So, of course, I go to town on this chick until the sun comes up. Then she picks up her coat off the floor, gives me a peck on the cheek, and fucks off.
Later, when we’re all at breakfast, trying to work out where you put the maple syrup – Geezer was pouring it over his hash browns – I go, ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me last night.’
‘Actually,’ said Bill, with a little cough, ‘I think I can.’
Turned out we’d all had a knock on our door that night: it was our tour manager’s ‘Welcome to America’ present. Although, judging by the way my chick looked in daylight – she couldn’t have been a day under forty – he’d got obviously a bulk deal.
During the two months of our American tour, we covered distances that we couldn’t have imagined back in England. We played the Fillmore East in Manhattan. We played the Fillmore West in San Francisco. We even went to Florida, where I swam in an outdoor swimming pool for the first time: it was mid-night, I was out of my mind on dope and booze, and it was beautiful. I also saw my first proper turquoise ocean in Florida.
Bill hated flying, so we drove between a lot of the gigs, which became a bit of a ritual for us. Me and Bill’s epic road trips ended up being the highlights of all our American tours. We spent so much time together in the back of rented GMC mobile homes, we became as thick as thieves. Bill got his brother-in-law Dave to do the driving eventually, so we could drink more and take more drugs. It’s funny, you learn a lot about people when you’re on the road like that. Every morning, for example, Bill would have a cup of coffee, a glass of orange juice, a glass of milk, and a beer. Always in the same order.
I asked him why he did it once.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘the coffee’s to wake me up, the orange juice is to give me some vitamins to stop me getting sick, the milk’s to coat my stomach for the rest of the day, and the beer’s to put me back to sleep again.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Makes sense.’
Funny bloke, Bill. I remember one time, we had the GMC loaded full of beer and fags, and Dave was driving. We were going from New York to somewhere a long way further down the East Coast, so we’d got up early, even though we’d had a big night. Dave kept complaining that he’d eaten a dodgy pizza before going to bed. It tasted like rat’s piss, he said. So I’m sitting in the passenger seat at seven or eight o’clock in the morning, bleary-eyed and hung over; Bill’s crashed out in the back; and Dave’s driving along with this funny look on his face. I wind down the window and light up a fag, then look over and see Dave turning green.
‘You all right, Dave?’ I said, blowing smoke into the cabin.
‘Yeah, I’m—’
Then he lost it.
Bleeeeeugh!
He threw up all over the dashboard, and these half-digested lumps of cheese and dough and tomato sauce started to dribble into the air vents and on to my box of cigarettes. Just the sight and the smell were enough to make me come out in sympathy.
‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Dave, I think I’m gonna—’
Bleeeeeugh!
So now there were two stomachfuls of vomit all over the inside of this van. The smell was fucking abominable, but Bill didn’t notice a thing – he was still passed out in the back.
We pulled over at the next truck stop and I ran out and asked the chick in the shop if she had any air freshener. There was no way I was even going to try to clean up the puke, but we needed to do something about the smell. It seemed like even the drivers of the cars overtaking us on the freeway were holding their noses. But the chick in the shop didn’t understand a fucking word I was saying. Finally, she goes, ‘Oh, you mean this?’ And she gives me a can of spearmint air spray. Then she says to me, ‘Personally, I don’t recommend it.’
Fuck it, I thought, and I bought it anyway. Then I ran back to the GMC, slammed the door, and while Dave pulled out of the parking spot I started spraying the stuff all over the place.
Then, all of a sudden, there’s this grunt and a rustling noise from behind us. I look over my shoulder and see Bill sitting bolt upright, looking very unwell. He could take the smell of our puke, but the spearmint air spray had tipped him over the edge.
‘Christ!’ he goes. ‘What the fuck is that sm—’
Bleeeeeugh!
