Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne; Penelope Dening

  "I'm doing great!"

  "Hey! Saw you guys on Jay Leno last week. Didn't Ozzy look great? You both looked great!"

  "Why, thank you!"

  "And what can I get for you today?"

  "Could you fix this for me, please?" I hand over my prescription. Nothing to get overexcited about. Just some antiseptic pimple-disguising medication. My volcano isn't leprosy. My self-diagnosis, that it might have something to do with the colonic, is probably right, the doctor says. He also gave me a Botox injection in my forehead for good luck, so once again I am ready to face the world.

  I'm in the drugstore on the bottom floor of the doctor's building. I don't know this woman, but she knows all about me. Ever since The Osbournes, it's been like that. Everywhere. When we were in Australia at the beginning of March it was the same, on a bloody South Sea island people were staring, taking pictures with their mobile phones, asking if they could take a picture of me with their boyfriend or girlfriend or mother or sister or brother or their fucking kangaroo. Because they think they know me. So I put my hand around a shoulder, smile at the camera. I tell Ozzy that the day people stop asking for your autograph is the day you have to worry, because your career is over. It doesn't harm anyone to be nice. But I'm the sort of person, you treat me nice, I'm nice to you. You treat me mean and I'm even meaner to you. I am extremes. But sometimes all you want is to be left alone, just to buy an ice cream and wander along the harbor and sit in a cafe like anybody else without the whole world staring at you as if your tits were hanging out.

  Mickey Fine's is an old-fashioned American drugstore, like the one I first went to in the Beverly Wilshire all those years ago, a time when there seemed to be one on every corner. You'd have a soda, buy a magazine and wait for your medication to be dispensed, like Schwab's on Sunset, which was famous as the place where all the directors and producers used to hang out in the thirties and forties and discover movie stars. Now it's a Virgin Megastore.

  In fact, I am probably left alone here more than anywhere else. It's being medical that does it. You have the right to be invisible. Nobody asks you what you're doing, in case you tell them that your crotch is itching or your scrotum is acting up.

  7

  Split

  I knew from previous conversations that Black Sabbath's members were all very bruised and very demoralized. Everyone had taken advantage of them: music publishers, managers, lawyers. Because they were just Birmingham boys who knew nothing. Prime targets to be abused. And they were abused. Basically the industry nearly destroyed them, ate them up and shat them out.

  Tony had always been Sabbath's spokesperson, and it was because of him that they had stayed so long with the Meehans. He'd always been close to Patrick Jr. and they'd be out together, each with the red Ferrari, each with the model on his arm. And by now the Meehans had lost all their big companies, all their big entities. They'd spent lavishly, on Ferraris, on Lamborghinis, on houses, on drugs. Because they thought it was never going to end. They owned the Black Sabbath record catalog for the world except North America, and they continued doing so into the late eighties. They kept pressing and pressing, doing compilations and greatest hits, and milked and milked and milked that catalog, and Sabbath never got anything. And they never paid a penny in royalties to Sabbath. Never a penny.

  So I called my father, who at that time was in England, and asked if he would see Tony and the band and help them out, and of course, he said he would. So they had this meeting and it was all "We love you, Don, we made a mistake," and my father agreed to try to extricate them from the terrible mess they were now in. Just one example: they were chased for the taxes, although they never got the original money.

  Would it have been any different if they'd gone with my father in the first place? In my view these people were all shysters, they were all dishonest and all in it for their own good. My father would have stolen from them, absolutely he would. But they would have been left with something. Now they were in this whirlpool, faced with years of endless court battles, with fortunes being spent in legal fees. If their money didn't go to Patrick Meehan it went to lawyers. It was a saga that didn't end for another twenty years, in the mid-nineties.

  It was 1979 by the time we landed Sabbath's management, and my job was to get them remotivated, writing and recording, to get them back on the road again, because that was the only means by which they could begin to scratch their way out.

