GEEZER BUTLER: Ozzy didn’t show up for six weeks. We couldn’t go on with him after that.
TONY IOMMI: It was me that dealt with Warner Bros. in them days. That was my task: to talk to them about the progress of the album, which, of course, we didn’t fuckin’ have. I’d go over there and they’d say, “How’s the album coming?” And I’d go, “Oh, great, great.” “When can we hear some tracks?” “Oh, soon, soon.” We hadn’t got anything, and I was really worried. I had to go and face these people knowing full well that we hadn’t got anything to play them. It just got to a real desperate stage. At that point Ozzy didn’t want to do anything apart from go out and get drunk. So it came to the point where the other guys said, “Well, look, if we don’t do anything we’re gonna break up. We’re not gonna stand it. We’re gonna leave.” So that was the decision between the three of us. We said we’re gonna have to replace Ozzy, and that’s what happened.
That same year, the bottom fell out for Peter Criss, and KISS headed into a decline that ended two years later with the departure of Ace Frehley. After the four members released simultaneous self-titled solo records in 1978, Criss suddenly seemed less interested in the band and began to withdraw. He was credited as the drummer on KISS’s 1979’s Dynasty, but in fact only played on his own song, “Dirty Living.” The drummer in David Letterman’s band, Anton Fig, played on the rest of Dynasty and all of 1980’s Unmasked. Criss’s last show with KISS (until their reunion in 1996) was December 16, 1979.
PETER CRISS: I thought, “God, this is turnin’ out to be such a damn business.” I was losin’ the fun of the early days when we were struggling, and now we were kind of having a lot of money and things we never could afford, we could [suddenly] afford without looking at the price tag. That got scary for me, I didn’t like it, and I started thinkin’ then about splittin’.
GENE SIMMONS: [When we were making 1978’s KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park,] Peter [was] in [one of his] car accidents. He skidded 400 feet before he crashed, and he wound up in the hospital. When he did speak in the movie he was impossible to understand because of his thick Brooklyn accent. So his voice was dubbed. Even getting Peter and Ace in front of the camera didn’t always work out. Sometimes they went missing. The only solution was to use doubles. For Peter, we had a fifty-five-year-old guy and we put makeup on him. For Ace, an African American stunt double.
PETER CRISS: I decided I wanted to do my own thing, my own music. Ten years in KISS was enough for me. I got tired of playing heavy metal. I like writing love songs. I like playing with strings, horns, and pianos.
ACE FREHLEY: When Peter left, I really felt a great chemical imbalance in the band. Even though I loved Eric [Carr, Criss’s replacement], God rest his soul, losing Peter upset the balance of the band a little too much. Plus, I didn’t have my drinking buddy anymore, so I had to go drink with my bodyguards and roadies. It took me a long time to realize that I had a serious problem. I guess I finally realized it when I crashed my DeLorean in ’83. I also got busted for drunk driving six months later, and lost my license for a couple of years. That was kind of a wake-up call to me to get help. If I had stayed in the group, I probably would have self-destructed and killed myself. You know, there were plenty of times when, driving home to Connecticut from the city, I contemplated just driving my Porsche into a fucking tree and ending it all. So I had to choose the lesser of two evils.
GENE SIMMONS: We consciously missed Ace and Peter all the time, but in no way, shape, or form did we feel responsible or blame ourselves for what happened to them. Everything is a choice in life and you make the bed you sleep in, and unfortunately, they decided to be self-destructive. That doesn’t mean you don’t miss them. We’ve had some great times. Some not-so-great ones, too—and that’s why they had to go.
AC/DC seemed unstoppable. Then, on February 19, 1980, Bon Scott tragically lost his life. The band was in London doing preproduction for the follow-up to Highway to Hell; Bon was living it up as he always did. The night before he died, Scott went to the Music Machine, a club in Camden Town, London, to check out the band Lonesome No More with his friend Alistair Kinnear, who was driving. After a night of heavy drinking, the two drove back to Kinnear’s apartment, and Kinnear noticed the singer had passed out.
