‘Dad,’ said Jack one day. ‘When you’re on the telly, d’you think people are laughing with you or at you?’
The question had obviously been bothering him for a while.
‘Y’know what,’ I said to him, ‘as long as they’re laughing, I don’t care.’
‘But why, Dad? Why would you want to be a clown?’
‘Because I’ve always been able to laugh at myself, Jack. Humour has kept me alive over all these years.’
And it’s true, y’know. I mean, it doesn’t take much to rattle my cage, either – although, as I’m getting older, I increasingly think, Fuck it, what’s the point, it’ll all work out one way or another – but humour has saved my life too many times to count. And it didn’t start with The Osbournes. Even in Black Sabbath, I was the clown. I was always the one making the others crack up.
But I felt bad for Jack.
It couldn’t have been easy for him, especially during those first two years of the show, when I was this shaking, mumbling, fucked-up wreck. I can’t even imagine it, to be honest with you. Same goes for Kelly. When we all became these mega-celebrities, it was the first time I really understood why all these young Hollywood starlets get doped up and go into rehab every other day of the week. It’s the pressure – it’s fucking ridiculous. Non-stop. Day-in, day-out. I mean, the first year we went on air, Kelly sang ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ at the MTV Movie Awards. She had to come down this big flight of stairs with every star in the business sitting there, watching her. But she just took it by the horns. And of course she ended up loving every minute of it, as did the audience.
But she had her problems, like we all do. And it broke my heart when Jack started to get fucked up too. He took Sharon’s cancer as hard as I did, to the point where he ended up on OxyContin, which they call ‘hillbilly heroin’ in LA. I remember we had this huge blow up about it, and I said, ‘What the fuck, Jack? Why are you going around getting pissed all the time? You’ve never wanted for a thing! What have you ever wanted for?’
He just looked at me and said, ‘A father.’
I won’t forget that moment in a hurry.
It was the first time I’d really had to face the cost of how I’d been living all those years – the cost to my son, who I loved so much, who I was so proud of, but who I’d never been there for. It was a terrible feeling.
All I could say was: ‘Jack, I’m so sorry.’
Jack got sober after that. But I didn’t.
By August 2003, I was shaking so much that I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t hold anything, I couldn’t communicate. It got to the point where Sharon started to get pissed off with my doctors. The stuff they were giving me seemed to be making me worse, not better.
So then I got a new doctor, Allan Ropper, who was based in the same teaching hospital in Boston where I’d been told I didn’t have MS in the early nineties. He was treating Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease at the time – Sharon had read an article about him in People magazine. The first thing Dr Ropper did when we flew out to see him was throw away all the pills I was on. Then he checked me into hospital for five days and ran every test ever invented on me. After that, I had to wait another week for the results,
Finally, me and Sharon went back to his office to find out what the fuck was wrong with me, once and for all.
‘I’ve think I’ve got to the bottom of this,’ he said. ‘Basically, Mr Osbourne, you have a very, very rare condition, which is caused by your mother and your father both having the same damaged chromosome in their DNA. And when I say it’s very rare, think one-in-a-billion rare. The good news is that it’s not MS or Parkinson’s disease. The bad news is that we don’t really have a name for it. The best description is probably Parkinson -ian syndrome.’
‘Is that what’s been giving me the tremor?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘And it’s hereditary? It has nothing to do with the booze or the drugs?’
‘The alcohol and some of the drugs you were taking were definitely making it worse. But they weren’t the primary cause.’
‘Can you treat it?’
‘Yes. But first I have to tell you something, Mr Osbourne. If you keep drinking, and if you keep abusing drugs, you’ll have to find another doctor, because I won’t have you as a patient. I’m a busy man, I have a very long waiting list, and I can’t afford to have my time wasted.’
I’d never been spoken to like that by a doctor before. And the way he looked at me, I knew he was serious.
‘OK, doc,’ I said. ‘I’ll try my hardest.’
