Anyway, at some point I remember Sharon coming up to us, very excited, and saying, ‘Great news, guys. The tickets for the Palladium in New York just went on sale, and they sold out in an hour!’ We were all cheering and whooping and doing high fives. Then Sharon went off to take a phone call. When she came back she had an even bigger smile on her face and said, ‘You’ll never guess what: the Palladium want us to do two shows in one night.’
I couldn’t believe it: everything was really taking off. But Bob and Lee went very quiet then disappeared for one of their little chin-wags. When they came back, they said, ‘Well, if we’re doing two shows, we want double our travel expenses and double our pay.’ That was a bit much for me. None of us had seen any real dough at that point, and the Ardens had put up the cash for everything – the studio time, the hotels, the food, the equipment, the staff, you fucking name it. Where did they think the money was coming from – the sky? The fact was, every last penny had to be paid back to Don, but Bob and Lee didn’t have to worry about that because they were basically session players.
I wanted them gone after that. I said to Sharon, ‘If we carry on like this, every five minutes there’s going to be another row, and I’ve had enough of that bullshit.’
So that was the end of Bob and Lee, although I worked with Bob a few times over the years, until he started suing me every other day of the week.
It’s sad, y’know, what money does to people. Always money. But I honestly believe that if Bob and Lee had stayed on, I wouldn’t be where I am today. The bad vibes would have made it impossible to get anything done. Luckily, Sharon had been working on replacements for them for a while – they’d been getting on her tits for a long time – and she managed to sign up Tommy Aldridge, the drummer I’d wanted from the start, and a bass player called Rudy Sarzo, who’d worked with Randy in Quiet Riot. And that was that.
When the second album was finally done, we packed up our stuff, got on a plane, and went to LA for a week of rehearsals and record company meetings before the tour began in Maryland.
Don’t ask me who bought the doves.
All I know is that Sharon showed them to me when we were in the limo on the way over to the Century City headquarters of CBS Records, a few days after we’d flown into LA.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she said. ‘Listen. They’re cooing. Aw.’
Our meeting with CBS was a big deal.
Although Blizzard of Ozz had been a hit in England, we badly needed success in America, ’cos we were broke. Everything depended on it. Since going out on the road, we’d been living hand-to-mouth, sleeping in flea-infested hotel rooms, one of us handcuffed to a briefcase full of all the cash we had left in the world. Which was fuck-all, pretty much. We hadn’t even been paid the advance for Diary of a Madman, ’cos Sharon couldn’t prise it out of her father’s sweaty hands. Meanwhile, Thelma was talking about a divorce, which meant I could lose everything all over again.
‘What d’you want doves for, anyway?’ I asked Sharon, swigging from the bottle of Cointreau I’d brought with me.
Sharon gave me one of her looks.
‘Don’t you remember, Ozzy? Our conversation? Last night? They’re for the meeting. When we get in there, you’re going to throw the doves in the air so they fly around the room.’
‘What for?’
‘Because that’s what we agreed. And then you’re going to say “rock ’n’ roll” and give them the peace sign.’ I couldn’t remember any of it. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but I was already on Planet Booze. I hadn’t stopped since the night before. Or the night before that.
I’d even forgotten why we were going to see CBS. But then Sharon reminded me: ‘They need a kick up the arse because they bought Blizzard of Ozz from my father for a pathetically small sum of money, so they’re probably expecting it to bomb, which is exactly what Black Sabbath’s last two albums did in America. You’re nothing in this country as a solo artist, Ozzy. Forget about the sold-out shows in Britain. You’re starting from scratch here. When you go into this meeting, you’ve got to make an impression, show them who you are.’
‘With doves?’ I said.
‘Exactly.’
I put down the bottle and took the birds from Sharon.
‘Why don’t I bite their heads off?’ I said, holding them up in front of my face. ‘That’ll make an impression.’
Sharon just laughed, shook her head, and looked out of the window at the blue sky and the palm trees.