Our first gig in America was at a club in New York called Ungano’s, at 210 West 70th Street. Then after that we did a show at the Fillmore East with Rod Stewart and the Faces. We were pissed off with the Faces, actually, because they didn’t give us any time for a sound check. And Rod kept well out of our way. Looking back now, I don’t suppose he was too happy about having Black Sabbath supporting him. We were the unwashed hooligans and he was the blue-eyed boy. He was all right though, Rod; always very polite. And I thought he was a phenomenal singer.
Two months felt like an eternity to be so far away from home, and we missed England like crazy – especially when we started talking about how much we couldn’t wait to go down the pub and tell everyone about America, which was like going to Mars in those days. Very few Brits ever made it over, because the air fares were so expensive.
Practical jokes ended up being the best way to take our minds off home. One of the things we found hilarious was the American accent. Every time a hotel receptionist called me ‘Mr Ozz-Burn’, we’d all crack up laughing. Then we came up with this prank to play in hotel restaurants. During the meal, one of us would sneak off to the front desk and get them to page a ‘Mr Harry Bollocks’. So the others would be sitting there eating their hamburgers and this bellhop would rush into the room, ringing his little bell, and shout, ‘Is there a Mr Hairy Bollocks here? I’m looking for Hairy Bollocks.’
Bill would laugh so hard he’d make himself ill.
But the biggest culture shock was at a gig in Philadelphia. It was mostly black guys in the audience, and you could tell they hated our music. We did ‘War Pigs’ and you could have heard a fucking pin drop. One guy, a big tall fella with a massive Afro, spent the whole gig sitting up on a high window ledge, and every few minutes he’d shout out, ‘Hey, you – Black Sabbath!’
I thought, Why the fuck does he keep saying that? What does he want? I didn’t realise he thought my name was Black Sabbath.
Anyway, about halfway through the gig, at the end of one of the songs, this guy does it again: ‘Hey, you – Black Sabbath!’
By this point I’d had enough. So I walked to the edge of the stage, looked up at him, and said, ‘All right mate, you win. What the fuck do you want? Just tell me. What is it, eh?’
And he peered down at me with this puzzled look on his face.
‘You guys ain’t black,’ he said.
That was our only bad gig, mind you.
None of us could believe how well the Black Sabbath album had gone down in America. It was a monster. Warner Bros, our American record company, were so pleased with it they told us they were going to delay the release of Paranoid until January the following year.
We were getting such big crowds wherever we played, we even started to get a few groupies.
Our first really crazy groupie experience was in a Holiday Inn, out in California somewhere. Now, usually, Patrick Meehan booked us into the shittiest of places; it wasn’t unusual for all four of us to share a single room in some dodgy motel on the out-skirts of town for five bucks a night. So the Holiday Inn was luxurious by our standards: my room had a bath and a shower and a phone and a telly. It even had a waterbed – which were all the rage in those days. I loved those things, actually; it was like falling asleep on a tire floating in the middle of the ocean.
Anyway, so we’re in this Holiday Inn, and I’ve just finished talking to Thelma on the phone when there’s a knock at the door. I open it and there’s this beautiful chick standing there in a little dress. ‘Ozzy?’ she goes. ‘The gig was awesome. Can we talk?’
In she comes, pulls off her dress, we get down to business, and then she fucks off before I can even ask her name.
Five minutes later, there’s another
knock on the door. I’m thinking, She probably left something in the room. So I get up to answer it. But it’s a different chick.
‘Ozzy?’ she goes. ‘The gig was awesome. Can we talk?’
Off comes her dress, down go my trousers, and after five minutes of my hairy arse bobbing up and down on top of her while we’re floating around on this waterbed, it was ‘Nice meeting you’, ‘Cheerio’, and off she went.
These Holiday Inns are fucking magic, I thought. Then there was another knock on the door.
You can guess what happened next.
I banged three chicks that night. Three. Without even leaving my hotel room. To be honest with you, I was flagging a bit with the last one. I had to use the special reserve tank.
