By the time Ozzy was fired from Sabbath in 1979, he was viewed by his bandmates as a slobbering buffoon who couldn’t be relied upon, even given the band’s lax “slobbering buffoon” standards. (According to Wall’s Symptom of the Universe, the final straw came when the band discovered Ozzy passed out in the studio, sleeping in a pool of his own piss.) Black Sabbath replaced Ozzy with the diminutive Ronnie James Dio, who actually looked like Satan, if Queens were a borough of Hades. Dio later pioneered the iconic “devil horns” hand sign known to metalheads everywhere, a fact that Dio pointed out
...more
