What I was most interested in twenty-four hours a day was the rural music. The idea was to be able to master these songs. It wasn’t about writing your own songs. That didn’t even enter anybody’s mind.
In a way, this line of talk brings us to your newest album, ‘Love and Theft.’ Its sense of timelessness and caprices reminds me of ‘The Basement Tapes’ and ‘John Wesley Harding’—records that emanated from your strong folk background. But ‘Love and Theft’ also seems to recall ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and that album’s delight in discovering new world-changing methods of language and sharp wit, and the way in which the music digs down deep into ancient blues structures to yield something wholly unexpected.
For starters, no one should really be curious or too excited about comparing this album to any of my other albums. Compare this album to the other albums that are out there. Compare this album to other artists who make albums. You know, comparing me to myself [laughs] is really like . . . I mean, you’re talking to a person that feels like he’s walking around in the ruins of Pompeii all the time. It’s always been that way, for one reason or another. I deal with all the old stereotypes. The language and the identity I use is the one that I know only so well, and I’m not about to go on and keep doing this—comparing my new work to my old work. It creates a kind of Achilles’ heel for myself. It isn’t going to happen.
Maybe a better way to put it is to ask: Do you see this as an album that emanates from your experience of America at this time?
Every one of the records I’ve made has emanated from the entire panorama of what America is to me. America, to me, is a rising tide that lifts all ships, and I’ve never really sought inspiration from other types of music. My problem in writing songs has always been how to tone down the rhetoric in using the language. I don’t really give it a whole lot of soulful thought. A song is a reflection of what I see all around me all the time.
The whole album deals with power. If life teaches us anything, it’s that there’s nothing that men and women won’t do to get power. The album deals with power, wealth, knowledge and salvation—the way I look at it. If it’s a great album—which I hope it is—it’s a great album because it deals with great themes. It speaks in a noble language. It speaks of the issues or the ideals of an age in some nation, and hopefully, it would also speak across the ages. It’d be as good tomorrow as it is today and would’ve been as good yesterday. That’s what I was trying to make happen, because just to make another record at this point in my career . . . Career, by the way, isn’t how I look at what I do. “Career” is a French word. It means “carrier.” It’s something that takes you from one place to the other. I don’t feel like what I do qualifies to be called a career. It’s more of a calling.
There’s also a good deal of humor on this record—maybe more than on any record of yours since the 1960s.
Well . . .
C’mon, there are some pretty funny lines on this album—like the exchange between Romeo and Juliet in “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” and that knock-knock joke in “Po’ Boy.”
Yeah, funny . . . and dark. But still, in my own mind, not really poking fun at the principles that would guide a person’s life or anything. Basically, the songs deal with what many of my songs deal with—which is business, politics and war, and maybe love interest on the side. That would be the first level you would have to appreciate them on.
This record was released on September 11th—the same date as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I’ve talked with several people in the time since then who have turned to ‘Love and Theft’ because they find something in it that matches the spirit of dread and uncertainty of our present conditions. For my part, I’ve kept circling around a line from “Mississippi”: “Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down.” Is there anything you would like to say about your reaction to the events of that day?
One of those Rudyard Kipling poems, “Gentlemen-Rankers,” comes to my mind: “We have done with Hope and Honour, we are lost to Love and Truth/We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung/And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth/God help us, for we knew the worst too young!” If anything, my mind would go to young people at a time like this. That’s really the only way to put it.
You mean because of what’s at stake for them right now, as we apparently go to war?
Exactly. I mean, art imposes order on life, but how much more art will there be? We don’t really know. There’s a secret sanctity of nature. How much more of that will there be? At the moment, the rational mind’s way of thinking wouldn’t really explain what’s happened. You need something else, with a capital E, to explain it. It’s going to have to be dealt with sooner or later, of course.
Do you see any hope for the situation we find ourselves in?
I don’t really know what I could tell you. I don’t consider myself an educator or an explainer. You see what it is that I do, and that’s what I’ve always done. But it is time now for great men to come forward. With small men, no great thing can be accomplished at the moment. Those people in charge, I’m sure they’ve read Sun-Tzu, who wrote The Art of War in the sixth century. In there he says, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself and not your enemy, for every victory gained you will suffer a defeat.” And he goes on to say, “If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Whoever’s in charge, I’m sure they would have read that.
Things will have to change. And one of these things that will have to change: People will have to change their internal world.
OZZY OSBOURNE
by David Fricke
July 25, 2002
Did you try hard not to say fuck when you met the queen?
That word was temporarily on hold in my head. My wife said to Camilla Parker Bowles [Prince Charles’ girlfriend], “I think you’re fucking great.” My eyeballs nearly flew out of my head. I said, “Sharon, watch your language.” And Camilla Parker Bowles says [affects posh accent], “Oh, it’s quite all right. We curse quite a lot around here.”
