I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne; Chris Ayres

  Another thing I did when I was drunk was get more tattoos, which drove Sharon mental. Eventually she said, ‘Ozzy, if you get one more tattoo, I’m gonna string you up by your bollocks.’

  That night, I went out and got ‘thanks’ tattooed on my right palm. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. I mean, how many times do you say ‘thanks’ to people during your lifetime? Tens of thousands, probably. Now all I had to do was raise my right hand. But Sharon didn’t appreciate the innovation. When she noticed it the next morning – I’d been trying to keep my hand under the kitchen table, but then she asked me to pass the salt – she drove me straight to a plastic surgeon to get the tattoo removed. But he told me he’d have to cut off half of my hand to get rid of the thing, so it stayed.

  When we left the hospital, Sharon thanked the doctor for his time.

  I just raised my right palm.

  Another time we were in Albuquerque in the middle of winter, freezing cold, ice and snow everywhere. I was pissed and coked out of my fucking mind and decided to take a ride on this aerial tramway thing, which goes ten thousand feet up the Sandia Mountains to a restaurant and observation deck at the top. But there was something wrong with the cable car, and it swung to a halt halfway up the mountain.

  ‘What do you do if you get stuck up here?’ I asked the bloke at the controls, after we’d been dangling there for ages.

  ‘Oh, there’s an escape hatch in the roof,’ he said, pointing to this hatch above our heads.

  ‘But how do you climb up there?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s a ladder right behind you. All you have to do is pull it out. It’s very simple.’

  ‘Is the hatch locked?’

  ‘No.’

  Big mistake, telling me that. As soon as I knew there was a ladder and an unlocked hatch I had to try it out. So I pulled out the ladder and started to climb up to the ceiling.

  The guy went mental.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? You can’t do that! Stop! Stop!’

  That just egged me on even more. I opened the hatch, felt this blast of icy wind, and pulled myself up on to the roof, by which time the guy and everyone else in the cable car was screaming and begging me to come back down. Then, just as I was getting my balance, the car started to move again. I almost slipped and went splat onto the rocks thousands of feet below, but I kept my balance by putting out my arms like I was surfing. Then I started to sing ‘Good Vibrations’. I stayed up there until we were almost at the top.

  The funny thing is I hate heights. I get vertigo going up a doorstep. So when I saw the cable car from the ground the next day – stone-cold sober, for once – I almost threw up. It makes me shiver even now, just thinking about it.

  Doing crazy stuff like that always led to another argument with Sharon. On one occasion I lost it so badly with her, I picked up a vodka bottle and threw it in her direction. But the second it left my hand, I realised what I’d done: it was going straight for her head. Oh, fuck, I thought, I’ve just killed my wife. But it missed by an inch, thank God. The neck went straight through the plaster in the wall above her head and just stuck there, like a piece of modern art.

  Sharon would always find ways to retaliate, mind you. Like when she’d take a hammer to my gold records. And then I’d retaliate to her retaliation by saying I didn’t want to go on stage that night. One time, I shaved my head to try to get out of doing a show. I was hung over, knackered and pissed off, so I just thought, Fuck it, fuck them all.

  But that shit didn’t work with Sharon.

  She just took one look at me and said, ‘Right, we’re getting you a wig.’ Then she dragged me and a couple of the roadies to this joke shop which had a Lady Godiva wig in the window that had been there for five hundred years, with dead flies and dust and dandruff and God knows what else embedded in it. I put it on and everyone pissed themselves laughing.

  But it turned out to be quite cool in the end, that wig, because I rigged it with blood capsules. Halfway through the show I’d pretend to pull out my hair and all this blood would come running down my face. It looked brilliant. But after the bat-biting incident, everyone thought it was real. At one gig, this chick in the front row almost fainted. She was screaming and pointing and crying and shouting, ‘It’s true what they say! He is crazy!’

  *

  ‘Darling,’ said Sharon, a few months after the Bark at the Moon tour, when she found out that she was pregnant with Kelly. ‘I’ve heard about this great place in Palm Springs where you can take a break before the next tour. It’s a hotel, and they have classes every day where they teach you how to drink like a gentleman.’