‘I’m serious,’ I said.
‘Ozzy, you’re not going to bite their heads off.’
‘Yeah, I am.’
‘No, you’re not, silly.’
‘Yeah, I fucking am. I’ve been feeling a bit peckish all morning.’
Sharon laughed again. I loved that sound more than I loved anything else in the world.
The meeting was bullshit. A bunch of fake smiles and limp handshakes. Then someone told me how excited they were that Adam Ant was coming to America. Adam Ant? I almost chinned the cunt when he said that. It was obvious none of them gave a shit. Even the PR chick kept looking at her watch. But the meeting went on and on while all these suits with gold watches spouted meaningless corporate marketing bollocks, until eventually I got pissed off waiting for Sharon to give me the cue to throw the doves in the air. In the end I just got up, walked aross the room, sat down on the arm of the PR chick’s chair, and pulled one of them out of my pocket.
‘Oh, cute,’ she said, giving me another fake smile. Then she looked at her watch again.
That’s it, I thought.
I opened my mouth wide.
Across the room, I saw Sharon flinch.
Then I went chomp, spit.
The dove’s head landed on the PR chick’s lap in a splatter of blood. To be honest with you, I was so pissed, it just tasted of Cointreau. Well, Cointreau and feathers. And a bit of beak. Then I threw the carcass on to the table and watched it twitch.
The bird had shit itself when I bit into its neck, and the stuff had gone everywhere. The PR chick’s dress was flecked with this nasty brown-and-white goo, and my jacket, a horrible yellow eighties thing with a Rupert the Bear-style pattern on it, was pretty much ruined. To this day, I have no fucking idea what was going on in my head. I mean, the poor dove. But I’ll tell you one thing: it made an impression, all right.
For a split second, all you could hear was everyone taking a breath at the same time and the photographer in the corner going click-click-click.
Then pandemonium.
The PR chick started screaming, ‘Ew, ew, ew!’, while a bloke in a suit ran over to the bin in the corner and puked. Then alarms started going off, as someone yelled into the intercom for security.
‘GET THIS ANIMAL OUT OF HERE! NOW!’
At that moment I took the other dove out of my pocket.
‘Hello, birdie,’ I said to it, giving it a kiss on the head. ‘My name’s Ozzy Osbourne. And I’m here to promote my new album, Blizzard of Ozz.’
Then I opened my mouth and everyone in the room went ‘NOOOOOO!’ People were covering their eyes with their arms and screaming at me to stop it and get the fuck out. But instead of biting its head off, I let it go, and it flapped happily around the room.
‘Peace,’ I said, as two massive security guards burst into the room, grabbed me by the arms, and dragged me out backwards.
The panic in that place was insane, man.
Meanwhile, Sharon was pissing herself laughing. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. I think it was just her reaction to the shock of it, more than anything else. She’d also been pretty pissed off with CBS for not showing enough enthusiasm about the album, so in a way she was probably glad I’d just given them the fright of their lives, even if it was the most horrific thing she’d ever seen. ‘You are banned from the CBS building, you freakshow,’ said the chief security bloke, after he’d pushed me out of the front door of the building into the hundred-degree LA heat. ‘If I see you here again, I’ll have
you arrested, d’you understand?’
Sharon followed me outside, then she grabbed me by the collar, and kissed me.
‘That poor fucking creature,’ she said. ‘We’ll be lucky if CBS doesn’t pull the plug on the whole record after that performance. They might even sue us. You bad, bad, bad boy.’
‘So why aren’t you giving me a bollocking, then?’ I asked her, confused.
‘Because the press are going to fucking love it.’
