Sharon Osbourne Extreme: My Autobiography

by Sharon Osbourne; Penelope Dening

  Sunset takes you right through to the coast at Pacific Palisades, and then it's only a few miles up the Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. The PCH is a horror road that can't be any wider than it is because there's ocean one side and mountains the other. Our beach house is built on the few yards of land between the road and the shore. If it weren't for the crashing of the surf right by the deck, the noise of the traffic would drive you mad.

  The first time I came to Malibu was when Patrick Meehan brought me to dinner with some friends who lived here--it must have been 1974 or '75--and I fell in love with it then. Later, after the children were born, we'd rent a house every summer to use as a base while Ozzy was touring. And it's a whole little community; everybody knows everybody else but nobody cares who you are. Peter Asher has a house here. I met him first with Rod Stewart back in 1977 when we were managing Britt Eckland; he's now with Kelly's record company. Ryan O'Neal lives on one side of us and Leonard Bernstein's daughter the other. Charlize Theron is right on our stretch of beach, and so is Orlando Bloom. Leonardo DiCaprio has a house here as well. We only found out when Lola, our English bulldog, went exploring and Ozzy had to go over to fetch her back.

  All our English friends love the Malibu house, and I could live here all the time, but Ozzy doesn't like having PCH up his arse. Everyone around here knows people who've been killed on the road, and Ozzy is frightened for the dogs. But when we're here, just the two of us, it's as if we're insulated from the outside world.

  10

  Sailing

  The track record of singers who leave their bands to go solo is not great. In more recent years George Michael and Robbie Williams have done it, but back in 1980 CBS was as excited about signing Ozzy Osbourne as they'd be about a sixty-five-year-old fart. They took the deal because it was cheap--my father had sold Ozzy to them for a pathetic $65,000--and when we arrived back in Los Angeles it was like, Oh yeah, the singer who left Black Sabbath.

  The British tour had been a sellout, and The Blizzard of Ozz was a huge hit all across Europe. But they couldn't have cared less: this was the United States of America. As CBS was based in Century City, right by where I had found our offices five years before, we decided Ozzy should do a meet and greet, introduce himself to everyone from promotion to publicity to the sales force.

  So the night before, we're up at the house thinking about what to do. There had to be something to remember him by. And so we decided that we should get hold of a couple of doves, and once he was inside, Ozzy would let them go as a symbol of peace and freedom and beauty. Not a publicity stunt, nobody from the press would be there to see it, just an offering.

  So the next morning, we buy two doves from a pet shop in Beverly Hills, and by the time we get out of the car Ozzy has one in each pocket, because when birds are in the dark they go to sleep.

  He is basically an incredibly shy person, particularly when he has to meet people he doesn't know, and so by the time we get in he's already tanked up, swigging away at a bottle of Cointreau. To make matters worse, it turns out he's not the only artist they're seeing; we're just one in a line. So while we're waiting in reception for our turn, Ozzy is getting more and more nervous and incensed, and I know that he's really on edge. I tell him to calm down, and next minute we're ushered in.

  And it's the obligatory: "Hello, how are you, lovely, lovely, lovely." And Ozzy feels instantly that they haven't a clue who he is. And the marketing people are at the center of this thing, so Ozzy sits down on one of the publicity girls' laps, and while she wasn't exactly hostile she was very, very cold--and this was the person who was supposed to be promoting him. Later he said that he just thought: Right, OK . . .

  So he pulls out one bird, puts its head in his mouth and rips it off, spits it out on the girl's knee and says, "Fuck you." At the same time he's pulled the other one out and released it, so you've got this live bird flying dementedly around the room, while the headless one is still flapping on the boardroom table where Ozzy had thrown the body.

  There's a split second of silence before this girl starts screaming, shortly followed by the sound of communal vomiting. Within seconds security has arrived and everybody is backing away. I cannot believe what he has done.

