Ozzy Osbourne Dishes it Out!!!

Although I’ve never really been a great fan of Ozzy Osbourne, I’ve always thought he was really hilarious. In fact, I remember watching an excerpt from a documentary that contained short interviews with the other band members where one of them had apparently told Ozzy ‘Hey man, if the singing doesn’t work out, you can always get a job as a comedian.’ I can personally remember laughing out loud while reading some of his interviews in Hit Parader, Circus and Rolling Stones Magazine. I mean this guy is funny. He was the lead singer for the pioneering English heavy metal band Black Sabbath until he got fired for excessive drug and alcohol abuse. He then launched a solo career where he found more success than he had ever had with his former band. Here’s a peek into the mind of a unique individual who should have ended up dead on the floor of a car parts factory but found fame and fortune as a rock star instead. All of these quotes have been taken from his biography titled “I AM OZZY” published by Grand Central Publishing (ISBN:978-0-446-56989-7)


“Over the past forty years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, Quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other substances too many other heavy-duty substances to list in this footnote. On more than a few occasions I was on all those at the same time. I’m not the fucking Encyclopedia Britannica, put it that way.”
pg.-01

“I hated school. Hated it!” pg. 13

“I was fifteen when I left school. I had two career choices: manual labor or manual labor.” Pg. 25

“In those days, the working person’s mentality went like this: you got what education you could, you found an apprenticeship, they gave you a shit job, and then you took pride in it, even though it was a shit job. And then you did that same shit job for the rest of your life. Your shit job was everything. A lot of people in Birmingham never even made it to retirement. They just dropped down dead on the factory floor.” Pg. 27

“The idea of getting a real job in the music business was a fucking joke. It was one of those impossible things, like becoming an astronaut or a stuntman, or shagging Elizabeth Taylor. Still, ever since the time I’d sung ‘Living Doll’ at our family shindig, I’d been thinking about starting a band.” Pg. 30

“A light went on in my head when I heard that (Beatles) record. It just sucked me in. Lennon and McCartney’s harmonies were like magic. They took me away from Aston and into this fantasy Beatleworld. I couldn’t stop listening to those fourteen songs (eight were originals, six were covers, including a version of Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’). It might sound over-the-top to say it now, but for the first time I felt as though my life had meaning.” Pg. 31

“Thanks to Beatlemania, it seemed alright that I didn’t want to work in a factory either! And they were just like me – working-class kids from the back streets of a run-down, far-from-London industrial town. I reckoned if they could be in a band, then maybe I could, too. I was eight years younger than Lennon and six years younger than McCartney, so I still had plenty of time to get my first big break. Apart from Tony Iommi-who I’d never seen again since leaving school-I didn’t even know anyone who could play a musical instrument. So, instead, I decided to grow my hair long and get some tattoos. At least I’d look the part. Pg.32

“They say that when the average person sees the inside of a slaughterhouse, they become a vegetarian. Not me. Having said that, though, it was an education. I quickly learned that there aren’t any little nugget-shaped chickens, or little hamburger-shaped cows. Animals are big fucking smelly things. I think that anyone who eats meat should visit a slaughterhouse just once in their life, just to see what goes on. It’s a bloody, filthy putrid fucking business. (On working in a slaughterhouse)
Pg. 33

“’Ambitious’ wasn’t a word you would have used to describe us. Our big dream was to play in a pub so we could earn some beer money. The trouble was, to play in a pub you needed to be able to play. And we never got around to learning how to do that, because we were always in the pub, talking about how one day we could play in a pub and earn some beer money. Music Machine never played a single gig, as far as I can remember. (On the first band Ozzy was in.) Pg. 49

“Most people reckoned I’d walked straight out of the funny farm. But they’d look at Geezer and think: I bet he’s in a band. He had it all. He’s such a clever guy, he probably could have had his own company with his name above the door: Geezer & Geezer Ltd. But the most impressive thing he could do was write lyrics: really fucking intense lyrics about wars and superheroes and black magic and a load of other mind blowing stuff. The first time he showed them I just said, ‘Geezer, we’ve gotta start writing our own songs so we can use these words. They’re amazing.’ Pg. 51

