Bernie Torme: An Unsung Hero

There’s a particular type of unsung hero, one who’ll play an essential role in a moment of history, even though that moment will remain invisible because of the scale of the moments around it. You’ll never know he was a hero. In fact, you might even think he was a villain. But those with the wit and intelligence to read between the lines will spot that kind of hero in the historical accounts – and they almost always have the best stories to tell.
Such a hero is Bernie Torme, who played seven shows with Ozzy Osbourne over a 10-day stint with the band, then left, to be regarded by many as a sell-out, a cash-grabber or even just a failure. The opposite of all those things is true of the Irish guitarist.
Former Black Sabbath vocalist Ozzy was suffering on the road in 1982. The Diary of a Madman tour, supporting the release of his second album, had already featured his notorious bat-biting incident, his collapse on stage, his even more notorious Alamo scandal and a heated disagreement between him
The musicians had loved and respected each other – but they were in disagreement about their future directions when the tragedy struck. Ozzy’s manager and later wife, Sharon Arden, seemed to feel that if Osbourne stopped at that point, he might never return to music. So their thoughts turned to replacing Randy, and they quickly settled on Torme, who’d recently quit Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan’s solo band.
“I’d been on Jet, Don Arden’s label, and I kind of knew Sharon,” Torme told Ultimate Classic Rock. “I was on the periphery of the family, and I’d just left Ian. They thought, ‘He’s out of a job – he’ll jump at it!’” But he had his own album and tour to work on. “Big artists have a thing where it’s totally incomprehensible that anyone would say ‘no.’ When I was saying, ‘I can’t, I have all this going on,’ David Arden [Don’s son] was thinking, ‘He’s probably only saying that to up his price. Typical