I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne; Chris Ayres

  One of the best things about it was that Ian Anderson – Tull’s lead singer, who was famous for playing the flute with this bug-eyed look on his face while standing on one leg, like a court jester – finally turned up when we were halfway through the set. The band’s bus had broken down on the M6, or something like that, and they’d had no way to contact the venue to warn them. I think Anderson had hitch-hiked there by himself to apologise. So there I was, screaming into the mic, and when I looked up I saw Anderson standing at the back of the hall, nodding his head, looking like he was really into the music. It was fucking fabulous.

  We came off stage buzzing. The venue manager couldn’t have been happier. Even Anderson seemed grateful. And after that, all the bookers knew our name – even if they couldn’t say it.

  Over the next few weeks everything started to take off for us. The gigs got bigger, our playing got tighter, and some local managers began sniffing around. One guy in particular took an interest in us: his name was Jim Simpson and he’d been the trumpet player in a fairly well-known Birmingham band called Locomotive. Jim had given up being a musician to set up a management company called Big Bear, which was John Peel’s nickname for him, ’cos he was this stocky, hairy, red-faced bloke, who ambled around Birmingham like a big, tame grizzly. He’d also opened a club on the floor above the Crown pub on Station Street, calling it Henry’s Blues House. It was one of our favourite hang-outs. One of the earliest shows I remember seeing there was a jam with Robert Plant and John Bonham, probably just before they went off to Scandinavia. It gave me fucking goosebumps, man.

  Then, near the end of 1968, Jim invited us to play at the club with Ten Years After, who were a huge blues act at the time. Alvin Lee, the band’s guitarist and singer, would later became a good friend of ours. It was a great night – as much of a turning point for Earth as the Jethro Tull gig had been. A few days later, after a few beers, Jim told me and Bill that he was thinking about managing us. Big Bear was already looking after Locomotive and two other local bands, Bakerloo Blues Line, and Tea and Symphony. It was a huge moment. Having Jim on our side would mean a lot more work and a much more realistic chance of making a living out of music without having to rely on handouts from Tony’s parents. We could go to London and play the Marquee Club. We could tour Europe.

  The sky was the fucking limit.

  The next day, me and Bill couldn’t wait to tell Tony. We’d booked the rehearsal room at Six Ways, and the second Tony walked in I said, ‘You’ll never fucking guess what…’

  But when I told him about the possible deal, he just said, ‘Oh’, then looked at the floor. He seemed upset and distracted.

  ‘Are you all right, Tony?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve got some news,’ he said quietly.

  My heart just about stopped beating. I turned white. I thought his mum or dad must have died. Something terrible, anyway, for him not to be excited about us getting a manager.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ian Anderson got in touch with me,’ he said, still looking at the floor. ‘Tull’s guitarist just quit. He asked me to replace him – and I said yes. I’m sorry, lads. I can’t turn it down. We’re going to be playing with the Rolling Stones in Wembley on the tenth of December.’

  Stunned silence.

  It was all over. We’d been so close, and now we were a million light years away.

  ‘Tony,’ I said eventually, swallowing hard. ‘That’s fucking great, man. It’s what you’ve always wanted.’

  ‘Congratulations, Tony,’ said Geezer, putting down his guitar and walking over to slap him on the back.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bill. ‘If anyone deserves it, you do. I hope they know how lucky they are.’

  ‘Thanks, lads,’ said Tony, sounding like he was trying not to choke up. ‘You’re going to do great, with or without me. You’ll see.’

  I can say with my hand on my heart that we weren’t bull-shitting Tony when we said all that stuff. We’d been through a lot together over the last few months, and all three of us were genuinely pleased for him.

  Even though it was the worst fucking news we’d ever heard in our lives.

  3

  The Witch and the Nazi

  We were all devastated.

  There was only one Tony Iommi, and we knew it.

  It had just worked with Tony. Maybe it was because all four of us had grown up within a few streets of each other. Or maybe it was because we were all broke and desperate and knew exactly what our lives would be like without rock ’n’ roll. Either way, we understood each other. It was obvious to anyone who saw us play.

  After getting home from the rehearsal where Tony broke the news, I remember lying on the bed at 14 Lodge Road with my head in my hands. My dad came into the room and sat down next to me. ‘Go and have a drink with your pals, son,’ he said, pressing a ten-bob note into my hand. I must have looked pretty fucking upset for him to do that, given all the unpaid bills on the kitchen table that my mum was crying over. ‘The world doesn’t revolve around Tony,’ he said. ‘There’ll be other guitarists.’

  He was a good guy, my old man. But this time he was wrong. There were no other guitarists.

  Not like Tony.

  So I went down the pub with Bill, and we got completely lollied. Bill was on the cider, as usual: the farm stuff, basically one step removed from poison. He would mix it with black-currant juice to take the edge off. They sold it for two bob a pint in those days, which was the only reason why anyone drank it. But Bill kept at it, years after he could afford champagne. He really took cider to heart, did Bill. When you had a few pints of that stuff it wasn’t like being drunk, it was like having a head injury.