“On Tony’s last day in the workshop, the bloke who was supposed to press and cut the metal before it was welded didn’t show up. So Tony had to do it. I still don’t know exactly what happened-if Tony didn’t know how to use the machine properly, or if it was broken, or whatever-but this fucking massive metal press ended up ripping off the tips of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand. Tony is left-handed, so they were his fretboard fingers. It makes me shiver just to think about it, even now. You can’t imagine what a bad scene it must have been with all the blood and the howling and the scrambling around on the floor trying to find the tips of his fingers, and then Tony being told by the doctors in the emergency room that he’d never be able to play again. He saw dozens of specialists over the next few months, and they all told him the same thing. ‘Son, your days in a rock ‘n roll band are finished, end of fucking story, find something else to do.’ He must have thought it was all over. Tony suffered from a terrible depression for a long time after the accident. I don’t know how he even got out of bed in the morning. Then, one day, his old foreman brought him a record by Django Reinhardt, the Belgian Gypsy jazz guitarist who played all his solos using just two fingers on his fretting hand because he’d burned the others in a fire. And Tony thought, Well, if old Django can do it, so can I. At first he tried playing right-handed, but that didn’t work. So he went back to left-handed, trying to play the fretboard with just two fingers, but he didn’t like that either. Finally, he figured out what to do. He made a couple of thimbles for his injured fingers out of a melted-down Fairy Liquid bottle, sanded them down until they were roughly the same size as his old fingertips, and then glued these little leather pads on the ends to improve his grip on the strings. He loosened the strings a bit too, so he wouldn’t have to put so much pressure on them. Then he just learned to play the guitar again from scratch, even though he had no feeling in his fingers. To this day, I’ve no idea how he does it. Everywhere he goes, he carries around a bag full of homemade thimbles and leather patches, and he always keeps a soldering iron on hand to make adjustments. Every time I see him play, it hits me how much he had to overcome. I have so much awe and respect for Tony Iommi because of that. Also, in a strange way, I suppose the accident helped him, because when he learned to play again he developed a unique style that no one has ever been able to copy. And fucking hell, man, they’ve tried. Pg. 57,58,59

“Officially, we didn’t have a band leader. Unofficially, we all knew it was Tony. He was the oldest, the tallest, the best fighter, the best-looking, the most experienced , and the most obviously talented. He’d really started to look the part, too. He’d gone out and bought this blue suede cowboy jacket with tassels on the arms, which the chicks loved. We all knew that Tony belonged right up there with the likes of Clapton and Hendrix. Pound for pound, he could match any of them. He was our ticket to the big time.” Pg. 69

“Tony was the main topic of conversation that night, and I can honestly say that we weren’t jealous of what he was doing. We were just heartbroken. As much as we both liked Jethro Tull, we thought Earth could be better- a hundred times better. Before he left, Tony had been coming up with all these heavy-duty riffs of his own-heavier than anything I’d heard anywhere before-and Geezer had started to write far-out lyrics to go with them. As for me and Bill, we’d been improving with every gig. And unlike a lot of the one-hit-wonder Top-Forty bands at the time, we weren’t fake. We hadn’t been put together by some suit-and-tie in a smoky office in London somewhere. We weren’t one star, a cool name, and a bunch of session players who changed with every tour. We were the real fucking deal. (The to-be ‘Black Sabbath’ used to be called ‘Earth’) Pg. 77

“’How can being in Jethro Tull not be your scene?’ said Geezer. ‘You played a gig with John Lennon, man!’ ‘I want to be in my own band. I don’t want to be someone else’s employee.’ (Ozzy quoting Tony Iommi who quit world renown Jethro Tull to return to the then unknown Black Sabbath (actually Earth at that time). Pg. 79

