B004FEF6RO EBOK

by Wylde, Zakk

  Note from Zakk: “Deep within the bowels of this formidable stronghold”? The only thing that’s got a strong hold on Father Eric is that I’m his number one biggest fan because of the fact that he keeps pulling this ridiculous shit out of his ass, or God only knows where from, and I’m still his friend. This is all coming from a guy whose Viking heritage can basically be traced back to his upbringing in Orange County, California. That’s even worse than my coming from New Jersey. At least we get winters and snow. Un-fuckin’-real. Between me and Eric, we come from the musical Viking lands of No Doubt and the almighty Jon Bon—as in Jon Bon motherfuckin’ Jovi.

  No More Tears: This Album Is the Shit!!! (I Mean Really, THE SHIT!)

  DURING THE MAKING OF THE NO MORE TEARS ALBUM, OZZY HAD THESE stink bombs—those little rotten-egg-smelling glass stink bombs. When we first got into the recording for the album we were working in Bearsville, New York, with Steve Thompson and Mike Bar-biero, who were known at the time for their work with Guns N’ Roses and Tesla. They picked up Ozzy in this town car and, on the way to the hotel, were telling Oz how excited they were to work on the record, how they were gonna record it, and all that stuff. You gotta understand that Ozzy really doesn’t give a fuck how any album is recorded or any of the details. He’s more of a “Let me do my part and get the fuck out of here” type of guy. Oz doesn’t know, or care, about the brand of mics or the type of recording console the engineers are using.

  The guys were telling him how great the studio was and all the “shop” stuff that Ozzy didn’t give a shit about. As far as Ozzy was concerned, they could have been speaking Chinese to him—he didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about. So Oz started busting these fucking stink bombs in the back of the car. These guys were getting gassed out and Oz was telling them he had been having really terrible gas because of his nerves and fear of flying. The whole ride back to the hotel stank to high hell and they didn’t say anything because they felt sorry for Oz and his “medical” condition. This became an ongoing gag for Oz throughout the entire production.

  The next day we were in the studio sitting at this SSL Neve mixing console and these guys were telling Oz that the Who’s legendary Tommy album had been recorded off that very console. Oz leaned toward them and asked in his classic Oz voice, “Who? Tommy who?”

  One of the guys answered back, “You know, Oz, Tommy?”

  More confused than before Ozzy asked, “Tommy who? Who’s Tommy?”

  Again the producer said, “You know, Tommy?”

  Oz became impatient. “Who in the fuck is fucking Tommy?”

  Finally, one of the guys said, “Ozzy, the Who’s Tommy. The Who recorded on this board.”

  That’s when Ozzy leaned back over to me and said, “Hey, Zakk, I think you’re gonna need to start shoveling coal into this motherfucker to keep it going!”

  As soon as Ozzy left the room to go use the bathroom, Mike and Steve leaned over to me and said, “Dude, Zakk, can we ask you something, man? Is Ozzy always like that? Fucking ripping farts all the time? It’s pretty bad, man.” So I said, “Yeah, it’s ’cause of his nerves, he actually goes to see a doctor for that, because he can’t help it.” They went on to tell me how horrendous it was coming back from the airport. These poor guys ended up just dealing with it because they thought Ozzy had a medical problem. And of course the Boss was having a blast with that one—firing off his stink bombs all over the fuckin’ place when the guys weren’t watching.

  Me, Mike Inez, and Randy Castillo were roommates during those sessions, and then Ozzy and his right-hand guy, Tony Dennis, who has been with Oz since the very beginning of his solo career with Saint Rhoads, were in the suite next door. In our kitchen we had all these empty beer trophies from all the beer we were drinking, up on a shelf that wrapped around the room. There were literally hundreds upon hundreds of beer bottles up on the wall—we weren’t fucking around.

