The morning after the crash I called my sister Jean, who told me that my mother had been on a bus when she’d seen a newspaper stand with the headline, ‘OZZY OSBOURNE – AIRCRASH DEATH’. My poor old mum had gone crazy. Then later that day, I went back to the dodgy housing estate with Randy’s brother-in-law. The bus was still there, twisted into the shape of a boomerang, next to the ruins of the garage. And there, in the corner, untouched in all the ash and rubble, was a perfect little cut-out section of the Gibson T-shirt that Randy had been wearing when he died. Just the logo, nothing else. I couldn’t believe it – it was so spooky.
Meanwhile, outside the hotel, all these kids had started to hang around. I noticed that some of them were wearing the Diary of a Madman tracksuits we’d had made for the tour, so I said to Sharon, ‘We’re not selling those things, are we?’ When she said ‘no’, I walked up to this kid and asked, ‘Where did you get the tracksuit from?’
He said, ‘Oh, I went in and got it off the bus.’
I went fucking crazy. Almost ripped his head off.
Eventually all the paperwork was done – the only drug they found in Randy’s body was nicotine – and the cops let us leave. They were glad to see us go, I imagine.
Then we had to do two funerals in one week, and it was fucking heavy-duty on all of us, especially Sharon, who suffered terribly. She couldn’t even listen to the Diary of a Madman album again for years.
Randy’s funeral was held at the First Lutheran Church in Burbank. I was one of the pallbearers. They had big pictures of Randy all around the altar. I remember thinking: It’s only been a few days since I was sitting on the bus with him, calling him mad for wanting to go to university. I felt so bad. Randy was one of the greatest guys who’d ever been in my life. And I suppose I felt guilty, too, because if he hadn’t been in my band, he wouldn’t have died. I don’t know how Randy’s mother survived the funeral – she must be some kind of woman. Her little baby had died. She was divorced, Delores was, so her kids meant everything to her. And Randy really loved her – he absolutely adored her. For years after, every time me and Sharon used to see Dee, we felt terrible. I mean, what can you say? It’s gotta be any parent’s worst nightmare when they lose their child like that.
After the service there was a motorcade from Burbank to San Bernardino, about an hour away. Randy was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grand -parents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I’ve never been back to his graveside. I’d like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side.
Rachel’s funeral couldn’t have been more different. It was at a black gospel church somewhere in South LA. She was very big on her church, Rachel was. And during the service they’re all singing gospel and diving on the floor and shouting, ‘Jesus Loves You, Rachel!’ I’m thinking, What the fuck’s all this about? It’s a joyous experience, an African-American funeral. There’s no moping around.
The following week I did the David Letterman show. It was surreal, man. As soon as I’d sat down and the band stopped playing, Dave said to me, ‘Let’s just get right to it, Ozzy. From what I hear, you bit the head off a…’
I couldn’t believe he was going there.
‘Oh, don’t,’ I said. But it was too late.
Dave was very cool with me overall – he was very nice, very sympathetic – but I was in no mood for the bat story. Shock is a very weird thing, and the funerals had been bad.
At the end of the interview, Dave said to me, ‘I know that recently there’s been a personal and professional tragedy in your life. Quite honestly, I’m surprised that you went ahead with your commitment to be here, and I appreciate that, and I know you want to take a minute to explain.’
‘All I can say is that I lost two of the greatest people in my life,’ I said, trying not to choke up. ‘But it ain’t gonna stop me because I’m about rock ’n’ roll, and rock ’n’ roll is for the people, and I love people, and that’s what I’m about. I’m going to continue because Randy would have liked me to, and so would Rachel, and I’m not going to stop, ’cos you can’t kill rock ’n’ roll.’
If it sounds a bit over-the-top, it’s ’cos I was as pissed as a fart. It was the only way I could function.
In private, I wasn’t so sure that you couldn’t kill rock ’n’ roll. ‘It’s not meant to be,’ I kept telling Sharon. ‘Let’s call it a day.’
