Throughout his 50-year career in music, bassist Rudy Sarzo has always seemed to find his way back to Quiet Riot.
As the sole remaining member from the band’s formative era, Sarzo said the “core purpose” of the band is still “all about the music.”
“I plug into our consciousness as a band the way it was when I first joined the band in 1978,” Sarzo said in a Zoom interview this week. “That essence, that spirit, (founding guitarist) Randy Rhoads created that.”
The last time the band performed in Niagara Falls, in 2022, was shortly after Sarzo returned to the lineup for the first time in nearly 20 years at the request of longtime drummer Frankie Banali shortly before he died from cancer in 2020.
As Quiet Riot returns to the stage at Third Street Music and Arts Festival in Niagara Falls on Friday, Sarzo’s focus is to carry on the band’s legacy that he created with his old bandmates.
“I came back to celebrate the legacy of the band and the memory of Frankie Banali, (lead singer) Kevin DuBrow and Randy Rhoads,” Sarzo said.
Sarzo’s stints in Quiet Riot encompassed the band’s formative era with Rhoads in the late 1970s as well as its most commercially successful period in the early to mid 1980s when its most popular songs, “Cum on Feel the Noise” and “Metal Health” were recorded.
However, as he points out, the end of his second stint in 1985 was the only time that he voluntarily left the band. In every other instance, Quiet Riot disbanded.
The end of Sarzo’s first stint in 1979 was ultimately the most difficult one for him to come to terms with.
“We were fighting to get a record deal… for the right to record the music and make a living as a professional musician. And we just got neglected by the Los Angeles record industry,” Sarzo said.
“The other ones were just conflicts within the group that could have been fixed by a phone call. A phone call would not fix that rejection that we were getting from the music industry in the ‘70s.”
He was also concerned at that time he may have never been able to play with Rhoads again.
Only a couple years later, however, he would rejoin Rhoads as a member of Ozzy Osborne’s band.
“Then I go and join Randy with Ozzy and that’s a whole new level. But then again, there was a lot of Quiet Riot that Randy brought into the Ozzy band not only musically, but also…the musical integrity,” Sarzo said.
In the wake of Rhoads’ death in a 1982 plane crash, Sarzo recalled that he “lost the joy of making music”
“Every night it was surviving during an emotional breakdown that I would have at some point during the set,” he said.
Around that same time, a call from DuBrow to record the song “Thunderbird” as a tribute to Rhoads with his Quiet Riot bandmates served as a “breath of fresh air,” and led Sarzo to make the difficult choice to leave Osborne’s band and rejoin Quiet Riot.
“I made the hardest decision ever made in my whole life musically, to leave Ozzy and one of the biggest bands in the world for the unknown. But what I knew was that I was going to get the joy of making music again,” Sarzo said.
That effort would lead to “Metal Health,” which topped the Billboard charts and sold six million copies.
Since rekindling his musical passions all those years ago, Sarzo has recorded and performed with a variety of rock and metal artists such as Whitesnake, Dio and The Guess Who in between his stints with Quiet Riot.
Throughout the various stops along his musical journey, his approach to performing has changed little.
“Every night we go on stage it’s 1978 to me,” Sarzo said.
The band’s show on Third Street is free and starts at 6 p.m.