About.com Rating

Ozzy Osbourne’s long and storied solo career is the focus of Memoirs Of A Madman. The album is a greatest hits collection, while the 2 DVD set focuses on the visual. The album and DVD are sold separately, and there are also regular vinyl and picture disc versions of the album in addition to CD and digital download.

The album features 17 songs dating back to his 1980 solo debut Blizzard Of Ozz all the way through 2010‘s Scream.

Classics like “Crazy Train,” “Bark At The Moon” and “Mama I’m Coming Home” are included along with more recent songs like “I Don’t Wanna Stop,” “Let Me Hear You Scream” and “Changes,” the song he did with his daughter Kelly.

The biggest omissions are “Shot In The Dark,” “Time After Time,” “See You On The Other Side” and “Back On Earth,” which were all top 10 rock hits. But with so many hits and only one disc, there’s only so much material that could be included. The final track on the album is a live version of “Paranoid” that was recorded in 2010.

The DVDs include a ton of material. The first disc has more than two dozen music videos from over the years. There you’ll find “Time After Time,” “See You On The Other Side” and “Back On Earth” that are not on the album, but still no “Shot In The Dark.”

The second disc is the mother lode, jam packed with live performances and interviews going back to 1981.  Four songs including “Suicide Solution” and “Mr. Crowley” are from a 1981 Rochester, New York performance featuring the late, great Randy Rhoads.

Ozzy talks about his guitarist’s death in a 1982 MTV interview.

The performances feature all the various backing musicians Ozzy has had over the years, from Jake E. Lee to Zakk Wylde to Rob Trujillo to Gus G. and all the others. The disc has nearly 2 1/2 hours of material, with the most recent footage being “Let Me Hear You Scream” from a London show a few years back.

There’s a lot of Ozzy material out there, but Memoirs Of A Madman is a worthy addition. The album collects most of his biggest hits in one place, and the DVDs have some hard to find and previously unreleased footage that fans will want to see.

(released October 14, 2014 on Epic Records/Legacy Recordings)