I Am Ozzy

  Another crazy thing that happened around that time was getting to know Frank Zappa in Chicago. We were doing a gig there, and it turned out that he was staying at our hotel. All of us looked up to Zappa – especially Geezer – because he seemed like he was from another planet. At the time he’d just released this quadraphonic album called Apostrophe (’), which had a track on it called ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’. Fucking classic.

  Anyway, so there we were at this hotel, and we ended up hanging out with his band in the bar. Then the next day we got word that Frank wanted us to come to his Independence Day party, which was going to be held that night at a restaurant around the corner.

  We could hardly wait.

  So come eight o’clock, off we went to meet Frank. When we arrived at the restaurant, there he was, sitting at this massive table, surrounded by his band. We introduced ourselves, then we all started to get pissed. But it was really weird, because the guys in his band kept coming up to me and saying, ‘You got any blow? Don’t tell Frank I asked you. He’s straight. Hates that stuff. But have you got any? Just a toot, to keep me going.’

  I didn’t want to get involved, so I just went, ‘Nah,’ even though I had a big bag of the stuff in my pocket.

  Later, after we’d finished eating, I was sitting next to Frank when two waiters burst out of the kitchen, wheeling a massive cake in front of them. The whole restaurant went quiet. You should have seen that cake, man. It was made into the shape of a naked chick with two big, icing-covered tits – and her legs were spread wide apart. But the craziest thing about it was that they’d rigged up a little pump, so champagne was squirting out of her vagina. You could have heard a pin drop in that place until the band finally started to sing ‘America the Beautiful’. Then everyone had to have a ceremonial drink of the champagne, starting with Frank.

  When it was my turn, I took a long gulp, screwed up my face, and said, ‘Ugh, tastes like piss.’

  Everyone thought that was hilarious.

  Then Frank leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘Got any blow? It’s not for me – it’s for my bodyguard.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sure. But don’t tell the band. They’re straight.’

  I saw Frank again a few years later, after he’d done a gig at the Birmingham Odeon. When the show was over, he asked me, ‘Is there anywhere we can get something to eat in this town? I’m staying at the Holiday Inn, and the food’s terrible.’

  I told him, ‘At this time of night, there’s only the curry house on Bristol Street, but I don’t recommend it.’

  Frank just shrugged and said, ‘Oh, that’ll do, I’ll have a go.’

  So we all went to this dodgy Indian joint – me, Frank, Thelma and some Japanese chick that Frank was hanging out with at the time. I told Frank that the only thing on the menu he shouldn’t order, under any circumstances, was the steak. He nodded, looked at the menu for a while, then ordered the steak. When it arrived, I just sat there and watched him try to eat it.

  ‘Like old boots, is it?’ I said.

  ‘No, actually,’ replied Frank, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. ‘More like new ones.’

  *

  By the mid-seventies, everything had changed with Black Sabbath. In the early days, we used to hang out with each other all the time, and whenever we arrived in a new place for a gig, we’d walk around the town like a little gang, trying out the pubs and clubs, hitting on chicks, getting pissed. But as time went on, we saw less and less of each other. When me and Bill did our road trips, for example, we hardly spent any time with Tony or Geezer. Then even me and Bill started to drift apart. I was the noisy fucker who would always be throwing parties and having chicks in my room and getting up to all sorts of debauchery, and Bill would just want to stay in his bed and sleep.

  After all that time on the road, we’d just had enough of each other’s company. But when we didn’t spend any time together, all our problems grew in our heads, and we stopped communicating.

  Then, all of a sudden, everything just blew up. For a start, the publishing rights to a lot of our early work had already been sold to a company called Essex Music ‘in perpetuity’, which was a posh way of saying for ever.

  And there’d been other signs of trouble, like when London & County Bank went bust. I don’t know exactly what the deal was – I’m hardly the financial brain of Britain – but I know I had to sell the deeds to the land I’d bought from the cross-dressing farmer in order to save Bulrush Cottage. If me and Thelma hadn’t paid for the land with our own money, we’d have been fucked.