“’Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’ Me and Bill thought that was a great idea, so we went and wrote some lyrics that ended up becoming the song ‘Black Sabbath’. It’s basically about a bloke who sees a figure in black coming to take him off to the lake of fire. Then Tony came up with this scary-sounding riff. I moaned out a tune over the top of it, and the end result was fucking awesome-the best thing we’d ever done by a mile. I’ve since been told that Tony’s riff is based on what is known as the ‘Devil’s interval’, or the ‘tri-tone’. Apparently, churches banned it from being used in religious music during the Middle Ages because it scared the crap out of people. The organist would play it and everyone would run away ‘cos they thought the Devil was going to pop up from behind the altar. As for the title of the song, it was Geezer who came up with that. He got it from a Boris Karloff film that had been out for a while.” Pg. 83

“Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song ‘Black Sabbath’. But I’ve always had a bee up my arse about the term ‘heavy metal’. To me, it doesn’t say anything musically, especially now that you’ve got eighties heavy metal, nineties heavy metal and new-millennium heavy metal-which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they’re all the same. In fact, the first time I heard the words ‘heavy’ and ‘metal’ used together was in the lyrics of ‘Born to Be Wild’. The press just latched onto it after that. We certainly didn’t come up with it ourselves. As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write scary music. But then, long after we stopped writing scary music, people would still say, ‘Oh, they’re a heavy metal band, so all they must sing about is Satan and the end of the world.’ That’s why I came to loathe the term. Pg. 83

“‘Fairies Wear Boots’-to this day, I have no idea what that song’s about, even though people tell me that I wrote the lyrics.” Pg. 86

“In January 1970, it finally happened. We got a record deal. For a few months, Jim Simpson had been shopping us around by inviting all these big-wigs from London to come to our gigs. But no one was interested. Then one night a guy from Philips drove up to Birmingham to see us play at Henry’s Blues House and decided to take a bet on us. The name Black Sabbath made a big difference, I think. At the time there was an occult author called Dennis Wheatley whose books were all over the bestseller lists, Hammer Horror films were doing massive business at the cinemas and the Manson murders were all over the telly, so anything with a ‘dark’ edge was in big demand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure we could’ve done it on the strength of the music alone. But sometimes when it comes to getting a deal, all these little things have to come together at the right time. You need a bit of luck, basically. Pg. 91

“As far as I can remember, we didn’t have any demos to speak of, and there was no official talk about making an album. Jim just told us one day that we’d been booked for a week of gigs in Zurich, and that on our way down there, we should stop off at Regent Sound Studios in Soho and record some tracks with a producer called Rodger Bain and his engineer, Tom Allom. So that’s what we did. Like before, we just set up gear and played what amounted to a live set without an audience. Once we’d finished, we spent a couple of hours double-tracking some of the guitar and vocals, and that was that. Done. We were in the pup in time for last orders. It can’t have taken any longer than twelve hours in total. That’s how albums should be made, in my opinion. I don’t give a fuck if you’re making the next Bridge Over Troubled Water-taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just fucking ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again. Pg. 93

“On Friday the thirteenth of February 1970, Black Sabbath went on sale. I felt like I’d just been born but the critics hated it. Still, one of the good things about being dyslexic is that when I say I don’t read reviews, I mean I don’t read reviews. But that didn’t stop others from poring over what the press had to say about us. Of all the bad reviews of Black Sabbath, the worst was probably written by Lester Bangs at Rolling Stone. ‘They’re just like Cream, but worse’, which I didn’t understand, because I thought Cream were one of the best bands in the world.” Pg. 96

“I can honestly say that we never took the black magic stuff seriously for one second. We just liked how theatrical it was. I couldn’t believe it when I learned that people actually ‘practiced the occult’. These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I’d say to them, ‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are whiskey, vodka and gin.’ At one point we were invited by a group of Satanists to play at Stonehenge. We told them to fuck off, so they said they’d put a curse on us. What a load of bollocks that was. Britain even had a ‘chief witch’ in those days, called Alex Sanders. Never met him. Never wanted to.” Pg. 99

