This cultural icon hardly needs an introduction, but here goes anyway. Born in 1940 in San Francisco while his father was on tour with the Cantonese Opera Company, Bruce quickly returned back to his father's native land, Hong Kong, where he spent his formative years cha-cha dancing and training in Wing Chun Kung Fu. The latter transformed him into a ferocious street fighter resulting in him getting into some serious trouble with local gangsters and the police. Sensing that Bruce was going nowhere really fast, Bruce’s father arranged to have Bruce relocated back to the United States. After a short-lived stint as a dishwasher, he started teaching Kung Fu to neighborhood college students and other wannabe-badass hopefuls. One thing led to another and after giving an impressive demonstration at a martial arts tournament, he was tapped to star in the short-lived Green Hornet TV series as the lead role’s sidekick (no pun intended). This experience solidified Bruce’s acting aspirations. However, given the inherent racism in Hollywood at the time, Bruce picked up and went to Hong Kong where he made a film for peanuts and rice titled “Fists of Fury.” Following the release of the film, Bruce's fame exploded. The rest as they say is history. Regardless of his untimely passing due to cerebral edema (swelling of the brain) in 1973, Bruce Lee has continued to serve as an inspiration for millions and has probably done more for the self-esteem of Asian-Americans than any other person since, alive or dead. Enjoy these quotes taken from “Bruce Lee Jeet Kune Do.” ISBN:978-0-8048-3132-1.
“I have to say I am writing whatever happens to be popping into my mind. It might be incoherent to some but, what the heck, I don’t care. I’m just simply writing whatever wants to be written at the moment of its conception. If we communicate, which I sincerely hope; it’s cool. If not, well, it can’t be helped anyway.” Pg. 17
“I don’t know what I will be writing but just simply writing whatever wants to be written. If the writing communicates and stirs something within someone, it’s beautiful. If not, well, it can’t be helped.” Pg. 17
“Martial art, like any art, is an expression of the human being. Some expressions have flavor, some are logical (perhaps under certain required situations), but most martial arts are the mere performing of a sort of mechanical repetition of a fixed pattern. This is most unhealthy because to live is to express and to express you have to create. Creation is never merely repetition. Remember well my friend that all styles are man-made and man is always more important than any style. Style concludes. Man grows. So martial art is ultimately an athletic expression of the dynamic of the human body. More important yet is the person who is there expressing his own soul. Yes, martial art is an unfolding of what one is-his anger, his fears-and yet under all these natural human tendencies (which we all experience, after all) a “quality” martial artist can-in the midst of all these commotions-still be himself. And it is not a question of winning or losing but it is a question of being what is at that moment and being wholeheartedly involved with that particular moment and doing one’s best. The consequence is left to whatever will happen. Therefore to be a martial artist also means to be an artist of life. Since life is an ever-going process, one should flow in this process and to discover, to actualize, and to expand oneself.” Pg. 18
“Anger blinds.” Pg. 22
“I never met a conceited man whom I did not find inwardly embarrassed.” Pg. 23
“The man who pulls a knife on you is at a disadvantage. He will clearly lose the fight. The reason is very simple. Psychologically, he only has one weapon. His thinking is therefore limited to the use of that single weapon. You, on the other hand, are thinking about all your weapons: your hands, elbows, knees, feet, head. You’re thinking 360 degrees around him. Maybe you’re considering some form of escape, like running. He’s only got a lousy knife. Now he might throw it at you. Let him. You still have a chance to avoid it, block it, or he may miss you. You’ve got all the advantages when you think about it.” Pg. 24
“Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I work on my legs. Every Thursday and Saturday I work on my punch. On Wednesdays and Sundays, I have sparring sessions.” Pg. 24
“I personally do not believe in the word style. Why? Because, unless there are human beings with three arms and four legs, unless we have another group of human beings on earth that are structurally different from us, there can be no different style of fighting. Why is that? Because we have two hands and two legs?” pg. 28
“Understand.” Pg. 29
“Many people will come to an instructor but, most of them, they say, ‘Hey man, like what is the truth?’ You know, would you hand it over to me? So, therefore, one guy would say now, ‘I’ll give you the Japanese way of doing it.’ And another guy would say ‘I’ll give you the Chinese way of doing it.’ But to me that’s all baloney because unless there are men with three hands or there are men with four legs, then there (cannot be) a different way of doing it. But since we only have two hands and two legs, nationalities don’t mean anything.” Pg. 28
“You can be a slave in the form of a holy mind to live. We do not live for, we simply live.” Pg. 31
“Don’t look for secret moves. Don’t look for secret movements. If you’re always hunting for secret techniques you’re going to miss it. It’s you. It’s your body that’s the key.” Pg. 34