  Tony was the main topic of conversation that night, and I can honestly say that we weren’t jealous of what he was doing. We were just heartbroken. As much as we both liked Jethro Tull, we thought Earth could be better – a hundred times better. Before he left, Tony had been coming up with all these heavy-duty riffs of his own – heavier than anything I’d heard anywhere before – and Geezer had started to write far-out lyrics to go with them. As for me and Bill, we’d been improving with every gig. And unlike a lot of the one-hit-wonder Top-Forty bands at the time, we weren’t fake. We hadn’t been put together by some suit-and-tie in a smoky office in London somewhere. We weren’t one star, a cool name, and a bunch of session players who changed with every tour.

  We were the real fucking deal.

  Tony left in December 1968.

  It was so cold that winter that I started to have flashbacks to the time when I’d worked as a plumber, bending over manholes while my arse-crack frosted over. Without Tony, me and the lads had fuck-all to do apart from sit around all day, moan, and drink cups of tea. All our gigs had been cancelled, and we’d given up our day jobs long ago, which meant none of us had any dough, so even going down the pub wasn’t an option.

  No one wanted to think about getting ‘real’ work, though.

  ‘In 1968, John Osbourne was an up-and-coming rock ’n’ roll star,’ I would say in this fake movie-announcer voice as I wandered around the house. ‘In 1969, he was an up-and-coming garbageman.’

  The one thing we had to look forward to was seeing Tony on the telly. The BBC was going to broadcast the gig in London with the Rolling Stones. It was going to be called ‘The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus’. Nothing like it had ever been done before: the Stones would basically play a private show with a few of their rock star pals at Intertel Studios in Wembley, where the set would be made to look like a circus ring with a big top over it. Jethro Tull would open. Then The Who would play. Mick Jagger had even talked John Lennon into doing a version of ‘Yer Blues’ with a one-off band called the Dirty Mac – featuring Eric Clapton on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums and Keith Richards on bass. I didn’t even know Richards could play bass. The press was going nuts about it, because it was going to be the first time Lennon had done a gig since the Beatles’ last show in 1966. (Someone told me later that one of those p
osh BBC producers called up Lennon and asked him what kind of amplifier he wanted to use, and he just replied, ‘One that works.’ Fucking priceless, man. I wish I could have met that guy.)

  In the end, though, the BBC never broadcast the thing. The Stones killed it. I heard that Jagger wasn’t too pleased about how the Stones had sounded during the gig. It was twenty-eight years before the footage was finally shown, at the New York Film Festival. If you ever get to see it, Tony’s the one in the white hat with the king-sized ferret on his upper lip. He does a great job of playing ‘Song for Jeffrey’, although there doesn’t seem to be much chemistry between him and Ian Anderson.

  Maybe that’s why he decided to quit after four days.

  *

  ‘What d’you mean, you quit?’ asked Geezer, at an emergency

  meeting down the pub a few days before Christmas.

  ‘It wasn’t my scene,’ said Tony, with a shrug.

  The drinks were on him.

  ‘How can being in Jethro Tull not be your scene?’ said Geezer. ‘You played a gig with John Lennon, man!’

  ‘I want to be in my own band. I don’t want to be someone else’s employee.’

  ‘So Ian Anderson’s a tosser, then?’ I asked, getting to the point.

  ‘No – he’s all right,’ said Tony. ‘He just wasn’t… We didn’t have a laugh, y’know? It wasn’t like this.’

  Bill, already on his third pint of cider, looked like he was about to burst into tears.

  ‘So are we back together?’ said Geezer, trying not to lose his cool by grinning too much.

  ‘If you’ll have me.’

  ‘OK. But can we please now find another name?’ I said.

  ‘Look, forget about the name,’ said Tony. ‘We just need to agree that we’re all serious. We can’t fuck around any more. I’ve seen how guys like Jethro Tull work. And they work, man: four days of rehearsals for one show. We need to start doing that. And we need to start writing our own songs and playing them, even if we get boos. The punters will soon get to know them. It’s the only way we’re going to make a name for ourselves. And we need to think about an album. Let’s go and talk to Jim Simpson in the morning.’

  Everyone nodded seriously.

  None of us could believe our fucking luck, to be honest with you. Was Tony insane? No one in their right mind would give up the kind of gig he’d just walked away from. Even Robert Plant had eventually gone off to join Jimmy Page in the New Yardbirds, leaving Hobbsbollocks in the dust. And I can’t tell you that I’d have done the same thing if I’d been in Tony’s position. As much as I was heartbroken when Earth split up, if I’d been the one walking into a band with national recognition, headliner status and a record deal, it would have been, ‘Oh, er, see ya!’ The bottom line was you had to take your hat off to Tony Iommi. He knew what he wanted, and he obviously believed that he could get it without taking a ride on Ian Anderson’s coat tails.

  All we had to do was prove he’d made the right decision.

  ‘OK, lads,’ said Tony, draining his pint and slamming the glass back down on the table. ‘Let’s get to work.’

