Night Ranger guitarist Brad Gillis stepped in as Randy Rhoads’s replacement in Ozzy Osbourne’s solo band, following a brief stint by Bernie Tormé. He recently addressed why he was absent from Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s final show, Back to the Beginning, in 2025, in comments shared by The Metal Voice.
Gillis explained that touring commitments with his band Night Ranger made it impossible for him to attend the event, despite receiving an invitation.
“I couldn’t go. I was on tour with my band [Night Ranger]. I couldn’t put everybody out of work. And everybody wanted you to pay your own way, whatever, but here I’m paying my own way, I’m on tour. What do I do? Do I cancel the tour and put 15 people out of work? So I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it,” Gillis said.
He went on to describe the circumstances surrounding the decision in more detail, noting the scale of the show Night Ranger was performing that same night.
“I got an e-mail inquiring if I was interested in coming. And I thought about it. And I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ I’d wanted to. We [Night Ranger] were on tour. And the place we were playing the night of the actual show was a big festival. We had 8,000 people there. It’s what it was. And I would’ve loved to make it and been a part of that, but that’s what it was,” Gillis continued.
Gillis’s remarks shed light on the difficult choices musicians face when balancing personal history with professional obligations. This tension traces back to a chapter of his career that began more than four decades ago under far more urgent circumstances.
Gillis became Ozzy’s first full-time guitarist replacement for Randy Rhoads in the spring of 1982. He stepped in permanently after Bernie Tormé’s brief seven-show run, which followed Rhoads’s death in a plane crash that March. The transition was anything but smooth. Gillis was thrust into a demanding role with almost no preparation time. He was expected to master Rhoads’s intricate parts and step directly into a touring machine already in motion.
He has said he learned Ozzy’s entire set by ear in just a matter of days after being recruited. He relied on a boombox, a guitar, and live tapes of Rhoads to piece together the material. That crash course became the foundation for his run through the remainder of the Diary of a Madman tour. The period cemented his place in Ozzy Osbourne’s touring history, even though it lasted only a matter of months.
Gillis stayed with Ozzy through the end of 1982. He eventually departed to rejoin Night Ranger after bassist Rudy Sarzo left the band for Quiet Riot. Before his exit, though, his contributions were captured on record. He appeared on Ozzy’s live album Speak of the Devil, which was assembled from concert recordings made that September, preserving his brief but pivotal tenure in the band’s catalog.
Back to the Beginning, the concert Gillis ultimately couldn’t attend, took place on July 5, 2025, in Birmingham, United Kingdom. It was billed as Ozzy Osbourne’s final performance. The event drew guitarists and musicians tied to Ozzy’s decades-long career. This made Gillis’s absence notable to fans who had followed his early contribution to shaping the sound Ozzy carried into his solo years.