‘Good. I’m going to put you on two pills a day. You should see a vast improvement in your health.’
That was the understatement of the century, that was.
My tremors calmed down almost overnight. I could walk again. My stammer improved. I even managed to get back into the studio and record a new version of ‘Changes’ with Kelly.
I’d been promising to do a song for Kelly ever since I named one of the tracks on Ozzmosis after Aimee. She was always saying, ‘How come Aimee got a song and I didn’t?’ In fact, I’d done a song for Jack, too – ‘My Little Man’ – which is also on Ozzmosis. So I owed Kelly – and I wanted to help her out, anyway, ’cos she’s my special girl, y’know? I mean, I love all my children the same, but Kelly always seems to end up in the firing line, for some reason.
So we did ‘Changes’, one of my favourite songs of all time, with the lyrics changed slightly for a father and daughter. It was so good, I thought we might have a Christmas number one on our hands. Then we flew back to England in December to promote it. By then, I was off the booze – on Dr Ropper’s orders – but I was still fucking around with all kinds of pills. You don’t just stop being a drug addict overnight. I was Russian Rouletting it every day. At the time, I was into chloral hydrate, which is the world’s oldest sleeping medication or something. But it was still a big improvement on the ridiculous amount of narcotics I’d been taking only a few months earlier, and I got through an appearance with Kelly on Top of the Pops with no problems. Then I drove up to Welders House with my assistant Tony for the weekend.
MTV already had a camera crew up there, because by then a lot of our family routines had become old hat, and they were desperate for some new material. But there wasn’t much to shoot. I had this Yamaha Banshee 350cc quad bike – like a bullet on wheels – and I’d gun it around the fields for hours on end. So I spent most of the weekend doing just that. And on Monday morning, December 8 – the day ‘Changes’ went on sale – I took the bike out again.
By this point, the crew were a bit cheesed off, I think. They didn’t even have the cameras rolling. I remember getting off the bike to open a gate, closing it after everyone had gone through, getting back on the bike, racing ahead along this dirt trail, then slamming on the brakes as I went down a steep embankment. But the trouble with that quad bike was that it didn’t have one of those twisty throttles like you get on a motorbike. It just had a little lever that you pushed to go faster. And it was very easy to knock the lever by accident, while you were trying to control the bike, especially when it became unstable. That’s exactly what happened when I got to the bottom of the embankment: the front wheels hit a pothole, my right hand slipped off the handlebar and slammed into the lever, the engine went fucking crazy, and the whole thing shot out from under me and did a backflip in the air, throwing me on to the grass. For about a millionth of a second, I thought, Oh well, that wasn’t so bad.
Then the bike landed on top of me.
Crack.
When I opened my eyes, my lungs were full of blood and my neck was broken – or so my doctors told me later.
OK, now I’m dying, I thought.
It was the Nazis’ fault, believe it or not. The pothole was a little crater, made by a German bomb that had been dropped during the war. I didn’t know it at the time, but the land around Welders is full of them. The German pilots would bottle out before they reached the big cities – where they might get shot d
own – so they’d dump their bombs over Buckinghamshire, claim they’d carried out their mission, then fuck off home.
I can’t remember much of the next two weeks. For the first few hours, I was slipping in and out of consciousness all the time. I have this vague memory of Sam, my security guard, lifting me on to the back of his bike and driving me back across the field. Then all I can remember are glimpses of the inside of an ambulance, followed by lots of doctors peering down at me.
‘How did you get him to an ambulance?’ one of them said.
‘We put him on the back of a bike,’ replied a voice I didn’t recognise.
‘You could have paralysed him! He’s got a broken neck, for God’s sake. He’ll be lucky to walk again.’
‘Well, how were we supposed to get him out of the forest?’
‘A helicopter was on its way.’
‘We didn’t know that.’
‘Clearly.’
Then everything started to melt away.
Apparently the last thing I did before losing consciousness was to pull on a doctor’s sleeve and whisper in his ear, ‘Whatever you do, don’t fuck up my tattoo.’
