In an interview with Metal Edge, Adrian Vandenberg talked about his first shows in America with Ozzy Osbourne and shared some details about the tour. “That was a very crazy tour, and Ozzy was such a nice guy, unlike the tour I did with Kiss the year after,” Vandenberg said. “Ozzy would tell us to just take the soundcheck, as he said he didn’t need the soundchecks. He also gave us full use of the lights and sound.”
Vandenberg compared Ozzy with KISS and said KISS made things harder for his band. “While the Kiss tour we did the year after was more difficult, because Kiss seemed to be a little bit in an identity crisis because they had said goodbye to the black-and-white makeup, and had traded it for the pink makeup, though they still used a lot of makeup.”
“But we were on the road because we just had a big hit with ‘Burning Heart,’ so we did really well, and the Kiss guys didn’t like it. Two days later we weren’t allowed to use as much sound anymore. Then we weren’t allowed to use as much of the stage and the lights, and it just kept shrinking and shrinking. But the less we were allowed to use, the harder we worked,” he added.
The tour with Ozzy went so well that after it, Osbourne asked Vandenberg to join his band.
“[Ozzy] said, ‘Adrian, do you wanna join my band?’ I said, ‘Man, we’re supporting you guys. And Jake [E. Lee] is a fantastic player,'” Vandenberg shared in a separate interview. “And he mumbled something, like, ‘We’ll stay in touch’ or whatever. But later on, some people mentioned that Don Airey and a couple of other guys in the band mentioned to Ozzy that my style of playing had a lot of resemblance with Randy Rhoads’s playing in the sense of classical influences, like Euro metal type of stuff combined with American and blues and whatever.”
Vandenberg admitted that he wasn’t too familiar with Randy’s playing at the time. “Ozzy was not popular in Europe at all at the time — he was huge in the United States. So when we got the invitation to support him, I was kind of surprised. I thought, ‘Wow, Ozzy.’ I didn’t really know he was that huge in the States.”
After Randy Rhoads passed away, many top guitarists were asked to join Ozzy’s band. Some only stayed for a short time and are now just small parts of Ozzy’s history. Adrian Vandenberg was one of those asked to join, but he didn’t stay long either.