ALISTAIR KINNEAR (Bon Scott’s friend): I tried to lift him out of the car, but he was too heavy for me to carry in my intoxicated state, so I put the front passenger seat back so that he could lie flat, covered him with a blanket, left a note with my address and phone number on it, and staggered upstairs to bed. It must have been 4 or 5 a.m. by that time, and I slept until about 11, when I was awakened by a friend. I was so hungover that I asked him to do me a favor [and check] on Bon. He did so, and returned to tell me my car was empty, so I went back to sleep, assuming that Bon had awoken and taken a taxi home. At about 7:30 that evening I went down to my car intending to pay a visit to my girlfriend who was in hospital, and was shocked to find Bon still lying flat in the front seat, obviously in a very bad way, and not breathing. I immediately drove him to King’s College Hospital, where Bon was pronounced dead on arrival. The Lambeth coroner’s report cited acute alcohol poisoning, and death by misadventure.
ANGUS YOUNG: Nobody knew what to do. We were so battered. It’s as if we’d had an arm amputated.
PHIL RUDD (AC/DC): His death numbed me. Nobody believed it could happen to us. We were so depressed. We were just walking around in silence.
3
BRITISH STEEL: NEW WAVE OF BRITISH HEAVY METAL SHAPES THE FUTURE, 1980–PRESENT
As 1979 dawned, the metal landscape looked dim for the genre’s founders. Black Sabbath had no singer, and its former vocalist was so dependent on drugs and alcohol he could barely function. But even if Sabbath and Ozzy had never returned, the foundation they had built was so powerful it couldn’t be destroyed. AC/DC carried on after Bon Scott’s death—and reached new heights with vocalist Brian Johnson. Judas Priest was about to release its most highly acclaimed album, British Steel. And, inspired by Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Saxon, Def Leppard, and a batch of other UK groups spawned the awkwardly titled but hugely influential New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) movement.
The NWOBHM trailblazers each had their own style, but were lumped together by music journalists. Some, like Def Leppard, were firmly rooted in melody; others, such as Iron Maiden, in galloping, classical-tinged punk. NWOBHM’s influence spread across the United Kingdom, and then the rest of Europe, inspiring bands like Germany’s Accept and Scorpions, Denmark’s Mercyful Fate, America’s Armored Saint, and a little band called Metallica.
ROB HALFORD: Metal music gained its foothold on a global level in a short space of time. There were a handful of music papers or magazines, so the way it was growing and the intensity of the focus made us think more and more about how we wanted to look. Really, Judas Priest’s biker image started to take shape around the time of [1979’s] Hell Bent For Leather. You know the way Audrey Hepburn’s little black dress in Breakfast at Tiffany’s shook the world? For me it was the little biker jacket. I wore it to rehearsal and everybody went, “Fuck, that looks really tough. That looks really strong. That looks like the music sounds, almost.” We all looked at each other and nodded in agreement and said, “I wonder what else we could do?” I just need a nod of approval and then the walls come crashing down.
IAN HILL: At the time, we were a little bit surprised that other bands started dressing the same way. But the look fit the music. Just imagine us playing “Freewheel Burning” in satin and velvet. It wouldn’t fit.
ROB HALFORD: To get some of these bits and pieces of my clothing, I had to go to the local S&M sex shops in the UK. It wasn’t like we wanted the S&M part of it associated with Priest, but I could only get the little accoutrements and accessories through these kinds of establishments. I had this whip that went with the outfit. Now these days if I brought out a whip and whipped the crowd I would get litigation left, right, and center. But in those early days th
at’s literally what I would do, and they’d be shouting, “Whip me! Whip me!”
MARTIN POPOFF: When Judas Priest begin to adopt this rough and tough leather look, they begin to get across this idea, subtly, that it’s okay to be heavy metal, it’s okay to be proud of it, and they slowly begin to become the self-identified, self-aware heavy metal band. You get this metal army forming, and a cult of metal that begins to evolve with the look and the live show that no one had seen before.
ROB HALFORD: We used to do a song called “Genocide,” and I said to the band, “Wouldn’t it be great if at the end of the song we use a machine gun?” We got in touch with a weapons prop guy, and for that tour he came with us and I used a full automatic machine gun. It shot these blanks. It was really fucking loud, and smoke came out, and these blank brass cartridges would spray all over the stage. Eventually we hit a wall because the local fire marshals were afraid the gun was real and that we were going to cause a riot. They had a point, because there were crowds that looked confused and you could tell they were thinking, “Surely to God, that’s not a machine gun. Is it plastic? No, it’s real! What’s going on? What the fuck is this?” Then I’d look at them and point it straight at them. Nobody knew in advance what was going on, so there was this look that was a combination of sheer horror and, “Oh my God, that’s so cool.”