But she wasn’t having any of it. ‘No, we are not calling it a day. This is what you’re meant to do, Ozzy. Nothing’s gonna stop us.’ If Sharon hadn’t given me that speech a few times, I’d never have gone on a stage again.
I don’t know who started making the calls to find a new guitarist. Sharon was a mess, totally distraught, so maybe her father’s office organised it from LA. But eventually the search became a welcome distraction, a way to take our minds off things. I remember at one point I phoned Michael Schenker, the German guy who had played with UFO. He was like, I’ll do you this favour, but I want a private jet, and I want this, and I want that. I said to him, ‘Why are you stipulating your demands at this point? Just get me though the next show and we’ll talk about it.’ But he just kept saying, Oh, I’ll need this and I’ll need that. So in the end I said, ‘Y’know what? Go fuck yourself.’
He’s nuts anyway, Schenker, so I don’t hold it against him.
Our first stand-in was Bernie Tormé, a tall, blond Irish guy who had played with Ian Gillan’s band. Bernie was in an impossible situation, trying to take Randy’s place, but he couldn’t have been more helpful. Having been thrown in at the deep end, he did an incredible job for a few nights, before leaving to record with his own band. Next we hired Brad Gillis, from Night Ranger, and he got us through to the end of the tour.
I honestly don’t know how we did any of those gigs after Randy died. We were all in a state of shock. But I suppose being on the road was better than sitting around at home, thinking about the two incredible people we’d lost, and how we’d never get them back.
A few weeks after Randy died, I asked Sharon to marry me. ‘If there’s one good thing that could come out of all the shit we’ve been through on this tour,’ I told her, ‘it would be making you my wife.’
She said yes. So I put a ring on her finger, and we set a date.
Then the booze wore off and I changed my mind.
After everything that had gone down with Thelma, I was terrified of going through it all again. But then I got over the fear. I was in love with Sharon, and I knew I didn’t want anyone else. So, a few weeks later, I proposed again.
‘Will you marry me?’ I asked her.
‘Fuck off.’
‘Please?’
‘No.’
‘Please?’
‘All right then, yes.’
It went on like that for months. We had more engagements than most people have wedding guests. After the first one, it was usually Sharon who called them off. One time, when we were driving to a meeting in LA, she threw her ring out of the car window ’cos I hadn’t come home the night before. So I went out and bought her another one. Then I got pissed and lost it, but I didn’t realise until after I’d got down on one knee.
So that one was a non-starter.
But a couple of days later, I bought her another ring and we got engaged yet again. But then I was walking home after a twenty-four-hour bender, and I passed a graveyard. There was one freshly dug grave with a bunch of flowers on top. Beautiful flowers, actually. So I nicked them and gave them to Sharon when I got home. She almost burst into tears, she found it so touching.
Then she made this little sobbing noise and went, ‘Oh, Ozzy, and you even wrote me a note, how sweet!’
Suddenly I was thinking: What note? I can’t remember writing any note.
But it was too late. Sharon was already opening up the envelope and pulling out the card.
‘In loving memory of our dearest Harry,’ it s
aid.
That was another ring out of the fucking window.
And I got a black eye, for good measure.
I proposed to her seventeen times in the end. You could track me home by the trail of rings. They weren’t fucking cheap, either. But they got a lot cheaper as time went on, that’s for sure.
Then, as soon as I’d signed the decree-whatever-the-fuck-it’s-called to make my divorce with Thelma official, Sharon chose July 4 as our wedding day – so I’d never forget the anniversary.
‘At least it’s not the first of May,’ I said to her.
‘Why?’
‘That’s the date Thelma chose so I’d never forget the anniversary.’
With things getting serious with Sharon, she started to get heavy with me about all the cocaine I was doing. She was fine with the booze, but the coke – no way. The fact that our psycho bus driver had been high on coke when he killed Randy and Rachel made it even worse.
Every time I took the stuff, I’d get a bollocking – to the point where I had to start hiding it from her.
But that caused even more problems.