Sharon was in LA, so Tony called her and put the chief doc on the line. He told her everything, and they agreed I had to go straight into surgery.
I was very badly injured. As well as breaking my neck, I’d fractured eight of my ribs and punctured my lungs, which was why they were filling up with blood. Meanwhile, when my collar-bone broke it cut through a main artery in my arm, so that there was no blood supply. For a while the docs thought they were gonna have to chop it off. Once they were done operating on me, they put me into a ‘chemical coma’, ’cos it was the only way I was going to be able to handle the pain. If I’d copped it then, it would have been a fitting end for me: I’d spent my whole adult life trying to get into a chemical coma. They kept me under for eight days in the end. Then they started to bring me slowly back to consciousness. It took another six days for me to fully wake up. And during that time I had the most fucking insane dream. It was so vivid, it was more like a hallucination. All I can say is that the NHS must have loaded me up with some top-quality gear, ’cos I can still picture every detail like it was yesterday.
It started off with me in Monmouthshire – where I used to go to rehearse with Black Sabbath and my solo bands. It was raining – pissing it down. Then I was in this corridor at Rockfield Studios, and in front of me was a camouflaged fence, like something they might have had in the trenches during World War Two. To my left was a window. When I looked through it, on the other side was Sharon, having a party. She couldn’t see me, but I could see her. I followed her out of this party and watched as she met up with some handsome, wealthy guy, who had his own plane. In the dream I thought, There’s my wife, and she’s leaving me. It was terribly sad. The guy had a landing strip in his back yard, and at the end of it was a big gun. Then, all of a sudden, he could see me – so I offered him some telescopic night-vision sights, because I wanted him to like me. He told me to fuck off, and I felt rejected all over again. At that point, all the guests from the party came running on to the lawn. The crowd got bigger and bigger until in the end it became this big music festival.
That was when Marilyn Manson showed up.
It was fucking nuts, man.
Next, I was on the rich guy’s plane going to New Zealand, and they were serving draught Guinness in the cockpit. I suppose that must have had something to do with my son Louis’s wedding in Ireland, which I was missing because I was in hospital. In New Zealand it was New Year’s Eve. Jack was there – he’d bleached his hair completely white and he was letting off fire crackers. Then he got arrested.
At that point, Donovan strolled into the dream and started to play ‘Mellow Yellow’.
What made all this even freakier was that I kept coming around, so some aspects of the dream were real. For example, I thought I was living in a fish ’n’ chip shop, but in fact my bed was right next to the hospital kitchen, so I could smell them cooking. Then I saw my guitarist Zakk Wylde – which in the dream I thought was impossible, because he lived in America – but I later learned that he’d flown over to see me, so he was really there.
I also saw him wearing a frilly dress, dancing with a mop and a bucket.
But that wasn’t real.
Or at least I hope it wasn’t.
‘Ozzy, Ozzy, can you hear me?’
It was Sharon.
After almost two weeks, they’d finally brought me out of the coma.
I opened my eyes.
Sharon smiled and dabbed at her face with a tissue.
‘I’ve got news for you,’ she said, squeezing my hand.
‘I had a dream,’ I told her, before she could say anything more. ‘You left me for a rich guy with an aeroplane.’
‘What are you talking about, Ozzy? Don’t be silly. No one’s leaving anyone. Everyone loves you. You should see the flowers that your fans have left outside. You’ll be touched. They’re beautiful.’ She squeezed my hand again and said, ‘Do you want to hear the news?’
‘What is it? Are the kids OK?’
‘You and Kelly are at number one. You finally fucking did it.’
‘With “Changes”?’
‘Yes! You even broke a record, Ozzy. It’s never taken anyone thirty-three years from having their first song in the charts to getting a number one. Only Lulu has even come close.’
I managed a smile. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’ I said. Then I laughed.
Not a good idea, with eight broken ribs.