  Our typical routine was to jam all day, then stop by our room for a couple of beers, and then at night we would go over to this place called the Tinker Street Café. One day, Ozzy had snuck into our room and put some of those stink bombs in the beer bottles. There were so many of these fucking bottles, God only knew where the stinky ones were—there was no fuckin’ way we were gonna find them. That motherfucker. All we could do was laugh. The Boss fucking gassed us out. Once we got out of the room, we saw Ozzy and told him it was pretty fuckin’ funny how bad our room smelled and how he got us good. He played dumb and said, “What? I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about.” Sure he didn’t.

  “That’s cool, man,” I said. But in my head I was saying, “Payback is gonna be fucking brutal.”

  Ozzy typically spent most of the day watching VCR tapes of World War II documentaries, since he is a huge war history buff, so while we were jamming, he wouldn’t have to be bombarded by our volume of doom all day and could just come in later to check everything out and sing a bit. He had moved the couch over to where he could stretch out and watch TV. One day Ozzy and Tony had to go into the city to do some interviews. As soon as they left for the interview, I took a shit into a brown paper bag and slid it under Ozzy’s couch, right below where his head would be. The couch had tassels hanging from the bottom so you couldn’t see what was underneath. Then Randy took a shit in a Tupperware container and stuck it in the back of their refrigerator behind a bunch of stuff so they wouldn’t find it right away.

  My shit must have stayed under the couch for five days. Oz said the whole time he smelled something that reeked like rotten fucking ass and couldn’t figure out what the fuck it was. Well, he finally figured it out. And the games continued.

  The next day we finished jamming and went back to the room. Randy took a shower, and then we got ready to split for the night—headed to a couple of bars in town. The entrance to our side of the house we were staying in was this hallway where you opened one door, stepped into a corridor, and then opened another door to get inside. We all followed Randy out the door and into the hallway. He made it through the first door and then stopped dead in his tracks. He flipped the light switch and it didn’t work.

  “Hold on a second. It smells like shit. That motherfucker did something in here,” he said. Randy lit his lighter and waved it around, and he discovered that the door handle had been completely smothered with shit. Obviously Ozzy had taken a spoon or something and smeared shit on anything that we might grab or touch in the hallway. We looked through the hallway window into his fuckin’ room, and there he was, peeking out from behind a curtain like Mrs. Kravitz, smiling, laughing, and waiting to see if we were gonna grab the shit handle. These kinds of pranks ran rampant until we all headed back home. For several days after I got back home I was double-checking everything at my own house to make sure it didn’t have shit on it. It was like when war vets come home and get those fuckin’ nightmares and flashbacks. As always, it was nothing but laughing our balls off and having good fucking times with the Boss.

  Eventually, Ozzy had a recording studio built into his home. While we were in there recording the tracks for the Black Rain album, Oz and I got to talking about how much money went to studio costs over the years. For me, it was seven Black Label studio albums, some live records and DVDs, and a couple of solo albums. That’s a decent chunk of change right there. But for Ozzy? It was millions upon millions of dollars. It cost a few hundred thousand dollars to make each record and his career spans back to 1968. Obviously the first records were low budget, but if you added all of them up, you could take all that money and build twenty studios.

  Fast-forward to 2009, when Barb and I converted our guesthouse into a recording studio, or as it came to be known, the Black Vatican.

  Back when the Warden and I first bought the mountain we live on, the guesthouse was where we lived with the kids. Sometimes, it would be us, the kids, the tour manager, band members, guitar techs, the whole fucking cast and crew in all its glory. Yeah it was tight, but we always had a great time with all of our Black Label br
ethren—barbecuing, drinking, shooting steroids, taking Viagra, starting a religious cult, starting our own brokerage hedge fund, buying bulk Girl Scout cookies and reselling them at a higher price so we could afford the barbecue, booze, and steroids. All the while Barb designed the main house that we live in now.

  When we used to go into the recording studio it would take me an hour or two to get to the studio and an hour or two to get back home. Add up all the hours driving back and forth, combined with the money spent on the studio, and it only made sense to have my own place to record. You know, why rent when you can own?

