Bob Daisley’s Premonition About Randy Rhoads

Former Ozzy Osbourne bassist Bob Daisley said he had a “premonition” about Randy Rhoads’ success soon after they met.

He also recalled the moment he was told of the guitarist’s death in a plane crash in 1982.

In a recent interview with Artists on Record, Daisley said Osbourne’s manager, David Arden, had doubts about hiring Rhoads in 1979 after the ex-Black Sabbath singer started talking about the “guitar teacher” he had met in Los Angeles.

"When he said ‘guitar teacher,’ I envisaged this older guy with pipe and slippers and a cardigan," Daisley noted. "David Arden didn't want to do it. … He didn’t want to fly Randy over. He said, ‘He’s unknown, he’s young, nobody’s heard of him.’ But then David Arden’s words were, and I still remember, 'Against my better judgment, I flew him over.'"

The bassist remembered "the three of us caught a train up to Ozzy’s, and we stayed over there. And we had that first play together, in Ozzy’s rehearsal room at his house. And as soon as Randy and I started playing together, at the end of the first little knock that we had together, we said to each other, ‘Well, great, this is good.’ I said, ‘I like the way you play,’ and he said that to me, almost at the same time, almost the same words. We knew that it was going to happen.”

You can watch the interview below.

The pair left Osbourne’s home the following day. "While we're standing on the railway platform together, I had this weird sort of premonition," Daisley recalled. "I just thought, ‘One day people are going to repeatedly ask me, 'What was it like to play with Randy Rhoads?' Obviously, I didn’t know that he wasn’t going to be around that long, or what was going to happen with the band, the album and all the rest of it. But, as history has shown now, those first two albums just became milestones in rock history."

At the time of Rhoads’ death, Daisley and former Osbourne drummer Lee Kerslake were members of Uriah Heep and on tour in the U.S., and they decided to take advantage of a night off to visit the club they'd be playing the following night. "And as we were walking in," Daisley said, "the girl at the door said, 'Oh, you guys were with Ozzy, weren’t you? I think a few of them got killed this morning. There was a plane crash.' … If you go in and ask the DJ in the club, he knows about it.'

“So I went in, and Lee kept on walking and went and got a drink. ... And when I went to the DJ, he told me … it just blew me away. I went and sat next to Lee, and I was speechless. He turned around, he said, ‘God, what’s wrong with you? You've gone all pale.’ And that’s when I told him. I said, ‘Randy got killed this morning.’

“Lee and I went back to our hotel, and we just sat in the bar, drank ourselves silly and cried and cried, because it was just awful.”