Bill had always been the boy who cries wolf, y’know? I remember one time, back in the day, I was at his house and he said, ‘Oh, ’ello Ozzy. You’ll never guess what? I’ve just come out of a coma.’
‘What d’you mean, a coma? That’s one stage removed from being dead. You know that, don’t you, Bill?’
‘All I know is I went to bed on Friday, and now it’s Tuesday, and I only just woke up. That’s a coma, isn’t it?’
‘No, that’s taking too many drugs and drinking too much cider and sleeping for three days in a row, you dick.’
But this time it turned out that Bill wasn’t fucking around. His sore hand was the first sign of a major heart attack. Both his parents had died of heart disease, so it ran in the family. He was kept in hospital for ages, and even when he was let out he couldn’t work for a year. So we had to tour without him again, which was a terrible shame. When he finally felt up to it, we gave it another shot in the studio, but by then it just wasn’t happening.
The press blamed my ego for our failure to record a new album. But in all honesty I don’t think that was the problem. I’d just changed. We all had. I wasn’t the crazy singer who spent most of his time getting blasted down the pub but could be called back to do a quick vocal whenever Tony had come up with a riff. That wasn’t how I worked any more. And by then I’d been solo for a lot longer than I’d ever been with Black Sabbath. If I’m honest, being sober probably didn’t help the creativity, either – although I was still a chronic drug addict. I latched on to a doctor in Monmouth in no time, and got him to prescribe me some Valium. I was also taking about twenty-five Vicodins a day, thanks to a stash I brought over from America. I needed something to calm me down. I mean, the expectations for the album were just so high. And if it wasn’t as good as before, what was the point of doing it? There wasn’t a point, as far as I was concerned.
So it never happened.
I was back in LA, staying at a rented place in Malibu, when the phone rang. It was Norman, my brother-in-law.
Oh shit, I thought. This ain’t gonna be good news.
It wasn’t.
‘John?’ said Norman. ‘It’s your mother. She’s not doing very well. You should come home and see her.’
‘Now?’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry, John. But the docs say it’s bad.’
It had been eleven years since the argument about the newspaper retraction, and I hadn’t seen much of my mum since – although we had made up over the phone. Of course, I now wish I’d spent more time with her. But my mum didn’t exactly make it easy for me, talking about money all the time. I should just have given her more of it, I suppose. But I always thought that whatever I had was temporary.
As soon as I got the call from Norman, I flew back to England with my assistant Tony. Then we drove up to Manor Hospital in Walsall, where she was being treated.
My mum was eighty-seven, and she’d been ill for a while. She was diabetic, had kidney trouble, and her ticker was on the blink. She knew her time was up. I’d never known her go to church before, but all of a sudden she’d become very religious. She spent half the time I was there reciting prayers. She’d been raised a Catholic, so I suppose she thought she’d better catch up on her homework before going over the great divide. But she didn’t seem frightened, and she wasn’t suffering – or, if she was, she didn’t let me know. The first thing I said to her was: ‘Mum, are you in pain? You’re not just putting on a brave face, are you?’
‘No dear, I’m all right,’ she said. ‘You’ve always been such a worrier. Ever since you were a little baby.’
I stayed for a few days. Mum sat up in bed for hours talking to me with her arm hooked up to this whirring and bleeping dialysis machine. She seemed so well, I began to wonder what all the fuss was about. Then, on my last day there, she asked me to pull my chair closer to the bed, because she had something very important to ask me.
I leaned in really close, not knowing what to expect.
‘John,’ she said, ‘is it true?’
‘Is what true, Mum?’
‘Are you really a millionaire?’
‘Oh, for fu—’ I had to stop myself. After all, my mum was dying. So I just said, ‘I don’t really want to talk about it.’
‘Oh, go on, John, tell me. Pleeeease.’
‘OK, then. Yeah, I am.’
She smiled and her eyes twinkled like a schoolgirl’s. I thought, Well, at least I finally made her happy.
