I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne; Chris Ayres

  Then our accountant going, ‘Lads, this is serious. This is a million-dollar tax bill from the IRS.’

  And Geezer saying, ‘We’re calling the album Technical Ecstasy. We need a new direction. We can’t do that black magic shit for ever.’

  It wouldn’t stop.

  Over and over.

  ‘John, feed the chickens.’

  ‘Lads, this is serious.’

  ‘We’re calling the album Technical Ecstasy.’

  ‘John, did you feed the chickens?’

  ‘A million-dollar tax bill.’

  ‘John, feed the chickens!’

  ‘We need a new direction.’

  ‘This is serious.’

  ‘We can’t do that black magic shit for ever.’

  AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!

  When I reached the coop I put down the jerry can and the gun, knelt down by the ‘Oflag 14’ sign and took a look inside. The chickens clucked and nodded their little beaks.

  ‘Anyone laid any eggs?’ I asked – like I didn’t already know the answer to that fucking question. ‘Didn’t think so,’ I said, standing up. ‘Too bad.’

  Then I picked up the gun.

  Safety off.

  Aim.

  Cluck-cluck.

  Bang-bang!

  Aim.

  Squawk!

  Bang-bang!

  Aim.

  Squaaawwwwwwwwwkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!

  BANG!

  The sound of the gun was fucking deafening, and it echoed across the fields for what seemed like miles in all directions. And with every shot there was a white flash that lit up the coop and the garden around it, followed by a strong whiff of gun-powder. I was feeling much better now.

  Much, much better.

  Swig. Ahhh. Burp.

  The chickens – the ones who hadn’t already gone off to meet their maker – were going nuts.

  I waited a moment for the smoke to clear.

  Aim.

  Cluck-cluck.

  Bang-bang!

  Aim.

  Squawk!

  Bang-bang!

  Aim.

  Squaaawwwwwwwwwkkkkkkkkkk!!!!!

  BANG!

  By the time I was done there was blood and feathers and bits of beak all over the fucking place. It looked as though someone had thrown a bucket of chicken guts at me and then emptied a pillow over my head. My dressing-gown was ruined. But I felt fucking fabulous – like someone had just lifted a three-ton anvil off my back. I put down the shotgun, picked up the jerry can, and started emptying it over what was left of the chickens. I lit up another fag, took a long drag, stood well back, then flicked it into the coop.

  Whoooooooooossssshhhhh!

  Flames everywhere.

  Then I took the leftover cartridges out of my pocket and started throwing them into the fire.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Bang-bang-bang!

  ‘Heh-heh-heh,’ I went.

  Then something moved behind me.

  I almost fell over the gun and shot myself in the nuts with fright. I turned around to see a chicken legging it away from me. That little fucker! I heard myself letting out this weird, psycho noise – ‘Eeeeaaaargggghhhh!’ – then, without even thinking, I set off after it. I didn’t know what the fuck was wrong with me, or why I was doing what I was doing. All I knew was that I was possessed with this insane, uncontrollable rage at all chickenkind. Kill the chicken! Kill the chicken! Kill the chicken!

  But let me tell you something: it’s not fucking easy, catching a chicken, especially when it’s getting dark and you haven’t slept for twenty-four hours and you’re fucked up on a shitload of booze and coke and you’re wearing a dressing-gown and welly-boots.

  So I clomped back over to the shed, found a sword, and came out with it raised above my head, Samurai-style. ‘Die, you chicken bastard, die!’ I shouted, as the chicken made a last-ditch run for the fence at the end of the garden, its little beak nodding so fast it looked like its head could fly off at any second. I’d almost caught up with it when the front door of my neighbour’s house burst open. Then this little old lady – Mrs Armstrong, I think her name was – came running out with a garden hoe in her hands. She was used to all kinds of crazy shit going on at Bulrush Cottage, but this time, I don’t even think she could believe it. With the coop burning and the rounds from my gun exploding every few minutes, it was like a scene from an old World War Two movie.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  Bang-bang-bang!