  ‘Really?’ I said.

  In my head, I was going, That’s it! I’ve been doing it wrong. That must be why I’ve been getting these terrible hangovers. I need to learn how to drink like James Bond!

  ‘What’s the name of this place?’ I said.

  ‘The Betty Ford Center. Have you heard of it?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, it just opened, and it’s run by the wife of a former president. I think you’ll have a good time there.’

  ‘Sounds magic,’ I said. ‘Sign me up.’

  ‘Actually, I’ve already booked you in for the week after the baby’s due,’ Sharon replied.

  In the end, Kelly arrived on October 28, 1984. It was an eventful birth, to say the least. For some insane reason, Sharon had decided that she didn’t want an epidural. But then as soon as the contractions started, she went, ‘I’ve changed my mind! Get me the anaesthetist!’ Now, for Sharon to say that meant that she was in fucking agony – ’cos my wife can take a bit of pain, certainly a lot more than I can. But the nurse wasn’t having any of it. She goes, ‘Mrs Osbourne, you do realise that there are people in third world countries who give birth without an epidural all the time, don’t you?’ Big mistake, that was. Sharon sat up in bed and screamed, ‘LISTEN, YOU FUCKHEAD, THIS ISN’T A FUCKING THIRD WORLD COUNTRY, SO GET ME A FUCKING ANAESTHETIST!’

  An hour later, Kelly came out into the world, screaming – and she hasn’t stopped since, bless her. She’s a real chip off the old block, is Kelly. I think that’s why I’ve always felt so protective of her. It certainly wasn’t easy, leaving my beautiful little girl with Sharon and the nurses only a few hours after she was born, but at the same time I knew I had to get my drinking under control. With any luck, I thought, I’ll come home from Palm Springs a new man. So the next morning I got on the plane, drank three bottles of champagne in first class, landed at LAX twelve hours later, threw up, had a few toots of cocaine, then passed out in the back of a limo as it drove me to the Betty Ford Center. I hope this place is relaxing, I thought, ’cos I’m knackered.

  I’d never even heard the word ‘rehab’ before. And I certainly didn’t know that Betty Ford – the wife of President Gerald Ford – had been an alcoholic herself. While I was on tour I never spent much time watching telly or looking at newspapers, so I had no idea what a big deal the clinic was, or that the press had been calling it ‘Camp Betty’. In my head, I imagined this beautiful oasis of a hotel out in the middle of the Californian desert, with a shimmering swimming pool outside, a golf course, lots of hot chicks in bikinis everywhere, and all these Hugh Hefner types in velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, leaning against an outdoor bar, while a middle-aged woman with a voice like Barbara Woodhouse said, ‘OK, gentlemen, after me: take the olive, stir it around the martini, pick up the glass with your fingers arranged like so. That’s right, good, good. Now, take a sip, count to three, and do it again. Slowly, slowly.’

  This is going to be my dream holiday of a lifetime, I said to myself.

  But when I got there, the place looked more like a hospital than a hotel. Mind you, the grounds were stunning: freshly sprinkled lawns, tall palm trees and man-made lakes everywhere, and these huge, brown, alien-looking mountains looming in the background.

  I walk in the door and Betty herself is waiting for me. She’s a tiny little thing. Polo-neck sweater, big hairdo
. Not much of a sense of humour, by the look of it.

  ‘Hello, Mr Osbourne,’ she goes. ‘I’m Mrs Ford. I spoke with your wife Sharon a few days ago.’

  ‘Look, Betty, d’you mind if I check in a bit later?’ I say. ‘I’m gasping. Terrible flight. Where’s the bar?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The bar. It must be around here somewhere.’

  ‘You do know where you are, don’t you, Mr Osbourne?’

  ‘Er, yeah?’

  ‘So you’ll know that we don’t… have a bar.’

  ‘How do you teach people to drink properly, then?’

  ‘Mr Osbourne, I think your wife might have misled you slightly. We don’t teach you how to drink here.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘We teach you not to drink.’

  ‘Oh. Maybe I should stay somewhere else, then.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s not an option, Mr Osbourne. Your wife was… How can I put this? She was very insistent.’

