There are two artists with this name; 1) The California-based blues band 2) The Brighton-based trap producer 1) It is 1971 in a small town near Santa Cruz, California. Three friends from Sacramento have just polished off a bottle of cheap wine to the sounds of Captain Beefheart’s Strictly Personal and wander on to the beach with a couple of harmonica and a guitar. For the next couple of hours, they howl out some Beefheart inspired blues yuck. Thus begins a musical relationship that would become the band Ozzie. From their wine-soused, Magic Band obsessed roots to their art-rock/new wave end some ten years later, Ozzie made some fantastic music. They built up substantial followings in Sacramento, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They were a Mabuhay Gardens regular, sharing the bill with bands like the Weirdos, The Sleepers, VOM, and the Nuns. In Sacramento, they played with everyone from the Rutabaga Boogie Band and the Talking Heads to the Nerves and the Fleshtones. However like many bands of the time, their limited output (only three 7”s during their lifetime) and difficulty fixing them to one musical subgenre led to their obscurity and ultimately them being forgotten. In the early 90s, S.S. stumbled upon Ozzie’s 1977 debut single, “Android Love”, and flipped. He tracked down one of the band’s main members, William Fuller, and struck up a friendship with him. A decade later S.S. tosses Fuller the idea to reissue “Android Love” single with a different B side. Fuller digs out some reel to reel tapes, an act that starts a multi-year odyssey through the Ozzie archives, recordings and print material spanning from the mid 70s to the early 80s. The proto-punk meets glam wildness what made “Android Love” (produced by Public Nuisance/Twinkeyz David Houston) such a great song was present in the tapes, but there was more: Massive doses of Blue Oyster Cult inspired hard rock brilliance, Roxy Music glam drama, Sparks-like art, Bomp! Records-worthy power pop, edgy new wave that recalls the Suburban Lawns, and mid-Seventies-style underground rock sounds that thrill any collector of private press obscurities, all with a Keith Moon/Jethro Tull inspired drummer.