“Another reason why we could what we wanted was because we had total musical control. No record mogul had created Black Sabbath, so no record mogul could tell Black Sabbath what to do. A couple of them tried-and we told them where to stick with it. Not many bands can do that nowadays.” Pg. 105

“Even after our first album went gold, I never got any good-looking chicks. Black Sabbath was a blokes’ band. We get fag ends and beer bottles thrown at us, not frilly underwear. We used to joke that the only groupies that came to our gigs were ‘two-baggers’ – you needed to put a couple of bags over their head before you could shag them; one wasn’t enough. And most of the time I was lucky even to get a two-bagger, to be honest with you. The chicks who wanted to shack up with me at the end of the night were usually three- or four-baggers. One night in Newcastle I think I had a five-bagger.” Pg. 107

“It’s funny, y’know: if you’d told us at the time that people would still be listening to any of those songs forty years into the future-and that the album would sell more than four million copies in America alone. We would have just laughed in your face. But the fact is Tony Iommi turned out to be one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Whenever we went into the studio we’d challenge him to beat his last riff- and he’d come up with something like ‘Iron Man’ and blow everyone away.” Pg. 111

“The only problem was the album cover, which had been done before the name change and now it didn’t make any sense at all. What did four pink blokes holding shields and waving swords have to do with paranoia? They were pink because that was supposed to be the color of the war pigs. But without ‘War Pigs’ written on the front, they just looked like gay fencers. ‘They’re not gay fencers, Ozzy,’ Bill told me. ‘They’re paranoid gay fencers.” Pg. 112

“And then there were the American chicks, who were nothing like English chicks. I mean when you pulled a chick in England, you gave her the eye, one thing led to another, you took her out, you bought her this and that, and then about a month later you asked if she fancied a good old game of hide the sausage. In America, the chicks just came right up to you and said, ‘Hey, let’s fuck.’ You didn’t even have to make any effort.” Pg. 114

“I thought America was fabulous. Take pizza, for example. For years, I’d been thinking, I wish someone would invent a new kind of food. In England, it was always egg and chips, sausage and chips, pie and chip…any-thing and chips, After a while it just got boring, y’know? But you couldn’t exactly order a shaved Parmesan and rocket salad in Birmingham in the early seventies. If it didn’t come out of a deep-fat fryer, no one knew what the fuck it was. But, then in New York, I discovered pizza. It blew my mind wide fucking open. I would buy ten or twenty slices a day. And then, when I realized you could buy a pizza all for yourself, I started opening them whenever we went. Pg. 115

“Before we even left for America, someone had sent us a film of a black magic parade in San Francisco, held in our honor. There was a bloke who look liked Ming the Merciless sitting in a convertible Rolls-Royce while all these half-naked chicks danced around him in the streets. The bloke’s name was Anton LaVey and he was the High Priest of the Church of Satan or some bollocks, and author of a book called ‘The Satanic Bible’. We just thought, ‘What the fuck?’ I have a theory, y’know, about people who dedicate their lives to that kind of bullshit: they’re just into it because of all the sexual debauchery they can get up to. Which is fair enough I suppose. But we didn’t want anything to do with it.” Pg. 120

“The biggest culture shock was at a gig in Philadelphia. It was mostly black guys in the audience, and you could tell they hated our music. We did ‘War Pigs’ and you could have heard a fucking pin drop. One guy a big tall fella with a massive afro, spent the whole gig sitting up on a high window ledge, and every few minutes he’d shout out, ‘Hey, you-Black Sabbath!’ I thought, Why the fuck does he keep saying that? What does he want? I didn’t realize he thought my name was Black Sabbath. Anyway, about halfway through the gig, at the end of one of the songs, this guy does it again: “Hey you-Black Sabbath!” By this point I’d had enough. So I walked to the edge of the stage, looked up at him and said, ‘All right mate, you win. What the fuck do you want? What is it, eh?’ And he peered down at me with this puzzled look on his face. ‘You guys ain’t black,’ he said. Pg. 118

