For Ex-Black Sabbath Star Bill Ward, Demons Are in Past : Personality: His latest album celebrates the discovery of a new career--and a new self--since he was able to push alcohol out of his life.

For most of his adult life, Bill Ward had a role to play and a ready-made mask to wear.

The role was prominent, and highly remunerative: drummer for Black Sabbath, one of the earliest, most extravagantly popular heavy metal rock bands.

The mask was what you would expect.

“My ego wanted you to see this heavy metal monster--Grrrr!” Ward said, hiking up his shoulders under a navy blue double-breasted blazer as he imitated a mad-dog rocker’s growl. Then he smiled a tolerant smile.

“I know who that guy was, and I look at him sometimes,” Ward said Tuesday as he sat in a diner on Pacific Coast Highway, not far from his home a few blocks from the ocean in Seal Beach. “I go, ‘Yeah, he was OK. But he was pretty messed up.’ Bill Ward the drummer seems like a distant friend these days.”

Bill Ward the Black Sabbath drummer died six years ago this week in an alleyway in Huntington Beach. Once he had been a millionaire rock star, living in a fine, 19th-Century home on a hill overlooking a village in his native England. Drinking took all that away. Eventually, Ward’s alcohol addiction stripped him of his ability to function as a musician. Toward the end, it estranged him from his friends and family. In his last days, Ward the drinker lived in the streets of Huntington Beach, dogged by pneumonia, looking for a way out. He found it in that alley, where he stuck a borrowed 12-gauge shotgun in his mouth.

“I didn’t have the courage to kill myself,” Ward recalled softly. “But as a human being, I was already dead.”

The metal mad-dog drummer never made it out of that alley. In his place walked a man taking the first steps toward sobriety, and toward a new musical life in which the pounding headbanger drum beats still figure, but the mask is no longer required.

The evidence of Ward’s artistic rebirth is his first solo album, “Ward One: Along the Way.” Released Wednesday by Chameleon Music Group, it is due in record stores next week.

The album begins with the ominous crackle of an ambulance radio relaying grim medical reports--a sound that Ward says became an almost routine part of his life in 1983 as it dwindled into a series of physical emergencies and mental crises fueled by his alcoholism. It ends with the sound of footsteps, first circumspect, but growing steadily stronger until the steps are joined by the sound of a light, optimistic whistle. In between, Ward’s song cycle probes the dark, lonely tightrope walk of an addict struggling to reach for hope before he tumbles into despair.

While much of “Ward One” recalls the brooding tone, wailing guitar and tromp-and-chug rhythms of vintage Black Sabbath, the album also has a strong adventurous streak that allows for an unflagging emphasis on melody, atmospheric textures that recall Pink Floyd, African rhythms not unlike Peter Gabriel’s, and even the softness of a caressing rock lullaby.

Ward sings lead vocals for the first time in his 22-year rock career, in a voice that is limited, but evocative after the manner of Roger Waters’ dramatic singing in Pink Floyd (minus the screams). Ward gets some all-star help from Ozzy Osbourne, his old Black Sabbath band mate, and from Cream alumnus Jack Bruce, each of whom sings the lead on two songs.

As a founding member of Black Sabbath, Ward had some creative input, but he faced nothing like the wide-ranging demands of writing, singing and arranging an album of his own.

“I guess I put in what I could, how I could,” he said of his creative role in Black Sabbath, which Ward formed in 1968 along with Osbourne, bassist Terry (Geezer) Butler and guitarist Tony Iommi.

When it came to writing songs with Black Sabbath, “I’d let things pass. I’d have an idea, and I’d keep it inside. Finding out what I’m capable of, what’s inside--that’s what this album is about. There’s been a whole discovery. I found a guy who had this inside him, but didn’t know how to let it out.”

For Ward, 41, the process of finding a musical self began after he gained sobriety in 1984. First, he rejoined Butler and Iommi in Black Sabbath, but he soon quit the band, feeling that it had stagnated (Iommi still leads a rump version of Black Sabbath). Ward tried playing with other musicians for two years but failed to find a focus.

Then, starting in 1987, he began work on “Ward One” with a nucleus of Southern California-based musicians, including guitarists Rue Phillips and Keith Lynch, who helped Ward write the music on several of the album’s songs.

Ward contacted Bruce and asked him to sing two songs, even though he had never met the former Cream singer-bassist. Bruce’s clear, emotive tenor serves as the voice of comfort and encouragement on the lullaby, “Light Up the Candles,” and on “Tall Stories,” an affirmative rocker in which Ward writes of regaining the ability to play music.

“Ozzy invited himself,” Ward said. “He said, ‘What’s all this I hear about you doing an album? You haven’t invited me.’ ” Ward turned the microphone over to Osbourne for the album’s most Sabbath-like rockers, “Jack’s Land” and the excellent “Bombers (Can Open Bomb Bays).”

Osbourne, whose own successful solo career has been played out against continuing struggles with drug and alcohol abuse, is the voice of baleful warning in his two songs, expressing bleak visions of addiction’s consequences, yet also pointing to hope and recovery as open paths.

At least at the start, the guest stars and Sabbath connections will be a big part of the promotional strategy for Ward’s album, according to Stephen Powers, president of Chameleon, the Hawthorne-based independent record label that has raised its profile with recent releases by Mary’s Danish and John Lee Hooker.

“We’re going to get out of the gate based on past history and associations,” Powers said. “But our long-range goal is to develop Bill as an artist so they don’t see this as a one-off where his friends came in and played and that’s the only reason for the album.”

Ward wants no part of the metal-monster baggage that came with Black Sabbath, a band infamous for its dark musings, occult trappings and demonic imagery.

“I don’t want to do death any more. I don’t want to do doom and gloom. I want to do life and love,” Ward said.

“I want no burning skulls or demonic interest,” he added, speaking of video plans. “Naked women running across the video set--no thank you. Get somebody else to do that. I’ve had enough of that. If I get the opportunity to do any videos and you see any skulls in it, you can come over to my house and smack my head with a big shovel.”

Doom-laden imagery aside, Ward said he is still fond of Black Sabbath’s head-banging sound.

“I love its primitivism, its naivete,” he said. “A very important rock band and a very good band. I love ‘em. I can be a fan now. I can listen to it and be outside it.”

Ward acknowledges that he remains a fortunate Sabbath insider in one respect: royalties. “It’s been a godsend. I get to feed the kids,” he said of catalogue sales spurred by the advent of compact discs. “I’m hoping I can get in a position where I’m self-supporting from my own work.”

As his first album emerges, Ward is preparing for one of the last but most difficult steps along the way to a full comeback: touring. In the early ‘80s, an alcohol-fogged Ward was capable of suffering a nervous breakdown at the mere thought of touring. The drummer said he is putting together a band and road crew for a “noncommittal” round of live shows this spring.

“I could still have mixed feelings” about touring, said Ward, a father of three who lives with his third wife and his two younger children in a quiet section of quaint Seal Beach, an old Navy town that couldn’t be farther from the rock ‘n’ roll fast lane.

“That’s why I want to go a little slow. I’m looking for a place inside where I can say, ‘Yeah, I feel OK about this.’ I want to make the professional commitment. I want to work through the fears that I have about going on the road. That’s my goal. If that trial run works, we’ll get more committed.”

This time, Ward won’t feel compelled to wear that old heavy metal monster’s mask.

“(With Black Sabbath) I felt I had to perform for everybody the way I thought they wanted me to be, instead of playing what I am. I feel I’ve begun to play what I am instead of playing safe. I’m letting myself be vulnerable nowadays. I’m being more of a human being these days.”