I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne; Chris Ayres

  In the end, I just rolled them up and hid them in the bath, behind the shower curtain.

  If you’re reading this, Roger, I’m terribly, terribly sorry. But how about buying some shit roll in future, eh?

  A lot of people think you have to be fucked up to write good material, but I reckon the album I did after coming out of Huntercombe Manor, No More Tears, was my best in years. Maybe part of that was because I said to the band before we even started, ‘Look, we have to treat every song like it could be a hit single, but without being too hokey or try-hard.’

  And it worked, pretty much.

  Everything about that album seemed to go right. My new guitarist, Zakk Wylde, was a genius. My producers were amazing. And Sharon got the artwork spot on. She’s very artistic, my wife, which a lot of people don’t realise. The cover is a sepia portrait of me with an angel’s wing on my shoulder. The idea was to give the album more of a mature vibe. I mean, I couldn’t keep doing the blood-out-of-the-mouth thing – it was starting to get hammy. I remember the shoot for the cover in New York very well, actually: normally, it takes about five hundred rolls to get a photograph like that in the can, but for No More Tears it was just click-click-click, ‘OK, we’ve got it, see ya.’

  The only thing I didn’t like about No More Tears was the video for ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’. It was one of those high-tech, million-dollar jobs, but all I wanted was something simple, like the video for Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. So in the end I did a second video for $50,000 using the Nirvana camera guy, and it was perfect. It had a huge impact on me, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ – and I was very proud when I found out that Kurt Cobain was a fan of mine. I thought he was awesome. I thought that whole Nevermind album was awesome. It was such a tragedy the way it ended.

  Mind you, it’s amazing I didn’t end up the same way as Kurt Cobain. I might have been sober after No More Tears – most of the time, anyway – but whatever I’d cut out in booze I was making up for with pills. I was already an expert at scamming doctors, and I’d go to a different one every day of the week, picking up a new prescription for something each time. For a while, it was enough just to fake symptoms, but when Sharon cottoned on and started calling the doctors in advance to warn them about me, I had to give myself real symptoms. So I’d whack myself over the head with a piece of wood and say, ‘I fell off my bike, can I have some Vicodin, please?’

  The doc would go, ‘Are you sure you fell off your bike, Mr Osbourne?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘It’s just that you have a nail sticking out of your head with a splinter attached to it, Mr Osbourne.’

  ‘Oh, I must have fallen on a piece of wood, then.’

  ‘Right. OK. Take five of these.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  But I didn’t just go to doctors. I had dealers, too. I remember one time, in Germany I think it was, I visited this guy to buy some sleeping pills – I was more addicted to sleeping pills than just about anything else. He was out of sleeping pills, but he asked if I wanted to try some Rohypnol instead. Now, as it happened, I’d heard all about Rohypnol. The press were going crazy about it at the time, calling it the ‘date-rape drug’, but, to be honest with you, I thought it was all bullshit. A drug that could completely paralyse you while you remained fully awake? I mean, c’mon, it seemed too good to be true. But I bought a couple of doses of the stuff and decided to try it out, as a kind of science experiment.

  I gulped down the pills with a bit of cognac as soon as I got back to my hotel room. Then I waited. ‘Well, this is a load of bollocks,’ I said to myself. Two minutes later, while I was lying on the edge of the bed, trying to order a movie on the telly with the remote control, it suddenly kicked in. Fuck me, this stuff is real! I couldn’t move. Totally paralysed. But I was also wide awake. It was the weirdest feeling. The only trouble was that I’d been dangling on the edge of the bed when my muscles had seized up, so I ended up sliding to the floor and banging my head on the coffee table on the way down. It hurt like a motherfucker. Then I was trapped between the bed and the wall, unable to move or talk, for about five hours.

  So I can’t say I’d recommend it.

  My health took a real dive around that time.