  One of the first things Jim Simpson did as our manager was pack us off on a ‘European tour’. This meant loading our gear into Tony’s van – which by now had been upgraded from a Commer to a Transit – driving it on to a ferry at Harwich, sailing across the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, then hoping the engine would start again when it was time to get off. The temperature in Denmark would be twenty below freezing. From the Hook of Holland, the plan was to drive to Copenhagen, where our first gig had been booked.

  I remember taking my entire wardrobe with me on that trip. It consisted of one shirt on a wire hanger, and one pair of underpants in a carrier bag. I was wearing everything else: jeans, second-hand Air Force overcoat, Henry’s Blues House T-shirt, lace-up boots.

  Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job – as the band’s ‘public representative’ – to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the fucking thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly.

  ‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door.

  ‘Oh, thank fuck,’ I said, out of breath and sniffling. ‘Our van’s knackered. Can you gis a tow?’

  ‘Halløj?’

  I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?’

  The guy just looked at me and started to pick wax out of his ear. Then he said, ‘Bobby Charlton, ja?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Bobby Charlton, betydningsfuld skuespiller, ja?’

  ‘Sorry mate, speako Englishki?’

  ‘Det forstår jeg ikke,’ he said, with a shrug.

  ‘Eh?’

  We stood there and looked at each other for a second.

  Then he went, ‘Undskyld, farvel,’ and shut the door in my face. I gave it a good old kick and set off back through the waist-high snow. I was so cold, my hands were turning blue. When I reached the road I saw a car coming and almost threw myself in front of it. Turned out it was the Danish cops – friendly ones, thank God. They gave me a sip from a flask they kept in the glove box. I don’t know what was in that thing, but it warmed me up soon enough. Then they organised a tow-truck to take us to a garage in the next village.

  Good guys, those Danish cops.

  When they waved us off, they told us to send their regards to Bobby Charlton.

  ‘We’ll tell him you said hello,’ promised Geezer.

  Day two, the van broke down.

  This time it was due to a dodgy petrol gauge – the tank ran dry without us knowing it. So off I went to get help again. But this time I had a better idea. We’d conked out next to a little white church, and outside was what I guessed was the vicar’s car. I thought he wouldn’t mind being a good Samaritan, so I disconnected the hose from the van’s engine and used it to siphon fuel from his tank to ours. It worked brilliantly, apart from the fact that I got a mouthful of petrol when it came spurting out of the tube. I had toxic, highly flammable burps for the rest of the day.

  Every time it happened I’d screw up my face and have to spit petrol and lumps of vomit out of the window.

  ‘Urgh,’ I’d say. ‘I fucking hate four star.’

  Between gigs we started to jam out some ideas for songs. It was Tony who first suggested we do something that sounded evil. There was a cinema called the Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’

  Me and Bill thought it was a great idea, so off we went and wrote some lyrics that ended up becoming the song ‘Black Sabbath’. It’s basically about a bloke who sees a figure in black coming to take him off to the lake of fire.

  Then Tony came up with this scary-sounding riff. I moaned out a tune over the top of it, and the end result was fucking awesome – the best thing we’d ever done, by a mile. I’ve since been told that Tony’s riff is based on what’s known as the ‘Devil’s interval’, or the ‘tritone’. Apparently, churches banned it from being used in religious music during the Middle Ages because it scared the crap out of people. The organist would start to play it and everyone would run away ’cos they thought the Devil was going to pop up from behind the altar.

  As for the title of the song, it was Geezer who came up with that. He got it from a Boris Karloff film that had been out for a while. I don’t
think Geezer had ever seen the film, to be honest with you. I certainly hadn’t – it was years before I even knew there was a film. It’s funny, really, because in spite of our new direction we were still quite a straightforward twelve-bar blues band. If you listened closely, you could also hear a lot of jazz influences in our sound – like Bill’s swing-style intro to one of our other early numbers, ‘Wicked World’. It’s just that we played at eight hundred times the volume of a jazz band.

  Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song ‘Black Sabbath’. But I’ve always had a bee up my arse about the term ‘heavy metal’. To me, it doesn’t say anything musically, especially now that you’ve got seventies heavy metal, eighties heavy metal, nineties heavy metal and new- millennium heavy metal – which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they’re all the same. In fact, the first time I heard the words ‘heavy’ and ‘metal’ used together was in the lyrics of ‘Born to be Wild’. The press just latched on to it after that. We certainly didn’t come up with it ourselves. As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music. But then, long after we stopped writing scary music, people would still say, ‘Oh, they’re a heavy metal band, so all they must sing about is Satan and the end of the world.’ That’s why I came to loathe the term.

  I don’t remember where we first played ‘Black Sabbath’, but I can sure as hell remember the audience’s reaction: all the girls ran out of the venue, screaming. ‘Isn’t the whole point of being in a band to get a shag, not to make chicks run away?’ I complained to the others, afterwards.

  ‘They’ll get used to it,’ Geezer told me.

  Another memorable performance of ‘Black Sabbath’ was in a town hall near Manchester. The manager was there to greet us in a suit and tie when we climbed out of the van. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw us.