  And then I start laughing, and I just can't stop, weeping with uncontrollable laughter--shock, embarrassment, whatever. And as the security guy is escorting us out I am literally doubled up, helplessly clutching my crotch--no chance of asking if he could direct me to the ladies' restroom--so I pissed on the sidewalk in Century City. I was laughing and farting and pissing. And you could see the puddle as the piss was running down my legs onto the concrete, and I'd pissed in my shoes, and by the time we got back to the house my legs were all sore at the top where they'd been chafed raw with the piss.

  Ozzy's behavior was always unpredictable. Nobody told him to go in and do it. It was totally done on impulse, because that's just how he is. And when people say, "How could he do such a thing?'--if you have worked in a slaughterhouse, like Ozzy had, and killed five hundred cows or five hundred sheep a day when you're fifteen, what is it to pull a bird's head off? In fact, when we got back, while I was trying to sort it all out with CBS on the phone from the office behind the house, Ozzy took an air gun belonging to my father and started shooting pigeons. Having wounded one--Jet brought it back to him--he then ripped its head off and left it in our receptionist's handbag. He was on a roll.

  By this time CBS's legal department was already on the case. Not only were they threatening not to release The Blizzard of Ozz, due out the following week, but as he was still under contract, they said they would destroy him. They had never seen behavior like it in their lives, and could not be associated with anyone who could be so foul and violent as to do something like that.

  But although the album hadn't yet been put out, a first track had already gone to radio--like a sample track, a standard procedure to get interest up. And as the week went on the story grew: it wasn't a dove, it was a parrot, no, it was a fucking pelican. And by the end of that week "Crazy Train" was No. 1 on every rock station across America. So then, of course, CBS soon forgot about the bloody dove. Within six working days, CBS had gone from: "We will destroy you, and we never want you in this building again" to: "That track?--I tell ya, we fucking knew it was a hit!" And then it just went bigger and bigger, it snowballed and the tour dates went on sale and sold out instantly.

  The dove incident was pure Ozzy. The show, however, was me. However much I disliked my father's working methods, his success as a showman was undeniable, and I was not about to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Everything he knew about putting on a show he had learned in vaudeville, and I look on everything I do, even today, as vaudeville. You still have to go on and you still have to put on a show. Just because the music's louder, it's still vaudeville, people still want to go and see a whole package, and if you forget that as a promoter, you're dead. So I would give them a show.

  The support band was Motorhead, and although they were big in Europe this was their first US outing. I made Ozzy's white-fringed outfits more elaborate. Everything was more theatrical, with makeup and color. Eventually I dressed Ozzy in red chain mail, and put Tommy up behind them, like on an altar, backlit as if God had spoken and his drums were the apocalyptic wake-up call.

  I hadn't been on the road in America since ELO, and things were very different for me this time around. ELO had flown everywhere, but Ozzy liked to travel by bus. After the gig it was get out, get in and hit the road. We had two buses: one for the band, and one for the crew. And it was just how a band on the road should be. Crazy and fun, and we really were like one big happy family.

  American tour buses are much bigger than their European equivalents. In Europe there are problems with bridges that US buses don't face, and the bus we'd used in England was little better than a standard coach. But in the US, even thirty years ago, tour buses were custom-built palaces in comparison. In ours we had eight bunks, and the back lounge area was where Ozzy and I slept
on a fold-down double bed and could be completely private. There was a little kitchen with a big fridge and cooktop, and a bathroom with a shower and toilet. And this was our first home.

  It was such freedom not to have to worry about whether Thelma was about to turn up or telephone, or even my father or my brother. There were no mobile phones in those days. When we were in there, we felt completely safe, it was like we were sailing.

  Most of the traveling was done at night, and the only real arguments were about music. In tour buses now, each bunk has a flip-down TV linked to a satellite dish on the roof, where you can watch DVDs or listen to your own music with headphones, but in those days it was just cassettes that were played over the loudspeaker system.

