Zakk Wylde is one of rock’s most recognisable and prolific guitarist. After making his name in the late 80s as a teenage hotshot with Ozzy Osbourne, the end of the following decade found him striking out on his own with Black Label Society. In 2008, he looked back on the turbulent creation of BLS’s debut album Sonic Brew – potential lawsuits and all.
Zakk Wylde was plucked from obscurity by Ozzy Osbourne in 1987 after hearing the singer tell Howard Stern during a radio interview that he was looking for a new guitarist to replace the recently fired Jake E Lee and offering his services. Since then, Zakk has been Ozzy’s right hand man, sometime confidante and biggest cheerleader, appearing on six of the Double O’s studios and countless tours.
But if playing with Ozzy is Zakk’s highest profile gig, then Black Label Society is where the New Jersey-born six-stringer finds an outlet for his creative restlessness. Since launching the band in the late 90s with their debut album Sonic Brew, BLS has been Wylde’s domain, his vision, his fire.
“You got it!” he says. “This is about what I wanna do. If I wanna do a fucking ballad, then I’ll do it with this band. If I wanna rock out, I’ll do that. Black Label Society is whatever me and the band decide to make it.”
And yet the idea for Black Label Society was born out of a sense of desperation. It came up about when Wylde ended up caught between Axl Rose and the Ozzman.
“What happened was this,” Zakk explains. “There wasn’t much going on with Ozzy – he took a break after the Ozzmosis album in 1995. That’s cool. The Boss [Ozzy] always told the rest of us in his band that he wouldn’t wanna tour forever, and that if we ever got the chance to do other things then we should take that opportunity. Everyone gets to a point in their life when they wanna come off the road and just record. So, I get a call from Axl Rose in ’95, inviting me to jam with Guns N’ Roses.”
At the time, Wylde didn’t know the GN’R frontman. He’d hung out with bassist Duff McKagan and guitarist Slash. But the unpredictable singer was a different matter entirely, and a new experience for the guitarist.
“I started to jam out ideas with Axl, and things seemed to be going well. Then, suddenly, I get this message from Ozzy, after he’d done the Black Sabbath reunion [in the summer of 1997]: ‘Hey, I’m going on tour. You in or out?’ Now, things began to get heavy, with lawyers and fucking managers involved. To me it was simple. Mum [Sharon Osbourne] tells me how much I’m getting paid, and that’s it, because I know she’s fair. But, no, there were fucking businessheads putting their 10 cents in…”
Result? Although he did get back with Ozzy for a tour of Japan, Australia and New Zealand early in 1998, Wylde was then left high and dry. Ozzy decided not to use Wylde for the US Ozzfest tour that same year, and his jam with Guns N’ Roses hadn’t turned into anything concrete. Zakk was suddenly left on the sidelines. He’d already recorded and released a solo album, 1996’s Book Of Shadows, which was very much a precursor to BLS. But now was the time to press onwards.
“It was crazy, man. I got a letter from Ozzy telling me that my services weren’t needed, and Axl had also gotten rid of me,” he said. “So, I had all these riffs and song ideas, and I had nowhere to go with them.”
It was at this pivotal moment that Black Label Society was born. In 1998, Zakk began working on the album that would become Sonic Brew. Initially, he treated it as a solo project in the most literal sense.
“Of course I was gonna play guitar. But then I realised that the more I did, the greater my control. I can play bass and piano, and I’ve got a voice. So let’s go for it. The big thing for me was the singing. I’d been working with the very best for a decade. Once you’ve played with Ozzy, anything else is a step down. The man’s a total pro. So, I wasn’t prepared to hire some pussywhipped lame fucking asshole to be my vocalist, because he’d have lasted five minutes, and he then would have had a Les Paul wrapped around his head.
“All my life I’ve played in bands where the friendship was strong, and now I wasn’t looking forward to going out and finding an ego on legs to front my songs. I knew I could do the job, so why put myself through the frustration of auditioning fucking tossers? And by playing everything on the record, apart from drums, I kept a tight control over the music. It’s why Jimmy Page produced Zeppelin. The last time I looked they were fucking masterpieces, and Page oversaw them, because he couldn’t trust anyone else to do it. Same with me.”