  Order of the Black

  WE RECORDED THE ENTIRE ORDER OF THE BLACK ALBUM IN THE BLACK Vatican. Pretty much like every other Black Label album, it took us ninety-four days, including writing, recording, mixing, mastering (with George Marino), and artwork, to get it fucking done.

  The great thing about the Black Vatican is, not only can I record, but I can mix there as well. So basically, we can make the doughnuts, box them up, and ship them all out of the same place.

  Here’s where all the magick happens—where the performances go down. You know, where we run our Black Label racketeering, prostitution, money laundering, and gambling. We just don’t dabble with illegal narcotics. We only bootleg alcohol. It’s because we’re nice people. For fuck’s sake, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. If we got into illegal narcotics, I don’t know how I’d sleep at night.

  Anyway, the control room is kind of like the bridge on the legendary USS Starship Enterprise. Except for on our ship, we can’t save you. Because everyone on board this ship is a complete fucking idiot. You can see the drum room off to the side, behind glass, so that we can all see each other and the joy upon our faces as we head into the musical train wreck that is the almighty Order. You can also see where I record my vocals and spew my literary masterpieces of poetry that become Black Label lyrics of wisdom, wit, charm, and adorableness that could only come from something as precious as the taint between my balls and my ass.

  Here is the piano room. If you look up to the left of the piano you’ll see a video screen and camera that allows me to see the rest of my Black Label brethren at the console and in the drum room, where they can also see me and tell their friends they were lucky enough to share breathing space with me. Remember, I’m the lead singer, so I can pull out this douchebag shit any time I fucking want. Sue me. Go ahead. I’ve actually sued myself several times for defamatory remarks made to me, by myself.

  This allows me to keep a close eye on JD, wherever he may be lurking around the studio—you know, when he’s not pillaging the kitchen. Oh, and if it seems like I’m picking on JD a lot—that’s because I am. But in all fairness, I’ve given him a platform to defend himself, directly proportional to the level of his importance in the band—he gets two words at the end of this book.

  The Black Vatican kitchen. JD’s favorite place in the studio, where he can receive a free meal, wash it down with a free beverage, get free Internet access (where he can hook up with scantily clad women on Facebook), and watch pay-per-view (for free). Have you noticed how many times I’ve mentioned the word free here? Now you know why it’s JD’s favorite room in our sonic Black Label cathedral.

  The Black Vatican lounge. For inspiration, the walls are covered with huge posters of Father Van Halen, Saint Rhoads, Pope Page, Father Di Meola, Father McLaughlin, Father Trower, and other guitar gods. Basically, it looks just like my bedroom when I was fourteen except now the pictures are in frames instead of just duct-taped to the wall. Thank you, God—you rule!

  Zack Fagan (of Under the Wire) was the guy who put Ozzy’s bunker together. He did such an awesome job with that studio that I had him come out and build mine as well.

  It’s great having the studio, but I picked a terrible time to stop sniffing glue and drinking booze. Back in the day when I would be out at a studio making an album, we would buy these blocks of studio time from noon until midnight every day to record. By the end of each recording day, I’d be too tired or too wasted to drive home, so I’d lie on the couch and pass out. At that point I figured there was no sense going home anyway, since as soon as I got up in the morning it would be time to get my ass back down there and do it all over again. But the deal is, they charge you an extra thousand dollars if you spend the night. I can’t tell you how many thousand-dollar nights I spent doing that.

  Now, with the studio right next to the main house on the grounds of our compound, if I was still drinking, I could get blasted to all hell and then just float, or roll down the hill, until I landed at the house. But I’m high on life now. Yay! Go team! Frank Sinatra once said, “I feel sorry for people who don’t drink. When they wake up in the morning that’s as good as they are going to feel all day.” I do have to disagree with Mr. Sinatra. After Barb fingers my asshole and sucks me off, I feel as if I’m brimming with “country freshness” and ready to take on the day!