  Ozzy and Randy were obsessed with Phil Collins and they played Face Value, his first solo album, over and over and over again. And, as soon as "In the Air Tonight"--their favorite track--announced itself, Rudy and Tommy would be going, "Oh no, not this again . . ." And with Ozzy's ears already fucked by all those years with Sabbath, the volume was always as high as it could go. And after a month, the other guys got the tape and threw it out of a window.

  "Has anyone seen my Phil Collins cassette?"

  "Nooooooo."

  The next one to meet the same fate was Gerry Rafferty's City to City. Ozzy adored him too and this time is was "Baker Street" thudding into our heads.

  "Has anyone--?"

  "Nooooooo."

  Then there was the Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin period. Ozzy would never listen to hard rock or metal. Never in a million years. When it comes to the genre of music that he's in, Ozzy prefers not to listen to it on his own time. When you've been working all day in a chocolate factory, you don't want to come home and eat a Hershey bar. The music he was doing now was much more melodic, and in Randy he had found a soulmate.

  Randy's mother ran a music school, and whenever he was back in LA, he'd teach the kids guitar. He told Ozzy how the only song they ever seemed to want to play was the old Sabbath classic "Iron Man," and how it used to drive him mad. And every time we had a break--after a three-day run we'd always have one day off--he'd get the local Yellow Pages and find a classical teacher to give him a lesson. As if that weren't enough, he was developing a system of notation that would revolutionize the way we write music, he said.

  Randy was a true musician. When Ozzy had been with Black Sabbath, he'd basically had to sing in whatever key suited them, but now Randy would tailor his playing to suit Ozzy's range rather than the other way around. So I'd overhear him saying things like: "If we do it in this key, you can get to the top note easier."

  And he basically gave Ozzy so much confidence. Now they were equal partners in the writing process, and the more Randy took up Ozzy's ideas, the more the ideas flowed. Yet until Randy came into Ozzy's life, he thought he was worthless because he didn't play an instrument.

  Ever since I had given up trying to slim down the London office, I had been off the company payroll, so we were having to live off Ozzy's weekly retainer. Everything moneywise from the tour itself was going straight to my father, even though we were selling out.

  He still hadn't paid Ozzy and Randy their advance on Diary of a Madman. I kept asking and asking for the money and in the end had to tell my father that they were refusing to perform unless they got paid, which was a lie. So finally he said to meet him in New York on one of our days off, so we must have been playing somewhere reasonably close.

  While the only hotels we could afford were shitholes, Don Arden was staying at the Helmsley Palace in Manhattan. As soon as the door to his suite had closed behind us, he tossed two checks onto the floor. There had been no "Hello, how are you, how's it going?" No nothing. The only thing he said was: "Don't make a noise when you go out, because I have a reputation to uphold."

  The checks only related to the advance due on the second album, which had been recorded nearly a year before. Money for the shows was quite another matter. Every check from every performance was sent to my father direct, while we barely survived on the road.

  The way it worked was this: the venue would pay half the fee up-front to the agent who had put together the tour; this was known as the guarantee. The agent would then send this, minus his commission, to Don. The remaining 50 percent was payable on the night. If you sold out, then you went into percentage, the actual figure based on the power of the artist. And it's still like that today; everybody goes in with a different deal, just as everybody gets a different fee. And Ozzy's fee was going up because word had spread that he was selling out venues.

  I actually liked the agent who did our bookings, but he was under Don Arden's control, and I was already lining someone up that my father couldn't control, to whom he couldn't say, "Send me the money." Sometimes the local promoter could be persuaded to hand the settlement over to us instead of sending it to the agent. I tried to accumulate as much cash as I could like this, keeping it stashed away in a carpet bag I always carried, a Cartier tote made of suede, soft and squashy, because we were staying in motels with no safes. And it was this money I was having to use to cover our expenses. I was desperate for any cash I could legitimately get hold of.

  The music business in those days was a boys' club, fueled by cocaine and sexual favors. These were the days of payola and Mafia involvement, and the standard currency, if you were a woman, was a blow job, but men soon learned that Sharon Arden was more likely to kick them in the balls than suck their dicks.