The only instrument Zakk doesn’t play on Sonic Brew is drums. That task fell to Phil Ondich, who had contacted Zakk via email while the guitarist was still playing with Ozzy.
“He said to me, ‘If you ever wanna do a record away from Ozzy, I’m your drummer.’ We kept in touch, met when I was touring Book Of Shadows and then one day I hung out with him outside a radio station in Roanoke, Virginia. He gave me a tape of this band he was in called Raging Slab, and before you know it we were jamming on a song I’d just written called Beneath The Tree. It was me on acoustic guitar, and Phil just tapping out time on his legs. That was enough for me. I asked him if he fancied coming down to Miami, Florida, and doing the Sonic Brew project with me.”
Wylde and Ondich entered the studio in May 1998. Working with co-producers Ron and Howard Albert, they quickly got into a regular regime, one that won’t surprise anyone who knows the guitarist’s reputation for drinking back then.
“Phil and I would jam throughout the day. Then in the evening, we’d go and get fucked up at an Irish pub we found round the corner from the studio. Man, what a place. The jukebox was full of classics from Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Bad Company… and there was Motown shit going on as well.”
The result of all this jamming and drinking was an album that was vibed up, emphasising the importance of spirit and energy over discipline, yet also has some supreme examples of Wylde’s songwriting prowess. The man himself has an unsurprisingly hazy recollection of those days.
“How long were we in the studio? I dunno. Our attitude has always been to do whatever feels right. If I hear the Beatles doing Hey Jude on the radio while driving to the studio, then I might think, ‘Let’s write a fucking ballad’. We react to situations and sounds…always have done; it keeps this thing fresh.”
Wylde’s original plan was to call his new band Hell’s Kitchen. “Phil even designed an album cover,” he says. “But then we couldn’t get the name trademarked, so we changed our minds. We went for Black Label Society because we love that whisky [Johnnie Walker Black Label], and the whole thing about ‘black label’ is that it means the best.”
The album was released in Japan in October 1998, but issues with the audio quality meant it wasn’t released until May 1999. Even then there were further problems. Wylde’s initial idea for the Sonic Brew cover had been to adapt the label from the respected whisky.
“I picked up a bottle one day in the supermarket and thought, ‘That’s the cover done!’” he says. “So, we release the album, and then Johnnie Walker get in touch. ‘Great’, I think, ‘They wanna endorse us – here come cases of free whisky. Oh, no!‘ They issue a cease and desist order. Their product is respectable and classy, they say, and not one to be associated with fucking greaseball douchebags like us. It was Spinal Tap. Here we were, ready to work with them, and then they pull the rug from under us! We had to think fast, scrap the first cover, and do another [a motorcycle club-style logo of the band’s name]. If you got a copy of Sonic Brew with the original sleeve, hang onto it, it’s probably worth something now.”
Unlike later Black Label Society albums, Sonic Brew featured a whiff of the Southern Rock that had characterised previous band, the short-lived but beloved Pride & Glory. It also featured a guest appearance on one track from Mike Inez, who had played with Zakk in Ozzy’s band in the early 1990s and was then a member of the still theoretically active Alice In Chains. Inez appeared on BLS’s version of Ozzy’s classic 1991 track No More Tears.
“You work with Ozzy and he’s always jamming on Sabbath stuff in the studio,” says Zakk. “Same with me. I’d do [Ozzy solo track] Mama, I’m Coming Home and No More Tears. It seemed logical to record the latter – and it worked. I asked Mikey to get his ass down and jam with us on our version of No More Tears. It seemed a natural thing to do. I ain’t saying it’s better than the original, but it’s a bit of a tribute to the Boss.”
Sonic Brew didn’t give Ozzy any sleepless nights in terms of chart positions, but it did give Zakk both the safety net and the creative outlet he needed at that point in his career. It also launched Black Label Society as an ongoing concern – to date, they’ve released 11 albums, the most recent of which was 2021’s Doom Crew Inc.
“You listen to that album, and you’ll understand what me and the band are about,” he says of Sonic Brew. “I love playing. I’ve friends with whom I used to play years ago, who are now in real estate, because they’ve a wife and kid. They hate what they’re doing. I’m lucky to be where I am. Everything I do is about putting a smile on people’s faces. Get out Sonic Brew again, and tell me you can’t feel the power, the passion!”
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 169. Updated in August 2024
