I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne

  I was scared for the kids, more than anything. I told the nannies never to stop for anyone on the street. It was 1986, just over five years since John Lennon had signed a copy of Double Fantasy for a fan and then been shot by the same bloke. And I was well aware that it was often the fans who could be the most psycho. One guy started to follow me around with this five-million-year-old mammoth tusk. Another bloke sent me a video of his house: he’d painted my name over every single thing, both outside and in. Then he sent me another video of this little girl wearing a pair of welly-boots and dancing to ‘Fairies Wear Boots’.

  He was insane, that guy. He built a tomb so that me and him could spend the rest of eternity together. I could think of better fucking things to do with eternity, to be honest with you. It got to the point where the cops had to take him into custody every time I played a gig anywhere near where he lived. And if I did a signing at a record shop in the area, they’d make me wear a bullet-proof jacket, just to be safe.

  I got well and truly pissed off with the crazy stuff after a while. I remember one time, me and my assistant Tony were on a flight from Tokyo to LA. There’d been a six-hour delay at the gate, and they’d handed out free drinks coupons, so everyone was pissed. But this one American chick wouldn’t leave me alone. She was sitting behind me, and every two seconds she’d tap me on the back of my head and go, ‘I know you.’

  Tony kept saying to her, ‘Now, missus, please just go away. We don’t want to be bothered,’ but she wouldn’t listen.

  In the end, she got out of her seat, came round, and wanted a photograph. So I let her take one. Then she went, ‘I got it! You’re Ozzy Bourne!’

  I’d had enough. ‘FUCK OFF!’ I shouted.

  A stewardess came over and told me not to be rude to the other passengers.

  ‘Well, keep that woman away from me then!’ I told her.

  But she kept coming back. And back. And back.

  Finally, I thought, Right, I’m gonna do something about this.

  In those days, I used to carry around these things called Doom Dots. They’re basically chloral hydrate, and they come in little gel caps. All you do is stick a pin in the end and squirt the stuff into someone’s drink. When you hear about people being ‘slipped a Mickey’, that’s what they’re being given – a Doom Dot. Anyway, I waited for this chick to get up and go for a piss, then reached behind me, and squirted a Doom Dot into her glass of wine.

  When she came back, I told Tony, ‘Keep looking behind me, and tell me what’s happening.’

  He said, ‘Whey, she’s ahl-reet right now, but she’s leaning forward a bit. She’s lookin’ a bit dazed. Oh, hang on now –

  she’s goin’, she’s goin’, she’s—’

  I felt a jolt in the back of my seat.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked Tony.

  ‘Face down on the tray. Fast asleep.’

  ‘Magic,’ I said.

  ‘Aye. It’s just a shame she didn’t get her soup oot the way first, lyke. Poor lass. She’s gonna be covered.’

  But the Jesus freaks were the worst. While the ‘Suicide Solution’ case was going through the courts they followed me around everywhere. They would picket my shows with signs that read, ‘The Anti-Christ Is Here’. And they’d always be chanting: ‘Put Satan behind you! Put Jesus in front of you!’

  One time, I made my own sign – a smiley face with the words ‘Have a Nice Day’ – and went out and joined them. They didn’t even notice. Then, just as the gig was about to start, I put down the sign, said, ‘See ya, guys,’ and went back to my dressing room.

  The most memorable Jesus-freak moment was in Tyler, Texas. By then, the death threats were coming in pretty much every day, so I had this security guy, a Vietnam vet called Chuck, who was with me at all times. Chuck was so hardcore he couldn’t even go into a Chinese restaurant. ‘If I see anyone who looks like a Gook, I’m gonna take ’em out,’ he’d say. He had to turn down a tour with me in Japan ’cos he couldn’t handle it. Whenever we stayed in a hotel, he’d spend the night crawling around on his belly through the undergrowth in the garden or doing push-ups in the corridor. Really intense guy.