That night, we went back to Don Arden’s house, where we were staying with Rudy and Tommy, our new rhythm section. Don’s house was a big Spanish-style deal at the top of Benedict Canyon, above Beverly Hills, with red tiles on the roof and a huge iron gate to keep the little people away. Apparently Howard Hughes had built the place for one of his girlfriends. Don had bought it after making a ton of dough from ELO, and now he lived up there like a king, with Cary Grant as his neighbour. When were in town, Don would put us up in the one of the ‘bungalows’ on the grounds. He used another one of the bungalows as the LA headquarters of Jet Records.
I was so shitfaced by the time our limo pulled up in the driveway, I barely knew what planet I was on. Then I went off with Rudy to one of the rooms at the back of the house where Don had a TV, a drinks cabinet and a ‘wet bar’. I’d moved on from Cointreau to beer by that point, which meant I needed to take a slash every five seconds. But I couldn’t be arsed to walk all the way to the bog, so I just pissed in the sink. Which wasn’t a problem until Don walked past the door in his dressing-gown, on his way to bed.
All I heard was this voice from behind me, loud enough to register on the Richter scale. ‘OZZY, ARE YOU PISSING IN MY FUCKING SINK?’
Oh, shit.
I squeezed my dick to stop the piss.
He’s gonna kill me, I thought. He’s gonna fucking kill me.
Then I had an idea: if I whip around really quick while zipping up my fly, everything will be fine. So that’s what I started to do. But I was so loaded, my hand slipped off my dick as I turned, and this jet of piss came spraying out – straight at Don.
He jumped backwards and it missed him by a fraction of an inch.
To this day, I’ve never seen a human being so angry. I swear, I thought he was gonna rip my head off and take a shit down my windpipe. The bloke was livid: red in the face, shaking, spit flying out of his mouth. The whole deal. It was terrifying. When he was done calling me every name under the sun – and a few more – he said, ‘GET OUT. GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FUCKING ANIMAL. GET OUT! GET OUT NOW!’
Then he stomped off to find Sharon. A couple of minutes later, from the other end of the house, I heard, ‘AND YOU’RE EVEN WORSE, BECAUSE YOU’RE FUCKING HIM!’
All in all, I have great memories of that first American tour.
And it wasn’t just because Blizzard of Ozz had sold a million copies by the time we’d finished. It was because I had such fabulous people around me. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve Randy Rhoads. He was the only musician who’d ever been in my band. He could read music. He could write music. He was so dedicated that he would find a classical guitar instructor in every town we went to and get a lesson. He’d give his own lessons, too. Whenever we were on the West Coast, he’d find time to go to his mother’s school and tutor the kids. He worshipped his mum, Randy did. I remember when we were recording Blizzard of Ozz at Ridge Farm, he asked if he could write a song and name it ‘Dee’ in her honour. I told him to go for it.
And I was having the greatest nights of my life with Sharon. We’d do stuff together that I’d never done before, like clubbing in New York. It couldn’t have been more different to when I went to New York with Black Sabbath – in those days, I wouldn’t even leave my room, ’cos I was always scared shitless. Coming from England, I thought the place was full of gangsters and villains. But Sharon took me out. We used to go to this bar called PJ’s, do coke, meet all these random people and have crazy adventures. We even hung out with Andy Warhol a few times – he was friends with a chick called Susan Blonde, who worked for CBS. He never said a word. He’d just sit there and take pictures of you with this freaky look on his face. Strange, strange bloke, that Andy Warhol.
I hung out a lot with Lemmy from Motörhead on that tour, too. He’s a very close friend of the family now. I love that guy. Wherever there’s a beer tent in the world, there’s Lemmy. But I’ve never seen that man fall down drunk, y’know? Even after twenty or thirty pints. I don’t know how he does it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he outlived me and Keith Richards.
Motörhead opened a few shows for us on that tour. They had this old hippy bus – it was the cheapest thing they could find – and all Lemmy would carry around with him was this suitcase full of books. That’s all he had in the world, apart from the clothes on his back. He loves reading, Lemmy. He’ll spend days at a time doing it. He came up to stay with us at the Howard Hughes house one time, and he wouldn’t leave the library.