  I can’t even begin to describe the disappointment. It was almost as bad as the boredom. After one hour in that place, I felt like I’d been there a thousand years. The thing I hated most about the weeks that followed was talking about my drinking in front of all these strangers during the group sessions. Although I learned some pretty cool things. One bloke was a dentist from LA. His wife found out about his drinking and she was on his case twenty-four hours a day. So he emptied the tank of wind-screen-washer fluid in his BMW, refilled it with gin and tonic, disconnected the plastic tube from the nozzles on the bonnet, and re-routed it so it came out of one of the air vents under the dashboard. Whenever he wanted a drink, all he had to do was get in his car, put the tube in his mouth, pull on the indicator stalk, and he’d get a squirt of G&T down his throat. It worked brilliantly, apparently, until one day there was a really bad traffic jam and he turned up at work so out of his shitter that he accidentally drilled a hole in the head of one of his patients.

  I’m telling you, the ingenuity of alcoholics is something else. If only it could be put to some kind of good use. I mean, if you said to an alcoholic, ‘Look, the only way for you to get another drink is to cure cancer,’ the disease would be history in five seconds.

  As well as the group sessions, I had to see a therapist on my own. It was hard, being sober and having to discuss all the things I’d just found out were wrong with me. Like being dyslexic and having attention deficit disorder. (They didn’t add the word ‘hyperactivity’ to it until a few years later.) It explained a lot, I suppose. The shrink said that my dyslexia had given me a terrible insecurity complex, so I couldn’t take rejection or failure or pressure of any sort, which was why I was self-medicating with booze. She also said that because I was poorly educated, and knew I was poorly educated, I always thought people were taking me for a ride, so I didn’t trust anyone. She was right, but it didn’t help that I usually was being taken for a ride – until Sharon came along. Mind you, I had moments of coked-up paranoia when I didn’t trust my wife, either.

  The shrink also told me that I have an addictive personality, which means that I do everything addictively. And, on top of that, I have an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which makes it all ten times worse. I’m like a walking dictionary of psychiatric disorders, I am. It blew my mind. And it took me a long time to accept any of it.

  My stay in Camp Betty was the longest I’d been without drink or drugs in my adult life, and the comedown was horrendous. Everyone else was going through the same thing, but I can’t say that made me feel any better. At first, they put me in a room with a guy who owned a bowling alley, but he snored like an asthmatic horse, so I moved and ended up with a depressive mortician. I said to him, ‘Look, if you suffer from depression, why the fuck do you work in a mortuary?’

  ‘Dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s just what I do.’

  The mortician snored even louder than the bowling alley guy – he was like a moose with a tracheotomy. The whole room shook. So I ended up spending every night on the sofa in the lobby, shivering and sweating.

  Eventually, Sharon came to get me. I’d been in there six weeks. I looked better – I’d lost a bit of weight – but I’d got the whole rehab thing wrong. I thought it was supposed to cure me. But there ain’t no cure for what I’ve got. All rehab can do is tell you what’s wrong with you and then suggest ways for you to get better. Later, when I realised it wasn’t a solution by itself, I used to go there just to take the heat off myself a bit when things got out of hand. Rehab can work, but you’ve got to want it. If you really want to quit, you can’t say, ‘Well, I want to quit today, but I might have a drink next week at my friend’s wedding.’ You’ve got to commit, then live each day as it comes. Every morning, you’ve got to wake up and say, ‘OK, today’s gonna be one more day without a drink,’ or a cigarette, or a pill, or a joint, or whatever it is that’s been killing you.

  That’s as much as you can hope for when you’re an addict.

  The first gig I did after Betty Ford was in Rio de Janeiro.

  I was legless before I even got on the plane.

  By the time we reached Rio, I’d got through a whole bottle of Courvoisier, and was passed out in the aisle. Sharon tried her best to move me – but I was like a dead fucking body. In the end she got so pissed off with me that she grabbed the stainless steel fork from her meal tray and began stabbing me with it. I soon fucking moved after that. But at least I now knew what I was – a full-blown, practising alcoholic. I couldn’t pretend any more that I was just having fun, or that boozing was something everyone did when they got a bit of dough. I had a disease, and it was killing me. I used to think, Even an animal won’t go near something again if it makes it sick, so why do I keep going back to this?