  But when I get up, that’s not the worst I’m gonna feel all day. I’m gonna see JD’s mug and want to ram my car straight into a fucking telephone pole. The best I’m gonna feel? That would be the magickal moment in my day when the Mongoose leaves the room.

  Under the Wire

  BY ZACK FAGAN

  HAVING WORKED WITH BOTH OZZY AND ZAKK IN THE STUDIO, I was honored when Zakk asked me to design, engineer, and construct the Black Vatican. No two studios are built, or sound, the same. And Ozzy’s and Zakk’s studios are no different. In fact, while Ozzy and Zakk are linked forever in friendship and music, their studios have totally different vibes and couldn’t be more unalike.

  I utilized a more traditional approach when I picked equipment for Zakk’s place. My philosophy is that the Classic Neve and API mic preamps are must-have pieces of equipment in any modern studio, regardless of your recording medium. Everything starts at the mic preamp. And when you want to capture the pure essence of hard rock and Heavy Metal guitars, Neves and APIs do it the best. Ozzy has some Neves also, but no APIs.

  Zakk also had some Eventide Ultra Harmonizers in storage that we added to the equipment rack. They take a while to warm up and sometimes they lose their settings but nothing sounds like the original. Of course the plug-ins are cool, but it’s nice to patch into a piece of history every once in a while too!

  As far as the equipment list goes, I chose everything in the racks except for the Eventides. I knew what Zakk needed and put the studio together like it was my own. He always wanted vintage gear, which I agreed was the way to go. And while we didn’t put in any hardware Pultecs, we did get the plug-ins to satisfy Zakk’s need for the vintage EQ.

  Ozzy’s studio is an underground “cave” with no windows or natural light, whereas the Black Vatican is flush with windows offering natural light and beautiful views of the mountains. Glass is challenging to work with because it reflects sound around the room, causing echoes and false interpretations during playback. To resolve this, we installed acoustic treatments on the walls and ceilings and heavy sound-absorbing curtains for the windows.

  One day on the job, I was out on the porch and was startled by a sudden thunderous noise. It was Zakk playing his guitar in the driveway with his Marshalls cranked full blast. He played like that for over an hour, with no worries because his neighbors are so far away, there’s no one to bother.

  I’m sure Zakk will tell you about the Pazuzu Loo, the studio’s bathroom designed to literally scare the shit out of you. That’s one of Zakk’s passions, scaring people. During the construction of the Black Vatican, he made it his personal mission to scare the bejesus out of anyone he could. I’d be bent over measuring something and he’d quietly push the door open, creep up on me, and then yell at the top of his lungs, “Whattaaayaaaaaaa dooooooooin’!!!!!!” while slamming something heavy onto the floor for the added boom!

  Note from Zakk: Father Fagan, awesome job on the Black Vatican, my Black Label brother!

  This is where the gospel of the Black Label Order religion is spoken. A religion of confusion for
the confused, by the confused, who not only enjoy being confused but have no other option yet to be completely and utterly—confused. Mind you, we’re all happy.

  Now, when it came to painting the outside of the recording studio, Barbaranne picked out some nice brown colors that matched our house, and JD’s underwear. But when the painters arrived, I was there to intercept and send them back to the store to exchange all the brown paint for flat black. That’s right. I made the executive decision that the entire exterior of the Black Vatican should be black. I thought it came out great, but the Warden fucking hates it, and that’s putting it lightly. She said it looks ridiculous and then asked me if I was Anton LaVey or twelve years old. But I dig it and if Jimi Hendrix had a home studio he’d probably have painted it purple and it would have looked cool as hell. I’m the Black Label Society guy, not Brown Label Society, so the Vatican is BLACK … end of story.

  Right after the killer paint job was done, I sent some photos of it to Father Eric to show him that I actually did change the color. Eric loved the color and agreed it was the perfect choice. So then I told the Warden, “Look, you love Eric, and Eric loves the black paint job, so by default, you love the black paint job.” How do you like that philosophy, Barb?

  Barb replied, “You’re not a philosopher. You’re an asshole.”