I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne; Chris Ayres

  ‘My girlfriend nicked my clothes,’ I explained. ‘What else was I supposed to fucking wear?’

  ‘It ain’t the dress, you limey faggot piece o’ dirt. That wall you’re relieving yourself on is the Alamo!’

  ‘The Aalawot?’

  Before he could answer, two fat Texan coppers came puffing around the corner, radios crackling.

  ‘That’s the one,’ said the old bloke. ‘Him… in the dress.’

  BAM!

  I was face down in the dirt, being handcuffed.

  It took a moment for it all to click. I’d definitely heard of the Alamo – I’d seen the John Wayne movie a few times. So I knew it was this big-deal place where lots of Americans had been killed while they were fighting the Mexicans. But I hadn’t made the connection between the old wall I was pissing on and the ruins of a sacred national monument.

  ‘You’re a Brit, ain’tcha?’ one of the cops said to me.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, how would you feel if I urinated on Buckingham Palace, huh?’

  I gave it some thought. Then I said to him, ‘I’ve no idea. I don’t fucking live there, do I?’

  That went down a treat, that did.

  Ten minutes later, I was sharing a jail cell with a 280 lb Mexican bloke who’d just murdered his wife with a brick, or some crazy shit. He must have thought he was hallucinating when he saw me show up in a green frock. I was thinking, Christ, he’s going to think I’m the ghost of his missus, and then he’s going to try to give her one last dick up the arse.

  But all he did was grunt and stare.

  I was in the cage for about three hours. Some of the cops and their friends came over to look at me. Maybe some of them had bought Blizzard of Ozz, I don’t know. But they gave me a pretty easy ride. They did me for public intoxication, instead of the more heavy-duty desecration of a venerated object, which would have meant a year in the slammer. And they let me out in time for the gig. Although the chief came down personally to tell me that, as soon as the show was over, I had to leave town and never show my ugly mug again.

  That one piss cost me a fortune in lost San Antonio gigs over the years. And rightly so; I suppose: pissing on the Alamo wasn’t the cleverest thing I’d ever done. It wasn’t so much like pissing on Buckingham Palace as pissing on one of the monuments at a Normandy beach. Unforgivable. A few years later, I apologised in person to the Mayor, promised never to do it again, and donated ten grand to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. He let me play in the town again after that, although it took more than a decade for it to happen.

  When I finally went back, I remember this scrawny Mexican kid coming up to me after the show.

  ‘Ozzy, is it true you got busted for pissing on the Alamo?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I told him. ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Shit, man,’ he said. ‘We piss on it every night on our way home.’

  8

  While I was Sleeping

  We were in the tour bus, on our way from Tennessee to

  Florida, when Randy broke the news.

  ‘I don’t think I want to be a rock ’n’ roller any more,’ he said.

  I waited for him to crack a smile. But he didn’t.

  We were sitting at a little picnic table in the kitchen area of the bus, which was like a five-star hotel on wheels. It had TVs hanging from the ceiling, shag-pile carpets, air-conditioning, limo-style windows, a flash gold and white paint job, and – of course – a fully stocked bar.

  I’d been drinking gin all night. After that bad scene at the Alamo, I’d gone easy on the Courvoisier for a while.

  Randy was smoking fags and sipping from a can of Coke. He hardly touched the booze. He only liked that horrible aniseed shit. What’s it called? Anisette. Like a thick, milky liqueur thing. Didn’t do drugs, either. Mind you, he made up for it with the fags. He could have won a gold medal in the Lung Cancer Olympics, could Randy Rhoads.

  ‘Are you joking with me?’ I said, trying not to choke on my drink.

  ‘No, Ozzy, I’m serious.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  It was long after midnight – maybe three or four in the morning – and me and Randy were the only ones still awake. Sharon was in the bedroom at the back. Rudy and Tommy were sprawled out on the bunks, along with some of the crew members who travelled with us, like Rachel Youngblood, an older black lady who did all our wardrobe, hair and make-up.

