Life at home was made more complicated because Thelma’s son was living with us. His name was Elliot, and he must have been four or five at the time. I adopted him, actually. He was a good kid, but for some reason we never got on. Y’know, some people just don’t hit it off with their children. That was me and Elliot. I spent the whole time when I was home screaming at him or whacking him around the ear ’ole. And it’s not like he ever did anything bad to deserve it. I wish I could have been better with him, because he’d had a rough time before I came along: his dad had fucked off before Elliot had ever known him. When he got older, he told me he saw his old man in the pub one time, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk to him. Which is terribly sad, really.
But I wasn’t much of a substitute. It probably didn’t help that my boozing was so over the top, which made me volatile. And, of course, my ego was out of control. To tell you the truth, I must have been a horrendous stepdad.
And if I loved Thelma, I certainly didn’t treat her like I did. If I’ve got any regrets about my life, that’s one of them. For years, I acted like a married bachelor, sneaking around, banging chicks, getting so wasted down the pub that I’d fall asleep in the car on the street outside. I put that woman through hell. I should never have married her. She didn’t deserve it: she wasn’t a bad person, and she wasn’t a bad wife. But I was a fucking nightmare.
Nine months to the day after me and Thelma got married, she got pregnant. At that point, we still hadn’t seen much dough from all the record sales and the touring, but we knew how well the band was doing, so we assumed that Patrick Meehan would soon be sending us a royalty cheque big enough to buy Buckingham Palace. In the meantime, the usual agreement stood: anything I wanted, I just picked up the phone. So Thelma suggested that we should go house hunting. We couldn’t live in a little flat with a screaming baby, she said, so why not move to a proper place? We could afford it, after all.
I was all for it.
‘Let’s live in the country,’ I said, imagining myself in a tweed suit with green welly-boots, a Range Rover and a shotgun.
For the next few months, every time I came off the road for a few days, we climbed into our brand-new green Triumph Herald convertible – I’d got it for Thelma, because I couldn’t drive – and go looking for houses in the countryside. Eventually we found one we both liked: Bulrush Cottage in Ranton, Staffordshire. They were asking just over twenty grand for the place, which seemed reasonable enough. It had four bedrooms, a sauna, there was room for a little studio and, best of all, it had plenty of land. But we kept on looking, just to make sure. Then, one day, in a tea shop in Evesham, Worcestershire, we decided that we’d seen enough: we’d make an offer on Bulrush. It felt like I’d finally grown up. But just as we were starting to get excited about our new life in the country, Thelma suddenly went ‘Shhh!’ and said, ‘Can you hear that?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘That clicking noise.’
‘What clickin…?’ Then I heard it, too.
It was more of a tick than a click.
Tick, tick, tick, tick.
I looked down and saw a big puddle under Thelma’s chair. Something was dripping from under her dress. Then one of the tea ladies started wailing about the mess on the floor.
‘Oh my God,’ said Thelma. ‘My waters have broken!’
‘What d’you mean?’ I said. ‘You’ve pissed yerself?’
‘No, John – my waters have broken.’
‘Eh?’
‘I’m having the baby.’
I jumped up so quickly my chair fell over. Then my whole body went numb with panic. I couldn’t think. My heart was like a drum roll. The first thing that came into my head was: I’m not drunk enough. The bottle of cognac I’d gone through in the car had already worn off. I’d always thought that Thelma would go off to hospital to have the baby. I didn’t think it could just happen – in the middle of a fucking tea shop!
‘Is anyone in here a doctor?’ I shouted, looking desperately around the room. ‘We need a doctor. Help! We need a doctor!’
‘John,’ hissed Thelma. ‘You just need to drive me to hospital. We don’t need a doctor.’
‘We need a doctor!’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘Yeah, we do,’ I moaned. ‘I don’t feel well.’
‘John,’ said Thelma, ‘you need to drive me to hospital. Now.’
‘I don’t have a driving licence.’
