📍Burbank, CA, USA
1956 – 1979“I was born Randall William Rhoads in Santa Monica, California, in December 1956, the youngest of three children, and grew up in Burbank, in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of film studios and quiet streets. When I was seventeen months old, my father left, and my mother, Delores, raised my brother Kelle, my sister Kathy and me on her own. She was a music teacher, and since the late 1940s she had run her own music school, the Musonia School of Music in North Hollywood, which became my second home. I grew up in and around Musonia, taking lessons and later teaching there, and playing my first shows in its little hall. At seven I started playing guitar on my grandfather's old Gibson acoustic, learning folk songs, and my mother gave me piano lessons to help me understand music theory. Classical music became a lifelong love. At John Muir Middle School in Burbank I met Kelly Garni, who became my best friend, and I taught him to play bass. By fourteen I was in a band called Violet Fox, named after my mother's middle name, and I practised constantly, studying classical guitar even after I became a rock player. I was small, shy and polite, but on stage I came alive. At about seventeen, Kelly and I formed Quiet Riot, playing the clubs of Hollywood, and I taught guitar at Musonia. In 1979 Ozzy Osbourne heard me play and asked me to join his band, and on Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, with Crazy Train and Mr. Crowley, my blend of classical and metal guitar inspired a generation. My brother Kelle still runs Musonia, and it remains a shrine to my music.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today