Normally, I hate Christmas. I mean, if you’re an alcoholic and you’re drinking, Christmas is the best thing in the world. But if you ain’t drinking, it’s fucking agony. And I hate the fact that you have to buy everyone a gift. Not because I’m tight – it’s just that you do it out of obligation, not because you want to.
It’s always seemed like total bullshit to me.
But Christmas 2003 was the exception. Me and Kelly might not have got the Christmas number one – we were outsold in the last week by Michael Andrews and Gary Jules, with their cover version of ‘Mad World’ – but I got to live another day. Which is pretty unbelievable, when you think about it. The only sadness I have from that time is that none of my old Black Sabbath bandmates called to say they liked ‘Changes’, or to say, ‘Well done on getting to number one.’ Even if they’d called to say they thought it was a piece of shit, it would have been better than silence. No wonder it was raining so hard in Monmouthshire when I was there in the dream.
But whatever, man. It ain’t a big deal.
The hospital where I’d been in the coma, Wexham Park, couldn’t have been better. But I pissed them off in the end. I wanted to go home, ’cos I’d had enough, but they told me there was no way I could leave. I mean, at that point I couldn’t walk; I had a neck brace on; my arm still hadn’t come back to life; and I was in excruciating fucking pain. But my dream had fucked me up. I was convinced that Sharon was flying around the world in a private jet with a hot tub in the back, while being shagged senseless by some billionaire. If I was in hospital, I thought, I had no chance of getting her back. But by the time Sharon had raced over to the hospital with the kids to tell me for the millionth time that everything was OK, that it was all just a dream, it was too late: I’d managed to sign myself out. So Sharon had to get a hospital bed for me at Welders House and a home-help nurse to wipe my arse and shake my dick. For weeks, the only way I could get from room to room was in a wheelchair, and every night I had to be carried upstairs to go to bed.
But eventually I made a full recovery. Or as full as anyone could expect. My short-term memory seemed worse, but maybe that was just age, or the sleeping pills. And my ribcage is still full of screws and bolts and metal rods. When I walk through an airport metal detector these days, a klaxon goes off in the Pentagon.
But I can’t complain, y’know? I remember when I first went back to America after the crash, and I had to go to the do
c for a check-up. He took all these X-rays of my chest, put them up on the viewing box, and started to whistle through his teeth. ‘Nice work,’ he said. ‘Must have been a bit pricey, though. What did it cost ya? Seven figures? Eight?’
‘Nothing, actually,’ I said.
He couldn’t believe it. ‘What d’you mean?’
‘National Health Service,’ I said, and shrugged.
‘Holy crap,’ he went. ‘No wonder you guys put up with the weather.’
Once I was out of the wheelchair and the neck brace, it was time to renegotiate our contract with MTV – again. But I couldn’t face another season of The Osbournes.
Enough was enough.
Anyway, by then MTV had killed the show by trying to wring every last ounce of dough out of it. It seemed to be on twenty-four hours a day. And when you overdo a show like that, people get bored. You want the folks at home to be saying, ‘Oh, it’s nine o’clock. Time for The Osbournes.’ You want them to be jacked up for it. But when it’s on every night, they just say, ‘Meh, it’ll be on tomorrow.’ They did the exact same thing with Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It was brilliant for five minutes, then you couldn’t get away from it.
Another problem was that after three years of doing the show, we’d filmed just about everything we could ever film. So, for the last season, we had to come up with all these gimmicks – and we were so famous that we were mobbed whenever we left the house. It started to feel a bit fake, which was the exact opposite of what The Osbournes was all about.
So that was the end of it. By 2005 the show was over, Fort Apache was taken down, and the crew moved out. Not long after, Jack and Kelly moved out too. But I like to think we made our mark on TV. And especially on MTV. They love reality shows now, that lot. You have to stay up until three in the morning just to catch a music video these days. And, of course, a lot of people have tried to take credit for The Osbournes now that it’s over. But I’ve never been in any doubt about who were the true creators of The Osbournes.
I Am Ozzy Page 36