I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne

  Not a fucking chance.

  Clearwell Castle certainly wasn’t our first choice of venue for making the new album. The plan had initially been to go back to the Bel Air mansion to write the next record, but then we found out we wouldn’t be able to do any recording in LA, because Stevie Wonder had installed a giant synthesizer in our favourite room at the Record Plant. So that idea was shelved. Probably a good job, too: we’d almost killed ourselves with cocaine the last time we’d made a record in LA. At Clearwell Castle, meanwhile, the only danger was scaring ourselves to death.

  And of course we tried very, very hard to do just that.

  We hadn’t been there a day before the practical jokes started. I was the first culprit: I realised that if you put a cartridge in our eight-track machine and turned down the volume all the way, when it reached the end of a song it would make this loud CHA-CHUNK-CHICK noise, which would echo off the stone walls. So I hid the machine under Tony’s bed. Just before he turned in for the night – after we’d spent the evening putting the willies up each other with a seance in the dungeon – I sneaked into his room, pressed ‘play’, and set the volume to zero. Then I ran out and hid in the room next door.

  Eventually I heard Tony get into bed.

  I waited.

  Then, one by one, the lights in the castle went out, until it was pitch black. Apart from the occasional creak from the rafters, and the wind rattling the windows, there was just this eerie silence.

  I waited.

  And waited.

  Then, out of the darkness: CHA-CHUNK-CHICK.

  All I heard from Tony’s room was ‘AAAAGGGGGGHHH-HHH!’ and then a thump as he fell out of bed. Then the door burst open and Tony came charging out in his underpants, screaming, ‘There’s something in my fucking room! There’s something in my fucking room!’

  I didn’t stop laughing for days.

  But as much as the castle might have taken our minds off things, it didn’t help with the songwriting. The problem was that Vol. 4 had been a classic – by Black Sabbath’s standards, anyway. Which meant we wanted the follow-up to be another classic. But you can’t control that. To a certain extent, you’ve just got to be in the right place at the right time. I mean, I don’t think Michael Jackson sat down one day and said to himself, ‘Y’know what? Next year I’m gonna write an album called Thriller, and every song will be a corker, and then I’ll sell a million copies of it every week.’ You can’t plan that kind of thing.

  Then again, we were terrified of becoming one of those bands who started off with a few albums that people thought were amazing, only to follow them up with one turd after another. None of us could really believe how our lives had changed since coming back from the Star Club in 1969. I think we all expected to wake up one day and find that it was all over, that our little scam had been exposed.

  Personally, one of my biggest worries was about us moving too far away from what our fans wanted. I mean, I knew we couldn’t keep on doing ‘Iron Man’ for ever – we had to challenge ourselves – but we couldn’t put brass bands on every track or start doing abstract jazz bollocks, either. The name of the band was Black Sabbath – and as long as we were called Black Sabbath, it was gonna be hard to be accepted as anything else.

  It’s like the guy who plays Batman in the movies. He might be a great actor, but if he goes off and plays a gay waiter in his next role, people will spend the entire movie wondering when he’s gonna rip off his tuxedo, put on a rubber suit, and jump out of the window.

  So we had to be very careful.

  To be honest with you, for a few days at Clearwell Castle, it felt like we didn’t know how to move on. For the first time ever, Tony seemed to be having a hard time coming up with new material. Which meant no riffs. And without riffs, we had no songs. It was that Dutch band, Golden Earring, that saved us in the end. We were listening to their latest album, Moontan, and something just clicked in Tony’s head. A couple of days later, he came down to the dungeon and started playing the riff to ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ . Like I said: every time we thought Tony couldn’t do it again, he did it again – and better. From that moment on, there was no more writer’s block.

  Which was a huge relief.

  But we still couldn’t concentrate in that bloody castle. We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep. You’d just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second and shove a dagger up your arse.

  And the fucking seances we kept holding didn’t help. I dunno what we were thinking, ’cos they’re really dodgy, those things. You’ve got no idea who’s pushing the glass, and then you end up convincing yourself that your great aunt Sally is standing behind you with a sheet over her head. And when you’re doing it in a dungeon, it’s even worse.