While Judas Priest was searching bondage shops and cultivating their dramatic live show, Black Sabbath was looking for a new vocalist. The remaining members were afraid they’d never find a singer as charismatic and iconoclastic as Ozzy—and many fans and critics wrote Sabbath off. Then Sabbath returned with vocalist Ronnie James Dio, discovered through the most unlikely source.
TONY IOMMI: To be honest, it was Sharon [Osbourne, née Arden] that told me about Ronnie; of course, that was before she was managing Ozzy. I met Ronnie at a party and I was talking to him there and I thought, “Well, he’s a nice enough guy.” Not doing anything [with Ozzy] was getting frustrating, so I talked to Ronnie about doing a side-project album together, but it didn’t materialize. Then I called him about joining Sabbath.
RONNIE JAMES DIO: I liked the music they were doing so much. I liked writing with them and I liked them, too. And that took away a lot of the intimidation factor of joining Black Sabbath. But even then, we went through a lot of traumas. The band had to deal with Warner Bros. The label didn’t want this band without Ozzy, and that could have been a disaster.
TONY IOMMI: We were arguing with management as well because they said, “Look, it’s gotta work with Ozzy. Make it work.” We said, “Well, it just can’t.” Ozzy was too out of it and we weren’t far behind him, going down and down into the drugs and booze.
RONNIE JAMES DIO: Suddenly, we seemed to have no support, and it came down to us making the record with our own money. Luckily, Tony and Bill had some friends at Warner Bros., and they said they’d listen to the record but they didn’t want to bankroll it. The lads spent some of their money, I spent some of mine. It just wasn’t the kind of freewheeling experience we were both used to. To make matters more complicated, we went down there without Geezer because he was having some personal problems.
TONY IOMMI: Geezer had to sort his life out. Ronnie and myself put the tracks together with Bill. At one point Ronnie played bass so we could come up with the ideas for “Heaven and Hell” and one or two other songs.
RONNIE JAMES DIO: We eventually had to move to Florida to a city called Criteria because we didn’t have enough money to stay where we were. We lived together in a house on Biscayne Bay. After overcoming those initial obstacles, it just worked. The songs were memorable. It was great to bond in the face of that kind of pressure. We tested out the songs by taking them to a local strip bar. We’d have them play it and see if the dancers liked to dance to it. And oh, they loved “Heaven and Hell.” That was my favorite Sabbath record because it was a good time that wrested its way out of a bad time.
TONY IOMMI: We managed to have fun, I suppose. Bill used to have this fascination with Nazi Germany. One night he got pissed and wanted to dress up as Hitler. So we got this gaffer tape and taped all his hair down and put a little moustache on him and a swastika on his shirt. It was great until he wanted to take the gaffer tape off. We couldn’t get it off of his head. We had to cut all around under the gaffer tape to get his hair out. Oh, he looked a right mess after we were done. When he woke up in the morning, he looked in the mirror and said, “Oh, my God, what happened last night?” Another time, I set Bill on fire. We had this little party prank that started one night in a club. The waiter came up and I said, “Excuse me, do you have a lighter?” Bill had a big beard at the time, and I lit his beard and it went straight up his face and he breathed in all the smoke and went, “Mmm, 1948.” And the guy went, “Wow, man, that really freaked me out!” It started at that and just got worse as it went along. I’d tip rubbing alcohol over him in the studio and light him, and, of course, it used to burn off. But this one time, we had producer Martin Birch in the studio, and I said, “Hey, Bill, can I set you on fire?” He said, “Oh, not just yet, I’m a bit busy.” And he came over to me two hours later and said, “I’m going home now Tone, do you want to set me on fire or what?” This was in front of Martin, who had never seen us do this. I said, “Yeah.” So I tipped a big, full bottle over him and it all soaked into his clothes and when I lit him he just went up like a bomb and then went down on the floor. He was rolling around screaming and I thought he was laughing. Meanwhile, I’m still tipping stuff on him. He had third-degree burns all over his legs and we had to take him to hospital. Then his mum phoned me up and said, “You barmy bastard, Bill might have to have his leg cut off.”