  I was amazed they could sleep, ’cos the bus was rattling and shaking and groaning like it was gonna fall to pieces. It was a seven-hundred-mile journey from Knoxville to Orlando, and the driver was going like the clappers. I remember looking out of the window at all the headlamps of the cars and trucks flying past in the other direction and thinking, Any minute now, the wheels are gonna come off this thing. I had no idea that the driver had a nose full of coke. I only found that out later from the coroner’s report.

  Mind you, I had no idea about anything, me. I was out of my skull with all the booze and the coke and the fuck-knows-what-else I was shoving down my throat, twenty-four hours a day.

  But I knew I didn’t want Randy to leave.

  ‘How could you quit now?’ I said to him. ‘We’ve only just broken through, man. Sharon says Diary of a Madman might sell even more copies than Blizzard. It’s going fucking gangbusters all over the world. Tomorrow night we’re playing with Foreigner!’

  Randy just shrugged and said, ‘I want to go to university. Get a degree.’

  ‘Are you mad?’ I said. ‘Keep this up for a couple of years and you can buy your own fucking university.’

  At least that made him smile.

  ‘Look,’ I went on. ‘You’re just knackered. Why don’t you get some rest, give yourself a bit of a break, y’know?’

  ‘I could say the same thing to you, Ozzy.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘That’s your fourth bottle of gin in twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Keeps me happy.’

  ‘Ozzy, why do you drink so much? What’s the point?’

  The right answer to that question was: because I’m an alcoholic; because I have an addictive personality; because whatever I do, I do it addictively. But I didn’t know any of that back then.

  All I ever knew was that I wanted another drink.

  So I just gave Randy a blank look.

  ‘You’ll kill yourself, y’know?’ said Randy. ‘One of these days.’

  ‘Goodnight Randy,’ I said, draining my glass. ‘I’m off to bed.’

  When I opened my eyes a few hours later, it was getting light. Sharon was lying next to me in her dressing-gown. My head felt like a pile of toxic shit.

  I couldn’t understand why I’d woken up so early. The gin should have knocked me out until at least mid-afternoon.

  Then I heard the noise.

  It sounded like an engine at full revs. I thought we must have been overtaking a truck.

  BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMM…

  Whatever it was that was making the din seemed to move away from the bus, but then all of a sudden it came back, even louder than before

  BBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMMMM-MMMMMMBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMM MMM…

  ‘Sharon?’ I said. ‘What the fuck is that noi—’

  Then my head smashed into the bed frame as all the windows of the bus exploded.

  I could smell fuel.

  For a second, there was nothing but blackness.

  Next thing I know I’m looking out of the porthole-shaped window next to my left arm. I can see black smoke and people with their heads in their hands, screaming. So I jump out of bed – stark bollock naked apart from a pair of greasy old underpants – and force open the bedroom door. There are tiny fragments of glass everywhere, and a fucking massive hole in the roof. Then I notice that the entire bus has been bent into a V-shape.

  The first thing that comes into my head is that the driver must have lost control on the freeway. We must have crashed.

  Then I’m co
ughing from the stench of the fuel and the smoke from the fire outside.

  And I think: Fire and fuel. Oh, fuck.

  ‘EVERYONE GET OFF THE FUCKING BUS!’ I start to shout. ‘IT’S GONNA BLOW! IT’S GONNA BLOW!’

  Panic.

  Numb legs.

  Sharon screaming.

  I was still sozzled from the gin. My head was throbbing. My eyes were all crusty and raw. I looked for an emergency exit, but there wasn’t one. So I ran to the open door at the front of the bus instead, pulling Sharon along behind me. Then I looked around for the others, but all the bunks were empty. Where the fuck had everyone else gone? Where the hell was Randy?

  I jumped out of the bus and landed on grass.

  Grass?

  At that point I thought I must have been dreaming.

  Where was the road? Where were the cars? I’d expected to see twisted metal, blood, spinning hub-caps. But we were parked in the middle of a field, surrounded by a bunch of over-the-top, coke-dealer-style mansions. I saw a sign that said, ‘Flying Baron Estates’. Then, next to one of the houses, a gigantic fireball – like something from the set of a James Bond film. That’s where all the smoke was coming from. There was wreckage strewn around it. And what looked like…

  Oh, Jesus Christ. I almost threw up when I saw that shit.