  At first I didn’t even notice her. I was too busy chasing the chicken, which ended up bolting under the fence and legging it up Mrs Armstrong’s driveway, out of her gate, and down Butt Lane in the direction of the pub. Then I looked up and our eyes met. I must have been quite a sight, standing there in my dressing gown with a crazed look on my face, splattered with blood, and holding up a sword, my garden on fire behind me.

  ‘Ah, good evening, Mr Osbourne,’ she said. ‘I see you’re back from America.’

  There was a long silence. More cartridges exploded behind me. I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.

  ‘Unwinding, are we?’ she asked.

  I wasn’t the only one going out of my mind with the stress of the band imploding.

  I remember one time, Geezer phoned me up and said, ‘Look, Ozzy, I’m sick of touring just to pay the lawyers. Before we go on the road again, I wanna know what we’re gonna get.’

  And I said to him, ‘Y’know what, Geezer, you’re right. Let’s call a meeting.’

  So we had a meeting, and I was the first one to speak up.

  ‘Look, lads,’ I said, ‘I think it’s crazy that we’re doing gigs to pay the lawyers. What d’you think, Geezer?’

  Geezer just shrugged and said, ‘Dunno.’

  That was it.

  I’d had enough. There didn’t seem to be any point any more. None of us was getting on. We were spending more time in meetings with lawyers than we were writing songs; we were all exhausted from touring the world pretty much non-stop for six years; and we were out of our minds on booze and drugs. The final straw was a meeting with Colin Newman, our accountant, where he told us that if we didn’t settle our tax bills soon, we’d be going to prison. In those days, the tax rate for people like us was something like 80 per cent in the UK and 70 per cent in America, so you can imagine the amount of dough we owed. And after the taxes, we still had our expenses to pay. We were broke, basically. Wiped out. Geezer might not have had the bollocks to say anything in front of the others, but he was right: there was no point in being in a rock ’n’ roll band just to worry about money and writs all the time.

  So one day I just walked out of a rehearsal and didn’t come back.

  Then I got a call from Norman, my sister Jean’s husband.

  Now, he’s a lovely guy, Norman – in many ways the older brother I never had. But whenever he called, it usually meant something heavy was going down with the family.

  This time was no different.

  ‘It’s your dad,’ said Norman. ‘You should go and see him.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘He’s not well, John. He might not make it through the night.’

  I immediately felt sick and numb. Losing a parent had always been my worst fear, ever since I was a little kid, when I would go up to my dad’s bed and shake him awake because I thought he wasn’t breathing. Now the fear was coming true. I knew my dad had been ill, but I hadn’t thought he was at death’s door.

  When I pulled myself together, I got in the car and went to see him.

  My whole family was already there by his bedside, including my mum, who was just absolutely devastated.

  Dad was riddled with cancer, it turned out. It was out of control, because he’d refused to go and see a doctor until they had to carry him away in an ambulance. He’d stopped working only a few months before. He was sixty-four, and they’d offered him an early retirement deal. ‘I’m gonna have some time to do the garden
now,’ he’d told me. So he did the garden. But as soon as he’d done the garden, that was it. Game over.

  I was terrified of seeing him, to be honest with you, because I knew what to expect. My dad’s younger brother had died the year before from liver cancer. I’d visited him on the ward and it had shocked the crap out of me, so much so that I’d burst into tears. He bore no resemblance to the guy I’d known. He didn’t even look human.

  When I got to the hospital this time, my dad had just come out of surgery, and he was up and running. He looked all right, and he managed a smile. They had him on the happy juice, I imagine. Although, as one of my aunties used to say, ‘God always gives you one good day before you die.’ We talked a little, but not much. The funny thing is, when I was growing up, my dad never used to say anything like, ‘You wanna watch those cigarettes,’ or, ‘Stop going to the pub all the time,’ but that day he told me, ‘Do something about your drinking, John. It’s too bloody much. And stop taking sleeping pills.’

  ‘I’ve left Black Sabbath,’ I told him.

  ‘They’re finished then,’ he said. Then he fell asleep.