  So we brought them over to California and I rented a house in Bel Air and had a studio built in the garage there. I sorted them out with a housekeeper and cars, because that's what management did in those days. I looked after them, literally looked after them, as if I was their mummy.

  As for the creative side, it was hard work because they were at each other's throats. When you have four egos in a band, every one of them thinks: "This band is good because of me." What none of them seemed to understand was that it was a collective force. Nobody could do Ozzy's melody lines, just as nobody could do Tony's guitar riffs, nobody could do Geezer's lyrics and nobody could do Bill's drum fills. But the main focus for all their anger and discontent was Ozzy, as it always had been.

  It started to go bad when Ozzy was late getting to the house. He'd had a drug bust in 1970, so every time he came to America he had to reapply for an entry visa, which took forever. So by the time he did finally turn up, the others had already settled in. Even the day he landed, it had taken him five hours to get out of the airport. I can still remember sitting around that kitchen table in Bel Air as Ozzy reenacted how immigration had strip-searched him and gone looking for drugs up his bum, and how I completely cracked up.

  The rest of the guys had already seen where I lived. But when I took Ozzy up to see the Howard Hughes house, he was taken aback by its beauty. He just couldn't believe it. He had never seen anything like it, never even imagined such a place could exist and be lived in by ordinary people. From then on, while the others would still be asleep, he'd get a cab to bring him up every morning, and by seven he'd be in the kitchen with Rachel cooking him breakfast, and then he'd go down to the pool or sit on the terrace. By this time our office had moved to one of the other houses on the property that I had done up, and he'd wander up there. And each day I would spend more time with him, at the house and at the office. And though Tony Iommi and Bill Ward would come up too, they never overlapped because they were night people. Geezer Butler was the only one who never appeared, but that was largely because he was already dating Gloria.

  All this while Ozzy assumed I was involved with Tony. First there was our dawn meeting in Amsterdam--what other conclusion could he come to? Then he was constantly seeing me coming out of Tony's bedroom at the Bel Air house. It would always be the middle of the night when they'd need me to listen to something, so I'd go over in my jammies and a dressing gown, and then later Tony would want to talk to me alone. He was going through a divorce, and so I would go to his room and sit on the floor for hours listening to him as if I were his agony aunt, so people automatically thought there must be something going on between us. My father certainly thought so.

  I was doing my best to encourage and motivate the band, but it was like pulling teeth: "That's a good track, save that track," I'd say brightly. Or, "Let's work on this, guys." It was ridiculous really, because I knew that they only had to be in a room together and it would be magic. And if a song needed work, then as long as the bones were there, we could fix it. But they wouldn't. Although to the outsider it might have looked as if they were working together, they weren't. They were like a family that, although they sit down and have breakfast, won't even pass one another the cereal.

  One day Tony just appeared at the house and said he wanted to talk. About Ozzy. I was used to it. It was evening, and the sun was going down over the Santa Monica hills, and I poured us both a drink.

  "OK, Tony, so what is it now?"

  "We want him out."

  I couldn't believe what I'd heard. I knew they'd tried it two years before and it had
n't worked.

  "You've got to be insane. You can't get rid of Ozzy! Without Ozzy Black Sabbath isn't Black Sabbath, you know that." And this went on month after month. They just couldn't work with Ozzy, they said. He was doing too much dope and coke. But they were all doing dope and coke. The difference was that the others could maintain a semblance of control; they wouldn't be staggering around crying or in a heap on the floor like Ozzy. He might as well have had a neon sign on his head with red flashing lights saying "Stoned."

  I found them a producer named Sandy Pearlman, and they began to work in the studio and to write, putting down backing tracks, but whatever vocal line Ozzy put on, they hated.

  Ozzy was equally unhappy. The atmosphere in the house was terrible, he said. He and Tony had gone to the same school, and he told me how Tony had been one of the school bullies and how the other bully at their school, Albert Chapman, had been brought in as their tour manager. He'd always be yanking on Ozzy's chain, knowing that he would take it.