  I started to notice a tremor in my hand. My speech was slurred. I was always exhausted. I tried to escape from it all by getting loaded, but I’d developed such a tolerance to all the drugs I was taking, I had to overdose to get high. It reached the point where I was getting my stomach pumped every other week. I had a few very close calls. One time, I scammed a bottle of codeine off a doctor in New York and downed the whole fucking lot. I nearly went into respiratory arrest. All I remember is lying in this hotel bed, sweating and feeling like I was suffocating, and the doc telling me over the phone that if you take too much codeine, your brain stops telling your lungs to work. I was very lucky to survive. Although, the way I was feeling, I would have been happy never to wake up again.

  The worse I got, the more I worried that Sharon would leave me. And the more I worried, the worse I got. In fact, I couldn’t understand why she hadn’t already left me. I’ve heard people say, ‘Oh, your wife only wants to spend your money.’ But it’s only because of her that I’m alive to make any money. And people forget that when we met, she was the one with the money, not me. I was halfway to the bankruptcy court.

  The bottom line is: Sharon saved my life, Sharon is my life, and I love her. And I was terrified that I was going to lose her. But as much as I wanted everything to be normal and right, I was terribly sick, physically and mentally. I couldn’t even face being on stage any more.

  So I tried to kill myself a few times to get out of gigs. I mean, I wasn’t really trying to kill myself. If you’re determined to commit suicide, you’ll blow your brains out or you’ll jump off a tall building. You’ll do something that you can’t take back, in other words. When you ‘try to kill yourself’ by taking too many pills – like I did – you know you’re probably gonna get found by someone. So all you’re doing is sending a message. But it’s a deadly fucking game to play. Look what happened to my old mate Steve Clark from Def Leppard. All it took was a bit of brandy, a bit of vodka, some painkillers and some anti-depressants, and that was the end of it. Lights out.

  For ever.

  Then, one day, Sharon said to me, ‘Right, Ozzy, we’re going to Boston. There’s a doctor I want you to see.’

  ‘What’s wrong with going to a doctor in England?’

  ‘This one’s a specialist.’

  ‘A specialist in what?’

  ‘In what’s wrong with you. We’re leaving tomorrow.’

  I presumed she just meant a doctor who knew a lot about drug addiction, so I said, ‘OK,’ and off we went to Boston.

  But this doc was a hardcore guy. The best of the best. He worked out of a teaching hospital – St Elizabeth’s Medical Center – and he had more qualifications hanging on his office wall than I had gold records.

  ‘OK, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to stand in the middle of the room, then walk towards me, slowly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do it,’ hissed Sharon.

  ‘All right then.’

  So I walked towards this bloke, and I mustn’t have been drinking that day, ’cos I managed to go in a straight line.

  More or less.

  Then he got me to follow his finger as he moved it up and down, and from side to side. What the fuck does this have to do with being a drug addict? I kept thinking to myself. But that wasn’t the end of it. Next thing I knew I was hopping across the room on one leg, doing lifting exercises, and jogging around in circles with my eyes closed.

  It felt like a fucking PE class.

  ‘Hmm, OK,’ he said. ‘Well, I can tell you this much, Mr Osbourne. You don’t have multiple sclerosis.’

  What the—?

  ‘But I never thought I did have multiple sclerosis,’ I spluttered.

  ‘And you don’t have Parkinson’s.’


  ‘But I never thought I did have Parkinson’s.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ he went on, ‘you clearly have some symptoms that could be caused by both of those conditions, and diagnosis can be difficult. All I can say is that, for now, you’re one hundred per cent clear.’

  ‘What?’

  I looked at Sharon.

  She looked at the floor. ‘Ozzy, I didn’t want to tell you,’ she said, sounding like she was trying hard not to cry. ‘But after your last couple of physicals, the doctors told me they were worried. That’s why we’re here.’

