business, between kids coming out of it and everything else going in it. It should be rephrased, ‘If you want to be tough, grow a vagina.’”
For all the hearty, hoist-yer-tankards-high bluster, Zakk is a natural-born diplomat who just wants everyone to be friends. If the UN are really looking for someone to resolve the problems in Syria, they could do worse than send him in.
Case in point #1: he’s possibly the only man on Earth who can hang out with Axl and Slash without pissing the other one off. His friendship with both stems from the 90s, when he came within a whisker of joining GN’R.
“I was friends with Slash, and I knew the other guys just from seeing them around,” he recalls. “Axl called me up, and I went down to just jam some riffs, have a blast. The band would have been Axl, Slash, me, Duff, Matt Sorum and Dizzy Reed. It could have been great, but it just never materialised. I’m buds with Axl and the guys in the band, I’m buds with Slash and his band. I’m like Sweden – I’m buddies with everybody.”
Case in point #2: he’s also possibly the only man who could engineer some sort of rapprochement between the two halves of Pantera. Though even he knows the enormity of that task.
“That’s up to Vinnie , Rex and Philip,” he says cautiously. “But if they ever wanted to do it, and said, ‘Zakk, we want you to honour Dime’s legacy and play his stuff on tour’, of course I’d do it.”
Could you help make it happen?
“Sure! Between getting the original GN’R and Led Zeppelin back together, splitting the atom, finding a cure for cancer, coming up with world peace and mopping the fuckin’ kitchen floor!”
His innate diplomatic skills extend to the wider world of politics. Aside from some pro-war rants in the early 00s (at a time when pretty much every American musician was suggesting the US raze the Middle East) he plays it strictly middle of the road, coming over like your average blue-collar Joe. Dave Mustaine he isn’t.
“I’m friends with Tom Morello, and he’s all about that stuff,” he says. “I just laugh when my friends get pissed off about politics. I go, ‘Look, the only thing people care about is whether they have jobs, whether they can pay their bills and provide for their family, whether they can buy something nice at the end of the day.’ If you’re President, Prime Minister or whatever, and you’re doing that and keeping the country safe, you’re doing your job, man.”
And is your President doing a good job?
“I think he’s doing the best job he can in regards to those things. Things go up a little, then they come down. They go up again, then they go down again. But the Titanic’s not sinking. The world’s a little rough right now, but it’s gonna get smoother.”
Zakk Wylde talks a brilliant game, no doubt about it. While his band have might have plateaued in terms of success – let’s face it, they’re never going to headline Download, a fact of which the man himself is utterly accepting (“Maybe we can headline the fuckin’ aftershow party. In the basement.”) – what they do have is a legion of diehard fans who wear their badge like a biker gang wears their colours.
“We don’t have fans, we have fams – as in families. It’s like The Grateful Dead on steroids. If you see some guy with the colours on in a pub, you start talking to him and the next thing you know you’re best man at this guy’s wedding.”
Why is that? Is it the music? Is it the Cult Of Zakk?
“I don’t know, man. It’s a religion. A religion of confusion! Everyone’s, like, ‘What the fuck’s goin’ on?’ But everyone’s happy, and that’s what matters.”
It’s telling that he describes BLS as a ‘religion’. Zakk has made no secret of his beliefs. Born and raised a Catholic, he describes himself only half-jokingly as “a soldier of Christ”. How often does he go to church?
“I go to church every Sunday when I’m home,” he says. “Especially now I’ve replaced the booze with glue.”
You’re friends with Dave Mustaine. Do you ever pray together?
“Dave and us were on the road. He’s a good dude. I’ve known him for a while…”
So when you were on the road, did you pray together?
“[Seriously] No, we did not pray together. [Long pause] We spoke about another religion. [Another long pause, then much laughter] The religion of Jimmy Page! The religion of awesomeness!”
On the subject of awesomeness, if you had to arrange the guitarists in Ozzy’s solo band in order of greatness, where would you put yourself?
“Oh man, let’s break it down like the Catholic church. Ozzy would have to be God, and Randy would be Jesus Christ, the Messiah. Which means Jake E Lee, Gus G and me, we’re the Pontiffs. We’re the ones who keep spreadin’ the gospel.”
When you joined Ozzy’s band, back when you were starting out, did you aspire to be one of the greats?
“Yeah, sure,” he says, sounding like it’s the dumbest question ever. “Everybody does. That’s the reason why you have posters of Jimmy Page and Randy Rhoads and Frank Marino on the wall. You want to join ’em up there one day.”
And do you think you’ve made it? Do you think you’re one of the greats?
“My whole thing is that it’s a trickle-down effect – the tree of knowledge. If I can inspire a kid to play the way that Randy or Jimmy inspired me, and that kid checks out those guys because of it, then that’s the beautiful thing. You’ve passed down the knowledge. It’s like Georgie Best and David Beckham.”
And with that, everyone’s favourite God-lovin’, Elton John-worshippin’, Manchester United-referencin’ Viking marauder (semi-retired) guffaws to the heavens one more time.
Originally published in Metal Hammer 256, March 2014