“As much as we tried to avoid them, the Satanists never stopped being a pain in the arse.” Pg. 121

“I killed the vicar. Or at least I thought I did. You see, in those days, out in the countryside, vicars would make house calls. They didn’t need a reason to come and see you. You’d just hear a knock on your door and there would be a bloke in his frock and his dog collar, wanting to talk about the weather. So one day, while I was down the pub, the vicar came round to Bulrush Cottage for one of his visits, and Thelma invited him in for a cup of tea. The trouble was, Bulrush Cottage wasn’t set up for entertaining vicars-there were beer cans and shotguns and bongs all over the place-and Thelma didn’t have a clue what to feed him, either. So she rummaged around in the kitchen until she found this nasty-looking cake in an old tin. With no better option, she gave him a slice, even though it looked and tasted like shit. What Thelma had forgotten was that the week before, my local dope dealer had given me some dodgy hash. It was stale or something, so it was crap to smoke, but it was still as potent as ever. And rather than letting it go to waste, I’d grated it into a bowl with some cake mix and baked it. The trouble was, the lump of dope was enormous, and I only had half a tin of cake mix in the cupboard, so the cake ended up being about 80 percent dope and 20 percent mix. I almost barfed when I tasted it. ‘See this tin?’ I remember saying to Thelma. ‘Don’t let anyone touch it.’ She mustn’t have been listening. All she knew was that there was a tin with a skull and crossbones marked on it, with some cake inside, and that she had a vicar to feed. So she gave him a slice. He’d just swallowed his last mouthful when I got back from the pub. The second I saw him sitting there on the sofa with the little plate in front of him and crumbs everywhere, I knew it was bad news. “That really was a delicious slice of cake. Thank you very much, Mrs. Osbourne,’ the vicar was saying. ‘Would you mind if I had another?’ ‘Oh not at all!’ said Thelma. ‘Thelma,’ I said, ‘I don’t think we have any more cake.’ ‘Yes, we do, John, it’s in the kitch-‘ ‘WE. DON’T. HAVE. MORE. CAKE.’ ‘Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble,’ said the vicar, standing up. Then he started to dab his brow with a handkerchief. Then he turned a funny color. I knew exactly what was coming next. You see, eating dope is very different to smoking it-it affects your whole body, not just your head. And it takes only the tiniest bit to send you over the edge. ‘Oh my’, he said. ‘I think I’m feeling a little-‘ BOOM! ‘Fuck! Vicar down!’ I shouted, rushing over to see if he was still breathing. Then I turned to look at Thelma. ‘What the fuck were you thinking?’ I said. He’s gonna die! I told you not to touch that cake. He’s just eaten enough Afghan hash to knock out a bleedin’ elephant!’ ‘How was I supposed to know the cake was dodgy?’ ‘Because I told you!’ ‘No you didn’t.’ ‘It’s in a tin with a skull and crossbones on the top!’ ‘So what are we going to do?’ said Thelma, turning white. ‘We’re going to have to move the body, that’s what we’re going to have to do,’ I said. ‘Here take the legs.’ ‘Where are we taking him?’　‘Back to where he lives.’ So we carried the vicar to his car, put him on the back seat, found his address in the glove compartment, and I drove him home. He was out cold. Part of me honestly thought he was a goner, although I’d been drinking most of the day, so I can’t say I was thinking completely straight. All I knew is that for a man of the cloth-or anyone else-that much of my hash in one go could be lethal. But I just kept telling myself that he’d wake up with a really bad hangover, and we’d be OK. When I got to his house I dragged him up on the steps to the front door. If I’d been cleverer, I would have wiped my fingerprints off the car, but I just felt so terrible about what had happened, and I so badly wanted to believe he’d be fine, I can honestly say it never even entered my head. Still, I spent the entire night lying awake, waiting for the sirens. Clearly, I’d be the first person to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night if they did any tests on the vicar’s body. Who else in the parish would have given him a lethal slice of hash cake? But there were no sirens that night. And none the next day either. Then more days passed. Still nothing. That’s it, I thought. I killed him. I wondered if I should turn myself in. ‘It was an accident, Your Honour,’ I imagined myself saying to the judge ‘A terrible, terrible accident.’ This went on for at least a week. Then, one day, I walked into the pub and there he was, at the bar, in his frock, sipping a cranberry juice. I almost hugged the bloke and gave him a kiss. ‘Ah, Mr. Osbourne,’ he said, shaking my hand. ‘You know the funniest thing? I can’t remember how I got home from your house the other day. And the next morning I had this terrible, terrible flu. I was having hallucinations for three days, you know? The most curious experience. I convinced myself that Martians had landed on the Vicarage lawn and we’re trying to organize a tombola.’ (Tombola: The traditional Italian bingo-like game played at Christmas) Pg. 151-154