Eventually I decided to find out where the fuck all these groupies were coming from. So I went to the bar but it was completely empty. Then I asked the guy in the lobby, ‘Where is everyone?’ He went, ‘Your British friends? Try the pool.’ So I took the lift up to the pool on the roof, and when the doors opened I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like Caligula up there: dozens of the most amazing-looking chicks you could ever imagine, all stark naked, and blowjobs and threesomes going on left, right and centre. I lit up a joint, sat down on a recliner between two lesbian chicks, and began to sing ‘God Bless America’.
But it wasn’t just groupies who followed us around America. We also got a lot of loonies – the kind of people who took the black magic thing seriously. Before we even left for America, someone had sent us a film of a black magic parade in San Francisco, held in our honour. There was a bloke who looked like Ming the Merciless sitting in a convertible Rolls-Royce while all these half-naked chicks danced around him in the streets. The bloke’s name was Anton LaVey and he was the High Priest of the Church of Satan or some bollocks, and the author of a book called The Satanic Bible.
We just thought, What the fuck?
I have a theory, y’know, about people who dedicate their lives to that kind of bullshit: they’re just in it because of all the sexual debauchery they can get up to.
Which is fair enough, I suppose.
But we didn’t want anything to do with it. A lot of people were still freaked out by Sharon Tate’s murder, so we didn’t want to come off like members of Charles Manson’s ‘Family’. I mean, only a few months earlier we’d been playing at Henry’s Blues House in front of a few dozen people, and now we were playing the Forum in LA in front of twenty thousand fans. We loved being big in the US, and we didn’t want to do anything to fuck it up.
Mind you, we did bump into some members of the Manson Family at the Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles one night. They were very weird people – somewhere-else people, if you know what I mean. Not on the same wavelength as the rest of the world. They gave me the willies, big time. The funny thing is, though, before he turned psycho, Manson had been a big part of the LA music scene. If he hadn’t gone to jail, we probably would have ended up hanging out with him. It blew my mind when I learned that he’d been pals with Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys had even covered one of Manson’s songs, ‘Never Learn Not to Love’. But from what I heard, Dennis ended up getting so spooked by Manson and his friends that he fled his own house. He just woke up and fucked off one day. Then Manson had a bullet delivered to Wilson’s new place. The bloke must have been shitting bricks.
There was a lot of mad stuff like that going on in those days.
LA was a crazy place in 1970. The flower power thing was still a huge deal. When you drove around, you’d see all these people with long hair and bare feet, just sitting around on street corners, smoking weed and strumming guitars. The locals probably thought we were crazy, too, I suppose. I remember walking into an liquor store on Sunset Boulevard one time and asking for twenty fags. The woman behind the counter said, ‘What do you want twenty fags for? Get out of here, you fucking pervert!’
She must have thought I was a sex fiend. Of course, at the time I didn’t have a clue that ‘fag’ doesn’t mean cigarette in America.
As much as we tried to avoid them, the Satanists never stopped being a pain in the arse. About a year after the first tour, we were playing a gig in Memphis and this bloke wearing a black cloak ran on stage. Under normal circumstances, if a fan climbed on stage, I’d put my arm around him and we’d have a good old head bang for a bit. But this bloke looked like one of the satanic loonies, so I told him to fuck off out of it and pushed him away, towards Tony. Before I knew it, one of our roadies was running on stage with a metal bar raised above his head, and he twatted the guy in the face. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ I shouted. ‘You can’t do that!’
The roadie turned around and said, ‘Yes I fucking can. Look.’
The satanic bloke was lying on the stage with his cloak wide open. In his right hand was a dagger.
I almost fell backwards into one of the speaker cabinets, I was so freaked out. If it hadn’t been for our roadie, Tony might have been a goner.
By the time we headed back to our motel that night, everyone was shaken up. But the fuckers had found out where we were staying, and in the car park of the motel were more guys in black robes, their hoods up, chanting. We were too knackered to deal with it, so we just ignored them and made our way to our rooms, which faced on to the street. A few seconds later, one of the roadies started jabbering and screaming – it turned out that someone had drawn an inverted cross in blood on his door.
I can’t say we were scared. But after the incident with the guy on the stage, we weren’t in the mood to take any more bullshit. So we called the police. Of course, they found the whole thing extremely funny.
