I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne

  One night, these two girls in fishnets invited me and Geezer back to their apartment. They were obviously on the game, but I was up for anything that would spare me from another night of sharing a bed with Bill, who spent the whole time complaining about my smelly feet. So when they sweetened the deal by saying they had some dope, I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s go.’ But Geezer wasn’t so sure. ‘They’re hookers, Ozzy,’ he kept saying. ‘You’ll catch something nasty. Let’s find some other chicks.’

  ‘I ain’t gonna bonk either of ’em,’ I said. ‘I just wanna get out of this fucking place.’

  ‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Geezer. ‘The dark-haired chick isn’t so bad-looking. After a few beers and a few puffs of the magic weed, she’ll have her way with me.’

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘if she makes a move on yer, I’ll kick her up the arse and we’ll leave, all right?’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘If she makes one move towards your knob, Geezer, I’ll pull her off you and we’ll fuck off.’

  ‘All right.’

  So we go back to their place. It’s all dimly lit, and Geezer’s on one side of the room with the dark-haired chick, and I’m on the other side with the ugly one, and we’re smoking weed and listening to the album by Blind Faith, the ‘supergroup’ formed by Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and Ric Grech. For a while it’s all serene and trippy – the music’s playing and everyone’s snogging and fumbling around. Then, all of a sudden, this deep Brummie voice rises out of the mist of dope smoke.

  ‘Oi, Ozzy,’ says Geezer. ‘Time to put the boot in.’

  I looked over and this hooker was straddling him as he lay there with his eyes closed and this pained expression on his face. I honestly thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

  I don’t even know if he shagged her in the end. I just remember laughing and laughing and laughing until I cried.

  Jim Simpson wanted to see us at his house as soon as we got back from Switzerland. ‘I’ve got something you need to see,’ he said, in this ominous voice.

  So that afternoon we all met up in his living room and sat there, twiddling our thumbs, wondering what the fuck he was going to say. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out the finished record of Black Sabbath. We were speechless. The cover was a spooky-looking fifteenth-century watermill (I later found out it was the Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames in Oxfordshire), with all these dead leaves around it and a sickly looking woman with long dark hair, dressed in black robes, standing in the middle of the frame with a scary look on her face. It was amazing. Then, when you opened the gatefold sleeve, there was just black everywhere and an inverted cross with a creepy poem written inside it. We’d had no input with the artwork, so the inverted cross – a symbol of Satanism, we later found out – had nothing to do with us. But the stories that you hear about us being unhappy with it are total bullshit. As far as I can remember, we were immediately blown away by the cover. We just stood there, staring at it, and going, ‘Fucking hell, man, this is fucking unbelievable.’

  Then Jim went over to his record player and put it on. I almost burst into tears, it sounded so great. While we’d been in Switzerland, Rodger and Tom had put these sound effects of a thunderstorm and a tolling bell over the opening riff of the title track, so it sounded like something from a film. The overall effect was fabulous. I still get chills whenever I hear it.

  On Friday the thirteenth of February 1970, Black Sabbath went on sale.

  I felt like I’d just been born.

  But the critics fucking hated it.

  Still, one of the few good things about being dyslexic is that when I say I don’t read reviews, I mean I don’t read reviews. But that didn’t stop the others from poring over what the press had to say about us. Of all the bad reviews of Black Sabbath, the worst was probably written by Lester Bangs at Rolling Stone. He was the same age as me, but I didn’t know that at the time. In fact, I’d never even heard of him before, and once the others told me what he’d written I wished I still hadn’t. I remember Geezer reading out words like ‘claptrap’, ‘wooden’ and ‘dogged’. The last line was something like, ‘They’re just like Cream, but worse’, which I didn’t understand, because I thought Cream were one of the best bands in the world.