  I had to turn away.

  Aside from the smoke, it was a clear day – but it was early, so there was still a kind of muggy haze in the air.

  ‘Where are we? What’s happening?’ I kept saying, over and over. I’d never felt so totally fucking out-of-it in my life. It was worse than the worst acid trip I’d ever had. Then I noticed what looked like an air strip and a hangar. Next to the hangar, a woman in riding gear was walking next to a horse, like nothing had happened – like this was an everyday fucking occurrence. I was thinking, This is a nightmare, I’m dreaming, this can’t be real.

  I stood there, in a trance, while our keyboard player, Don Airey, ran back to the bus, grabbed a miniature fire extinguisher from somewhere, jumped off the bus, then pointed it in the direction of the flames.

  It spluttered and dribbled uselessly.

  Meanwhile, Sharon was trying to do a head count, but people were scattered all over the field. They were just pointing at the flames and wailing and sobbing.

  Now I could make out the remains of a garage around the flames. It looked as though there were two cars inside.

  Something must have crashed into it.

  And whatever it was must also have ripped the hole in our tour bus and taken out half the trees behind it.

  Then Sharon went over to Don – ‘El-Doom-O’, we used to call him, ’cos he was always expecting the worst – and screamed, ‘What happened? Tell me, what the fuck happened?’ But Don was crouched down in a ball and couldn’t talk. So Sharon turned to Jake Duncan, our Scottish tour manager. But he couldn’t say anything, either. Next thing I knew, Sharon took off her shoe and just started beating Jake around the head with it.

  ‘Where are Randy and Rachel? Where are Randy and Rachel?’

  All Jake could do was point towards the flames.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Sharon said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  I didn’t understand, either. Nobody had said, ‘Oh, by the way, Ozzy, on the way to Orlando, we’re gonna stop off at a bus depot in Leesburg to fix the air conditioning.’ Nobody had said, ‘Oh, and by the way, Ozzy, the bus depot is part of this dodgy housing estate with an air strip.’ Nobody had said, ‘Oh, yeah, and your driver – who’s been up all night, out of his mind on cocaine – also happens to be pilot with an expired medical certificate who’s going to borrow some bloke’s plane without his permission and then, while you’re fast asleep, take your lead guitarist and your make-up artist on a sight-seeing trip above the tour bus, before dive-bombing into it.’

  Nobody had said anything like that at all.

  Then the house next to the garage catches fire, and without even thinking I’m running towards it – still half-pissed, still in my underpants – to make sure no one’s inside. When I get to the front door, I knock, wait for about two seconds, then barge in.

  In the kitchen an old bloke is making coffee. He almost falls off his chair when he sees me.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he says. ‘Get out of my house!’

  ‘There’s a fire!’ I shout at him. ‘Get out! Get out!’

  The guy was clearly insane, ’cos he just picked up a broom from the corner and tried to push me away with it. ‘Get out of my house, you little bastard! Go on, fuggarf!’

  ‘YOUR FUCKING HOUSE IS ON FUCKING FIRE!’

  ‘GEDDOUT! GEDDOUT, GODAMMIT!’

  ‘YOUR HOUSE IS—’

  Then I realised he was stone deaf. He wouldn’t have heard if the entire fucking planet had exploded. He certainly couldn’t hear a word this long-haired, raving English loony in his under-pants was telling him. I couldn’t think what to do, so I just ran to the other side of the kitchen, where there was a door which led to the garage. I opened it, and the fucking thing practically blew off its hinges from the force of the fire.

  The old bloke didn’t tell me to get out of his house again after that.

  We only learned the full story much later. The bus driver was called Andrew C. Aycock. Six years earlier, he’d been involved in a fatal helicopter crash in the United Arab Emirates. Then he’d got a job working for the Calhoun Twins, a Country & Western act who owned the company that was doing the transportation for our tour. When we stopped at the bus depot to fix the air conditioning, Aycock decided to try his luck at flying again. So, without asking, he took a plane belonging to a mate of his.