Then she said, ‘But tell me, John, are you a multi-multi-multi-multi-millionaire?’
‘C’mon, Mum,’ I said. ‘Let’s not talk about this.’
‘But I want to!’
I sighed and said, ‘OK, then. Yeah, I am.’
Her face broke into that huge grin again. Part of me was thinking, Is this really that important to her? But at the same time, I knew this moment was the closest we’d been in years.
So I just laughed. Then she laughed, too.
‘What’s it like?’ she asked, with a giggle.
‘Could be worse, Mum,’ I said. ‘Could be worse.’
After that we said our goodbyes and I flew back to California with Tony. As soon as I landed, I had to go and do a gig with Black Sabbath at the Universal Amphitheatre. I can’t remember much of it, ’cos I couldn’t concentrate. I just kept thinking about my mum, asking me if I was a millionaire. After the gig, I went back to the house in Malibu. When I opened the door, the phone was ringing.
It was Norman.
‘John,’ he said. ‘She’s gone.’
I sobbed, man.
I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.
It was April 8, 2001 – just forty-eight hours since we’d been talking in the hospital.
I don’t know why, but I took it very hard. One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I’m no good at dealing with people dying. It’s not that I’m afraid of it – I know that everyone’s gotta go eventually – but I can’t help thinking that there are only one or two ways of being brought into this world, but there are so many fucked-up ways of leaving it. Not that my mum went out in a bad way: Norman told me that she just went to sleep that night and never woke up.
I couldn’t face the funeral – not after what had gone down at my father’s. Besides, I didn’t want it to be a press event, which it would have been, with people asking me for a photograph outside the church. I just wanted my mum to go out in peace, without it being about me. I’d given her enough grief over the years, and I didn’t want to add to it. So I didn’t go.
I still think it was the right decision – if only because my final memory of my mum is such a fond one. I can see her so clearly, lying in the hospital bed, smiling up at me, asking what it’s like to be a ‘multi-multi-multi-multi-millionaire’, and me answering, ‘It could be worse, Mum. It could be worse.’
11
Dead Again
The first time we allowed TV cameras into our house was in 1997, the year Black Sabbath got back together. We were renting Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith’s old place in Beverly Hills. I was off the booze – most of the time, anyway – but I was still scamming as many pills as I could from any doctor who’d write me a prescription. I was smoking my head off, too. Cigars, mainly. I thought it was quite acceptable to fire up a foot-long Cuban while lying in bed at nine o’clock at night. I’d say to Sharon, ‘D’you mind?’ and she’d look up from her magazine and go, ‘Oh no, please, don’t mind me.’
I don’t think the TV guys could believe what they were seeing most of the time. On the first day, I remember this producer turning to me and saying, ‘Is it always like this?’
‘Like what?’
‘A sit-com.’
‘What d’you mean, “a sit-com”?’
‘It’s the timing,’ he said. ‘You walk in one door, the dog walks out of the other, then your daughter says, “Dad, why does the dog walk like that?” and you say, “Because it’s got four legs.” And then she goes into a huff and storms off, stage left. You co
uldn’t script this stuff.’
‘We’re not trying to be funny, you know.’
‘I know. That’s what makes it so funny.’
‘Things just happen to my family,’ I told him. ‘But things happen to every family, don’t they?’
‘Not like this,’ he said.
A company called September Films made the documentary – Ozzy Osbourne Uncut, they called it – and it was shown on Channel Five in Britain and the Travel Channel in America. People went crazy over it. In the year after it came out, Five repeated it over and over. I don’t think anyone could get over the fact that we had to deal with the exact same boring, day-to-day bullshit as any other family. I mean, yes, I’m the crazy rock ’n’ roller who bit the head off a bat and pissed on the Alamo, but I also have a son who likes to mess around with the settings on my telly, so when I make myself a nice pot of tea, put my feet up, and try to watch a programme on the History Channel, I can’t get the fucking thing to work. That kind of stuff blew people’s minds. I think they had this idea in their heads that when I wasn’t being arrested for public intoxication, I went to a cave and hung upside down, drinking snakes’ blood. But I’m like Coco the Clown, me: at the end of the day, I come home, take off my greasepaint and my big red nose, and become Dad.