  All this had been going on for six months, apparently. My doctors in LA were pretty much convinced that I either had MS or Parkinson’s, which is why we’d had to come all the way to Boston to see this specialist. But even though the doc had given me the all-clear, just the sound of the words ‘MS’ and ‘Parkinson’s’ set me off into a panic. The worst thing was, if I’d had either of those diseases, it would have made a lot of sense – my tremor was out of fucking control. That’s why both me and Sharon wanted to get another opinion. So the doc recommended that we go and see a colleague of his who ran a research centre at Oxford University, and off we went. He did the exact same tests on me as before, and told me the exact same thing: I was clear. ‘Aside from your drug addiction and your alcoholism, you’re a very healthy man, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘My considered medical opinion is that you should leave my office and go and live your life.’

  So I decided to retire. In 1992 I went on tour to promote No More Tears. We called it the No More Tours tour. That was it. I was done. The end. I’d been on the road for twenty-five years, pretty much. I was like a mouse on a wheel: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, album, tour. I mean, I’d buy all these houses, and I’d never fucking live in them. That’s the thing about being working class: you feel like you can never turn down work. But after seeing the doc in Boston I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to work. I don’t need the dough.

  Then, when we got back to England, Sharon said, ‘Don’t go crazy, but I’ve bought us a new house.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s called Welders House. In a village called Jordans in Buckinghamshire.’

  ‘Is there a pub near by?’

  ‘It’s a Quaker village, Ozzy.’

  She wasn’t fucking kidding, either. Welders is probably further away from a pub than any other house in England. I was seriously pissed off with Sharon for buying that place – I didn’t talk to her for about six months because it was in such a dreadful state. ‘Dilapidated’ doesn’t even begin to describe it, and we had to rent a place in Gerrards Cross for a year while it was being done up. Even now, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as attractive as Beel House. But on the inside it’s magnificent. Apparently, it was built by the Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as a wedding present for his daughter. Then it became a convalescent home for army officers during World War Two. By the time Sharon came along, it was owned by one of the special-effects guys who’d worked on Star Wars.

  I forgave Sharon eventually, because when we finally moved in it was magic. The weather was perfect that summer, and suddenly I had all this land – two hundred and fifty acres – and I could just fuck around all day on my quad bikes, without having to worry about anything. My health improved dramatically. I even stopped worrying about MS and Parkinson’s disease. I just thought, Well, if I get it, I get it.

  But as soon as I felt better, I got bored. Crazy bored. I started to think about my dad – about how he’d taken early retirement and then ended up in hospital as soon as he’d finished the garden. I started to think about the bills for the renovation, and the cost of the staff at the management company, and how all the money to keep the whole machine up and running was now coming out of my savings. Then I thought, How can I retire at the age of forty-six? I mean, it’s not like I worked for anyone other than myself.

  And what I do for a living isn’t a job, anyway. Or if it is, it’s the best fucking job in the world, hands down.

  So one morning I got up, made myself a cup of tea, and said to Sharon, all casual, ‘Can’t you get me a gig at one of those American festivals this year?’

  ‘What d’you mean, Ozzy?’

  ‘I’d like to do a gig. Get back in the game.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m bored out of my fucking brains, Sharon.’

  ‘OK, then. If you’re serious, I’ll make some calls.’

  So she called the organisers of Lollapalooza.

  And they told her to fuck off.

  ‘Ozzy Osbourne? He’s a fucking dinosaur,’ they said, in not so many words.

  That wound Sharon up no end, as you can imagine. So a few days later, she said, ‘Screw it, we’ll do our own bloody festival.’

  ‘Hang on a minute, Sharon,’ I said. ‘What d’you mean, “We’ll do our own festival”?’

  ‘We’ll book some venues and we’ll do it ourselves. Screw Lollapafuckinglooza.’

  ‘Won’t that be expensive?’

  ‘I’m not going to lie to you, Ozzy, it could be very expensive. But life’s all about taking risks, isn’t it?’

  ‘OK, but before you start going around booking stadiums left, right and centre, let’s test the ground first, eh? Start off small, like we did with Blizzard of Ozz. Then, if it takes off, we’ll get bigger.’

  ‘Well, listen to you, Mr Businessman all of a sudden.’