  The show was a sellout wherever we went. At one small venue a promoter had the nerve to charge me for six weeks' advertising at a thousand dollars a week. This was a complete and utter lie, and his "receipts" were false.

  "You're not taking six grand off me when I know this gig has been sold out since the first day it went on sale," I said.

  "Well, I'd like to see what the fuck you are going to do about it."

  So I showed him. I head-butted him, and whacked him around the head and kicked him in the balls. The next thing I knew he was back with a uniformed cop in tow.

  "I want you to arrest that woman," the arsehole said. "She assaulted me."

  The cop just laughed.

  Apart from my father, I had no role model, so to a certain extent I had to make up the rules as I went along, but I didn't react well to being told what to do.

  It is nearly impossible now for me to break down the following months. Even the names of the towns mean nothing. Two different albums, two separate tours, yet all the hotels meld into one. Every town was the same, every venue was the same. We weren't there on an educational trip; we didn't go to the art gallery or museum. We went to the radio station, the TV station, the gig and then out. The food was the pits. We lived on garbage. And the delicate butterfly that started out in England a year before had turned back into the familiar caterpillar munching its way through pizza at three in the morning. We'd stop at a truck stop, and I'd say, "Oh, just get me a plate of fries." Just shit. And the more stress I was under, the more I ate.

  Ozzy's and my relationship was never conventional. Discussions rapidly descended into arguments settled either by fighting or by going to bed or more usually both. We were completely and utterly nuts. We beat each other to such a point and then we loved each other to such a point. Half the time we would start to laugh halfway through.

  I smashed his precious gold discs, including the first gold for The Blizzard of Ozz. I hit him with the record, smashed it into pieces and threw it down an elevator shaft, and it was sacred: all the work it took to get there. That was in Buffalo. We've been on trains where I've ripped up blueprints of stage sets and itineraries. I've thrown stuff out of the windows onto the highway. I've ripped up his clothes. I've torn up his passport. I was just childish and destructive for the sake of it. When I got like that, Ozzy called me psycho woman. And, not surprisingly, he would take his revenge. We were both drinking heavily, though I hated the stuff and was only doing it to keep up with him.

  Some incidents stand out, but only because they had
repercussions. Like the time I threw a full bottle of scotch and it hit him on the back of his head. He had been on his way out of the room. He then turned, came charging back and hammered me against the wall, so violently that my two front teeth broke off. Not only were the caps gone, but the original teeth under them had snapped, so the next morning I was on a plane back to Los Angeles to get them fixed.

  The general pattern was that Ozzy would hit, and I would throw anything that I could pick up, from lamps to tables to telephones. One time in New York I threw a family-size bottle of mouthwash at him, but it hit Pete Mertons instead. I had known Pete since 1970. In one of those coincidences that shadowed our lives, he and Ozzy had been at school together, then he'd been a roadie for one of the Birmingham bands my father managed, and later David had put him with ELO. Now he worked with us.

  Another of my father's old team we had along was a heavy named Harry Mohan, who had been a successful amateur boxer when he was younger. And one day Harry was there when Ozzy hit me, and so, to stop him, he punched Ozzy in the nose and said, "Don't you ever touch her again." Ozzy fired him on the spot. This was Ozzy's show, and no matter what the circumstances, or who was involved, nobody messed with him.

  And one day, I just woke up and realized it had to stop. One of us, at least, had to stay sober. As it wasn't going to be Ozzy, it had to be me. My wake-up call was when I looked in the mirror that morning and hadn't recognized the person who looked back. One eye was completely closed and that side of my face was navy blue tinged with green. But worst of all, I had no memory whatsoever of it happening. This was insane behavior. I didn't enjoy drinking, and now here I was blacking out with it. From then on, unless it was a glass of champagne to toast somebody, I drank no alcohol for the best part of twenty years.