Meanwhile, we just kept selling more records. One minute we were at the raggedy end of the line when it came to rock bands from Birmingham; the next we’d overtaken just about everybody. What we didn’t know was that Meehan was taking nearly everything. Even a lot of the stuff he ‘gave’ us wasn’t actually ours. Behind the scenes, he was bleeding us dry. But y’know what, I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and I don’t think we can complain too much. We’d come out of Aston with nothing to lose and everything to gain, and by our early twenties we were living like kings. We didn’t have to carry our own gear, we didn’t have to make our own food, we barely had to tie our own shoelaces. And, on top of all that, we could just ask for stuff and it would appear on a silver plate.
I mean, you should have seen Tony’s collection of Lamborghinis. Even Bill got his own chauffeured Rolls-Royce. We were good like that: we split all the dough four ways. The way we saw it, Tony did the riffs, Geezer did the words, I did the melodies, and Bill did his wild drum thing, and each part was as important as the others, so everyone should get the same. I think that’s why we lasted as long as we did. For starters, it meant we never argued over who’d done what. Then, if one of us wanted to branch out – like if Bill wanted to sing, or if I wanted to write some lyrics – it was cool. No one was sitting there with a calculator, adding up the royalties they’d win or lose.
Mind you, another reason why we could do what we wanted was because we had total musical control. No record mogul had created Black Sabbath, so no record mogul could tell Black Sabbath what to do. A couple of them tried – and we told them where to stick it.
Not many bands can do that nowadays.
One thing I regret is not giving more dough to my folks. I mean, if it hadn’t been for my old man taking out a loan on that PA system, I never would have had a chance. In fact, I’d probably have gone back to burglary. Maybe I’d still be in prison today. But I didn’t think about them. I was young, I was loaded most of the time, and my ego was already starting to rule the world. Besides, I might have been rich, but I didn’t have much ready cash. All I did was call Patrick Meehan’s office and put in my requests, which was different to having your own dough to throw around. In fact, the only time I made any real money was when I realised I could just sell the stuff that the management company gave me, which I did one time with a Rolls-Royce. The others soon learned the same trick too. But how was I supposed to explain that to my folks, when they just saw me swaggering around the place like Jack the Lad? It’s not like I gave them nothing, but I know now that I never gave them enough. You could tell from the atmosphere every time I walked through the door at 14 Lodge Road. I’d ask my mum, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Well, it’s obviously something. Just tell me.’
She wouldn’t say, but you could smell it in the air: money, money, money. Nothing but money. Not: ‘I’m proud of you, son. Well done, you finally made it, you worked hard. Have a cup of tea. I love you.’ Just money. It got really ugly after a while. I didn’t want to be at home; it was so uncomfortable. I suppose they’d never had any money of their own, and they wanted mine. Which was fair enough. I should have given it to them.
But I didn’t.
I met a girl and moved out instead.
4
‘You Guys Ain’t Black!’
I was never the Romeo type, me.
Even after our first album went gold, I never got any good-looking chicks. Black Sabbath was a blokes’ band. We’d get fag ends and beer bottles thrown at us, not frilly underwear. We used to joke that the only groupies that came to our gigs were ‘two-baggers’ – you needed to put a couple of bags over their head before you could shag them; one wasn’t enough. And most of the time I was lucky even to get a two-bagger, to be honest with you. The chicks who wanted to shack up with me at the end of the night were usually three- or four-baggers. One night in Newcastle I think I had a five-bagger.
That was a rough night, that was. A lot of gin was involved, if I remember correctly.
But none of that stopped me trying to get my end away.
One of the places where I used to go cruising for a good old bonk was the Rum Runner nightclub on Broad Street in Birmingham, where an old school mate of Tony’s worked on the door. It was a famous place, the Rum Runner – years later, Duran Duran would become the resident band there – so it was magic to have someone on the inside who could get you in without any trouble.
One night, not long after we’d signed the record deal, I went to the Rum Runner with Tony. This was before we’d met Patrick Meehan, so we were still broke. We drove there in Tony’s second-hand car, which I think was a Ford Cortina. It was a piece of crap, anyway. Albert greets us at the door as usual, the bouncers unclip the rope to let us through, and the first thing I see is this dark-haired chick behind the counter in the cloakroom.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked Albert.
‘Thelma Riley,’ he told me. ‘Lovely gal. Brainy, too. But she’s divorced, and she’s got a kid, so watch yerself.’
I didn’t care.
She was beautiful, and I wanted to talk to her. So I did what I always did when I wanted to talk to a bird: I got fucking lollied. But something strange must have been going on that night, because the old get-as-dribblingly-drunk-as-possible strategy worked: I pulled her on the dance floor while Tony pulled her mate. Then we all drove back to Tony’s place in his Cortina, with me and Thelma having a snog and a fumble on the back seat.
Tony dumped Thelma’s friend the next day, but me and Thelma kept going. And when I finally couldn’t take any more of the bad atmosphere at 14 Lodge Road, we rented a flat together above a launderette in Edgbaston, a posh part of Birmingham.