  Tony was the one who pulled the most pranks. One day he found an old dressmaker’s dummy in a cupboard, put a frock and a wig on it, then threw it out of a third-floor window just as Bill and Geezer were coming back from the pub. They almost shit their pants. Bill legged it so fast back up the drive-way, he must have broken the land speed record. Another time – I wasn’t around to witness this, but someone told me about it – Tony tied a piece of white thread to an old model sailing ship that was in one of the roadies’ bedrooms, and he fed the thread under the door and into another room. Then he waited until the roadie was in there alone and he gave it a little tug. The roadie looked up, and there on this dusty mantel-piece – which was supported by two gargoyles – the ship was ‘sailing’ all by itself. He ran out of that room and refused ever to go back in.

  Bill got the worst of it, though. One night he’d been on the cider and had passed out on the sofa. We got this full-length mirror and lifted it over him, so it was only a few inches from his face. Then we poked him until he woke up. The second he opened his eyes, all he could see was himself staring back. To this day, I’ve never heard a grown man scream so loud. He must have thought he’d woken up in hell.

  Bill started going to bed with a dagger after that.

  The jokes got out of hand eventually. People started driving home at night instead of sleeping in their rooms. The funny thing is, the only genuinely dangerous thing that happened during our time at Clearwell Castle was when I got loaded and feel asleep with my boot in the fire. All I can remember is waking up at three o’clock in the morning with a funny feeling at the end of my leg, then jumping up, screaming, and hopping around the room with this flaming boot, looking for something wet to put it in. Everyone else thought it was hilarious.

  Geezer just looked at me and said, ‘Got a light, Ozzy?’

  But the smile was soon wiped off his face when an ember flew off my boot and set the carpet on fire. All I can say is: thank God for the vat of cider that Bill kept behind his drum kit, which we used to douse the flames. I’m amazed it put the fire out, to be honest with you. I’d tasted Bill’s cider, so I half expected it to go up like a Molotov cocktail.

  By the time we left Clearwell Castle, we at least had most of the new album written. So we moved on to Morgan Studios, just off Willesden High Road in north London, to finish it off.

  Morgan Studios was a very popular place at the time, so whenever you did any work there, you’d run into other bands, and usually you’d end up going over to the little caff they had in there – it had a dartboard and served booze – and having a bit of a laugh. This time, though, when I went over to say hello to the band working next door to us, my heart sank. It was Yes. While we were working on our album in Studio 4, they were making Tales from Topographic Oceans in Studio 3. They were hippies, so they’d brought in all of these cut-out cows to make their recording space look ‘earthy’. I later found out that the cows even had electrically powered udders. No fucking kidding. They also had bales of hay all over the place, a white picket fence, and a little barn in the corner – like a kid’s plaything. I just said to myself, ‘And I thought Geezer was weird.’

  During the whole time we were at Morga
n Studios, the only member of Yes I ever saw in the caff was Rick Wakeman, their superstar keyboard player. He was famous for doing warp-speed Moog solos while dressed in a wizard’s cape, and it turned out he was the only regular bloke in Yes. In fact, he was always in the caff – usually drinking heavily – and he wasn’t into any of that cut-out-cow, hippy bullshit. He’d rather get out of his box and play darts with me.

  We used to have a right few laughs, me and Rick – and we’ve remained friends to this day.

  The bloke’s a born storyteller. Hanging out with him is like An Evening with… He once told me that he’d legally changed his name to Michael Schumacher in case the cops ever pulled him over for speeding and asked for his name. Then, when PC Plod told him to fuck off and demanded to see his driving licence, there it would be, in black and white. You’ve got to admire that kind of dedication to winding up the boys in blue.

  He had a collection of about thirty Rollers and Bentleys back then – although I don’t know when he ever drove ’em, because whenever I saw him he was shitfaced. He was almost as bad as me. Then, a few years later, he had a bunch of heart attacks in a row and had to give it up.