“What man has to get over is consciousness. The consciousness of himself.” Pg. 34
“When a man is thinking he stands off from what he is trying to understand. Feeling exists here and now when not interrupted and dissected by ideas or concepts. The moment we stop analyzing and let go, we can start really seeing, feeling-as one whole. There is no actor or one being acted upon but the action itself. I stayed with my feeling then-and I felt it to the full without naming it that. At last the I and the feeling merged to become one. The I no longer feels the self to be separated from the you and the whole idea of taking advantage or getting something out of something becomes absurd. To me, I have no other self (not to mention thought) than the oneness of things of which I was aware at that moment.” Pg. 35
“Nowadays, I mean you don’t go around on the street, kicking people or punching people. Because if you do, they will pull out a gun out of their jacket and bang! That’s it. I mean, I don’t care how good (in martial art) you are!” pg. 36
“Boards don’t hit back. This matter of breaking bricks and boards with the edge of your hand: Now I ask you, did you ever see a brick or a board pick a fight with anybody? This is gimmick stuff. A human being doesn’t just stand there and wait to be hit.” Pg. 38
“The traditional teacher says, ‘if your opponent does this, then you do this, and then you do this, and then you do this and then you do this.’ And while you are remembering all the ‘and thens’ the other guy is killing you.” Pg. 38
“I’ve lost faith in the Chinese classical arts-though I still call mine Chinese-because basically all styles are products of dry-land swimming, even the Wing Chun school. So my line of training is more toward efficient street fighting with everything goes; wearing head gear, gloves, chest guard, shin/knee guards, etc. For the past five years now I’ve been training the hardest and for a purpose, not just dissipated hit-miss training.” Pg. 53
“I stress again, I have not created or invented any kind of martial art. Jeet Kune Do is derived from what I have learned, plus my evaluation of it. Thus, my JKD is not confined by any kind of martial arts. On the contrary, I welcome those who like JKD to study and improve it.” Pg. 55
“Jeet Kune Do uses all ways and is bound by none, and likewise uses any technique or means which serves its end. Efficiency is anything that scores.” Pg. 55
“Of my art-gung fu and Jeet Kune Do-only one of 10,000 can handle it. It is martial art. Complete offensive attacks. It is silly to think almost anyone can learn it. It isn’t really contemporary forms of the art I teach. Mainly that which I work with-martial attack. It is really a smooth rhythmic expressing of smashing the guy before he hits you, with any method available.” Pg. 59
“I’m telling you it’s difficult to have a rehearsed routine to fit in with broken rhythm.” Pg. 61
“In attacking, you must never be halfhearted. Your main concern is with the correct and most determined execution of your offensive. You should be like a steel spring ready at the slightest opening to set the explosive charge of your dynamic attack.” Pg. 65
“There is always a temptation to rely too much on a small repertoire of favorite strokes which particularly suit one’s temperament or physical advantages. This must be resisted if one is to progress beyond a few initial successes in battle and, indeed, to enjoy fighting with all its subtlety, speed, and variety to the full. You must be able to exploit a wide variety of strokes and tactics, even though some movements will always suit your game best.” Pg. 99
“To be a first-class fighter, you must be able to box or slug efficiently. You must be a two-way fighter.” Pg. 119
“In comparisons of strength, the stronger one will certainly beat the weaker one. However, if the weaker one fights with all his effort and finally loses; his courage can win admiration from the stronger. Thus, one of the most important factors in fighting is morale.” Pg. 134
“In practicing Jeet Kune Do, we must practice swiftly and actively. But in real fighting, we have to keep our brain calm. Don’t let your mind be conquered by stupid thoughts. Just regard the fighting as if it were nothing.” Pg. 134
“Practice makes perfect. After a long time of practicing, our footwork will become natural, skillful, swift, and steady.” Pg. 134
“Many people make a big mistake in fighting against an enemy by thinking too much about winning or losing. Practically speaking, they should allow none of these sentiments to invade their mind. They need only to act as circumstances demand. When they act naturally, their hands and feet will suitably function.” Pg. 135
“Forget about fancy horse stances, of ‘moving the horse,’ fancy forms, pressure, locking, etc. All these will promote your mechanical aspects rather than help you. You will be bound by these unnatural rhythmic messes, and when you are in combat it is broken rhythm and timing you have to adjust to. The opponent is not going to do things rhythmically with you as you would do in practicing a kata alone or with a partner.” Pg. 183
“The leg is the more powerful weapon but, ultimately, the man who can punch better will be the one who will win.” Pg. 206
“The force of our fists must originate from the dynamic power of our waist and back. Of course, the amount of force is determined by the strength of the practitioner’s muscles and his weight. If two men of different weight are equal in strength of muscle and both know the technique of using their energy, then certainly the heavier one is in a more advantageous position.” Pg. 206