The documentary won a Rose d’Or award at the Montreux TV festival in Switzerland, and all of a sudden everyone wanted to make TV stars out of us. Now, I’ve never much liked being on telly. I just feel so hokey doing it. Plus, I can’t read scripts, and I when I see myself on screen, I get a fucking panic attack. But Sharon was all for it, so we did a deal with MTV to do a one-off appearance on Cribs, which was a bit like a cooler American version of Through the Keyhole. By then, we’d long since stopped renting Don Johnson’s old place and I’d forked out just over six million dollars for a house around the corner at 513 Doheny Road. We were living there full-time, going to Welders House only when we were in England for business or on family visits.
Again, people went crazy for it. That Cribs episode became a cult classic overnight. So one thing led to another, and MTV ended up offering us a show of our own.
Don’t ask me how all the business stuff went down, ’cos that’s Sharon’s department. As far as I was concerned, I just woke up one morning and we had this thing to do called The Osbournes. I was happy for Sharon, ’cos she loved all the chaos in the house. She loved doing TV, too. She’ll openly say, ‘I’m a TV hoo’er.’ She’d be the next fucking test card, if she had her way.
But if I’m honest, I was hoping that it would all be shelved before it ever made it on to the air.
A few days before we agreed to the filming, we had a family meeting, to make sure the kids were OK with it. You often hear people say, ‘How could they expose their kids to that kind of fame?’ but we had no idea how popular our little MTV show would become. And our kids had been born into show business, anyway: Aimee went on tour with us when she was less than a year old; Kelly was the kind of girl who’d stand up at the front of a jumbo jet and sing ‘Little Donkey’ to all the passengers; and Jack used to sit on my shoulders when I did encores on stage. It was the life they knew.
So we weren’t surprised when Jack and Kelly said they were all for The Osbournes.
Aimee felt differently, though. From the very beginning, she didn’t want anything to do with it.
We respected her for that. Aimee likes to be anonymous, and we’d never have forced her into doing anything she wasn’t comfortable with. In fact, I said to all my kids, ‘Look, if you decide you want to get involved with this, it’s gonna be like being on a fairground ride – you won’t be able to make it stop.’
Jack and Kelly both understood. Or at least they said they understood. To be honest with you, I don’t think any of us really understood.
Meanwhile, Aimee’s mind was made up. ‘Have fun, guys. See ya.’
She’s a smart one, Aimee. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we were all idiots for signing on the dotted line, ’cos in many ways The Osbournes was a great experience – but I’d never have agreed to any of it if I’d known what I was letting myself in for. No fucking way, man. I agreed to do it mainly because I thought there was very little chance it would ever happen. Even if it does happen, I remember thinking, it won’t get any further than one or two shows. American telly is very brutal. The bitching and backstabbing that go on when the cameras aren’t rolling are ridiculous – it’s enough to make the rock ’n’ roll business look like a fucking joke. And it’s like that because very, very few shows ever make it. I was convinced The Osbournes would be one of the failures.
Our first big mistake was letting them do all the filming at our real house. Most of the time on telly, everything’s recorded in a studio, then they cut to stock footage of a street or a bar or whatever to make you think that’s where the scene’s being shot. But no one had done a show like The Osbournes before, so MTV just made it up as they went along.
First they set up an office in our garage – Fort Apache, I called it, ’cos it was like some military command post. They put all these video monitors in there, and little office cubicles, and this big workboard, where they kept track of everything we had planned for the days ahead. No one slept in Fort Apache, as far as I know. They just staggered the shifts so they had all these technicians and camera operators and producers coming in and out all the time. It was very impressive, the way MTV organised the logistics; those guys could invade a country, they’re so good.