  You could tell that Rick was bored out of his mind with Tales from Topographic Oceans. One of the funniest stories I ever heard about him was from the time when Yes went on tour with that album. He got so fed up that halfway through one of the eight-hour twiddly bits, he got his roadie to order a curry and bring it to him on stage. Then he sat there at his keyboards, eating a chicken vindaloo under his cape while smoking a fag.

  He didn’t last much longer in Yes after that.

  Anyway, one day at Morgan Studios, when Rick seemed even more bored than usual, I asked him if he’d like to come over to Studio 4 and hear some of our new tracks. I remember playing the melody of ‘Sabbra Cadabra’ to him on my ARP 2600 synthesizer. There I was, murdering this riff with one grubby finger, going duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh, with Rick watching me. And when I finally stopped, Rick just went, ‘Hmm, maybe it would sound better like this…’ leaned over the keyboard, and went diddly-diddly-diddly-diddly-dud-diddly-duh. His fingers moved so fast, I swear you couldn’t see the fucking things.

  I asked him right then if he’d play on the album, and he said he’d love to, as long as we paid him his usual fee.

  ‘How much?’ I asked.

  ‘Two pints of Director’s best bitter.’

  Apart from Rick, though, Yes lived like monks. They didn’t eat meat. They looked like they had yoga classes every day. And you’d never see them getting boozed up. The only rock ’n’ roll thing they did was smoke dope – and, as it happened, I’d just got another shipment of hash in from Afghanistan, and it was phenomenal. Really heavy-duty shit. Now I considered myself a bit of dope connoisseur in those days, and I was interested to see what Yes thought of this stuff. So one morning I took my brick of hash to the studio, went over to see Yes, and gave them a big lump of it. For some reason, the only one of them who was missing that day was Rick.

  ‘Here, lads,’ I said. ‘Stick a bit of this in your rollies.’

  They said they’d try it immediately.

  I went back to Studio 4, had a couple of joints myself, did some double-tracking for the vocals, nipped over to the caff for a cheeky five or six at lunchtime, came back, had another joint, then decided to check how Yes were doing.

  But when I went into Studio 3, it was empty.

  I found the chick from the reception desk and said, ‘Have you seen Yes anywhere?’

  ‘Oh, they all started to feel very unwell around lunchtime. They had to go home.’

  By now, our album had a title – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, after the track that had broken Tony’s writer’s block – and it was another stonker. Our last truly great album, I think. Even the artwork was spot on: it showed a bloke lying on his bed being attacked by demons in his sleep, with a skull and the number 666 above his head. I fucking loved that cover. And with the music we’d managed to strike just the right balance between our old heaviness and our new, ‘experimental’ side. On the one hand, you had tracks like ‘Spiral Architect’, which featured a full orchestra, and ‘Fluff’, which sounded almost like the Shadows (it was named in honour of Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, the DJ who always played our records on Radio 1). On the other, there was ‘A National Acrobat’, which was so heavy it was like being hit over the head with a lump of concrete. I even got one of my own songs on the album: ‘Who Are You?’ I’d written it one night at Bulrush Cottage while I was loaded and fiddling around with a Revox tape machine and my ARP 2600.

  We were all happy with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, I think. Even Patrick Meehan and the record company were happy. Which meant only one thing, of course: things could only go down-hill from there.

  I should have known that bad things were about to happen to Black Sabbath when we flew to America in 1974 and the bloke sitting next to me croaked it halfway across the Atlantic.

  One minute I was hearing this choking noise – ‘uh, ugh, urrrgh’. The next I was sitting next to a corpse. I didn’t know what the fuck to do, so I pressed the button to call for a flight attendant.

  ‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’ said the chick, all prim and proper.

  ‘This bloke’s a goner, I reckon,’ I said, pointing at the lump beside me.

  ‘Sorry, sir?’

  ‘He’s kicked the bucket,’ I said, holding up the bloke’s floppy left arm. ‘Look at ’im. Dead as a fucking dodo.’

  The stewardess started to panic. ‘What happened?’ she hissed, trying to cover him with a blanket. ‘Did he seem unwell?’