MICK WALL: Black Sabbath played with fire and eventually got burned very badly. In 1980, when I went to work for Sabbath, Bill was still in the group and they were finishing up Heaven and Hell in Paris. My company, Heavy Publicity, had been hired to do their PR in Britain. I was flown to Paris to meet the group and seal the deal. I met Dio, Iommi, and Geezer, and they all seemed cool. Then I met Bill at the photo session when he went wandering around the Sacré-Coeur in the pouring rain. He was acting strange and we didn’t have a proper conversation. In those days it was really important to bond with the people you worked with. You would do drugs and drink and talk, and I hadn’t had any of that with Bill. Then at 2 a.m. Paul, the tour manager, called my room and said, “Bill wants to meet you now.” I’m like, “Paul, it’s 2 a.m. I’ve just got to bed and I’ve got an early flight tomorrow.” He says again, “Bill would like to meet you now.” I got up, got dressed, went to see Bill at the Hotel George Cinq in Paris, and as I arrive at 2:30 a.m. the hotel plumber was leaving Bill’s suite. Bill had bunged up every toilet, every sink, every bath drain with vomit so badly that the hotel plumber had to unplug everything. I walked in and Bill’s in a robe. It looked like he hadn’t slept in weeks. His first wife is with him. She looks like Dracula’s wife. I said, “So, Bill, what am I doing here?” He said, “I want to play you the album.” None of them had said that to me. I went, “Oh, I didn’t know it was finished.” He said, “It isn’t. We haven’t done the vocals yet, but I want to play you what we’ve done so far.” I was thinking, “Great. Just what you dream of doing at 3 a.m. with a guy who’s throwing up so heavily because he’s a major alcoholic who is doing major heroin.” That was in about March 1980. Within six months, by the time the album had come out and we’d got to America, he’d left the band.
TONY IOMMI: Bill left because he had a lot of alcohol problems and he was getting worse and worse. It got to a point where we were on the Heaven and Hell tour and [he] had to come off the road and get himself sorted out. He left very abruptly in Denver on the night of a gig. He freaked out, said, “I can’t do it anymore,” and left. I was panicking and petrified because I had played with Bill for all those years. Ronnie heard about Vinny [Appice], so we tried him out. The next gig we had coming up was in Hawaii, and it was a big festival. I was shitting myself. When I saw Vinny’s kit, it was
a quarter of the size of Bill’s. It just looked ridiculous on our big drum riser. But bloody hell, he really played it well, and we got through the show and I was so relieved after that.
VINNY APPICE (Heaven & Hell, ex-Dio, ex–Black Sabbath): Sharon called me when Ozzy was doing his first solo album and she asked if I was into playing with Ozzy. I was, like, twenty-one, and I knew Ozzy was pretty crazy. I said, “I’ll call you back.” So I called my brother [Carmine Appice (Cactus, ex-Vanilla Fudge)] and I said, “You know Ozzy. Isn’t he crazy? Should I go to England and try this?” Carmine said, “Yeah. He’s pretty crazy, so it’ll be funny to see what happens.” But I turned it down anyway. About a month later, the phone rings and it’s Black Sabbath’s tour manager, Paul Clark, and they’re in Los Angeles at the Sunset Marquis. So I went down to meet him and Tony. I brought an album I played on by a band called Axis. The next day they called and said, “Come down to SIR Studios on Sunset Boulevard.” So I went there and they go, “Do you know any of our new songs?” The week before I heard ‘Neon Knights’” on the radio driving in my car, so I said, “Let’s play ‘Neon Knights,’ because I knew the tempo. We played for about an hour and then we took a break. They went to the pub, then came back and said, “All right, you’re gonna do it.” Originally, Bill was gonna come back to the band and I was just gonna play the tour. But as the tour went on we got better and better and we got to know each other. At the end of the tour they said, “We’re gonna do an album, you wanna do it with us?” I said, “Yeah!” That’s when we started working on Mob Rules.
MICK WALL: After he left the band, Bill bottomed out. He told me he went to bed for three months in LA and every morning the drug dealer would come by with his smack and everything else he needed and then leave again. Then they would come back again the next morning. He said the reason he was in bed for three months was his legs didn’t work anymore, which was why it was so important that the dealer came to his place. It was at that time that John Bonham died. They were friends, and he found out about it from his dealer. He said his first thoughts were, “I’m right behind you Johnny, I’m right behind you.”
Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal Page 8