‘Since when has the law stopped you from doing anything?’
‘I’m drunk.’
‘You’ve been drunk since 1967! C’mon, John. Hurry.’
So I got up, paid the bill, and led Thelma outside to the Herald. I had no idea how to work the thing. My parents had never owned a car, and I’d always assumed that I’d never be able to afford one, so I hadn’t taken the slightest bit of interest in learning how to drive. All I knew was the basics, like how to tune the radio and wind down the windows.
But gears? Choke? Clutch?
Nah.
The car jerked backwards and forwards on its springs like a pissed kangaroo for about twenty minutes before I got it moving. In the wrong direction. Then I finally found first gear.
‘John, you’re going to have to put your foot down,’ said Thelma, between groans.
‘My foot’s shaking,’I told her. ‘I can hardly keep it on the pedal.’
My hands were shaking, too. I was terrified that our baby was going to end up plopping out of Thelma and on to the dashboard, where it might blow away, because the hood was still down. I could imagine the headline: ‘ROCKER’S TOT IN FREAK M-WAY TRAGEDY’.
‘Seriously, John. Arrrgh! Drive faster. Arrrgh! I’m having contractions!’
‘The car won’t go any faster!’
‘You’re only going ten miles an hour.’
After what seemed like a thousand years, we made it to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Edgbaston. Then all I had to do was stop the car. But every time I put my foot on the middle pedal it just started bouncing up and down again and making this horrible noise. It’s a miracle I didn’t crash into the back of an ambulance, to be honest with you. But somehow I managed to get the wheels to stop moving, and then get Thelma out of her seat – not easy when she was screaming and puffing – and into the maternity ward.
A few hours later, at 11.20 p.m., little Jessica Osbourne was born – so I became a father for the first time. The date was January 20, 1972. It was one of those cold, clear winter nights. Through the hospital window, you could see all these gleaming constellations in every direction.
‘What should we give her as a middle name?’ said Thelma, holding Jessica up to her chest.
‘Starshine,’ I said.
5
Killing the Vicar (in Atrocity Cottage)
By the summer of 1972 – six months after Jess was born – we were back in America, this time to record a new album, which we’d decided to call Snowblind in honour of our new-found love of cocaine. By now, I was putting so much of the stuff up my nose that I had to smoke a bag of dope every day just to stop my heart from exploding. We were staying at 773 Stradella Road in Bel Air, a rented 1930s mansion complete with its own staff of maids and gardeners. The place was owned by the Du Pont family and it had six bedrooms, seven bathrooms, a private cinema (which we used for writing and rehearsing) and a swimming pool in the back, which was on stilts and looked out over all these woods and mountains. We never left the house. Booze, drugs, food, groupies – everything was delivered. On a good day there’d be bowls of white powder and crates of booze in every room, and all these random rock ’n’ rollers and chicks in bikinis hanging around the place – in the bedrooms, on the sofas, outside on the recliners – all of them as high as we were.
It would be almost impossible to exaggerate how much coke we did in that house. We’d discovered that when you take coke, every thought you have, every word you say, every suggestion you make seems like the most fabulous thing you’ve ever heard in your life. At one point
we were getting through so much of the stuff, we had to have it delivered twice a day. Don’t ask me who was organising it all – the only thing I can remember is this shady-looking bloke on the telephone the whole time. But he wasn’t shady in the normal sense of the word: he was clean cut and had one of those Ivy League accents, and he’d wear white shirts and smart trousers, like he was on his way to work in an office.
I once asked him, ‘What the fuck do you do, man?’
He just laughed and fiddled nervously with his aviator shades. At that stage I didn’t care, as long as the coke kept coming.
