‘Is that what you’re going to wear on stage?’ he asked me, staring at my bare feet and pyjama top.
‘Oh no,’ I said, in this fake-shocked voice. ‘I always perform in gold spandex. Have you ever seen an Elvis gig? Well, I look a bit like him – but of course my tits are much smaller.’
‘Oh,’ he went.
We set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony launched into the opening riff of ‘Black Sabbath’ – doh, doh, doooohnnnn – but before I’d got through the first line of lyrics the manager had run on to the stage, red in the face, and was shouting, ‘STOP, STOP, STOP! Are you fucking serious? This isn’t Top-Forty pop covers! Who are you people?’
‘Earth,’ said Tony, shrugging. ‘You booked us, remember?’
‘I didn’t book this. I thought you were going to play “Mellow Yellow” and “California Dreamin’”.’
‘Who – us?’ laughed Tony.
‘That’s what your manager told me!’
‘Jim Simpson told you that?’
‘Who the hell’s Jim Simpson?’
‘Ah,’ said Tony, finally working out what had happened. He turned to us and said, ‘Lads, I think we might not be the only band called Earth.’
He was right: there was another Earth on the C-list gig circuit. But they didn’t play satanic music. They played pop and Motown covers. The promotional flyer that Jim Simpson had printed for us had probably only added to the confusion: it made us look like a bunch of hippies, with each of our portraits hand drawn in little clouds around a big sun and ‘Earth’ spelled out in wobbly psychedelic lettering.
‘I told you it was a crap name,’ I said. ‘Can we please now think of something that doesn’t sound like—’
‘Look,’ interrupted the manger. ‘Here’s twenty quid for the trouble of comin’ all the way up ’ere. Now fuck off, eh? Oh, and the little hobo is right – you should change yer name. Although I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would ever want to listen to that shite.’
‘Dear Mum,’ I wrote, a few weeks later,
We’re off to do a gig at the Star Club in Hamburg.
That’s where the Beatles played! Am writing this on a ferry to Dunkirk. Hope you like the picture of the white cliffs (other side). That’s what I’m looking at right now. Big news: we’re going to change our name to ‘Black Sabbath’ when we get back to England. Maybe we’ll hit the big time now. Love to all,
John
PS: Will call Jean from Hamburg.
PPS: When are you getting a telephone? Tell Dad it’s almost the 1970s now!!!
It was August 9, 1969: the day of the Charles Manson murders in Los Angeles. But we weren’t looking at the news. In those days it was almost impossible to get an English paper in Europe, and even if you did find one, it would be three or four weeks old. Besides, we were too focused on our next gig to pay much attention to the outside world.
We’d done shows before at the Star Club – which was on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, where all the dodgy hookers stand around in their skimpy dresses and fishnets – so we knew roughly what to expect. This time, though, we had a ‘residency’, which meant they would pay us a wage and put us up in this bombed-out shithole of a room above the stage – it had been gutted by fire more than a few times – and in return we’d have to play as many as seven sets a day, in between gigs from visiting bands.
It was a lot of fun, but it was fucking gruelling, man. Every day we’d start at noon and end at two in the morning. You’d do speed, pills, dope, beer – anything you could lay your hands on – just to stay awake. Someone once added up how many shows we did in the Star Club, and it turned out that we’d played more than the Beatles. Mind you, 1969 was seven years after the Beatles’ heyday, and the place had gone down the shitter a bit. In fact, we were one of the last British bands to do a residency there: the place closed its doors for good on New Year’s Eve of that year.
Then it burned down.