A year or so later, in 1971, we got married in a registry office.
I thought it was what you did: get some dough, find a chick, get married, settle down, go to the pub.
It was a terrible mistake.
A few months before the wedding, Black Sabbath finally made it to America. Before we went, I remember Patrick Meehan’s dad calling us into a meeting at his London office, and telling us that we were going to be ‘ambassadors for British music’, so we should fucking behave ourselves.
We just nodded and ignored him.
Having said that, I made sure to go easy on the booze until we reached the airport. But what I didn’t know is that airports had bars – and I couldn’t resist a couple of cheeky ones to calm my nerves. So by the time I got to my seat, I was as pissed as a fart. Then we found out that Traffic were on the same plane. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was on the same flight as Steve Winwood. For the first time in my life, I began to feel like a proper rock star.
Even with all the booze I put away on the plane, it seemed to take for ever to get to JFK. I kept looking out of the window, thinking, How the fuck does this thing stay up in the air? Then we flew over Manhattan, where the World Trade Center was being built – half of it was still just scaffolding and steel girders – and landed as the sun was setting. It was a warm night, I remember, and I’d never experienced that warm-night-in-New-York vibe before. It had a distinctive smell, y’know? I thought it was great. Mind you, I was beyond pissed by this point. The flight attendant had to help me out of my seat, and then I fell down the steps.
By the time I got to immigration, the hangover had set it. My headache was so bad that I’d forgotten what I’d written as a joke on the visa-waiver form. Where it asked for your religion, I’d put ‘Satanist’. So the bloke takes the form off me and starts reading it. Then he pauses when he gets halfway down.
He looks up at me. ‘Satanist, huh?’ he says, in this thick Bronx accent, with a bored, tired look on his face.
Suddenly I’m thinking, Oh, shit.
But before I can start trying to explain myself, he just stamps the form and shouts, ‘NEXT!’
‘Welcome to New York’ said the sign above his head.
We got our luggage from the carousel and went to
queue in the taxi rank outside the arrivals hall. Fuck knows what all the businessmen with their suits and ties and briefcases were thinking, standing next to this long-haired, unwashed, pissed-up Brummie, wearing a tap around his neck and a pair of smelly old jeans with ‘Peace & Love’ and a CND symbol on one leg, and ‘Black Panthers Rule’ and a black fist symbol on the other.
As we waited, this massive yellow car drove by. It must have had nineteen or twenty doors on it.
‘I knew the cars here were big,’ I slurred, ‘but not that big!’
‘It’s a limousine, you idiot,’ said Tony.
Before we left England, we’d already recorded our follow-up to Black Sabbath. We had it in the can only five months after the release of the first record – which is unbelievable when you consider the lazy-arsed way albums are made these days. It was originally going to be called Warpiggers, which was a term for a black magic wedding or something. Then we changed it to War Pigs, and Geezer came up with these heavy-duty lyrics about death and destruction. No wonder we never got any chicks at our gigs. Geezer just wasn’t interested in your average ‘I love you’ pop song. Even when he wrote a boy-meets-girl lyric, it had a twist to it – like ‘N.I.B.’ off the first album, where the boy turns out to be the Devil. Geezer also liked to put a lot of topical stuff, like Vietnam references, into our songs. He had his ear to the ground, Geezer did.
We went back to Regent Sound in Soho to make the second record, although we’d spent a few weeks beforehand rehearsing in an old barn at Rockfield Studios in South Wales. Studio time cost a fortune back then, so we didn’t want to fuck around when the meter was running. And once our work was done at Regent Sound we moved to Island Studios in Notting Hill to do the final mix. That was when Rodger Bain realised we needed a few extra minutes of material. I remember him coming down from the control room one lunch break and saying, ‘Look, lads, we need some filler. Can you jam something?’ We all wanted to get started on our sandwiches, but Tony launched into this guitar riff while Bill played around with some drum patterns, I hummed a melody, and Geezer sat in the corner, scribbling down some lyrics.
Twenty minutes later, we had a song called ‘The Paranoid’. By the end of the day, it had become just ‘Paranoid’.
It’s always the way with the best songs: they come out of nowhere, when you’re not even trying. The thing with ‘Paranoid’ is that it doesn’t fit into any category: it was like a punk song years before punk had been invented. Mind you, none of us thought it was anything special when we recorded it. To us, it just seemed a bit half-arsed compared with ‘Hand of Doom’ or ‘Iron Man’ or any of those heavier numbers. But fucking hell, it was catchy; I was humming it all the way home from the studio. ‘Thelma,’ I said, when I got back to Edgbaston. ‘I think we might have written a single.’
She just gave me a look that said, That’ll be the day.
It’s funny, y’know: if you’d told us at the time that people would still be listening to any of those songs forty years into the future – and that the album would sell more than four million copies in America alone – we would have just laughed in your face.