“All of a sudden I was unemployed. And unemployable. I remember thinking, Well, I’ve still got a few dollars in my pocket so I’ll have one last big fling in LA-then I’ll go back to England. I honestly thought I’d have to sell Bulrush Cottage and go work on a building site or something. I just resigned myself to the fact that it was over. None of it had ever seemed real, anyway.” (On getting fired from Black Sabbath ) Pg. 194

“Look,’ she (Sharon Arden) said. ‘Look if you want to get your shit together, we want to manage you.’ ‘Why would anyone want to manage me?’ I asked her. I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t. But it was a good job that someone wanted me, ‘cos I was down to my last few dollars. My royalties from Black Sabbath were non-existent, I didn’t have a savings account , and I had no new income coming in.” (Pg. 195)

“We drove over to a studio somewhere so I could hear him play. I remember him plugging his Gibson Les Paul into a little practice amp and saying to me, ‘D’you mind if I warm up?’ ‘Knock yourself out,’ I said. Then he started doing these finger exercises. I had to say to him, ‘Stop. Randy, just stop right there.’ ‘What’s wrong?’ he said, looking up at me with this worried expression on his face. ‘You’re hired.’ You should have heard him play, man. I almost cried, he was so good. (On his first meeting with then-to-become legendary guitarist Randy Rhoads) Pg. 197

“The funny thing is, I don’t think Randy (Rhoads) ever really liked Black Sabbath much. He was a ‘proper’ musician. I mean, a lot of rock ‘n’ roll guitarists are good, but they have just one trick, one gimmick, so even if you don’t know the song, you go, ‘Oh, that’s so-and-so.’ But Randy could play anything. His influences ranged from Leslie West to jazz greats like Charlie Christian and classical guys like John Williams. He didn’t understand why people were into ‘Iron Man’, ‘cos he thought it was so simple a kid could play it. We had arguments about that, actually. I’d say, ‘Look, if it works, who cares if its simple? I mean, you can’t get much easier than the riff to ‘You Really Got Me’-but it’s awesome. When I first bought the single, I played it until the needle on my dad’s radiogram broke.’ Pg. 199

“The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like, ‘What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is God, it’s nature. I feel the same way when people ask me if songs like ‘Hand of Doom’ and ‘War Pigs’ are anti-war. I think war is just part of human nature. And I’m fascinated by human nature-especially the dark side. I always have been. It doesn’t make me a Devil worshipper, no more than being interested in Hitler makes me a Nazi. I mean if I’m a Nazi, how come I married a woman who’s half-Jewish? Pg. 295

“The ‘Suicide Solution’ lawsuit was filed in January 1986, and was thrown out in August of that year. At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were going to ban ‘Suicide Solution’ and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they’d have to ban Shakespeare, cos Romeo and Juliet’s about Shakespeare, too. He also said that the song rights were protected by the rights of free speech in America. The judge agreed, but his summing up wasn’t exactly friendly. He said that although I was ‘totally objectionable and repulsive, trash can be given First Amendment protection, too’. Pg. 295