The guitarist who replaced Randy Rhoads in 1982 says he was invited to “Back To The Beginning” but was mid-tour with 15 people employed.
Brad Gillis got the email. He worked out what saying yes would cost the people on his payroll, and said no.
The Night Ranger guitarist, who took over from Randy Rhoads in Ozzy Osbourne‘s band in 1982, was asked by Jimmy Kay and Alan Dixon of Canada’s “The Metal Voice” why he was absent from “Back To The Beginning“, Osbourne‘s farewell concert on July 5 last year.
His replied (as transcribed by Blabbermouth): “I couldn’t go. I was on tour with my band [Night Ranger]. I couldn’t put everybody out of work. And everybody wanted you to pay your own way, whatever, but here I’m paying my own way, I’m on tour. What do I do? Do I cancel the tour and put 15 people out of work? So I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”
Pressed on whether the invitation had come, he confirmed it had.
“I got an e-mail inquiring if I was interested in coming. And I thought about it. And I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ I’d wanted to. We [Night Ranger] were on tour. And the place we were playing the night of the actual show was a big festival. We had 8,000 people there. It’s what it was. And I would’ve loved to make it and been a part of that, but that’s what it was,” he added.
The show took place at Villa Park in Birmingham, the home ground of Aston Villa, in front of more than 40,000 people, with a peak livestream audience of 5.8 million. Osbourne performed seated, and died seventeen days later on July 22, aged 76.
Gillis was 24 when he took the job nobody wanted. Rhoads died on March 19, 1982 in a plane crash in Florida, aged 25. Bernie Tormé covered a handful of dates before walking away, and Osbourne auditioned Gillis in a hotel room to finish the tour. He stayed through the end of that year alongside bassist Rudy Sarzo and drummer Tommy Aldridge.
That lineup produced Speak Of The Devil, the live album recorded at The Ritz in New York and made up entirely of Black Sabbath material, released to satisfy a contractual obligation. The separately issued video of the same name came from Irvine Meadows Amphitheater in California on June 12, 1982, and drew on the first two solo albums as well as the Sabbath songs.
Night Ranger have kept “Crazy Train” in the set in recent years. Their Best Of collection, with 2026 remasters of “Sister Christian“, “Don’t Tell Me You Love Me” and “(You Can Still) Rock In America“, arrives August 28 through Frontiers.