  Don and Jake were the first to go up with him. Everything was fine: the take-off and landing went smoothly. Then it was Randy and Rachel’s turn. There’s a photograph of the two of them standing beside the plane, just before they got on. They’re both smiling. I saw it once, but I could never look at it again. I’m told that Rachel agreed to go up only after Aycock promised not to pull any stunts while they were in the air. If he promised her that, he was a fucking liar as well as a coked-up lunatic: everyone on the ground said he buzzed the tour bus two or three times before the wing clipped the roof a few inches from where me and Sharon were sleeping. But the most insane thing – and the one fact I still can’t get my head around, nearly thirty years later – is that the bloke was going through a heavy-duty divorce at the time, and his soon-to-be-ex missus was standing right next to the bus when he crashed the plane into it. He’d picked her up at one of the tour venues, apparently, and was giving her a ride home.

  A ride home? The woman he was divorcing?

  At the time, there was a lot of talk that he might have been trying to kill her, but who the fuck knows? Whatever he was trying to do, he came down so low that even if he’d managed to miss the tour bus, he would have hit the trees behind it.

  Don watched the whole thing happen.

  I feel bad for him, ’cos it must have been a terrible thing to see. When the wing hit the bus, Randy and Rachel were thrown through the windscreen, or so I was told. Then the plane – minus its wing – smashed into the trees behind, fell into the garage, and exploded. The fire was so intense, the cops had to use dental records to identify the bodies.

  Even now I don’t like talking or thinking about it.

  If I’d been awake, I would have been on that fucking plane, no question. Knowing me, I’d have been on the wing, pissed, doing handstands and backflips. But it makes no sense to me that Randy went up.

  He hated flying.

  A few weeks earlier, I’d been drinking with him in a bar in Chicago. We were about to take a ten-day break from the tour, and Randy was asking how long it would take him to drive from New York to Georgia, where we were starting up again. I asked why the fuck he would want to drive all the way from New York to Georgia when there was an invention called the aeroplane. He told me he’d been freaked out by the Air Florida plane that had crashed into a bridge in Washington a f
ew days earlier. Seventy-eight people had died. So Randy wasn’t exactly the type of person to go clowning around in a bullshit four-seat piece of shit. He didn’t even want to get on a jet run by a big commercial airline.

  Some weird fucking unexplained shit went on that morning, because Rachel didn’t like planes, either. She had a weak heart, so she would hardly have wanted to do a loop-the-fucking-loop. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, they were pissing around, typical fucking rock stars.’ I want to set the record straight: Rachel was in her late fifties and had a heart condition; Randy was a very level-headed guy and he was afraid of flying. None of it makes any sense.

  By the time the fire engines arrived, the flames had already burned themselves out. Randy was gone. Rachel was gone. I finally put on some clothes and took a beer from what was left of the fridge in the bus. I couldn’t handle the situation. Sharon was running around trying to find a telephone. She wanted to call her father. Then the cops arrived. Good ol’ boy types. They weren’t too sympathetic.

  ‘Ozzy Ozz-Burn, huh?’ they said. ‘The bat-eating madman.’

  We checked into some shithole called the Hilco Inn in Leesburg and tried to hide from the press while the police did their thing. We had to call Randy’s mum and Rachel’s best friend Grace, which was horrendous.

  All of us wanted to get the fuck out of Leesburg, but we had to stay put until all the paperwork was done.

  None of us could get our heads around the situation. Everything had been magic one minute, and the next it had taken such an ugly, tragic turn.

  ‘Y’know what? I think this is a sign that I ain’t supposed to do this any more,’ I said to Sharon.

  By then I was having a total physical and mental breakdown. A doctor had to come over and shoot me up with sedatives. Sharon wasn’t doing much better. She was in a terrible state, poor Sharon. The one thing that gave us some comfort was a message from AC/DC saying, ‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know.’ That meant a lot to me, and I’ll always be grateful to them for it. You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan. In fact, AC/DC must have known exactly what we’d been going through, ’cos it had only been a couple of years since their singer Bon Scott had died from alcohol poisoning, also at a tragically young age.