One time, we were staying in one of the bungalows at the Howard Hughes house, and I’d just bought this eight-ball – an eighth of an ounce of coke – from my dealer.
‘This stuff’s gonna knock your head off,’ the bloke had told me.
As soon as I got back to the bungalow I went over to the bookshelves and hid the plastic bag inside this hardback novel. ‘Third shelf up, six books to the left,’ I kept repeating, so I’d remember. I was planning to save it for a special occasion, but that night I was having a bit of a bad comedown, so I decided to have a little toot. I made sure that Sharon was asleep, tiptoed out of the bedroom, went over to the bookshelves, counted three up and six across, then opened up the novel. No coke. Fuck.
Maybe it was six shelves up and three books from the left?
Still no coke.
So I sneaked out of the bungalow and knocked on the window of the room where Tommy was staying. ‘Pssst!’ I whispered. ‘Hey, Tommy! Are you awake, man? I can’t find the fucking coke.’
The second I said that, there was this clattering noise behind me.
Sharon had flung open the window of our bungalow.
‘IS THIS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR, YOU FUCKING DRUG ADDICT?’ she shouted, emptying the bag of coke on to a sheet of paper.
‘Sharon,’ I said. ‘Be cool. Don’t do anything cra—’
But then she goes puff, and blows all the coke into the garden.
Before I even have time to react, Sharon’s Great Dane comes lolloping out from his kennel, and starts licking up the coke from the grass like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted in his life. I’m thinking, This ain’t gonna be good news. Then the dog’s tail goes straight out – BOING! – and he takes this enormous shit. I’ve never seen such a big shit in my life, and it goes all over the water fountain in the courtyard. Then the dog takes off. He’s a fucking huge dog, this Great Dane, so when he runs he does some damage, knocking over plant pots, denting cars, trampling over flower beds, but he keeps it up for three days and three nights straight, his tongue hanging out, his tail still standing on end.
By the time the coke wore off, I swear the dog had lost four pounds. He’d developed a bit of a taste for the old waffle dust, too.
He was always trying to sniff it out after that.
We got married in Hawaii on the way to a gig in Japan. It was a small ceremony on the island of Maui. Don Arden showed up, but only because he wanted Sharon to sign some paper-work. My mum and my sister Jean came, too. Tommy was my best man. The funny thing about getting married in America was that we needed to get a blood test before they’d give us a licence. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bloke from the lab had called back and said, ‘Mr Osbourne, we appear to have found some blood in your alcohol.’
There was a lot of drinking at that wedding, not to mention seven bottles of Hennessy in the wedding cake. If you’d been breathalysed after eating a slice of that stuff, you’d have gone to jail. And I was smoking some killer weed, too.
‘Maui-wowy’, the local dealer called it.
The stag night was a joke. I got so fucked up in the hotel, I missed it. There’s a photograph of me crashed out in the room as everyone’s getting ready to leave. Fucking classic. The wedding night was even worse. I didn’t even make it back to the room to spend the night with my new wife. At five in the morning, the hotel manager had to call her room and say, ‘Will you please come and get your husband. He’s asleep in the corridor and blocking the maids.’
*
It wasn’t long after I almost pissed in my new father-in-law’s face that he stopped calling me Ozzy. He took to calling me ‘Vegetable’ instead. As in, ‘Fuck off, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Die, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Get out of my fucking house, right now, Vegetable.’ I could understand why the bloke was upset – no one likes to get piss splashed in their direction – but I thought that was a bit much.
Mind you, it was nothing compared with how he’d talk to Sharon. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have your own father say such fucking horrific things to you, but Sharon could take it. She was unbelievably tough like that. And I suppose she was just used to it. Most of the time it was me who got upset. I’d sit there and ask myself, How can a human being even come up with that shit? Never mind say it to their own flesh and blood. It was just the vilest stuff, from the depths of the lowest places.
Then, the next thing you knew, they were friends again.
That’s how Sharon was raised – and why she’s so extreme. But I needed someone like her in my life, because she could stand up to me. In fact, standing up to me was nothing compared with standing up to her father.
