At 15 years old, Nuno Bettencourt was already showing promise as the prodigy we know today, and the teenager had big dreams.
At that time, Ozzy Osbourne had just lost his friend and guitarist Randy Rhoads and was looking for someone to replace him in his band, and that's when the opportunity of a lifetime arose. “I had just dropped out of high school (…) and I was like, 'This is my chance! I'm going to get this job!' [laughs] You know, you believe in these things when you're 15 years old,” he recounted on the Oh Say Can You Stream hosted by Thom Hazaert and David Ellefson , alongside guests Zakk Wylde and Mark Weiss .
Nuno reveals that he practiced "Crazy Train" trying to capture Randy's sound and then sent the tape to Ozzy. 12 years later, when the guitarist had already given up on the idea of working with the Prince of Darkness and was taking off with his band Extreme , he received the invitation he had been waiting for.
“In 1994, I was on tour with Extreme in London, opening for Aerosmith, and Rod MacSween shows up. He comes to the show, takes me to the van, very serious, and says, ‘Hey, I need to talk to you…’. And that’s when Zakk Wylde, I think, had left. So he says, ‘I just got a call from Sharon Osbourne ’ — and he’s telling me this in this hallway, it’s just me and him. ‘I just got a call from Sharon on the way here. She said, “Talk to Nuno; if he wants, there’ll be a private jet somewhere at Heathrow Airport in London. If he leaves right now, he can go straight to the tour. No auditions.”
The guitarist recalled the surprise with which he received the information: “You know when someone speaks in movies and their voice disappears and it’s just silence? When he finally finished, all the sound came back, and all I could stammer when I looked at him was, 'They listened to the cassette tape? They finally listened to the cassette tape?!'. And he was like, 'What cassette tape…?' 'Forget it, forget it!'. That tortured me for 12 years.”
However, after processing the information, Nuno declined the invitation: “And what did I say? 'No, I can't do that. I'm with my band' and all that. Which was a stupid mistake because then my band broke up, like, three weeks later.”
Although the guitarist claims the incident occurred in 1994, Extreme officially went on hiatus in 1996, after the release of the album Waiting for the Punchline the previous year. Furthermore, Wylde left Ozzy's band in 1992, returning to record Ozzmosis (1995) and The Ozzman Cometh (1997).
It's possible he got the dates wrong, but can you imagine what would have happened if he had accepted the invitation?
Listen to the full interview below.