  It was a ridiculous situation and all of us, my father, my brother and me, were telling all four of them: "You're crazy, you've got to make this work, you've got to make this work." We were desperate. We had invested all that time and effort and we knew that all they had to do was come up with a good record, and they could do it blindfolded.

  People think that being a manager is a great job: it's not. It's the worst job in the industry. There'd be a ringing at the door and Bill would be there with a tape in his hand saying, "Listen to this, it's shit." It could be three in the morning. In the record business there is no ten to six. Managers are like parents; artists want praise, unconditional praise, and they want you to do everything from working out contracts to making hair appointments. If things go right, they could have done it without you. If things go wrong, it's your fault.

  However I tried to cool the situation, it did no good. Tony and Bill and Geezer were adamant that Ozzy had to go, and then one day they just fired him. So I got in my car, picked him up and put him into a residential hotel called Le Parc in West Hollywood, about the same distance from the Howard Hughes house as Bel Air but in the opposite direction. I thought it would blow over. I thought that once they'd had time to calm down and reconsider, we'd sort it out.

  And then Tony called me and asked about a singer I'd mentioned to him a couple of years back.

  "Ronnie Dio," I said.

  Could I find him for them? Sure I could find him; he lived in LA. He had a band called Elf, which was a good description of him. From the outside he was a little Munchkin but his ego more than made up for it. And did they really think that this little man could take over from Ozzy Osbourne? Perhaps this was the way to make them see sense.

  So Sabbath and Ronnie Dio got together and when somebody new comes in like that, you know how it is, you fall in love with them, and everything they do is amazing and fantastic and everyone is overly nice and overly complimentary. And so Ronnie Dio was Amazing, Humble and Sweet and Nice, and his wife was Gorgeous and he probably shit Gold.

  Meanwhile Ozzy was on his own at the Le Parc getting more and more depressed, drinking and doing coke. However dreadful the last few months with Sabbath had been, they were his security blanket and now he had nothing. I put one of ELO's roadies with him, so he would drive him around, but he couldn't be there twenty-four hours a day. I did what I could to reassure him.

  "Look, Ozzy, believe me, this new guy won't work. I know him, they don't, and in no way can he fit in your shoes. Just give it a bit more time and it'll fall apart."

  At the same time I was still dealing with Sabbath, and it turned out that Ronnie liked the producer, the producer liked him, so Sabbath liked Ronnie even more. And everything that I thought would fall apart didn't. What they couldn't understand was why Ozzy was still in LA.

  "Because we're still managing him, of course," I told Tony.

  "What do you mean?" he said. "You can't do that. You can't manage both of us; it's got to be one or the other."

  It had never occurred to me that this would be a problem. "But why?" I said. "You've both got careers, you've both got futures."

  The band refused to give way. "You have to choose. You cannot keep both."

  I said I would discuss it with my father and David.

  It was obvious now that they were never going to take Ozzy back, yet he had great song ideas and a huge following. So while we were working out what to do to keep everybody happy, Sandy Pearlman, the producer I put in, asked for a meeting. He had been looking to get into management, he said, so why didn't he take Sabbath on? My father and David and I talked about it, and in the end we said, "Fine." David had loads of English artists that he'd signed, so it was just like OK, go. Nobody was crying. And at least the headache was gone.

  The next thing was to put together a band for Ozzy. I knew that this was exactly what he'd wanted to do for a couple of years. He even had a name for his first record, which he'd had printed on a T-shirt that he'd worn with Sabbath: The Blizzard of Ozz. So half of him must have known in his soul that it was over with them. But the other half wasn't brave enough to think he could do it on his own. It was like a tired marriage. You get used to it and it's like, Oh it'll get better, we'll work it out, but in your heart you know it's over. That was the stage he was at with Sabbath.

