During a recent chat with Tone-Talk, Jake E. Lee revealed which Ozzy Osbourne album he hated the most.
“I remember when I first heard it, when they mixed it,” the guitarist recalled about ‘Bark at the Moon.’ “And then Ozzy and Sharon [Osbourne] asked me over to listen to it, and I listened to it, and he said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I hate it. Keyboards are loud. Guitars — they’re not driving the songs anymore. They’re too low.’”
He continued, “I said, ‘I hate it.’ And then Ozzy said, ‘That’s it! We need to remix it!’ And then Sharon said, ‘No. We’re already way too late giving them the album. We can’t remix it. We have to send this in now.’ And then she looked at me and said, ‘And just get used to it.’”
Ozzy dropped ‘Bark at the Moon’ on 18 November 1983 in the US and on 2 December 1983 in the UK. It’s Osbourne’s first album with Lee. The musician previously said he wrote most of the music for the album but was denied credit and royalties by Sharon Osbourne.
He claimed he was forced to sign a contract without legal help, which stated he couldn’t claim writing credits or discuss the issue publicly, or else he would be fired and replaced.
Lee told Eddie Trunk in 2014, “Here’s the truth. This is really gonna get me in more hot water, but whatever, I’m in hot water and I don’t see a way out… I was told from the get-go, ‘[If] you write part of the songs, you’ll get writing credit, you’ll get publishing. That’s part of your deal.’ So we recorded the album. I’m recording the album at Ridge Farm in Scotland, and this in the middle of Scotland, in the middle of farmland.”
“They promise me, ‘You’ll get what’s coming.’ And I keep asking because I’m getting really close to finishing all my stuff on the record, and finally, once I lay down the final track of my guitar playing, they said, ‘Ah! We have the contract for you.’ And in it, it says, specifically, ‘Ozzy Osbourne wrote all the songs. You had nothing to do with any of the writing, you have no claim to publishing, and you cannot say so publicly,’” he went on.
Lee added, “And I looked at it. I’m looking at Sharon [Ozzy’s wife/manager], and I said, ‘This is not what you told me before.’ And she says, ‘No, it isn’t.’ [And I said], ‘Why do you think I’m gonna sign it?’ And she says, ‘Because if you don’t, we’ll give you a plane ticket, you go back home and you stand in line and you sue us. In the meantime, we have all your tracks, we’ll get another guitar player, he’ll redo your tracks, and you’ll have nothing.’”
On the other hand, Lee’s favorite Ozzy song is ‘Killer of Giants’ due to its unique, shifting guitar style and orchestral feel. He enjoys how the song constantly changes direction and includes elements of classical music, a style linked more to Randy Rhoads than himself. He had fun creating the song, and he thinks it’s a great one.