  Bangs died twelve years later, when he was only thirty-three, and I’ve heard people say he was a genius when it came to words, but as far as we were concerned he was just another pretentious dickhead. And from then we never got on with Rolling Stone. But y’know what? Being trashed by Rolling Stone was kind of cool, because they were the Establishment. Those music magazines were all staffed by college kids who thought they were clever – which, to be fair, they probably were. Meanwhile, we’d been kicked out of school at fifteen and had worked in factories and slaughtered animals for a living, but then we’d made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us. So how upset could we be when clever people said we were no good?

  The important thing was someone thought we were good, ’cos Black Sabbath went straight to number eight in Britain and number twenty-three in America.

  And the Rolling Stone treatment prepared us for what was to come. I don’t think we ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews. Whenever I hear someone getting upset about reviews, I just say to them, ‘Look, it’s their job to criticise. That’s why they’re called critics.’ Mind you, some people just get so wound up they can’t control themselves. I remember one time in Glasgow this critic showed up at our hotel, and Tony goes over to him and says, ‘I wanna have a word with you, sunshine.’ I didn’t know it at the time, but the guy had just written a hit-piece on Tony, describing him as ‘Jason King with builder’s arms’ – Jason King being a private-eye type character on TV at the time who had this stupid moustache and dodgy haircut. But when Tony confronted him, he just laughed, which was a really stupid thing to do. Tony just stood there and said, ‘Go on, son, finish laughing, ’cos in about thirty seconds you ain’t gonna be laughing any more.’ Then he started to laugh himself. The critic didn’t take him seriously, so he kept on laughing, and for about two seconds they were both just standing there, laughing their heads off. Then Tony swung his fist back and just about put this bloke in hospital. I never read his review of the show, but I’m told it wasn’t very flattering.

  My old man wasn’t too impressed with our first album, either.

  I’ll always remember the day I took it home and said, ‘Look, Dad! I got my voice on a record!’

  I can picture him now, fiddling with his reading specs and holding the cover in front of his face. Then he opened the sleeve, went ‘Hmm’ and said, ‘Are you sure they didn’t make a mistake, son?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘This cross is upside down.’

  ‘It’s supposed to be like that.’

  ‘Oh. Well, don’t just stand there. Put it on. Let’s have a bit of a sing-along, eh?’

  So I walked over to the radiogram, lifted the heavy wooden lid, put the record on the turntable – hoping the dodgy speaker that I’d put in there from the PA would work – and cranked up the volume.

  With the first clap of thunder, my dad flinched.

  I grinned nervously at him.

  Then:

  Bong!

  Bong!

  Bong!

  My dad coughed.

  Bong!

  Bong!

  Bong!

  He coughed again.

  Bong!

  Bong!

  Bong!

  ‘Son, when does—’

  BLAM! Dow! Dowwwwwww!!! Dooooowwwwww!!!!!

  My poor old man turned white. I think he’d been expecting something along the lines of ‘Knees up Mother Brown’. But I left the record on anyway. Finally, after six minutes and eighteen seconds of Tony and Geezer thrashing away on their guitars, Bill beating the shit out of his drums, and me howling on about a man in black coming to take me away
to the lake of fire, my dad rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked at the floor.

  Silence.

  ‘What d’you think, Dad?’

  ‘John,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely sure you’ve only been drinking the occasional beer?’

  I went bright red and said something like ‘Oh, er, yeah, Dad, whatever.’

  Bless him, he just didn’t get it at all.

  But it broke my heart, y’know? I’d always felt as though I’d let my father down. Not because of anything he’d ever said to me. But because I was a failure at school, because I couldn’t read or write properly, because I’d been sent to prison, and because I’d been fired from all of those factory jobs. But now, finally, with Black Sabbath, I was doing something I was good at, that I enjoyed, that I was prepared to work hard at. I suppose I just really wanted my old man to be proud of me. But it wasn’t his fault – it was the way he was. It was his generation.

  And I think deep down he was proud of me, in his own way.

  I can honestly say that we never took the black magic stuff seriously for one second. We just liked how theatrical it was. Even my old man eventually played along with it: he made me this awesome metal cross during one of his tea breaks at the factory. When I turned up to rehearsals with it, all the other guys wanted one, so I got Dad to make three more.