  ‘Well, he was making a bit of a choking noise,’ I said. ‘I just thought his peanuts had gone down the wrong way. Then he turned white, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the next thing I knew he’d kicked the bucket.’

  ‘Look,’ said the stewardess quietly. ‘We’re going to prop him up here against the window with this pillow. Please don’t mention this to the other passengers. We don’t want anyone panicking. To compensate for your inconvenience, we can reseat you in first class, if you’d like.’

  ‘What’s the difference between business and first?’ I asked.

  ‘Champagne.’

  ‘Magic.’

  That was the beginning of The End.

  What I remember most about the tour to promote Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is everyone starting to get pissed off. By now Patrick Meehan had stopped being the magician on the end of the phone line who could get you a Rolls-Royce or a horse or a Scalextric set, and had started to become the annoying flash bastard who never gave you a straight answer when you asked him how much dough you were making.

  Meanwhile, Tony was grumbling about doing all the work in the studio, which meant he had no personal life. He had a point. But then again, Tony loved being in the studio – he’d even started to produce the albums himself. Personally, I could never stand all the sitting around, smoking cigarettes, and listening to the same three seconds of guitar solo over and over again. I still can’t handle it to this day. It drives me fucking nuts. Once I’ve done my thing, I have to get out into the fresh air. But as technology improved during the seventies, the temptation was always to add one more track, then another, then another… Tony couldn’t get enough of all that stuff. He had the patience for it. And no one ever argued with him, because he was the band’s unofficial leader.

  Geezer was also getting fed up, because he was tired of me asking him for lyrics all the time. I can see how that must have got on his tits after a while, but the guy was a genius. When we were at Morgan Studios, I remember calling him when he was taking a day off at his country house. I said, ‘C’mon, Geezer, I need some words for “Spiral Architect”.’ He grumbled a bit, told me to call him back in an hour, and put the phone down. When I spoke to him again, he said, ‘Have you got a pen? Good. Write this down: “Sorcerers of madness/Selling me their time/Child of God sitting in the sun…”’

  I said, ‘Geezer, are you just reading this out of a book or
something?’

  I couldn’t believe it. The bloke had written a masterpiece in the time it took me to read one sentence.

  I told him, ‘Keep that up and we’ll have the whole bloody album done by five o’clock.’

  One reason why we weren’t getting on so well is that we’d all started to develop these coked-up, rock-star egos.

  It was happening to a lot of bands in those days. When we did the CalJam Festival at the Ontario Motor Speedway in 1974, for example, there was all kinds of bollocks going on backstage with the other bands. Things like, ‘Well, if he’s got a pinball machine, then I want a pinball machine,’ or ‘If he’s got a quadraphonic sound system, then I want a quadraphonic sound system.’ People were starting to think they were gods. I mean, the scale of that CalJam thing was unbelievable: about 250,000 fans, with the performances ‘simulcast’ on FM radio and the ABC TV network. Rock ’n’ roll had never been done on that scale before. You should have seen the rig Emerson, Lake and Palmer had. Halfway through their set, Keith Emerson did a solo on a grand piano while it was lifted off the stage and spun around, end-over-end.

  CalJam was a good gig for us, actually.

  We hadn’t played live for a while, so we rehearsed in our hotel room without any amps. The next day we flew in by helicopter, ’cos all the roads were blocked. Then we just ripped through our set, with me wearing these silver moon boots and yellow leggings.

  Deep Purple didn’t have such a good time, though. Ritchie Blackmore hated TV cameras – he said they got between him and the audience – so after a couple of songs he smashed the neck of his guitar through the lens of one of them, and then set his amp on fire. It was a heavy scene, and the whole band had to fuck off quick in a helicopter, because the fire marshals were after them. ABC must have been well pissed off, too. Those cameras cost an arm and a leg. I remember being on the flight back to England with Ritchie, actually. It was fucking crazy. I had four grams of coke hidden down my sock, and I had to get rid of it before we landed, so I started handing it out to the air hostesses. They were completely whacked out on the stuff after a while. My in-flight meal took a flight of its own at one point. Can you even imagine doing that kind of thing nowadays? When I think about it, I shudder.