Jake E. Lee Reflects on His Time With Ozzy Osbourne

Jake E Lee said reconnecting with Ozzy Osbourne just before his death helped him feel better about his time in the singer’s solo band.

Lee was fired in 1987 after appearing on Osbourne’s albums Bark at the Moon and The Ultimate Sin. The pair lost contact afterward, then met briefly at Black Sabbath’s farewell show in July, where Lee took part in Osbourne’s solo set.

He previously revealed that the pair had planned to catch up again in the coming months, which didn’t happen before Osbourne’s death. But with peace having been made, Lee told Guitarist, he was left considering what to do next.

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“I did always want to reconnect with him on whatever level,” the guitarist explained. “Not necessarily musically, but that would have been nice. I didn’t want it to end with getting fired and feeling like there was bad blood.”

Asked how his dismissal from the band had made him feel, Lee said, “I never really took it personally. … I got kind of screwed over on the Bark at the Moon record. But I knew it was a business move, and that it wasn’t based around fucking me over.”

But he admitted that he never felt good about his time with Osbourne. “That might be my fault,” he said. “It might have been me going online, which is always a bad idea, and reading about all the reasons why I was the worst Ozzy guitar player, and starting to sort of believe it a little bit.

“[I don’t] believe it but let it weigh on me. That’s just human nature. You see something where there’s 99 comments about how good you are, and then you read one where you’re shit, and that’s the one you remember!”

Lee credited Osbourne for making him a better guitarist. “I’m proud of what I did. … I don’t necessarily think it was the high point of my playing. But I was really good, and Ozzy did make me better.

“In Hollywood, I was maybe considered the top guitar player, or at least in the top three. But when I joined Ozzy, I got a lot better.”

Jake E. Lee Helped Prove Ozzy Osbourne Wasn’t Done After Randy Rhoads Died

He joked that his welcome at the farewell show had been so warm that he suspected someone had sent a memo around telling everyone from Nuno Bettencourt to Tom Morello that they should be extra-nice to him.

“I do feel a lot better,” he said of the negativity he carried for decades. “What I have to think about now – and this is a little difficult – is saying, ‘OK, now I can go out with more confidence, have people talking about me, and get a good thing going.’

“I could also look at it as, ‘Well, that would be a good way to leave on that high note.’ Because I’m trying to figure out what exactly it is that I want to do now.”

Reflecting that his contributions to Osbourne’s band had “helped confirm that Ozzy wasn’t over just because Randy Rhoads had passed,” he added: “I’m proud to have been a part of that. I always wanted to reconcile, tell him there weren’t any hard feelings, and end things on a friendly note. I got to do that.”