Even so, it was the best training you could ever ask for, playing at the Star Club. A gig’s not like a rehearsal: you’ve got to see it through, even if you’re loaded, which we were, most of the time. It’s not that I needed any training to be the person I am on stage. I’m a lunatic by nature, and lunatics don’t need training – they just are. But the Star Club helped us nail all the new songs we’d written, like ‘The Wizard’, ‘N.I.B.’ (named after Bill’s beard, which we thought looked like the nib of a pen), ‘War Pigs’, ‘Rat Salad’ and ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ (to this day, I have no idea what that song’s about, even though people tell me that I wrote the lyrics). The Star Club also helped me get over my stage fright. Once I’d loosened up a bit, I’d just do crazier and crazier things to keep myself amused. And the lads encouraged me. When the crowd was obviously bored, Tony would shout over to me, ‘Go and organise a raffle, Ozzy.’ That would be my cue to do something fucking mental, to get everyone’s attention. One time, I found this can of purple paint backstage, and when I got the call from Tony I dipped my nose in it. Which would have been fine, if the paint hadn’t been fucking indelible.
I couldn’t get that shit off me for weeks. People would come up to me and go, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you, man?’ Or, more often, they wouldn’t come up to me at all, ’cos they thought I was mad.
We all had our moments at the Star Club. One night, Tony is so out of his skull on dope that he decides he’s gonna play the flute, but he’s lost his sense of distance, so he rests the flute on his chin instead of his lip. So for the entire song he’s just standing there, blowing into a microphone, with the flute nowhere near his mouth, and the audience is going, What the fuck?
Priceless, man.
The trick to having a really good time at the Star Club was to find some local German chick and then stay at her apartment, so you didn’t have to share a bunk bed with one of your farty, ball-scratching bandmates. We didn’t care what the chicks looked like – I mean, we weren’t exactly much to behold ourselves. And if they bought you beers and gave you fags, that was a bonus. And if they didn’t buy you beers and give you fags, you did your best to rob them. In fact, on more than one occasion we used Tony as a honey trap – ’cos he was the one all the chicks wanted to bang. What would happen is, he’d go upstairs to our room and start fumbling around with some groupie on one of the bunks, and I’d crawl over on my elbows – commando-style – to where she’d left her handbag, and swipe whatever dough I could find. I aint proud of it, but we had to fucking eat somehow.
We used to give these chicks nicknames, which, looking back now, was a bit cruel. More than a bit cruel, in some cases. For example, I shacked up with one girl who everyone called ‘The Witch’, ’cos she had a nose on her that was even bigger than Geezer’s.
We didn’t last long, me and The Witch. The morning after she took me back to her place, she got up, made herself a cup of coffee, and said, ‘I’m going off to work now. You can stay here, but don’t touch anything, OK?’ Of course, that’s a fatal thing to say to me. So, the second she’s out of the door I’m rummaging around in her cupboards, wondering what she doesn’t want me to find. And sure enough, at the back of the wardrobe, I come across this perfectly ironed Nazi uniform. It must have been her dad’s or something. Anyway, I’m thinking, Fucking-A, man, I’ve hit the motherlode here. So I put on the uniform, find the drinks cabinet, and before long I’m strutting around the living room, barking out orders to the furniture in this comedy German accent, smoking cigarettes, and getting loaded. I love all that wartime military stuff, me.
After an hour or so of doing that I took off the uniform, put it back in the wardrobe, made sure it was folded up perfectly, and pretended like nothing had happened. But when The Witch came back just before noon, she knew something was up. She went straight over to the wardrobe, threw open the doors, checked the uniform, and went fucking nuts.
Next thing I knew I was on the end of her broom, flying out of the door.
When we got back to England, we had a meeting at Jim Simpson’s hou
se to tell him about our change of name to Black Sabbath. He didn’t seem too keen, although to be honest with you I think he was distracted by my purple nose. He didn’t say anything about it, but I could tell it was on his mind, ’cos he kept staring at me with this worried look on his face. He must have thought I’d picked up some rare disease over in Germany or something. I seem to remember that Alvin Lee from Ten Years After was at that meeting, too. And he was even less keen on the name Black Sabbath than Jim was. ‘I don’t think you’ll get anywhere with that, lads,’ he told us. The exact order of what happened next is a bit of a blur, to be honest with you. All I know is that Jim had done a deal with a bloke called Tony Hall, who owned a freelance A&R/production company. He agreed to help us make an album as long as he got something back if we turned out to be a success – or something like that. I’m no good with business, me. I’m the last person to ask when it comes to contracts and dough and all that.