  I couldn’t believe it when I learned that people actually ‘practised the occult’. These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I’d say to them, ‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka and gin.’ At one point we were invited by a group of Satanists to play at Stonehenge. We told them to fuck off, so they said they’d put a curse on us. What a load of bollocks that was. Britain even had a ‘chief witch’ in those days, called Alex Sanders. Never met him. Never wanted to. Mind you, we did buy a Ouija board once and have a little seance. We scared the shit out of each other.

  That night, at God knows what hour, Bill phoned me up and shouted, ‘Ozzy, I think my house is haunted!’

  ‘Sell tickets then,’ I told him, and put the phone down.

  The good thing about all the satanic stuff was that it gave us endless free publicity. People couldn’t get enough of it. During its first day of release, Black Sabbath sold five thousand copies, and by the end of the year it was on its way to selling a million worldwide.

  None of us could believe it.

  Not even Jim Simpson could believe it – the poor bloke ended up getting completely overwhelmed. His office was in Birmingham, miles away from the action in London, and he had other bands to look after, no staff, and Henry’s Blues House to run. So it didn’t take long for us to start getting pissed off with him. For starters, we weren’t getting any dough. Jim wasn’t robbing us – he’s one of the most honest people I’ve ever met in the music business – but Philips were taking forever to cough up our royalties, and Jim wasn’t the kind of bloke who could go down there and bully them into paying. Then there was the issue of America: we wanted to go, immediately. But we had to get it right, which meant going easy on all the satanic stuff, ’cos we didn’t want to come across like fans of the Manson Family.

  We’d get strung up by our balls if we did.

  It didn’t take long for all the sharks down in London to realise there was blood in the water, as far as Jim was concerned. So, one by one, they started circling. They looked at us and they saw big fucking neon-lit pound signs. Our first album couldn’t have cost more than five hundred quid to make, so the profit margins were astronomical.

  The first call we got was from Don Arden. We didn’t know much about him apart from his nickname – ‘Mr Big’. Then we heard stories about him dangling people out of his fourth-floor Carnaby Street office window, stubbing cigars out on people’s foreheads, and demanding all his contracts be paid in cash and delivered by hand in brown paper bags. So we were shitting ourselves when we went down to London to meet him for the first time. When we got off the train at Euston Station, he had his blue Rolls-Royce waiting to pick us up. It was the first time I’d ever been in a Roller. I sat there in the back seat, like the King of England, thinking, Three years ago, you were a puke remover in a slaughterhouse, and before that you were doling out slop to child molesters in Winson Green. Now look where you are.

  Don had a reputation as the kind of guy who could make you world famous but would rip you off while he was at it. It’s not like he was pulling any complex, high finance, Bernie Madoff-type scams. He just wouldn’t fucking pay. Simple as that. It would be like, ‘Don, you owe me a million quid, can I have the money please?’ And he’d go, ‘No, you can’t.’ End of conversation. And if you ever went to his office to ask for the dough in person, there was a good chance you’d leave in the back of an ambulance.

  But the thing with us was, we didn’t really need anyone to make us world famous – we were already halfway there. Still, we sat in Don’s office and listened to his pitch. He was a short bloke, but with the build and presence of a pissed-off Rottweiler, and he had this incredible shouty voice. He’d pick up the phone to his receptionist and scream so loud the whole planet seemed to shake.

  When the meeting was over we all stood up and said how great it was to meet him, blah-blah-blah, even though none of us wanted anything more to do with him. Then, as we filed out of his office, he introduced us to the chick he’d spent half the meeting bawling at over the phone.

  ‘This is Sharon, my daughter,’ he growled. ‘Sharon, take these lads down to the car, will you?’

  I grinned at her, but she gave me a wary look. She probably thought I was a lunatic, standing there in my pyjama shirt, with no shoes and a hot-water tap on a piece of string around my neck.

  But then, when Don huffed back to his office and closed the door behind him, I cracked a joke and made her smile. I just about fell on the floor. It was the most wicked, beautiful smile I’d ever seen in my life. And she had the laugh to go with it, too. It made me feel so good, hearing her laugh. I just wanted to make her do it again and again and again.

