Amir Derakh may not be a household name, but the synth-guitar master isn’t as niche as he initially seems.
He replaced Craig Goldy (who replaced Jake E. Lee) in glam metal band Rough Cutt, lent his guitar synth chops to industrial rock band Orgy, and even backed Chester Bennington from Linkin Park.
The guitarist also nearly became Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist, only to lose out to a certain Zakk Wylde…
“I think [bassist] Phil Soussan and [drummer] Randy Castillo championed me, so I was fast-tracked and avoided a lot of the B.S,” Derakh tells Guitar World when looking back on the audition process.
“They had already gone through a lot of guitar players, but there were only a few they liked. One of them was this kid, Zakk Wylde.”
During what must have been a very nerve-wracking audition, Derakh was asked to play “a few of the hits, pretty much what everybody knows – Crazy Train, Bark at the Moon, Shot in the Dark, Over the Mountain. I’m not a finger-tapper, so I thought, ‘I’ll do that stuff, but I’ll do it with one hand.’ Ozzy was really impressed with my playing.”
Derakh goes on to say that the whole thing felt quite surreal – especially since he was a huge Randy Rhoads fan. “I got my ear pierced when Randy died. I got a guitar like him. So to be playing with Ozzy, it was unreal.”
However, he also admits his gut feeling was telling him that “it wasn’t right for me. I remember they asked me to do a guitar solo on the spot – you know, an unaccompanied solo. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not really prepared for that.’”
So how did Ozzy and co. break the news? “It was kind of like, ‘Ozzy really likes you…’ I pretty much knew that Zakk had the gig. I saw him at the Rainbow [in West Hollywood, California], and I said, ‘You’re going to get it.’ He was like, ‘No, no, no…’”
Derakh points to a couple of reasons why he didn’t land the gig, despite ticking most of the boxes. “One, I was connected to Wendy Dio [who managed Rough Cutt], so they didn’t want to deal with that whole thing. Two, I wasn’t completely unknown. They preferred people who were new,” he says matter-of-factly.
For more from Derakh, plus new interviews with Alex Lifeson, Geddy Lee and Gus G, pick up issue 605 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.
In more Ozzy-related news, it seems like a biopic is well and truly happening – at least according to his son, Jack Osbourne.