Anyway, Tony Hall said he thought we were ‘a great little blues band’, but that we needed a debut single – even though bands like ours rarely put out singles in those days. He played us this song called ‘Evil Woman’ by an American group called Crow, and asked if we wanted to cover it. He could tell we weren’t that into the idea, so suggested we could make the guitars heavier. We still didn’t really want to do it, but Tony offered to pay for some time at Trident Studios in Soho, so we thought, Fuck it, why not?
It was a bit embarrassing in the end. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing, so we just set up our equipment, hit the record button, and played our live set. The only vaguely professional thing about us was the fact that one of the roadies had spelled out ‘Black Sabbath’ with black electrician’s tape on the front of Bill’s bass drum.
Producing us was a guy called Gus Dudgeon. We were in awe of him because he’d worked with Eric Clapton, the Moody Blues and the Rolling Stones. Looking back, Gus was very good to us, although he also laid down the law a bit, and we weren’t used to being told what to do. Still, you couldn’t argue with the results – the bloke was a genius. After working on ‘Evil Woman’ he went on to produce some of Elton John’s biggest hits of the seventies and eighties. It was terribly sad when he and his wife Sheila were killed in a car accident in 2002. Gus was one of those guys who made a huge contribution to British music, even though he wasn’t a household name. And although we might not have fully appreciated it at the time, we were incredibly lucky to have him help us so early on in our career.
We played a few clubs while we were down in London. At one of those gigs the DJ put on a record before we went on stage, and it just blew me away. Something about the singer’s voice sounded familiar. Then it came to me: it was Robert Plant. So I went over to the DJ and said, ‘Is that the New Yardbirds’ record you’re playing?’
‘No, it’s a new band called Led Zeppelin.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, man. I swear.’
We played our gig, but I couldn’t get the record out of my mind, so afterwards I went back to the DJ and asked him, ‘Are you sure it’s not the New Yardbirds? I know that singer, and he ain’t in a band called Led Zeppelin. Does it say who the band members are on the sleeve?’
He read out the names: ‘Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant.’
I couldn’t believe it: the New Yardbirds must have changed their name to Led Zeppelin… and they’d made the best record I’d heard in years. In the van on the way home, I remember saying to Tony, ‘Did you hear how heavy that Led Zeppelin album sounded?’
Without missing a beat, he replied, ‘We’ll be heavier.’
By the end of 1969 we were desperate for anything that could take us to the next level. But we were still on the same C-list gig circuit, night after night. Our last gig of the year was on December 24 in Cumberland – we were still getting a lot of work up there – at Wigton Market Hall. As it happened, there was a women’s mental hospital right next door to the venue, and every year the doctors would let the patients out for a Christmas dance. We didn’t know anything about that, but even if we had, I doubt any of us would have guessed that the funny farm would choose a Black Sabbath gig for its annual outing. But it did. So we’re halfway through ‘N.I.B.’ when all these loony chicks come piling in through the door at the back of the hall, and by the end of the song a riot has broken out. You should have seen it: these chicks were punching the guys, and then the guys’ girlfriends were chinning the mental chicks right back. It was pandemonium. By the time the police showed up there were loads of women lying around on the floor with black eyes and bloody noses and split lips.
Then they started to sing ‘Give Peace a Chance’.
Meanwhile, we were just standing there on stage, amps buzzing. I looked at Tony, and Tony looked at me.
‘This is fucking nuts,’ I mouthed to him.
He just shrugged, turned up his amp, and started to play ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’.
In January 1970, it finally happened.
We got a record deal.
For a few months, Jim Simpson had been shopping us around by inviting all these big-wigs from London to come to our gigs. But no one was interested. Then one night a guy from Philips drove up to Birmingham to see us play at Henry’s Blues House and decided to take a bet on us. The name Black Sabbath made a big difference, I think. At the time there was an occult author called Dennis Wheatley whose books were all over the bestseller lists, Hammer Horror films were doing massive business at the cinemas, and the Manson murders were all over the telly, so anything with a ‘dark’ edge was in big demand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure we could’ve done it on the strength of the music alone. But sometimes, when it comes to getting a deal, all these little things have to come together at the right time.