They just wouldn’t fuck off, those Satanists. I’d walk out of my hotel room in the morning, and they’d be right outside my door, sitting in a circle on the carpet, all dressed in black hooded capes, surrounded by candles. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more. So, one morning, instead of brushing past them as I usually did, I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles, and sang ‘Happy Birthday’.
They weren’t too fucking happy about that, believe me.
We were on the road non-stop for two years after our first American tour. Between 1970 and 1972, we must have crossed the Atlantic six times. We spent so much time in the air, we ended up being on first-name terms with the PanAm flight attendants. And even though we were exhausted and ill half the time from the jet lag, the booze and the drugs, it was a fucking blast. We did everything, saw everything, met everyone.
We even went to an Elvis gig.
It was at the Forum in LA. We were so far up in the nose-bleeds, it seemed to take longer to get to our seats than it did for the King to do his set. He looked like an ant from where we were sitting, and I couldn’t get over the fact that his band played for ages before he came on. Then he did only a few numbers before he buggered off again. We were sitting there thinking, Is that it? Then this voice came booming out over the Tannoy: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.’
‘Lazy fat bastard,’ I said, before remembering where I was.
It was an education, that gig. It was the first time I’d seen merchandising sold so professionally at a venue. You could buy Elvis drinks coasters, Elvis bog-seat warmers, Elvis mug and spoon sets, Elvis dolls, Elvis watches, Elvis jumpsuits. Anything you could think of, they’d put the name ‘Elvis’ on it and wanted to sell it to you with an Elvis Coke and an Elvis hot dog. And the fans seemed only too happy to buy it.
He must have been the richest bloke on the planet.
It didn’t take us long to start getting into drugs big time. You couldn’t really get cocaine in Birmingham back then, so I didn’t try it until a gig in Denver with a band called Mountain in early 1971. Mountain’s guitarist and lead singer was a guy called Leslie West, and it was him who introduced me to the old waffle dust – we called it that ’cos it made you stay up all night, talking bollocks – although he insists to th
is day that I’d been taking it long before then. He’s got a bit of a bee up his arse about it, in fact. But I just say to him, ‘Listen, Leslie, when you come from Aston and you fall in love with cocaine, you remember when you started. It’s like having your first fuck!’
We were at a hotel after the show, and Leslie was cutting up a line. ‘D’you want a bit?’ he asked me.
At first I said, ‘Whoa, fucking hell, man, no way.’
But he kept saying, ‘Go on, just a bit, it’s all right.’
He didn’t exactly have to try very hard to persuade me.
Then it was, sniff-sniff-ahh.
I was in love, immediately. It’s the same with just about every drug I’ve ever taken: the first time I try it, that’s how I want to feel for the rest of my life. But it never works out that way. You can chase it all you want, but, believe me, you’ll never get that first-time high again.
The world went a bit fuzzy after that.
Every day I’d be smoking dope, boozing, having a few toots of coke, fucking around with speed or barbiturates or cough syrup, doing acid, you name it. I didn’t know what day it was most of the time. But at some point we made it back to Island Studios in Notting Hill to record our third album, Master of Reality, again with Rodger Bain.
I can’t remember much about it, apart from the fact that Tony detuned his guitar to make it easier to play, Geezer wrote ‘Sweet Leaf’ about all the dope we’d been smoking, and ‘Children of the Grave’ was the most kick-ass song we’d ever recorded. As usual, the critics hated it, although one of ’em described us as ‘Titanic’s house band on the eve of Armageddon’, which sounded about right to me. And the music press obviously didn’t put anyone off buying it, because Master of Reality was another monster hit, reaching number five in Britain and number eight in America.
But we never had a chance to enjoy our success. And I certainly didn’t have much time to enjoy married life. In fact, I was starting to realise that getting married so young might not have been such a clever idea. I would get this crazy restless feeling whenever I was at home, like I was going out of my mind. The only way I could handle it was to get loaded.
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