  Anyway, in Tyler, we did the gig, went out on the town, and got back to the hotel at about seven in the morning. I’d agreed to meet a doctor in the lobby at noon that day – my throat had been bothering me – so I went to bed, got a few hours’ sleep, then Chuck knocked on my door and off we went to see the quack. But the doctor was nowhere to be found, so I said to the chick on the front desk, ‘If a bloke in a white coat turns up, just tell him I’m in the coffee shop.’

  But I didn’t have a clue that the local evangelist guy had been doing this TV campaign about me in the run-up to the gig, telling everyone that I was the Devil, that I was corrupting the youth of America, and that I was going to take everyone with me to hell. So half the town was out to get me, but I had no idea. There I was, sitting in this coffee shop, with Chuck twitching and muttering beside me. Thirty minutes went by. No doctor. Then another thirty minutes. Still no doctor. Then, finally, this guy comes in and says, ‘Are you Ozzy Osbourne?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU! PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU! PUT SATAN BEHIND YOU! PUT JESUS IN FRONT OF YOU!’

  It was the preacher from the telly. And it turned out that the coffee shop was full of his disciples, so as soon as he started to do his nutty Jesus bullshit, all these other people joined in, until I was surrounded by forty or fifty Jesus freaks, all red in the face and spitting out the same words.

  Then Chuck went fucking mental. The whole thing must have triggered some sort of ’Nam flashback, ’cos he just flipped. Stage-five psycho. The guy must have taken down about fifteen of the Jesus freaks in the first ten seconds. There were teeth and Bibles and glasses flying everything.

  I didn’t stick around to see what happened next. I just elbowed the preacher in the nuts and legged it.

  The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, ‘What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is a God, it’s nature. If there’s a Devil, it’s nature. I feel the same way when people ask me if songs like ‘Hand of Doom’ and ‘War Pigs’ are anti-war. I think war is just part of human nature. And I’m fascinated by human nature – especially the dark side. I always have been. It doesn’t make me a Devil worshipper, no more than being interested in Hitler makes me a Nazi. I mean, if I’m a Nazi, how come I married a woman who’s half Jewish?

  All those Jesus freaks ever had to do was listen to my records, and it would have been obvious. But they just wanted to use me for publicity. And I suppose I didn’t care that much, ’cos every time they attacked me, I got my ugly mug on the telly and sold another hundred thousand records. I should probably have sent them a Christmas card.

  But in the end, even the American legal system came down on my side.

  The ‘Suicide Solution’ lawsuit was filed in January 1986, and was thrown out in August of that year. At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban ‘Suicide Solution’ and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they’d have to ban Shakespeare, ’cos Romeo and Juliet’s about suicide, too. He also said that the song lyrics were protected by the right of free speech in America. The judge agreed, but his summing up wasn’t exactly friendly. He said that although I was ‘totally objectionable and repulsive, trash can be given First Amendment protection, too’.

  I had to read that sentence about five times before I realised that the bloke had actually ruled in our favour.
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br />   The one thing the McCollums were right about was that there was a subliminal message in ‘Suicide Solution’. But it wasn’t ‘Get the gun, get the gun, shoot-shoot-shoot’. What I actually say is ‘Get the flaps out, get the flaps out, bodge-bodge-bodge’. It was a stupid dirty joke we had at the time. If a chick took her kit off, we said she was getting her flaps out – her piss flaps. And ‘bodge’ was just a word we had for fuck. So I was basically saying, ‘Get a chick naked and give her one,’ which was a whole fucking lot different to saying, ‘Blow your brains out.’

  But the media was obsessed with that stuff for a long time. Which was great PR as far as we were concerned. It got to the point where if you put a ‘parental advisory’ sticker on your album saying it contained explicit lyrics, you sold twice as many copies. Then you had to have one of those stickers, otherwise the album wouldn’t chart.