But the fact is Tony Iommi turned out to be one of the greatest heavy rock riff-makers of all time. Whenever we went into the studio we’d challenge him to beat his last riff – and he’d come up with something like ‘Iron Man’ and blow everyone away.
But ‘Paranoid’ was a different class again. About two seconds after the suits at Vertigo heard that song, the name of the whole album became Paranoid. It wasn’t that they thought War Pigs might upset Americans because of Vietnam – at least not as far as I know. No, they were just freaking out about our little three-minute pop song, because they thought it might get played on the radio, and bands like ours never got played on the radio. And it made sense to give the album the same title as the single, to make it easier to promote in the record shops.
The suits were right. ‘Paranoid’ went straight to number four in the British singles chart and got us on Top of the Pops – alongside Cliff Richard, of all people. The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the colour of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers.
‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.’
Top of the Pops was probably the biggest thing I’d done in my entire life at that point. Every week when I was growing up in Aston, the entire Osbourne family would get together around the telly to watch that show. Even my mum loved it. So when my folks heard I was going to be on, they were speechless. In those days, fifteen million people tuned in to Top of the Pops every week, and Pan’s People were still doing those hippy dances between the numbers.
It was fucking awesome, man.
I remember being really impressed by Cliff Richard, ’cos he did his song live, with a full orchestra.
We didn’t take the piss out of him or anything – after all, it hadn’t been that long since I’d been singing ‘Living Doll’ in front of my parents. I think the song he did was ‘I Ain’t Got Time Any More’. I haven’t seen the tape for years – maybe it was wiped so the reels could be reused, which was the BBC’s policy back then. I’ll tell you one thing, though: I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if Cliff looked older on that 1970 Top of the Pops episode than he does now. He ages in reverse, that bloke. Every time I see him, he’s lost another couple of years.
When it was our turn to go on, my whole body went numb with fear. The other three didn’t have to play a note – they just had to look the part and tap their feet in time to the backing track. But I had to sing live. It was my first time on telly and I was shitting myself like I’d never shit myself before. Pure terror. The inside of my mouth was so dry, it felt like I had a ball of cotton wool in there. But I got through it.
My mum and dad watched us at home on the telly – or so my brothers told me a few days later.
If they were proud, they didn’t say so. But I like to think they were.
That song changed everything for us. And I loved playing it. For a week or two we even had screaming girls showing up at our gigs and throwing their knickers at us, which was a nice change, although we were obviously a bit worried about pissing off our regular fans. Straight after Top of the Pops, we did a gig in Paris, and at the end of the show this beautiful French chick stayed behind. Then she took me back to her place and fucked the shit out of me. I didn’t understand a word she said the entire night.
Which is sometimes the best way with one-night stands.
I thought America was fabulous.
Take pizza, for example. For years, I’d been thinking, I wish someone would invent a new kind of food. In England, it was always egg and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chips… anything and chips. After a while it just got boring, y’know? But you couldn’t exactly order a shaved Parmesan and rocket salad in Birmingham in the early seventies. If it didn’t come out of a deep-fat fryer, no one knew what the fuck it was. But then, in New York, I discovered pizza. It blew my mind wide fucking open. I would buy ten or twenty slices a day. And then, when I realised you could buy a great big pizza all for yourself, I started ordering them wherever we went. I couldn’t wait to get back home and tell all my mates: ‘There’s this incredible new thing. It’s American and it’s called pizza. It’s like bread, but it’s better than any bread you’ve tasted in your life.’ I even tried to recreate a New York pizza for Thelma one time. I made some dough, then I got all these cans of beans and pilchards and olives and shit and put them on top – it must have been about fifteen quid’s worth of gear – but after ten minutes it just came dribbling out of the oven. It was like somebody had been sick in there. Thelma just looked at it and went, ‘I don’t think I like pizza, John.’ She never called me Ozzy, my first wife. Not once in
the entire time I knew her.
Another incredible thing I discovered in America was the Harvey Wallbanger – a cocktail made with vodka, Galliano and orange juice. They knocked your fucking head off, those things. I drank so many Wallbangers that I can’t even stand the smell of them now.
One whiff and I’ll vomit on cue.
And then there were the American chicks, who were nothing like English chicks. I mean, when you pulled a chick in England, you gave her the eye, one thing led to another, you took her out, you bought her this and that, and then about a month later you asked if she fancied a good old game of hide the sausage. In America, the chicks just came right up to you and said, ‘Hey, let’s fuck.’ You didn’t even have to make any effort.
We found that out on our first night, when we stayed at a place called Loew’s Midtown Motor Inn, which was on Eighth Avenue and 48th Street, a sleazy part of town. I couldn’t sleep, ’cos I had jet lag, which was another wild new experience. So I’m lying there, wide awake at three o’clock in the morning, and there’s a knock on the door. I get up to answer it, and there’s this scrawny-looking chick standing there in a trench coat, which she unbuttons in front of me. And she’s completely starkers underneath.
‘Can I come in?’ she whispers, in this throaty, sexy voice.
What was I supposed to say? ‘No thanks, darlin’, I’m a bit busy.’