And I have to admit, it was a laugh for a week or two. It was fun having all these new people around. And they were good guys – they became like family after a while. But then it was like, How much longer is this going to go on? I mean, if you’d have taken me aside after those first few weeks of filming in 2001 and told me that I’d still be doing it three years later, I’d have shot myself in the balls, just to get out of it. But I didn’t have a fucking clue.
None of us did.
In the early days, the production team’s life was made a lot easier because I had a very specific routine. Every morning, come what may, I’d get up, have a coffee, blend some juice, and go and work out in the gym for an hour. So all they had to do was put static cameras in those places and leave them running. But after a while these cameras started to appear all over the house, until I felt like I couldn’t get away from the things.
‘Right, that’s it,’ I said one day. ‘I need a bunker – a safety zone – or I’m gonna go out of my mind.’
So they taped off this room where I could go to scratch my balls, or pick a zit, or knock one out, without it ending up on the telly. I mean, you want reality only up to a point.
But then one day I was sitting in the safe room, smoking a joint and having a good old rummage under my ballsack, when I started to get this creepy feeling. At first I thought, The stress of this show’s driving me insane, ’cos I’m starting to get an attack of the old paranoia. But I searched the room anyway. And there in the corner, hidden under a pile of magazines, was a little spy-camera. I went apeshit about that. ‘What’s the point of having a safe room if there’s a fucking TV camera in it!’ I yelled at them.
‘Don’t worry, Ozzy, it’s not recording anything. It’s just so we know where you are.’
‘Bollocks,’ I said. ‘Get rid of it.’
‘But how will we know where you are?’
‘If the door’s closed, that’s where I am!’
The show was broadcast for the first time on March 5, 2002 – a Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, it was like I’d moved to another planet. One minute I was a dinosaur who’d been told to fuck off by Lollapalooza; the next I was strapped to a rocket and being blasted through the stratosphere at warp factor ten. I can honestly say that I never knew the power of telly until The Osbournes aired. When you’ve got a hit TV show in America, that’s as big as it gets, fame-wise. Bigger than being a movie star. Bigger than being a politician. And a lot bigger than being the ex-lead singer of Black Sabbath.
&n
bsp; I can’t say that I ever sat down and watched any of the shows all the way through. But from the clips I saw, it was obvious that the production team had done a phenomenal job – especially when it came to editing down the thousands of hours of footage they must have had. Even the title sequence – Pat Boone doing a jazzy version of ‘Crazy Train’ in that silky voice of his – was genius. I love it when people mess around with musical styles like that – it’s so clever. And the funny thing was we’d lived next door to Pat Boone for a while at Beverly Drive. He’s a lovely bloke, actually: a born-again Christian, but he never gave us a hard time.
We knew immediately that The Osbournes was big. But it took a few days for us to realise just how big. That weekend, for example, me and Sharon went down to Beverly Hills for a little walk around this market they have in the park, just like we often did. But literally the second I got out of the car, this girl turned around, screamed, then ran up to me with her mobile phone and went, ‘Ozzy! Ozzy! Can I take my picture with you?’
‘Oh, sure,’ I said.
But then all these other people turned around, then they screamed, which made even more people turn around, then they screamed. Within about three seconds, it seemed like thousands of people were screaming and wanted a fucking picture.
Having the MTV crew trailing along behind didn’t exactly help matters, either.
It was terrifying, man. I mean, I ain’t complaining, ’cos The Osbournes had given me a completely new audience, but the whole thing felt like Beatlemania on LSD. I couldn’t believe it. And I certainly couldn’t understand it. I’d never been that famous before – not even close. So I fucked off back to England to get away from it. But the same thing happened there. The moment I got off the plane at Heathrow, there was this wall of flash-bulbs and thousands of people shouting and screaming and going, ‘Oi, Ozzy! Over ’ere! Gis a picture!’
I Am Ozzy Page 33