  The biggest problem was our management. At some point we realised that we’d been stitched up. Although in theory Meehan would send us an allowance for whatever we wanted, whenever we asked for it, we didn’t actually have any control. We were supposed to have our own individual bank accounts, but it turned out they didn’t exist. So I’d have to go to his office and ask for a thousand quid or whatever. He’d say, ‘OK,’ and the cheque would turn up in the post. But after a while the cheques started to bounce.

  So we fired him. Then all this legal crap started, with law-suits flying around all over the place. While we were working on the follow-up to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath – which we ended up calling Sabotage, in reference to Meehan’s bullshit – writs were being delivered to us at the mixing desk. That was when we came to the conclusion that lawyers rip you off just as much as managers do. You get charged for every penny they spend while they’re working for you, down to the last paperclip. And they’re happy to fuck around in court for the rest of their lives, as long as someone’s paying the bills. If it takes fifty years to win, that’s fine, as far as those guys are concerned.

  We had this one lawyer working for us, and I ended up hating him. I just couldn’t stand the bloke because he was taking the piss. When we were recording Sabotage in Morgan Studios, he came over to see us one day and said, ‘Gentlemen, I’m going to buy you all a drink.’ I thought, Wow, I can’t believe this, the guy’s actually getting his wallet out for something. Then, at the end of the meeting, he took out this little notepad and started adding up what we’d all had, so he could bill us later. ‘Right. Ozzy, you had two beers, so that’s sixty pence,’ he went, ‘and Tony, you had one beer and—’

  I said, ‘You’re fucking joking, right?’

  But of course he wasn’t. That’s what lawyers do. They grease you down and stick their fist up your arse.

  You can hear the frustration on Sabotage. There’s some heavy-duty shit on that album. One incredible track is ‘Supertzar’. I remember the day it was recorded: I walked into Morgan Studios and there was an entire forty-member choir in there along with an eighty-six-year-old harpist. They were making a noise like God conducting the soundtrack to the end of the world. I didn’t even attempt to put a vocal over the top of it.

  One song I’m very proud of on that album is ‘The Writ’. I wrote most of lyrics myself, which felt a bit like seeing a shrink. All the anger I felt towards Meehan came pouring out. But y’know what? All that bullshit he pulled on us didn’t get him anywhere in the end. You should see him now: he looks like a fat, boozy old fuck. But I don’t hate him. Hating people isn’t a productive way of living. When all’s said and done, I don’t wish the bloke any harm. I’m still here, y’know? I still have a career. So what’s the point in hating anyone? There’s enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it. And I got a song out of it, at least.

  Aside from ‘The Writ’, I can’t say I’m very proud of much else that happened in that period.

  Like pulling a gun on Bill while I was having a bad acid trip at Bulrush Cottage. The gun wasn’t loaded. But he didn’t know that, and I didn’t tell him. He was very cool about it at the time, but we’ve never talked about it since, which means it was probably quite a big deal.

  I had a few bad acid trips around that time, actually. Another night we were at Fields Farm, Bill’s old rented house, which a couple of roadies had taken over, and we w
ere getting badly fucked up for some reason. There was a terrible vibe that night, because a kid had just drowned in the lake on the property while pissing around in a canoe, and the cops had torn the place apart, dredging the lake for the body, and searching for drugs. Not exactly the best time to be doing acid, in other words. But that didn’t stop us. All I can remember is wandering off into a field and meeting these two horses. Then one of them said to the other, ‘Fuck me, that bloke can talk,’ and I freaked out, big time.

  I hit Thelma, too, which is probably the worst thing I ever did in my life. I started to get overpowering with her, and the poor woman must have been frightened to death. What made it even worse was that we’d just had our second kid – little Louis. Thelma really suffered with me, y’know, and I really regret that. If there’s one thing I wish for in my life, it’s that I could take it all back. But of course you never can never take violence back – of any kind – and I’ll take it to the grave with me. My own parents used to fight a lot, so maybe I thought that’s just what you do. But there’s no excuse. One night, when I was out of my tree on booze and pills, I hit Thelma so hard I gave her a black eye. We were meeting her father the next day, and I thought, Fucking hell, he’s gonna beat the crap out of me now. But all he said was, ‘So which one of you won, eh?’

