By the time Ozzy Osbourne died this week at the age of 76, he'd shown that people's lives can have second acts — and more.
He had a rough childhood in Birmingham, England, left school at 15, worked odd jobs, including at a slaughterhouse, then was arrested for robbing a store, and spent six weeks in prison.
Yet Ozzy Osbourne could sing. He became a founding member of Black Sabbath, one of the bands that invented heavy metal music. But the band let him go in 1979 for often being drunk, or strung out on drugs.
Imagine how much drug and drink you'd have to do to get thrown out of a heavy metal band that had songs about drugs, like "Snowblind" and "Sweet Leaf."
Ozzy Osbourne then struck off on a solo career, and would sell more than 100 million albums.
But he persisted with drugs, drink, and a recklessness that shouldn't be just laughed off. He bit the head off a dove while signing a record deal in Los Angeles. He famously bit the head of a bat that was thrown onstage at him in Des Moines.
Ozzy canceled shows, or performed in a stupor, and sometimes attacked his bandmates. He once had a slash, as they say in British pubs, on a monument to those who died at the Alamo. He snorted a line of ants with Mötley Crüe. There are many other stories. He went into rehab programs, stopped, started, and stopped all over again.
Then, in the 2000s, Ozzy Osbourne became a hit on cable television: The Osbournes was an MTV reality series about the domestic life of his family. A performer once proclaimed as 'The Prince of Darkness' reappeared as a slightly daft and bumbling, burrito-loving suburban dad, albeit with an f-bomb charged vocabulary.
This week Alice Cooper, a founder of shock-rock, wrote on Instagram, "I always saw Ozzy as a cross between the prince of darkness, which is the persona his fans saw, and the court jester. That was the side that his family and friends saw."
And just last month, even as he struggled with Parkinson's, Ozzy Osbourne reunited with his Black Sabbath mates for a last show in Birmingham.
And he sang in one of their last songs:
"Yes, I've been a bad guy
Been higher than the blue sky
And the truth is I don't wanna die an ordinary man."
He sure didn't.
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