  The next day, he took a dive. One of the worst things about it was seeing my mum so distraught. In hospitals back then, the sicker you got, the further they moved you from the other patients. By the end of the day, my dad had been shoved into this broom cupboard in the corner, with mops and buckets and tubs of bleach all over the place. They’d put bandages around his hands like he was a boxer, and they’d tied him to the bars of this giant cot, because he’d kept pulling out his IV tube. It really fucked me up, seeing him like that, the man I adored, the man who’d taught me that even if you don’t have a good education, you can still have good manners. At least he was loaded on all kinds of drugs, so he wasn’t in too much pain. When he saw me, he smiled, stuck his thumbs up through his bandages and went, ‘Speeeeed!’ – it was the only drug he knew the name of. Mind you, then he said, ‘Take these fucking pipes out of me, John, they hurt.’

  He died at 11.20 p.m. on January 20, 1978: in the same hospital, on the same date, at the same time as Jess had been born six years earlier. That coincidence still floors me to this day. The cause of death was given as ‘carcinoma of the oesophagus’, although he also had cancer of the intestines and cancer of the bowel. He hadn’t eaten or gone to the bog by himself for thirteen weeks. Jean was with him when he passed away. The doctors told her they wanted to find out why their Frankenstein experiment on him the previous day in surgery hadn’t worked, but she wouldn’t let them do an autopsy.

  I was in the car, on my way to Bill’s house, listening to ‘Baker Street’ by Gerry Rafferty, at the moment he passed away. As soon I pulled up in Bill’s driveway, he was standing there, with a grim look on his face. ‘Someone’s on the phone for you, Ozzy,’ he said.

  It was Norman, giving me the news. To this day, whenever ‘Baker Street’ comes on the radio, I hear Norman’s voice and feel that intense sadness.

  His funeral was a week later, and he was cremated. I really hate the way traditional English funerals are organised: you’re just starting to get over the shock of the death, then you have to go through it all over again. The Jews have a far better idea: when someone dies, you bury them as soon as possible. At least that way you get it all out of your system quickly.

  The only way I could handle my father’s funeral was to get out of my skull. I got up that morning and poured myself a neat whisky; then I kept going all day. By the time they brought the coffin to the house where my mum and dad had been living, I was halfway to another planet. The coffin was sealed, but for some stupid fucking pissed reason I decided I wanted to see Dad again, one last time, so I got one of the pallbearers to unscrew the lid. A bad idea, that was. In the end, we all took it in turns to look at him. But he’d been dead a week, so as soon as I peered into the coffin, I regretted it. The undertaker had put all this greasepaint on him, so he looked like a fucking clown. That wasn’t the way I wanted to remember my father – but as I’m writing this now, that’s the picture I see in my head. I’d rather have remembered him being tied to that hospital cot, smiling and sticking his thumbs up, and going, ‘Speeeeed!’

  Then we all got in the hearse with the coffin. My sisters and my mother started howling like wild animals, which freaked the fuck out of me. I’d never experienced anything like it before. They teach you how to handle life in England, but they don’t teach you a thing about death. There’s no book telling you what to do when your mum or dad dies.

  It’s like, You’re on your own now, sunshine.

  If there’s one thing that sums up my father, it’s the indoor bathroom he built at 14 Lodge Road, so we wouldn’t have to use a tin bathtub in front of the fire any more. He hired a professional contractor to do most of the work, but only a few weeks after it was finished all this damp started coming in through the wall. So my dad went off to the hardware shop, bought what he needed, and replastered the wall himself. But the damp came back. So my dad plastered it again. Then it came back again and again and again. By this time he was on a mission. And you couldn’t stop my dad when he was on a mission. He came up with all kinds of crazy concoctions to put on that wall and stop the damp. It went on for ever, his anti-damp crusade. Then, finally, after a few years, he got this heavy-duty industrial tar from the GEC factory, smeared it all over the wall, plastered over the tar, then went out and bought some yellow and white tiles, and laid them on top.

  ‘That should fucking do it,’ I remember him saying.

  I’d forgotten all about it until years later, when I went back to the house to do a documentary with the BBC. By that time, there was a Pakistani family living there, and every wall in the house had been painted white. It was eerie, seeing the place like that. But then I walked into the bathroom – and on the wall were my dad’s tiles, still up there, like the day they were laid. I just thought, He fucking did it in the end, my old man.

  You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the day.