  The saddest thing is, it wasn’t until I became sober that I truly realised how disgusting my behaviour was. But I do now, trust me.

  While all that fucked-up stuff was going on, we decided to make another album – this time hauling all our gear and crew to America and booking into Criteria Studios in Miami. The title we’d decided on was Technical Ecstasy, although I can’t say I was 100 per cent enthusiastic. By now, our albums were getting ridiculously expensive to make. We’d recorded Black Sabbath in one day. Sabotage took about four thousand years. Technical Ecstasy didn’t take quite as long, but the cost of doing it in Florida was astronomical.

  At the same time as our sales were falling, the record company wasn’t as interested as it used to be, we’d just got a million-dollar tax bill from the IRS in America, we couldn’t afford to pay our legal bills, and we didn’t have a manager. At one point, Bill was the one manning the phones. Worse than all that, though, we’d lost our direction. It wasn’t the experimentation with the music. It was more that we didn’t seem to know who we were any more. One minute you had an album cover like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, with the bloke being attacked by demons on it, and the next you had two robots having sex while they’re going up a fucking escalator, which was the art-work for Technical Ecstasy.

  I’m not saying the album was all bad – it wasn’t. For example, Bill wrote a song called ‘It’s Alright’, which I loved. He sang it, too. He’s got a great voice, Bill, and I was more than happy for him to do the honours. But I’d started to lose interest, and I kept thinking about what it would be like to have a solo career. I’d even had a T-shirt made with ‘Blizzard of Ozz’ written on the front. Meanwhile, in the studio, Tony was always saying, ‘We’ve gotta sound like Foreigner,’ or, ‘We’ve gotta sound like Queen.’ But I thought it was strange that the bands that we’d once influenced were now influencing us. Then again, I’d lost the plot with the booze and the drugs, and I was saying a lot of bad things, making trouble, being a dick-head.

  In fact, my boozing was so bad during the Technical Ecstasy sessions in Florida, I checked myself into a loony bin called St George’s when I got back home. It’s real name was the Stafford County Asylum, but they changed it to make people feel better about being insane. It was a big old Victorian place. Dark and dingy, like the set of a science-fiction movie. The first thing the doctor said to me when I went in there was, ‘Do you masturbate, Mr Osbourne?’ I told him, ‘I’m in here for my head, not my dick.’

  I didn’t last long in that place. I’m telling you, the docs in those funny farms are more bonkers than the patients.

  Then Thelma bought me some chickens.

  She probably thought it would help bring me down to earth. And it did, for about five minutes. But then the novelty wore off – especially when I realised that Thelma expected me to feed the fucking things and clean out their shit. So I started trying to find a reason to get rid of them.

  ‘Thelma,’ I said to her, one morning, after I’d finally had enough. ‘Where did you get those chickens from? They’re broken.’

  ‘What do you mean, they’re broken?’

  ‘They’re not laying any eggs.’

  ‘Well, it would help if you fed them, John. Besides, they’re probably stressed out, poor things.’

  ‘Why d’you say that?’

  ‘Come on, John. You put up a sign beside their coop that says, “Oflag 14”. I know they can’t read, but still.’

  ‘It’s just a joke.’

  ‘Firing warning shots over their heads every morning probably isn’t helping much, either.’

  ‘Everyone needs a bit of encouragement.’

  ‘You’re scaring the living daylights out of them. You’ll give one of them a heart attack if you keep it up.’

  Here’s hoping, I thought.

  As the weeks and months went by, I kept forgetting to feed the chickens, and they kept forgetting to lay any eggs. All I would hear from Thelma was: ‘John, feed the chickens.’ Or: ‘John, remember to feed the chickens.’ Or: ‘John, did you feed the chickens?’

  It was driving me fucking nuts.

