If music was the magical elixir that got Zakk Wylde off the gridiron and on a stage when he was a teenage linebacker, the guitar was the vehicle that got him to the dream gig as Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist when Wylde was barely 20.
The next three-and-a-half decades have seen the Jersey native not only serve three tours of duty with Osbourne, but also carve out his own musical path via his own bands (Pride & Glory, Black Label Society and Zakk Sabbath) and do high-profile collaborations spanning the gamut from being part of Steve Vai’s Generation Axe and a performer on the Experience Hendrix tour to being Pantera’s current touring guitarist.
Given his close relationship with the Osbourne family, Wylde was, of course, hit hard by the news of Ozzy Osbourne’s death in mid-July. In a statement the guitarist posted on Instagram, he said: “Thank you for blessing the world with your kindness and greatness, Oz. You brought light into so many lives and made the world a better place. You lived with the heart of a lion. I Thank the good lord every day for blessing my life with you in it. I love you, Oz, beyond forever.”
It was only a couple of weeks before Osbourne’s death that Wylde participated in the Back To the Beginning charity concert, which also marked the final live performance of Osbourne and Black Sabbath.
Along with appearing on a bill that included Anthrax, Mastodon, Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool and Slayer, Wylde played with Pantera and as part of Osborne’s solo set. And while Wylde says in hindsight, his highlights included plugging in for both of those sets and taking in Black Sabbath’s headlining set, in real time, he was more focused on the task at hand.
“The ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’ performance from that show was on Instagram and [Pantera bassist] Rex [Brown] asked me what I was thinking when it was going on,” Wylde explained. “I told him nothing, because we just wanted to make sure that everything sounded right. When you’re in it, you’re not thinking about it. If you’re playing in the Super Bowl, you’re playing the game. You’re not thinking about how big the game is or whatever. When you get up there, you approach it like another gig, whether you’re playing a club, a phone booth, Madison Square Garden or the show last night. You go up there and you don’t half-ass it because you’re playing before less people. You approach each gig the same.”
Recalling the event fondly, he added, “A lot of it was like taking a trip down memory lane. It was great seeing everybody and all the other bands playing. It was a really beautiful moment. The whole thing was pretty amazing because I had my kids out there. [My wife] Barb[aranne] was there and the kids because Ozzy is godfather to our oldest son.”
With the biggest gig of the calendar year behind him, Wylde stayed busy, doing a summer tour with Pantera before hitting the road for a fall tour leading Zakk Sabbath. With the former, it’s a special honor given the relationship he’s had with the band dating back to his first meeting Pantera’s late guitarist Dimebag Darrell while sharing a bill at the 1994 Monsters of Rock Castle Donington festival.
“Meeting Dime back then and becoming friends over the years was incredible,” Wylde recalled. “Being up there now all of us — me, Charlie [Benante], Phil [Anselmo] and Rex [Brown] — get to honor Dime and Vinnie [Paul] every night. It’s a beautiful thing, because it’s a community. You have the Pantera faithful, who saw the band playing before eight people in an Irish pub. They you have all the younger kids that never got a chance to see Pantera back in the day and might only know about them because of an older brother or sister who saw them. And now they can hear that music live again.”
Founded in 2014, Zakk Sabbath is Wylde’s power trio Sabbath cover band currently featuring him on guitar and vocals with a rhythm section of bassist Rob “Blasko” Nicholson and Danzig/Queens of the Stone Age drummer Joey Castillo. While the band has its origins when Wylde and Nicholson were asked to participate in Metal Allstars, a touring concept featuring various metal musicians, Wylde’s Sabbath obsession dates back to sixth-grade. That’s when the then 11-year-old discovered the 1976 compilation “We Sold Our Soul for Rock ‘n’ Roll” after his mom offered to buy him an album during a trip to the local mall. Suffice it to say, it left quite an impression on Wylde, who’s also an avowed Elton John fan.
“The running joke is that I say I was Catholic when I put the album on,” Wylde said with a laugh. “When I got halfway through the album, I turned into a full-blown Satanist, and then when I got done with the end of the record, I converted back to Catholicism just so I could thank God for creating Black Sabbath. When I first put it on, I was beyond terrified. After that, I really dug it and I just kept listening to it. After that, it was a matter of trying to collect all the albums.”
By the time Black Sabbath was on Wylde’s radar, Osbourne had left to go solo and was replaced by the late Ronnie James Dio. It was this iteration of the band the future Ozzy guitarist saw at Philadelphia’s Spectrum on “The Mob Rules” tour. By this time, Wylde was practicing guitar 10 hours a day, learning the Sabbath and Osbourne canon along with other hard rock icons including Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. This self-driven woodshedding proved invaluable when Wylde eventually won the audition to replace Osborne’s former guitarist Jake E. Lee. While he continues to be grateful for that opportunity, the 58-year-old shredder knows that music was always going to be part of his life equation regardless of where he landed.
“Any jobs I ever had as a kid, it was a means to an end to buy a guitar or an amp,” Wylde said. “Whatever job I was working at, whether it was at the supermarket or mowing lawns, it didn’t bother me because I knew I wasn’t going to be doing it the rest of my life. I was doing it to get from here to here and then I’d be good. I’m truly blessed. Me and [Black Label Society bassist] J.D. [DeServio] always talk about it. If I hadn’t been blessed with Ozzy in my life, me and J.D. would still have a cover band, own a music store, teach, have a wedding band and do our originals. Everything would be based around music paying the light bill.”
Zakk Sabbath
Sun, Nov 2, 8pm
Midtown Ballroom
51 NW Greenwood Ave, Bend
midtownballroom.com/
$89+
This article appears in the Source October 23, 2025.
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