There’s been a rash of news recently surrounding late Ozzy Osbourne/Quiet Riot lead guitarist Randy Rhoads and current Osbourne guitarist Zakk Wylde. Among the news is an appearing-then-disappearing trailer for the long-awaited Randy Rhoads documentary due out this year, along with some indication that Zakk Wylde has been fired from Ozzy’s band.
In regards to the Rhoads news, a 10-minute film trailer for the long-awaited Randy Rhoads documentary surfaced this month, featuring interviews with band members, friends, family and ex-girlfriends of the incredible guitarist, who died in a 1982 plane crash.
Dakota Pictures yanked the trailer from several places where it was posted unlawfully, but we found it on a Randy Rhoads MySpace tribute site. (Watch it below.)
Director Peter Margolis has been filming the Randy Rhoads documentary for two-and-a-half years, beginning in March of 2007 at the Mountain View Cemetary in San Bernadino, Calif., where hundreds of fans had gathered to commemorate the anniversary of Rhoads’ death. At that time they announced, “In hopes to fully capture the significance of the 25th anniversary of Randy’s passing, the filmmakers will be interviewing as many of Randy’s fans as possible.”
In other news, Zakk Wylde has apparently been dismissed from Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band. The rub? Zakk supposedly found out he’d been canned not from Osbourne himself but through the press.
Osbourne recently told Classic Rock magazine that he was looking to replace Wylde because the new tunes he was recording with Wylde sounded too much like the work of Wylde’s band Black Label Society.
“I haven’t fallen out with Zakk, but Zakk’s got his own band, and I felt like my stuff was beginning to sound like Black Label Society,” said Osbourne. “I just felt like I wanted a change, you know?”
Earlier this month, Zakk responded to the rumors by posting on his Twitter, “I haven’t heard anything about this. Until I talk to the Boss I don’t know. I love Ozzy.”
But a more recent interview sheds more light on the transition.
In a video posted Friday on backstageaxxess.com, Zakk said, “Everything’s cool, man. I mean, Ozzy’s always jammed with other people — since we did Down To Earth and all that other stuff. So it’s no big deal. If Ozzy’s gonna play with someone else, what am I gonna do anyways? At the end of the day, when we did the Down To Earth record, Oz had other people coming in and writing with him. ‘Boss, knock yourself out,’ you know what I mean! What we’re supposed to do is there’s this date in August — August 20, I guess, down in Anaheim [at the BlizzCon convention] — and then after that, we’re supposed to finish the [new Ozzy] record up in September or something like that. We did 16 or 18 songs or something like that, so we’ll write some more, finish the record, and then we’re supposed to do like a year[-long] world tour.”