  ‘What are you planning to call this festival?’

  ‘Ozzfest.’

  As soon as she said the word, I could think of only one thing: ‘Beerfest’. It was fucking perfect.

  That’s how it started. Our strategy was to take all the undesirables, all the bands that couldn’t find an outlet anywhere else, and put them together, give them an audience. It worked better than we ever could have expected, ’cos nothing existed for those bands at the time. It had got to the point in the music business where if you wanted to play a gig, the venues made you buy all the tickets in advance, so you had to give them away for free or sell them on your own, which is bullshit. Black Sabbath never had to deal with that kind of bollocks in the early days. We’d never have left Aston, if that had been the case. Where would we have found the dough?

  A year later, in 1996, we were ready.

  And we did exactly what we said we’d do. We started out small in just two cities – Phoenix and Los Angeles – as part of my tour to promote the Ozzmosis album (the Retirement Sucks tour, as it was known). It couldn’t have gone better. It was a monster, from day one.

  As soon as it was over, Sharon turned to me and said, ‘D’you know who would be the perfect band to headline Ozzfest ’97?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Black Sabbath.’

  ‘What? Are you kidding? I think Tony’s the only one left. And their last album didn’t even chart, did it?’

  ‘No, the real Black Sabbath: you, Tony, Geezer and Bill. Back together after eighteen years.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘It’s time, Ozzy. Hatchets buried. Once and for all.’

  I’d spoken to Tony only once or twice since Live Aid. Although we had done a gig together, of sorts, in Orange County at the end of the No More Tours tour in 1992. I can’t remember if it was me who called him first, or the other way around, but once the word got out about a reunion, we had a few ‘big talks’ on the phone. During one of them I finally asked him why Black Sabbath had fired me. He told me what I already knew – that I’d been slagging off the band in the press, and that my drinking had become unmanageable – but for the first time I actually got it. I ain’t saying it was right, but I got it, y’know? And I could hardly complain, because if Tony hadn’t kicked me out, where would I be now?

  That summer, we went out on the road.

  At first, it wasn’t the full original line-up: it was just me, Tony and Geezer, with Mike Bordin from Faith No More standing in on drums for Bill. I honestly don’t know why we couldn’t get Bill to play those first few sh
ows. But I was told he’d had a lot of health issues, including a bad case of agoraphobia, so maybe the rest of us were trying to protect him from the stress. By the end of the year, though, he was back with us to do two gigs at the Birmingham NEC, which were fucking phenomenal. Even though I’ve always played Sabbath songs on stage, it’s never as good as when the four of us do them. Today, when I listen to the recordings of those shows – we put them out the following year on an album called Reunion – I still get chills. We didn’t do overdubs or anything. When you put that album on, it sounds exactly as it did on those two nights.

  Everything went so well that we decided to have a go at making a new album together, which would have been our first since Never Say Die in 1978. So off we went to Rockfield Studios in South Wales – where I’d quit the band twenty years before.

  At first, it all went smoothly enough. We did a couple of bonus songs for the Reunion album – ‘Psycho Man’ and ‘Selling My Soul’. But then the practical jokes started again.

  Or so I thought, anyway.

  ‘Ozzy,’ said Bill, after we’d finished the first rehearsal, ‘can you give me a massage? My hand’s hurting.’

  Here we go, I thought.

  ‘Seriously, Ozzy. Argh, my hand.’

  I just rolled my eyes and walked out of the room.

  The next thing I knew, this ambulance was coming up the driveway with all its lights flashing. It skidded to a halt in front of the studio, then four paramedics jumped out and ran into the studio. About a minute later they came out again with Bill on a stretcher. I still thought it was a joke. We’d relentlessly been giving Bill shit for his dodgy health, so we thought he was just getting his own back with a wind-up. Part of me was quite impressed: he was putting so much effort into it. Tony thought he was fucking around, too. He was on his way out for a walk when the ambulance arrived, and he just looked at it and said, ‘That’ll be for Bill.’