You need a bit of luck, basically.
Another thing that helped was the fact that Philips was setting up a new ‘underground’ label called Vertigo when we were looking for a deal. We were a perfect fit. But the funny thing was that Vertigo wasn’t even up and running in time for our first single, ‘Evil Woman’, so it was originally released on another Philips label, Fontana, before being reissued on Vertigo a few weeks later.
Not that it made any fucking difference: the song went down like a concrete turd both times. But we didn’t care,
because the BBC played it on Radio 1.
Once.
At six o’clock in the morning.
I was so nervous, I got up at five and drank about eight cups of tea. ‘They won’t play it,’ I kept telling myself, ‘They won’t play it…’
But then:
BLAM… BLAM…
Dow-doww…
BLAM…
Dow-dow-d-d-dow, dooooow…
D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d
DUH-DA!
Do-doo-do
DUH-DA!
Do-doo-do…
It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to hear yourself on Radio 1 for the first time. It was magic, squared. I ran around the house screaming, ‘I’m on the radio! I’m on the fucking radio!’ until my mum stomped downstairs in her nightie and told me to shut up. ‘Evil woman,’ I sang to her, at full volume, ‘Don’t you play your games with me!’ Then I was off, out of the door, singing my head off all the way down Lodge Road.
But if being played on Radio 1 was good, it was nothing compared with the advance we got from Philips: £105 each!
I’d never even had ten quid to call my own before, never mind a hundred. It would have taken me a whole year of tuning car horns at the Lucas factory to earn that kind of dough. I thought I was Jack the Lad that week. The first thing I bought was a bottle of Brut aftershave to make myself smell better. Then I got a new pair of shoes, ’cos I’d destroyed my old ones in Denmark. The rest I gave to my mum to pay the bills. But then I kept scrounging it back off her, so I could go down the pub and celebrate.
Then it was back to work.
As far as I can remember, we didn’t have any demos to speak of, and there
was no official talk about making an album. Jim just told us one day that we’d been booked for a week of gigs in Zurich, and that on our way down there, we should stop off at Regent Sound studios in Soho and record some tracks with a producer called Rodger Bain and his engineer, Tom Allom. So that’s what we did. Like before, we just set up our gear and played what amounted to a live set without the audience. Once we’d finished, we spent a couple of hours double-tracking some of the guitar and the vocals, and that was that. Done. We were in the pub in time for last orders. It can’t have taken any longer than twelve hours in total.
That’s how albums should be made, in my opinion. I don’t give a fuck if you’re making the next Bridge Over Troubled Water – taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just fucking ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again.
In our case, mind you, we didn’t have the luxury of taking our time. It wasn’t an option. So we just went in there and did it. And then the next day we set off for Zurich in the Transit to do a residency at a joint called the Hirschen Club. We hadn’t even heard Rodger and Tom’s final mix when we left Soho, never mind seen the album cover. That’s how the music business was run in those days. As a band, you had less say in what was going on than the guy who cleaned out the shitter in the record company’s executive suite. I remember it being a long, long way to Switzerland in the back of a Transit van. To kill time, we smoked dope. Shitloads of it. When we finally got to Zurich, we were so fucking hungry we found one of those posh Swiss caffs and held a competition to see who could eat the most banana splits in the shortest time. I managed to get twenty-five of the fuckers down my throat before the owner chucked us out. My whole face was covered in cream by the end of it. I could have had a couple more of them, too.
Then we had to go and find the Hirschen Club, which turned out to be even sleazier than the Star Club. They had this tiny little stage with the bar just a few feet away, and it was dark and there were hookers hanging around all over the place. The four of us had to share one crappy room upstairs, so getting a chick with her own place was the order of the day.
I Am Ozzy Page 9