When I went up to the queen, I tried to keep my hand in my pocket. I was afraid she would faint when she saw the tattoo [O-Z-Z-Y on the fingers of his left hand]. She said, “I understand you’re quite the wild one.” I just went, “Heh, heh, heh” [embarrassed laugh]. One thing I noticed—she’s got the greatest skin for a woman of her age.
If television cameras had followed you around as a child in Birmingham [as they did on MTV’s ‘The Osbournes’], what would we have seen?
My home was very poor. My father worked nights as a toolmaker. He was the English Archie Bunker; he wouldn’t change with the times. He would never buy my mom a washing machine. We had a boiler house in the garden—you’d put a fire under this copper boiler, where you would boil the clothes to death. I used to sleep in a bed with one of my brothers. We had no sheets. We had to use old coats.
When I was a young kid, my father would take me on Sunday mornings with my Uncle Jim to the pub, the Golden Cross. Since I wasn’t allowed in, I’d sit on the step, and they’d bring me a shandy, which is half lemonade, half beer. I remember thinking, “Beer must be the best lemonade in the world. I can’t wait until the age when I can drink it.” When I had my first beer, I spat it out: “That can’t be the fucking stuff. It’s like dishwater.” But then I got the glow. I didn’t drink for the taste—I did it for the feeling.
What was your mother like?
She did her best. We never went without food. She stretched things to the limit. There was always a lot of bread and potatoes to fill us up. But money was very scarce. I used to have to ask the neighbors for a cup of sugar, a bottle of milk. One of my biggest fears is going broke. It’s my insecurity, from when I was a child. I never went on holiday, never saw the ocean, until I was fourteen.
You left school at fifteen—because you wanted to or had to?
I wanted to. When I was in school,
they didn’t recognize dyslexia. I looked at the blackboard and it was like trying to read a Chinese menu, in Chinese. But I couldn’t hold down a job. First, I worked at a jewelry company—they made napkin rings and cigarette boxes. Then I was a plumber, then a tea boy on a building site. Then I worked in a slaughterhouse. That was the longest job I ever had.
What did you do there?
Kill—at the end of it. It was automated, but the guys would let me shoot a cow now and then. My first job there was emptying sheep’s stomachs of the puke. There was a giant mountain of the stuff. The stink was unbelievable. But you get used to it.
Then I got a job in a mortuary. My mother went ballistic: “You are crazy.” The formaldehyde was awful. I’d have visions of the dead people’s faces when I got home. Then my mother got me my first musical job—I tuned car horns. You were supposed to do 900 a day. Can you imagine being in a room with that fucking racket?
The big thing with working-class people in England was to work until retirement, and then they gave you a gold watch. That equation never made sense to me. I’m going to give you my life for a gold watch? I’d rather break a shopwindow and grab one.
You did some jail time, when you were seventeen, for burglary.
The best thing my father ever did for me was he refused to pay the fine. If you don’t pay the fine, you go to debtor’s jail. I went for a few weeks. He could have paid the fine for me, but after that, I never wanted to go back.
Describe Black Sabbath’s earliest days. You were originally called Earth.
We played twelve-bar blues, like Ten Years After and the original Fleetwood Mac. We had a van full of equipment, and we’d go to gigs hoping the other band wouldn’t make it, which happened several times. We used to play for nothing. We’d do wedding receptions.
We rehearsed at a community center near Tony Iommi’s house, across the road from a movie theater. One morning, Tony says to us, “It’s interesting. I was looking over at the theater.” It was showing something like The Vampire Returns. “Don’t you think it’s weird that people pay money to be scared? Maybe we should write scary music.” That’s when we came up with “Black Sabbath” [hums the guitar riff]. That was the fucking change of my life.
Were you guys interested in black magic—even a little?
We couldn’t conjure up a fart. We’d get invitations to play witches’ conventions and Black Masses in Highgate Cemetery. I honestly thought it was a joke. We were the last hippie band—we were into peace.
In a lot of live Sabbath photos, you’re flashing the peace sign.
I never did this black-magic stuff. The reason I did “Mr. Crowley” on my first solo album [Blizzard of Ozz, 1980] was that everybody was talking about Aleister Crowley. Jimmy Page bought his house, and one of my roadies worked with one of his roadies. I thought, “Mr. Crowley, who are you? Where are you from?” But people would hear the song and go, “He’s definitely into witchcraft.”
You were fired from Black Sabbath in 1978. Did you deserve it?
We deserved to fire each other. There was no one worse than anybody else. If the others had been churchgoing Bible punchers and I was fucking their wives, I could have expected it. But they were doing booze and quaaludes too.
In those days, we were well into cocaine. That turns you into a powder-seeking freak. The thing was, get the gig over with so we could get our bump of coke. We had a guy on tour with suitcases full of different strengths of coke.