  "OK, Ozzy," I said. "Let's put a band together, you can do it." And the more he lived with the idea, and the longer he was away from them, the more his confidence came back. He didn't have anyone telling him he was no good, he didn't have people saying, "You're a joke and an idiot, stand at the side of the stage." And there was no more bullying. No more practical jokes being played on him. They were all big practical jokers, and they used to do really mean things to each other for fun, like the time they set Bill's beard on fire and Tony shat in the guacamole dip and let them eat it. Things that they thought were unbelievably funny. But you look back and you think: you're sick. And Ozzy always came out the worst because he wasn't much of a fighter. Not then, not now.

  Ozzy doesn't like confrontation. He will always back away. And when you have three people and your crew against you, it gets to be too much. And after having been away from that for a while, Ozzy was so relieved to wake up and not be thinking, Oh God, what's going to happen today?

  After a month or two he started getting himself together, writing and putting down melodies. And then we started to audition musicians for a band, which is always a nightmare. The best way to get people is word of mouth, so we went to a place called Mates, a rehearsal room in LA, and put a notice on the board saying that Ozzy was looking for musicians, and giving the office number.

  Although Ozzy had new ideas in terms of where he wanted his music to go, we asked them to play Black Sabbath as a starting point. We would hear absolutely anyone. It was an open call, so they'd line up and it would be first come, first served. We paid other guys to stand in, so on the day we were auditioning for a bass player we had session musicians doing lead guitar and drums.

  These guys are really good at what they do, but with a rock band you have to have the complete package. It's no use being sixty years old, however technically brilliant. It's very easy to tell if they've got it, especially with a drummer. He's the metronome of the band and if he's out of time or has the wrong drum fills, it shows. Ozzy and I would pull up a couple of chairs and sit there and listen, but there was nobody, and this went on for months.

  Then Ozzy hooked up with a bass player named Dana Strum. Although he wasn't right for the band, he was very nice and befriended Ozzy and he kept talking about a fantastic guitar player he knew by the name of Randy Rhoads, who played in a local band called Quiet Riot. So Dana arranged for him to come down and audition.

  Randy completely blew Ozzy away. He was like a gift from God. He was nice and funny and a brilliant musician, and he had drive. He was great looking, with a tiny body, like Prince, but with a mane of golden hair. And Ozzy and he connected so well. Everything about him was perfect.

  We still c
ouldn't find a drummer, still couldn't find a bass player, but the main thing was the guitar player, so Ozzy decided he'd had enough. He'd been away from his family for months, and he was pining to go home and see his children, and now that he had the nucleus of his band there was nothing to stop him. So that's what happened. They both went back to England and Randy stayed at Ozzy's house in Stafford with his family, and they began to write, while my brother took over the search for a drummer and bass player. And gradually it started to bear fruit. Randy played guitar, Ozzy sang his melody lines, and they would work on their riffs together, and it was just perfect.

  But for me, still in Los Angeles, it was strange suddenly not having Ozzy in town, popping in for breakfast, hanging around the pool. And putting my energies into Glenn Hughes and Gary Moore hardly made me want to jump out of bed every morning. I'd put them with a drummer named Cozy Powell, who I'd hoped to put with Ozzy, but he was way too expensive. It was the same with Gary: he thought he was too good to be messing with somebody like Ozzy Osbourne. And thank God, because otherwise we'd never have found Randy.

  My father had begun to spend much more time in California, but I would come and go and do my own thing, and it wasn't like we'd have breakfast, lunch and dinner together. But then I hardly saw him in the office either. And it's not until something happens that you begin to put two and two together.

  One night I got back to the house. It was late, well after midnight. Colin Newman, our accountant from England, was in town and we'd been out to dinner. He was more my age than my father's and so we were friends. As Colin had just flown in, we went straight out onto the terrace to look at the lights twinkling below, and it was then I noticed my father's briefcase on the floor. I went to pick it up, to tidy it away and take it back to his room or whatever I had been planning to do, but it flopped open, so I looked inside. And what did I see but a tiny pair of see-through thongs. Briefs in a briefcase. And a little note: "Something to remind you of me."