  I was trying to have a break – making Technical Ecstasy had been knackering, mainly thanks to all the boozing involved – but I couldn’t get any peace. If it wasn’t Thelma, it was the lawyers. If it wasn’t the lawyers, it was the accountants. If it wasn’t the accountants, it was the record company. And if it wasn’t the record company, it was Tony or Bill or Geezer, worrying about the ‘new direction’ or complaining about our tax bills.

  The only way I could handle it was to get loaded all the time.

  Then one day I finally lost it.

  I’d been up all night – a lock-in at the Hand & Cleaver, followed by more boozing at home, then a few toots of coke, then some dope, then some more coke, then a blackout around breakfast time to refresh myself, then some coke to wake me up again. By then it was time for lunch. So I had a bottle of cough syrup, three glasses of wine, some more coke, a joint, half a packet of cigarettes and a Scotch egg. But no matter how much I put away, I couldn’t get rid of this horrendous restless feeling. I’d often get that feeling after coming home from America: I’d find myself standing in the kitchen for hours, just opening and closing the fridge door; or sitting in the living room in front of the telly, flipping from one channel to the next, never watching anything.

  But this time, something was different.

  I was going insane.

  There was nothing else for it: I was gonna have to go back down the Hand & Cleaver and sort myself out.

  I was just about to leave the house when I heard Thelma coming down the stairs. She walked into the kitchen and said, ‘I’m going to my mum’s to get the kids.’ I watched as she picked up a pile of Good Housekeeping magazines from the table and started putting them in her bag. Then she stopped and turned to look at me standing there beside the fridge in my underpants and my dressing-gown, fag in mouth, giving my balls a good old scratch.

  ‘Did you feed the chickens?’ she said.

  ‘I told you, they’re broken.’

  ‘Just feed them, John, for God’s sake. Or, y’know what? Let them die – I don’t care any more.’

  ‘I’m going down the pub.’

  ‘Wearing the terrycloth bathrobe you got for Christmas?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Classy, John. Very classy.’

  ‘Have you seen my slippers?’

  ‘Try the dog bed. I’ll be back at eight.’

  Next thing I knew I was staggering out of the house in a pair of welly-boots – I couldn’t find my slippers – heading in the direction of the pub. As I walked I kept trying to tighten the cord around my dressing-gown. I didn’t want to
be flashing a loose bollock at any passing farmers; especially not the bearded cross-dressing loony from down the road.

  When I got to the gate at the bottom of the driveway I suddenly had a change of heart. ‘You know what?’ I said to myself. ‘I’m going to feed those chickens. Fuck it. If it keeps her happy, I’ll do it.’ So I turned around and started wobbling back in the direction of the house. But I was thirsty now, so I went over to where the Range Rover was parked, pulled open the door, and reached into the glove box for my emergency bottle of Scotch.

  Swig. Ahhh. That’s better! Burp.

  On I went into the garden… But then I had another change of heart. Fuck the chickens! I thought. Not one of those little fuckers has ever laid any eggs for me! Fuck them! Fuck them all!

  Swig. Ahhh. Burp. I lit another fag.

  Then I remembered that I still hadn’t finished the fag that was already in my mouth, so I flicked it into Thelma’s vegetable patch. I changed direction again, this time heading towards the shed.

  I threw open the door and stood there, looking up at my Benelli semi-automatic on the gun rack. I picked it up, opened the chamber to see if it was loaded – it was – then I set about stuffing the pockets of my dressing-gown full of cartridges. Next I reached up to the top shelf for the jerry can of petrol that the gardener kept there for my lawnmower – the one I used to ride to the pub every so often for a laugh (Patrick Meehan’s office had got it for me, even though I’d asked them for a combine harvester).

  So, with the jerry can in one hand, the shotgun in the other, and the Scotch under my arm – still puffing away on my fag – I lurched into the garden and towards the chicken coop. The sun was setting now, and the sky had gone all red and orange. In my head, the only thing I could hear was Thelma saying, ‘John, feed the chickens. John, have you fed the chickens?’