  The gig was Rock in Rio, a ten-day festival featuring Queen, Rod Stewart, AC/DC and Yes. One and a half million people bought tickets. But I was disappointed by the place. I’d expected to see the Girl from Ipanema on every corner, but I never saw a single one. There were just all these dirt-poor kids running around like rats. People were either outrageously rich or living on the streets – there didn’t seem to be anything in between.

  I’ll always remember meeting Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, on that trip. In those days he was living in exile in Brazil, and he seemed to be making the best of it – he claimed he shagged two and a half thousand chicks while he was there. But it was still a kind of prison for him, because he was so homesick. He came over to the hotel wearing a T-shirt that said, ‘Rio – a Wonderful Place to Escape to’, but he just kept asking, ‘So, what’s it like in England, Ozzy? Do they still have this shop, or that shop, or this beer, or that beer?’

  I felt sorry for the guy. No one in their right mind would give him a job, so he’d get all these English tourists over to his house, charge them fifty quid each, get them to buy him some beers and a bag of dope, then tell them the Great Train Robbery story. He called it ‘The Ronnie Biggs Experience’. I suppose it was better than being in prison. He was all right, Ronnie, y’know. He wasn’t a bad guy, and everyone knew that he wasn’t even on the train when the driver was assaulted, yet he was sent down for thirty years. You can rape a kid and kill a granny and get less than thirty years nowadays. People say, ‘He got away with it in the end, didn’t he?’ But I don’t think he did. I mean, the bloke was so unhappy. I wasn’t surprised when he finally came back to Britain, even though it meant getting arrested at Heathrow and thrown straight in the slammer.

  Home’s home, in the end, even if it’s behind bars. At least he got his freedom at the finish, although it was only ’cos the guy was on his deathbed. Ronnie always said his last wish was ‘to walk into a Margate pub as an Englishman and buy a pint’. But from what I’ve heard, he’s going to have to wait until the next life for that pleasure.

  The summer after Rock in Rio, I agreed to do Live Aid with Black Sabbath. Sharon was already pregnant again, and we didn’t want to fly to Philadelphia, so we decided to take the QE2 to New York instead, then
drive the rest of the way.

  After the first hour at sea, we regretted it. In those days we were used to getting to New York in three hours on Concorde. The QE2 took five fucking days, which felt more like five billion years. I mean, what the fuck are you supposed to do on a ship, apart from puke your guts out ’cos you’re feeling sea sick? By the end of day one, I was hoping we might hit an iceberg, just to liven things up a bit. And the boredom only got worse from there. In the end I went to see the ship’s doctor and begged him for sedatives to put me out for the rest of the way. I woke up forty-eight hours later, just as we were pulling into port. Sharon was so pissed off – she’d had to entertain herself while I was out cold – it’s a miracle she didn’t throw me over-board. ‘Remember me? You arsehole,’ was the first thing she said when I opened my eyes.

  To be honest with you, I was stressed out about doing Live Aid. I hadn’t talked to Tony for years, so it wasn’t exactly the most comfortable of situations. Then the organisers put us between Billy Ocean and the Four fucking Tops… at ten o’clock in the morning. I don’t know what they were thinking. People kept telling us that they needed more black acts in the show, so maybe they thought we were black – like when we played Philadelphia on our first American tour.

  It didn’t get off to a good start.

  When I was in the lobby of the hotel, checking in before the gig, this bloke comes up to me and says, ‘Hey, Ozzy, can I have a photograph?’ and I go, ‘Sure, yeah.’ Then the bloke goes, ‘Sorry, I have to do this,’ and hands me a lawsuit. It was from my father-in-law. He’d served me – before a fucking charity gig.

  When everyone backstage heard about the writ – don’t ask me what it was about, or what happened to it, ’cos I left it all to Sharon – one of the roadies came up to me and said, ‘He’s quite a character, your father-in-law, isn’t he?’

  ‘What d’you mean?’ I asked him.

  ‘He said the cover of Born Again reminded him of his grand-children.’