My favourite thing to do when I was high was to stay up all night watching American telly. In those days there was only one thing on after the normal programming ended at midnight – a sales pitch by a bloke called Cal Worthington, who sold second-hand cars down in Long Beach or somewhere. His big joke was that he always appeared on air with his dog, Spot – but the dog was never actually a dog. It would be an alligator on a lead, or some crazy shit like that. He also had this catchphrase, ‘If I can’t make you a better deal, I’ll eat a bug!’, and did these stunts, like being strapped to the wing of an aeroplane as it did a loop-the-loop. After a few hours of snorting coke and watching that shit, you thought you were going insane. The funny thing is, he’s still at it today, old Cal. He must be about a thousand years old.
We fucked around so much at 773 Stradella Road, it’s a wonder we got any songs written at all. And it wasn’t just the coke. We got through a shitload of beer, too. I’d brought over these ‘party cans’ of best bitter from my local boozer. Each can held five pints, and you could fit six of them in one suitcase. It was like taking coal to Newcastle, but we didn’t care, ’cos we missed a good old English pint. We’d sit there by the pool, in ninety-degree sunshine, coked out of our minds, drinking stale Brummie piss, and looking out over Bel Air.
But then we had to tone things down because Thelma came to visit for few days – without the baby. The good behaviour didn’t last long, mind you. The second Thelma left for the airport to go back to England, we went straight back to being animals again. During our songwriting sessions, for example, no one could be arsed to walk upstairs for a slash, so we’d just go outside on to this little balcony and piss over the railing, which was only a couple of feet high. Then, one day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks round to the other side of the railing, and when Bill starts pissing, he sprays his dick with it. You should have heard the scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing, and starts to roll down the hillside.
I said to Tony, ‘Gimme a look at that can, will yer?’
He passed it up to me, and there on the side, in big capital letters, it said: ‘WARNING. KEEP AWAY FROM SKIN. MAY CAUSE RASH, BLISTERING, CONVULSIONS, VOMITING, AND/OR FAINTING. IF ANY OF THESE SYMPTOMS OCCUR, SEEK MEDICAL CARE.’
‘Ah, he’ll be all right,’ I said.
And he was, eventually.
Although he did have a blue dick for a while.
In spite of all the arsing around, musically those few weeks in Bel Air were the strongest we’d ever been. For me, Snowblind was one of Black Sabbath’s best-ever albums – although the record company wouldn’t let us keep the title, ’cos in those days cocaine was a big deal, and they didn’t want the hassle of a controversy.
We didn’t argue.
So, after we’d recorded the new songs at the Record Plant in Hollywood, the name Snowblind was dropped, and our fourth album became known as just Vol. 4. We still managed to get a cheeky reference to cocaine in the liner notes, though. If you look closely enough, you’ll see a dedication to ‘the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles’.
And it was true – that album owed a lot to cocaine.
When I listen to songs like ‘Supernaut’, I can just about taste the stuff. The whole album’s like having someone pour a couple of lines into your ears. Frank Zappa once told me that ‘Supernaut’ was one of his favourite rock ’n’ roll tracks of all time, because you can hear the adrenaline. We were flying, y’know? In 1972, it had been only two years since the biggest compliment you could give us was that we were big in Carlisle. Now we had more money than the Queen – or so we thought – with three hit records in the charts, fans all over the world, and as much booze and drugs and chicks as we could ever want.
We weren’t on Cloud Nine. We were on Cloud Ten-and-a-Half.
And we still really cared about the music. We wanted to impress ourselves before we impressed anyone else. If other people happened to like what we were doing, that was just a bonus. That’s how we ended up doing songs like ‘Changes’, which didn’t sound like anything we’d ever done before. When a lot of people hear the name Black Sabbath, all they think of is the heavy stuff. But there was a lot more to us than that – especially when we started making an effort to get away from all that black magic shit. With ‘Changes’, Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff, I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill was going through with his wife at the time. I thought that song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it.
I had to keep listening to it, over and over again. I’m still like that today: if I put it on my iPod, I’ll drive everyone nuts by singing along to it for the rest of the day.