  After a while, I started to put subliminal messages in as many of my songs as I could. For example, on No Rest for the Wicked, if you play ‘Bloodbath in Paradise’ backwards, you can clearly hear me saying, ‘Your mother sells whelks in Hull.’

  The saddest thing about that period wasn’t that the Jesus freaks kept giving us a hard time. It was that my old bandmates Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake decided to have a go, too. It started to feel like someone had put a bull’s-eye on my forehead, just ’cos I’d made a bit of dough.

  They claimed we owed them money for Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, so they sued us. And we fought, because we didn’t owe them anything. Bob and Lee were what’s known as paid-to-play musicians. They got a weekly rate for recording, a different rate for touring and another rate to stay at home. I even paid for the fucking petrol they used to drive to and from the studio. Yes, they helped write some of the songs on the first two albums, but they got publishing royalties for that – and they still get them to this day. So what more did they want? I’m obviously no great legal brain, but from what I understand they said I wasn’t a solo artist and that we were all part of a band. But if I was just the singer and we were all at the same level, how come I auditioned them? And how come I was talking about Blizzard of Ozz for years before I met them? And where the fuck are all their hit records, before and after the two albums with me?

  People ask me why we didn’t just settle. But that’s what Michael Jackson did, and look what happened to him. If you’ve got a bit of hard-earned dough in the bank and you say to someone who’s suing you, ‘OK, how much will it cost to make this go away?’ that opens the door for every loony and arsehole in the world to try to get the next load off you. You have to stand up for yourself, ’cos it can be a nasty game, this business – especially when people think you go to bed at night on a big mountain of cash.

  In the end Bob and Lee’s lawsuit got thrown out of every court in America. What really pisses me off is that Bob and Lee never said to me, ‘Ozzy, we’ve gotta sit down. We wanna have a talk to you.’ They just kept blasting off in all fucking directions. The first I knew about it was when I got served. They’d been creeping around behind my back, calling up other people who’d played on my albums and trying to get them involved. I’d done fuck-all wrong, but they made me feel like the criminal of the century, and it really got up my arse after a while.

  Sharon protected me from a lot of the details, ’cos she knows how much I worry. In the end she just snapped and re-recorded Bob and Lee’s parts on those two albums. When they were re-released, a sticker was put on the covers telling people all about it. I didn’t have anything to do with that decision, and I can’t say I feel good about it. I told Sharon that I was uncomfortable with it, but I get it, y’know? I understand why she felt she had to do it. Every time we got past one hurdle, another one would come up. It never stopped. The case went on for twenty-five years after Blizzard of Ozz was recorded. All I wanted to do was get on with being a rock ’n’ roller, and instead I ended up being Perry fucking Mason, giving depositions here, there and everywhere.

  What really kills me is that I worked with Bob for years, and I was very fond of him and his family. He’s a very talented bloke. We were good friends. I certainly didn’t turn around and sue him when they put my balls to the fire for ‘Suicide Solution’, even though he wrote some of the lyrics. But sometimes in life you’ve gotta move on. Eventually, I had to stop talking to him or seeing him, ’cos I was frightened I might say the wrong thing – and then it would be lawsuit time again. Also, I just hate fucking confrontations. It’s one of my biggest failings.

  I never want to go through any of that bullshit again. Before I work with anyone now, I tell them to get themselves a lawyer, have their lawyer write up a contract with my lawyer, then read it, think about it, make sure they’re happy with it, make double and triple sure they’re happy with it, and then never say that anyone ripped them off.

  Because I don’t do that – no matter what Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake might say.

  My last good memory of the eighties, before everything went dark, was being sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Not because I’d broken the law again – amazingly – but because I was asked to play a gig there.

  What a crazy experience that was. I might have been in a few police station lock-ups over the years, but I hadn’t set foot in a proper slammer since I’d walked out of Winson Green in 1966. The iron bars, the balconies, even the guards all looked the same as they had twenty years before, but it was the smell that really brought it all back to me: like a public shitter, times ten. Bad enough to make your eyes water. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to work in one of those places. I suppose they’re all ex-army, so they’re used to it.