Don Arden found him in there and threw a fit. He stormed to the lounge and shouted, ‘Sharon! Who the fuck is that caveman in my library? Get him out! Get him out of my house!’
‘Relax, Dad. It’s just Lemmy.’
‘I don’t care who he is. Get him out of here!’
‘He’s in a band, Dad. They’re supporting Ozzy.’
‘Well, for Christ’s sake at least get him a deckchair and put him out by the pool. He looks like the undead.’
Then Lemmy came strolling into the room. Don was right: he looked horrendous. We’d been out on the piss the night before, and his eyes were so red, they looked like puddles of blood.
But as soon as he saw me, he stopped dead in his tracks.
‘Fuck me, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘If I look half as bad as you do, I’m going back to bed, right now.’
When I finally got back to Bulrush Cottage at the end of 1981, I made a big effort to sort things out with Thelma. We even booked a holiday to Barbados with the kids.
Trouble is, if you’re a chronic alcoholic, Barbados isn’t the place to go. As soon as we got to the resort, I realised you could drink at the beach twenty-four hours a day. Which I saw as a challenge. We got there at five o’clock and I was legless by six. Thelma was used to seeing me pissed, but I was on another level altogether in Barbados.
All I remember is that at some point we bought tickets for a day trip around the bay on this olde worlde pirate ship. They had music and dancing and a walk-the-plank competition and all that kids’ stuff. Meanwhile, the big attraction for the adults was a barrel of rum punch they had at the ship’s bar. I just about jumped into that thing.
Every two minutes, it was glug-glug-glug.
After a few hours of that, I stripped down to my underpants, danced around the deck, then dived off the ship into these shark-infested waters. Unfortunately, I was too pissed to swim, so this big fucking Barbadian guy had to jump in after me and save my life. The last thing I remember is being hauled back on board and then falling asleep in the middle of the dance floor, still dripping wet. When the ship got back to the harbour, I was still there, dribbling and snoring. Apparently the captain came over and asked the kids, ‘Is that your dad?’ They went, ‘Yeah,’ then burst into tears.
Not exactly Father of the Year.
When we got on the plane to go home, Thelma turned to me and said, ‘This is the end, John. I want a divorce.’
I thought, Ah, she’s just pissed off because of the pirate ship incident. She’ll come to her senses.
But she never did.
When the plane landed at Heathrow, someone from Jet Records had organised a helicopter to pick me up and take me to a meeting about the Diary of a Madman tour. I said goodbye to the kids, kissed them on the heads, then Thelma looked at me for a long time.
‘It’s over, John,’ she said. ‘This time, it’s really over.’
I still didn’t believe her. I’d behaved so badly over the years, I thought she’d put up with anything. So I climbed into the helicopter and off I went to this country hotel, wher
e Sharon was waiting with all these set designers and lighting technicians.
They led me into a conference room with a scale model of the Diary of a Madman stage in the middle of it.
It looked incredible.
‘The beauty of this stage,’ one of the technical guys told me, ‘is that it’s easy to carry, and easy to put together.’
‘It’s brilliant,’ I said. ‘Really brilliant. Now all we need is a midget.’
The idea had come to me in Barbados. Every night on the tour, halfway through ‘Goodbye to Romance’, we’d stage the execution of a midget. I’d shout, ‘Hang the bastard!’ or something like that, and this little guy would be hoisted up with a fake noose around his neck.
It would be magic.
So, before we went out on the road, we held midget auditions.
Now, most people don’t realise that little people who are in the entertainment business are all in competition for the same jobs, so they’re forever backstabbing each other. When you hold auditions, they’ll come walking in and say, ‘Oh, you don’t want to work with that last guy. I did Snow White and the Seven with him a couple of years ago, and he’s a pain in the arse.’ It always cracked me up when a midget talked about being in Snow White and the Seven. They’d say it with a completely straight face, too, like they thought it was some hip and cool underground thing to do.