In the end, what happened between Sharon and her old man was tragic. At the time, I was too out of it on booze and drugs to know exactly what went down, and it’s not my place to say much about it now. All I know is that Sharon found out that Don was having an affair with a girl younger than she was; that we left Jet Records, which made Don go apeshit; and that we had to pay him $1.5 million to buy out our contract and stop him bankrupting us with lawsuits. There had always been bad blood between the two of them, but it got out of control. Eventually, they stopped talking to each other altogether, and the silence continued for almost twenty years.
If any good came out of that situation, it was that we borrowed as much dough as we could to buy out all of my contracts, so that we weren’t controlled by anyone. I remember Sharon going in for a meeting with Essex Music and saying, ‘OK, how much do you want to fuck off? This is going to get ugly, because we’re not playing along any more. Just give us the number, and we’ll pay it.’
A week later, I had my own publishing company.
Meanwhile, Don might have thought I was a vegetable, but from the moment Sharon bought out my contract, he never stopped trying to get it back – usually by attempting to fuck up our marriage. He could be a really devious guy when he wanted to be, could my father-in-law. One time, for example, I was staying with Sharon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and we’d rented this very conspicuous white Rolls-Royce Corniche to ride around town in. But then I got shitfaced, we had this crazy fight about something, and Sharon fucked off, saying she was going back to England. Literally two minutes after she walked out of the door, the phone rang. It was Don. ‘I need to talk to you, Veg… er, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent.’
Looking back, he must have had someone outside the hotel, looking out for Sharon driving the Roller by herself. Otherwise, how would he have known that I was alone? The last thing I wanted to do was talk to him, but I couldn’t say no. The guy was terrifying. If you believed the rumours, he kept a loaded gun in his desk.
So Don came over and started telling me the most vile things you could ever imagine about my wife. It was the most disgusting stuff I’d ever heard. It was inhuman, what he said. And he was talking about his own daughter.
Eventually, he paused for br
eath, then asked me, ‘Did you know all that, Ozzy? Did you know what your wife’s really like?’
Obviously, he wanted me to go crazy, leave Sharon, return to Jet Records, and start over.
But I wasn’t gonna give him the pleasure.
He had no right to come to my room and make up all this horrendous bullshit about my wife. I didn’t believe a single fucking word of it. Anyway, whatever Sharon had done, it couldn’t have been any worse than what I’d done. And it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what Don himself was doing. But I thought that the best way to piss him off would be just to act like it was no big deal.
‘Yeah, Don,’ I said. ‘I know all that about Sharon.’
‘You do?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And?’
‘And what, Don? I love her.’
‘If you want to get the marriage annulled, we can always arrange that for you, y’know?’
‘No thanks, Don.’
I could never believe what that guy was willing to do to his own family. Years later, for example, we found out that when he’d been managing me – and before then, even – he’d used Sharon as a shield. All of his companies, credit cards, bank accounts and loans were in her name. Basically Don didn't exist on paper, so if he didn’t pay his bills, he couldn’t be sued. And that included his tax bills, which he just fucking ignored – in England and America. Which left Sharon on the hook for everything without her ever knowing it. Then one day, out of the blue, she got a letter from the IRS saying she owed them, big time. By the time they’d added up all the unpaid taxes, interest and penalties, it came to seven figures. Don had taken her to the fucking cleaners.
‘I don’t know what your father’s made of,’ I said to her, ‘because I could never do that to my children.’
It drove Sharon halfway round the bend, that tax bill.
In the end, I said, ‘Look, whatever you’ve got to pay, just pay it, because I don’t want to live another day with this fucking thing hanging over us. You can’t avoid tax, so just get it done, and we’ll cut back on our expenses and work around it.’ That kind of thing happens a lot in the music business. When Sammy Davis Jr died, I heard that he left his wife with a seven-million-dollar tax bill, which took her a fucking eternity to pay off.
I Am Ozzy Page 24