Former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Jake E. Lee stated that he found Tony Iommi’s guitar parts more challenging to play than those of Randy Rhoads, and praised the way Iommi would bend his notes.
Fate would have it that Ozzy Osbourne would have astonishing guitar players by his side throughout his career, and Jake E. Lee was one of them. Having joined Ozzy’s band in 1982, Lee would build on the legacy Randy Rhoads left, and eventually contributed to two decade-defining records — “Bark at the Moon” (1983) and “The Ultimate Sin” (1986). While Lee took Ozzy even further down the ’80s hard rock/glam rabbit hole, his immediate job was to do justice to Tony Iommi’s and Randy Rhoads’ material on the “Speak of the Devil” tour.
Reflecting on his approach to playing Black Sabbath and early Ozzy material in an interview with Guitar World conducted ahead of Sabbath’s “Back to the Beginning” farewell show, Lee said:
“I joined in the middle of the ‘Speak of the Devil’ tour. Half of the set was Black Sabbath, and half was the stuff with Randy, so I just tried to get as close as I could.”
“With the Sabbath stuff, I will say I tried to modernize it or put a little bit more of me into it. It was classic rock that you could kind of fuck with because everybody knows the originals, so I played around a little bit more when we did the Sabbath stuff. With Randy’s, I tried to keep it pretty close because that was fairly recent.”
While both Tony Iommi and Randy Rhoads are monumental guitarists in their own right, Lee admitted that the former’s playing style was the more challenging to emulate:
“To be honest, probably Tony’s. It’s not difficult; nothing he plays is really that different except for those trills. I don’t know how he plays those trills so fast – but there’s a nuance.”
“A lot of times, when he bends a note, especially the lower notes, he doesn’t go all the way to pitch-perfect. He makes it a little bit flat, which makes it sound more menacing and kind of evil. That’s part of the genius of his playing.”
Jake E. Lee made a triumphant appearance at Black Sabbath’s and Ozzy’s star-studded final performance this past Saturday, performing “The Ultimate Sin” with Nuno Bettencourt, Mike Bordin, David Ellefson, Lzzy Hale, and Adam Wakeman, as well as “Shot in the Dark” with Bordin, Ellefson, Wakeman, and David Draiman on vocals.
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