  I miss my dad a lot, even now. I just wish we could have sat down and had a good old man-to-man conversation about all the stuff I never knew to ask him when I was a kid, or was too pissed and busy being a rock star to ask him when I was in my twenties.

  But I suppose that’s always the way, isn’t it?

  The day I left Black Sabbath, we were at Rockfield Studios in South Wales, trying to record a new album. We’d just had another soul-destroying meeting about money and lawyers, and I couldn’t take it any more. So I just walked out of the studio and fucked off back to Bulrush Cottage in Thelma’s Mercedes. I was shitfaced, obviously. And then, like a pissed dickhead, I started to slag off the band in the press, which wasn’t fair. But y’know, when a band splits up, it’s like a marriage ending – for a while, all you want to do is hurt each other. The bloke they found to replace me after I walked out was another Brummie, called Dave Walker, a guy I’d admired for a long time, actually – he’d been with Savoy Brown and then Fleetwood Mac for a while.

  But for whatever reason things didn’t work out with Dave, so when I came back a few weeks later, everything was back to normal – on the surface, at least. No one really talked about what happened. I just turned up in the studio one day – I think Bill had been trying to act as peacemaker on the phone – and that was the end of it. But it was obvious things had changed, especially between me and Tony. I don’t think anyone’s heart was in what we were doing any more. Still, as soon as I came back, we picked up where we’d left off with the album, which we decided to call Never Say Die.

  By now, we were starting to get our finances sorted out, thanks to Colin Newman, who advised us to make the album as tax exiles in another country, to avoid having to give 80 per cent of all our dough to the Labour government. We chose Canada, even though it was January and would be so cold that we wouldn’t be able to walk outside without our eyeballs freezing over. So we booked ourselves into Sounds Interchange Studios and flew off to Toronto.

  But even t
hree thousand miles away from England the old problems soon came up again.

  For example, I spent just about every night getting seriously fucked-up at a place called the Gas Works, opposite the apartment block where I was staying. One night I went over there, came back, passed out, and woke up an hour later with this incredible heartburn. I remember opening my eyes and thinking, What the fuck? It was pitch black, but I noticed this red glow in front of me. I had no idea what it was. Meanwhile, the heartburn was getting worse and worse. Then suddenly I realised what had happened: I’d fallen asleep with a cigarette in my hand. I was on fire! So I jumped out of bed, tore off my clothes, bundled them up with the smouldering sheets, ran to the bathroom, dumped the whole lot in the bath, turned on the cold water, and waited for the smoke to clear. By the time I was done, the room was a fucking bomb site, I was stark bollock naked, my sheets were ruined and I was freezing to death.

  I was thinking, What the fuck do I do now? Then I had an idea: I ripped down the curtains and used them as sheets instead. It worked great, until the boot-faced maid came in the next morning.

  She went mental.

  ‘WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY APARTMENT?’ she screamed at me. ‘GET OUT! GET OUT! YOU ANIMAL!’

  Things weren’t going much better in the studio. When I mentioned in passing that I wanted to do a side project of my own, Tony snapped, ‘If you’ve got any songs, Ozzy, you should give them to us first.’ But then whenever I came up with an idea, nobody would give me the time of day. I’d say, ‘What do you think of this, then?’ and they’d go, ‘Nah. That’s crap.’

  Then, one day, Thelma called the studio and said she’d just had a miscarriage, so we all packed up our stuff and went back to England. But going home didn’t improve things between us, to the point where me and Tony weren’t speaking to each other at all. We didn’t argue. The opposite, really: just a complete lack of communication. And during the last sessions for the album in England, I’d given up. Tony, Bill and Geezer decided they wanted to do a song called ‘Breakout’, with a jazz band going da-dah-da-dah, DAH, and I just went, Fuck this, I’m off. That’s why Bill sang the vocals on ‘Swinging the Chain’. The bottom line was that ‘Breakout’ was stretching it too far for me. With tracks like that on the album, I thought, we might as well have been called Slack Haddock, not Black Sabbath. The only impressive thing about that jazz band as far as I was concerned was how much they could drink. It was incredible. If you didn’t get the takes done by midday, you were fucked, ’cos they were all too pissed.