We went head over heels. It made me incredibly afraid. I remember lying in bed at night, feeling my heartbeat, thinking “Please, God, let me sleep for an hour, so I’ll be okay.” Then I’d wake up and [makes sniffing noise] be straight into it again. We did it for years. Eventually it turned everything sour. One minute, we were a rock band doing coke. The next, we were a coke band doing rock.
You’ve been married to Sharon for twenty years. What was it that first attracted you to her?
Her laugh. She has the best laugh. She was so infectious, the way she laughed and cursed. I fancied her from a distance for quite a while. We’d pass in hotels, airports. Her father, Don Arden, managed Black Sabbath, and she worked in the office.
Then I got fired from Black Sabbath. I went to a hotel in L.A., locked myself in this room, ordered cases of beer and had a dealer bring me coke every day. I thought, “I’m on my last fling. I’m going to get well fucked up for a few months, then go home and call it a day.” My idea was to open a bar—which is a brilliant idea for an alcoholic.
One day, there is a knock at the door. Someone in the band’s organization had given me an envelope of cash I was supposed to give to Sharon. I blew it on coke. So she came round to tear me off a stripe. She comes in—I think she felt sorry for me. She goes, “If you straighten your act up, I want to manage you.”
Everybody up to that point was going, “You dummy, you idiot, you can’t do fuck-all.” All my life, I used to be called a dummy. She was the one who didn’t. She encouraged me. She got my ass in gear. We’re the greatest team on earth.
You were arrested in 1989 for trying to kill her in a drunken rage.
It has not always been bliss. But when I was doing the Queen’s Jubilee, there wasn’t one rock star there, not one, with a wife who was the same age. They were all twelve or thirty-two or whatever. I know to get a young piece of skirt is one thing. But what the fuck do you talk about? “Oh, that was bad news about India and Pakistan.” And it’s so common. I wouldn’t trade my Sharon for anything.
Are you amazed that, after everything you’ve been through and done to yourself with drugs and alcohol, that you’re still here?
Absolutely. I’ve danced with death so many times, knowingly and unknowingly. You know what I do? Every year, since I was forty-five, I have a full physical: colonoscopy, prostate test; they shove things up my dick. And at the end, they go, “You’re fine.”
Nothing—touch wood [he knocks on a table three times]—has gone wrong with me. But if it does, it does. I’ve had a great run. The thing about life that gets me crazy is that by the time you learn it all, it’s too late to deal with it. It should be the other way around. We should be born with all this sense and knowledge, and then get stupider as we get older.
If you could write your own epitaph, what would it be?
Just “Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948, died so-and-so.” I’ve done a lot for a simple working-class guy. I made a lot of people smile. I’ve also made a lot of people go, “Who the fuck does this guy think he is?” I guarantee that if I was to die tonight, tomorrow it would be, “Ozzy Osbourne, the man who bit the head off a bat, died in his hotel room. . . .” I know that’s coming.
But I’ve got no complaints. At least I’ll be remembered.
KEITH RICHARDS
by David Fricke
October 17, 2002
How do you deal with criticism about the Stones being too old to rock & roll? Do you get pissed off? Does it hurt?
People want to pull the rug out from under you, because they’re bald and fat and can’t move for shit. It’s pure physical envy—that we shouldn’t be here. “How dare they defy logic?”
If I didn’t think it would work, I would be the first to say, “Forget it.” But we’re fighting people’s misconceptions about what rock & roll is supposed to be. You’re supposed to do it when you’re twenty, twenty-five—as if you’re a tennis player and you have three hip surgeries and you’re done. We play rock & roll because it’s what turned us on. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf—the idea of retiring was ludicrous to them. You keep going—and why not?
You went right from being a teenager to being a Stone—no regular job, a little bit of art school. What would you be doing if the Stones had not lasted this long?
I went to art school and learned how to advertise, because you don’t learn much art there. I schlepped my portfolio to one agency, and they said—they love to put you down—“Can you make a good cup of tea?” I said, “Yeah, I can, but not for you.” I left my crap there and walked out.
After I left school, I never said, “Yes, sir” to anybody.
If nothing had happened with the Stones and I was a plumber now, I’d still be playing guitar at home at night, or get the lads around the pub. I loved music; it didn’t occur to me that it would be my life. When I knew I could play something, it was an added bright thing to my life: “I’ve got that, if nothing else.”
Do you have nightmares that someday you’ll hit the stage and the place will be empty—nobody bothered to come?
That’s not a nightmare. I’ve been there: Omaha ’64, in a 15,000-seat auditorium where there were 600 people. The city of Omaha, hearing these things about the Beatles—they thought they should treat us in the same way, with motorcycle outriders and everything. Nobody in town knew who we were. They didn’t give a shit. But it was a very good show. You give as much to a handful of people as you do to the others.
The Rolling Stone interviews Page 43