Eventually we started to wonder where the fuck all the coke was coming from. All we knew was that it arrived in the back of unmarked vans, packed inside cardboard boxes. In each box there were about thirty vials – ten across, three deep – and each one had a screw-on top, sealed with wax.
I’m telling you: that coke was the whitest, purest, strongest stuff you could ever imagine.
One sniff, and you were the king of the universe.
But as much as we loved being human vacuum cleaners, we knew it would have been a big deal, getting caught with one of our dodgy shipments. Especially in America. And I didn’t much fancy the idea of spending the rest of my life bent over in an LA prison with the cock of some 280 lb gang member up my arse. The trouble was, of course, being constantly strung-out just made me even more paranoid, and after a while I’d convinced myself that our Ivy League dealer was FBI, or LAPD, or the fucking CIA.
Then, one night, me and the lads went down to Hollywood to see The French Connection at the cinema. Big mistake, that was. The plot was based on a true story about two undercover New York cops busting an international heroin-smuggling ring. By the time the credits rolled, I was hyperventilating.
‘Where the fuck would someone be getting vials of coke with wax seals on them?’ I said to Bill.
He just shrugged.
Then we went to the bog to do another couple of lines.
A few days later, I was lying by the pool, smoking a joint and drinking a beer, trying to get my heart to slow down, when the shady-looking bloke came over and sat down next to me. It was morning, and he had a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the Wall Street Journal in the other.
I hadn’t been to bed.
Now’s my chance to feel this bloke out, see how dodgy he is, I thought. So I leaned over and said, ‘Did you ever see that movie, The French Connection?’
He smiled and shook his head.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You should, y’know. It’s very interesting.’
‘I’m sure it is,’ the bloke chuckled. ‘But why go and see a movie when I had a part in the real thing?’
As soon as I heard that, I broke out into this horrible prickly sweat. This guy was bad news. I just knew it.
‘Listen, man,’ I said. ‘Who do you work for?’
He put down his newspaper and took a sip of his coffee. ‘The United States government,’ he said.
I almost jumped off my recliner and made a dive for the hedge. But my head was spinning, and I hadn’t felt my legs since the night before. That’s it, I thought: we’re all fucked now.
‘Jesus Christ, man, relax,’ he said, seeing the look on
my face. ‘I’m not the FBI. You’re not about to get busted. We’re all friends here. I work for the Food and Drug Administration.’
‘the what?’
‘The FDA.’
‘You mean, all that coke… it’s coming from—’
‘Think of it as a gift from Santa Claus, Ozzy. Because you know what they say about Santa Claus, don’t you?
‘No?’
‘There’s a lot of snow where he comes from.’
Before I could work out if the bloke was being serious, he looked at his watch and said he had a meeting to attend. So he finished his coffee, got up, patted me on the back, and fucked off. I thought no more of it. Then I went back inside the house for a bit more coke and a few hits on the bong.
So there I am on the sofa, with all these sealed vials of coke lined up in front of me – along with a big bowl of pot – and I’m cutting up my first line of the day. But then I start to sweat again – that same horrible, prickly sweat as before. Fuck me, I’m thinking, the paranoia’s really bad today. At that moment Bill strolls into the room with a beer in his hand and goes, ‘It’s like a furnace in here, Ozzy. Why don’t you switch on the AC?’ Then he pokes his head out of the patio door to get his first sunlight in days.
I thought, What’s ‘the AC’ when it’s at home? Then it clicked: air conditioning. I always used to forget that the mod cons in America were so much more advanced than they were in Britain. I’d only recently got used to the novelty of an indoor shitter, never mind automated climate control. So I got up and started looking for the thermostat. Must be on the wall somewhere around here, I said to myself. After a few minutes – bingo! – I found it in a little nook by the front door. So I turned down the temperature and went back to my coke and pot.
Magic.
But as soon as I’d got the first line up my nose, I heard something.
Was it…?
I Am Ozzy Page 13