  To this day, I feel bad about what happened with Jim Simpson. I think he got the wrong end of the stick with us. I suppose it’s easy to say what he should or shouldn’t have done with hind-sight, but if he’d admitted to himself that we were too big for him to handle, he could have sold us off to another management company, or contracted out our day-to-day management to a bigger firm. But he wasn’t strong enough to do that. And we were so desperate to go to America and get our big break that we didn’t have the patience to wait for him to sort himself out.

  In the end it was a wide boy called Patrick Meehan who nabbed us. He was only a couple of years older than us, and he’d gone into the management racket with his father, who’d been a stuntman on the TV show Danger Man and then worked for Don Arden, first as a driver, then as a general lackey, looking after the likes of the Small Faces and the Animals. Patrick had another ex-Don Arden henchman working with him too: Wilf Pine. I liked Wilf a lot. He looked like a cartoon villain: short, built like a slab of concrete, and with this big, tasty, hard-boiled face. I think his hardman routine was all a bit of an act, to be honest with you, but there was never any doubt that he could do some serious damage if he was in the mood. He’d been Don’s personal bodyguard for a long time, and when I knew him he’d often go down to Brixton Prison to see the Kray twins, who’d only just been put away. He was all right, was Wilf. We’d have a laugh. ‘You’re crazy, d’you know that?’ he’d say to me.

  Patrick was nothing like Don or Wilf, or his own father, for that matter. He was a slick, smooth-talking, good-looking guy, very cool, very sharp, didn’t have any problems with the ladies. He’d wear suits all the time, drove a Roller, kept his hair long but not too long. He was also the first guy I ever saw with diamond rings on his fingers. He’d obviously learned a lot from the way Don Arden operated. Patrick threw every trick in the book at us. The chauffeured limo. Th
e champagne dinner. The non-stop compliments and the phoney shock that we weren’t all multi-millionaires already. He told us that if we signed with him, we could have anything we wanted – cars, houses, chicks, whatever. All we had to do was call him up and ask for it. What he told us were like fairy tales, basically, but we wanted to believe them. And there was at least some truth to what he said… The music business is like any other business, y’know? When sales are going well, everything’s hunky-fucking-dory. But the second something goes wrong, it’s all blood and law-suits.

  I can’t remember exactly when or how we left Jim – we never actually fired him, although I suppose that makes no difference – but by September 1970 Big Bear Management was history and we were signed up with the Meehans’ company, Worldwide Artists.

  It took about three and a half seconds for Jim to sue us. We were served with the writ when we were standing backstage at a venue on Lake Geneva, waiting to go on. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened. Jim sued Meehan, too, for ‘enticement’. It all took years to go through the courts. To a certain degree, I think Jim got a raw deal. I mean, he had brought Philips out to see us in the first place, which had got us the record deal. And even though he won some dough from the courts, he spent years paying his lawyers. So he didn’t really win in the end. It’s always the way with lawyers – we found that out for ourselves, later. The funny thing is, I still run into Jim every so often. We’re like long-lost friends now. He’s done a lot of great things for music in Birmingham, Jim Simpson has. And he’s still at it today. I wish him all the very best, I really do.

  At the time, though, getting rid of Jim seemed like the greatest thing we’d ever done. It was like we’d just won the lottery: money was falling from the sky. Every day, I’d think of something new to ask for: ‘Er, hello, yes, is that Patrick Meehan’s office? It’s Ozzy Osbourne. I’d like one of them Triumph Herald convertibles. Can you send me a green one? Cheers.’ Click. Then – ta-dah! – the fucking thing would be sitting outside my house the next morning with an envelope tucked behind the windscreen wiper full of paperwork for me to sign and return. Meehan seemed as good as his word: whatever we asked for, we got. And it wasn’t all about the big things: we were given allowances, so we could afford beer and fags and platform boots and leather jackets, and we could stay in hotels instead of sleeping in the back of Tony’s van.