  Maybe that’s what I would have done in the end if the army hadn’t told me to fuck off.

  I was invited to do the gig because the prison had its own band, called the Scrubs, which had both guards and inmates in it. They’d written a song and donated the royalties to charity. Then they wrote to me and asked if I fancied doing a gig with them. The deal was that they’d play a set, then I’d play my set, then we’d do a jam of ‘Jailhouse Rock’.

  So we get to the prison and they let me through all the fences and gates and doors, then they show me into this back room where there’s a big fat guy making a pot of tea. He’s a nice jolly chap, very friendly, and offers me a cup of tea.

  I ask him, ‘How long are you in here for, then?’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘I’ll never get out of here.’

  We keep chatting for a while and I’m drinking this cup of tea, but then curiosity gets the better of me and I say, ‘So, how come you’re in here for such a long stretch?’

  ‘I murdered eight people.’

  That’s a bit heavy duty, I think, but we carry on talking. Then curiosity gets the better of me again. ‘So, how did you do it?’ I ask, taking another sip of my tea. ‘I mean, how did you kill all those people?’

  ‘Oh, I poisoned them,’ he says.

  I just about threw the mug of tea at the wall. And whatever had been in my mouth came out of my nose. It’s funny, when you think of a murderer, you always picture some tall, dark, evil-looking monster. But it can be just a nice, normal, jolly fat bloke, with a loose wire somewhere.

  The gig itself was surreal.

  The smell of dope in the hall where we played almost knocked me off my feet. It was like a Jamaican wedding in there. Another thing that amazed me was that they had a bar right outside, where all the guards went. As for the members of the Scrubs, the bass player was a Vietnamese guy who’d burned thirty-seven people to death a few years earlier by pouring petrol through the letterbox of an underground club in Soho and putting a match to it (the biggest mass killing in British history at the time); the guitarist was a kid who’d murdered a drug dealer by beating him to death with an iron bar; and then there were a couple of guards who sang and played the drums.

  I’ll never forget the moment when it was our turn to go on stage. Jake E. Lee had just left the band and Zakk Wylde had taken over as lead guitarist. He was you
ng, with ripped muscles and long blond hair, and the second he walked out from the wings, the entire place started to wolf-whistle and scream, ‘Bend over, little boy, bend over, little boy!’ Then they all started to jump around, stoned out of their minds, while the riot-guards stood guard. It was insane. I’d said to Sharon before we went on, ‘At least if we’re crap, no one will walk out.’ Now I was thinking, No, they’ll just kill me.

  At one point, I looked down and there in the front row was Jeremy Bamber, the bloke who murdered his entire family with a rifle at a farmhouse in Essex and then tried to make it look like his mentally ill sister had done it. His face had been on the front page of every tabloid in Britain for months. He gave me a big smile, did the old Bambinator.

  At the end, when we were playing ‘Jailhouse Rock’, there was a full-on stage invasion, led by one of the kids who had tried to cut the head off that police officer, Keith Blakelock, during the Broadwater Farm riot. I knew it was him ’cos one of the guards on stage told me. The last thing I saw was this kid taking off a shoe and hitting himself on the head with it.

  Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I thought. Nice seeing ya, I’m off now.

  And I didn’t look back.

  *

  One morning, not long after that gig, Sharon asked me, ‘Did you have a good night last night, Ozzy?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘At Kelly’s birthday party. Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose.’

  All I could remember was playing with the kids in the garden, making Jack laugh by tickling his tummy, telling a few funny jokes, and eating one too many slices of Kelly’s birthday cake. We’d even hired a clown for the occasion – a bloke called Ally Doolally – who’d put on a little puppet show. The rest was a bit of a blur, ’cos I’d also had one or two drinks.