The advantages of the lead punch
1. Faster-the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
2. More accurate-‘chooses the straightest course,’ thus, less chance of missing and is surer than other punches.
3. Balance is less disturbed-safer.
4. Less injurious to one’s hand.
5. Greater frequency of hits-more damage can be done.
“Jogging is not only a form of exercise to me, it is also a form of relaxation. It is my own hour every morning when I can be alone with my own thoughts.” Pg. 323
“It is not a shame to be knocked down by other people. The important thing is to ask when you’re being knocked down, ‘Why am I being knocked down?’ If a person can reflect in this way, then there is hope for this person.” Pg. 328
“Constant drilling on classical blocks and thrusts desensitizes oneself, making one’s creativity duller and duller.” Pg. 330
“To free yourself, observe closely what you normally practice. Do not condemn or approve; merely observe.” Pg. 334
“Living generally means living in imitation and therefore in fear.” Pg. 334
“Truth comes when your mind and heart are purged of all sense of striving and you are no longer trying to become somebody; it is there when the mind is very quiet, listening timelessly to everything.” Pg. 336
“Being oneself leads to real relationships.” Pg. 336
“Accept the other person’s feelings.” Pg. 337
“Only the self-sufficient stand alone-most people follow the crowd and imitate.” Pg. 337
“There is intelligence when you are not afraid. There can be no initiative if one has fear. And fear compels us to cling to tradition, gurus, etc. The important thing for you is to be alert, to question, to find out, so that your own initiative may be awakened. Understanding.” Pg. 339
“Tradition=the habit-forming mechanism of the mind.” Pg. 339
“The poorer we are inwardly, the more we try to enrich ourselves outwardly.” Pg. 339
“Sensitivity is not possible if you are afraid of this, that, etc.-the inner authority game. Authority destroys intelligence.” Pg. 339
“One must not merely copy but try to convey the significance of what you see.” Pg. 339
“Books, teachers, parents, the society around us, all tell us what to think, but not how to think.” Pg. 339
“What is the point of being educated, of learning to read and write, if you are going to carry on like a machine? After all, it is merely the root to function from.” Pg. 339
“The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. Just let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.” Pg. 342
“The process of maturing does not mean to become captive of conceptualization. It is to come to the realization of what lies in our innermost selves.” Pg. 342
“Instead of looking directly at the fact, cling to forms (theories) and go on entangling oneself further and further, finally putting oneself into an inextricable snare.” Pg. 342
“To meditate means to realize the imperturbability of one’s original nature. Meditation means to be free from all phenomena and calmness means to be internally unperturbed. There will be calmness when one is free from external objects and is not perturbed.” Pg. 344
“Have no mind that selects or rejects. To be without deliberate mind is to have no thoughts.” Pg. 345
“To me, ultimately, martial art means honestly expressing yourself. Now it is a very difficult thing to do. I mean it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with a cocky feeling and feel, like, pretty cool and all that. Or I can make all kinds of phony things, you see what I mean? And be blinded by it. Or I can show you some really fancy movement-but, to express oneself honestly, not lying to oneself-and to express myself honestly-that, my friend, is very hard to do.” Pg. 349
“When I look around, I always learn something, and that is: to always be yourself. And to express yourself, to have faith in yourself. Do not go out and look for a successful person and duplicate him. That seems to be the prevalent thing happening in Hong Kong. They always copy mannerisms, they never start from the root of their being: that is, how can I be m?” pg. 349
“Not every man can take lessons to be a good fighter. He must be a person who is able to relate his training to the circumstances he encounters. Self-actualization is the important thing. And my personal message to people is that I hope they will go toward self-actualization rather than self-image actualization. I hope they will search within themselves for honest self-expression.” Pg. 350
“Be flexible so you can change with change.” Pg. 351
“My only sure reward is in my actions and not from them. The quality of my reward is in the depth of my response-the centralness of the part of me I act from.” Pg. 351
“I feel I have this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence, greater than determination, greater than vision. It is all of these combined. My brain becomes magnetized with this dominating force which I hold in my hand.” pg. 352
“Whether it is the godhead or not, I feel this great force, this untapped power, this dynamic something within me. This feeling defies description, and there is no experience with which this feeling may be compared. It is something like a strong emotion mixed with faith but stronger.” pg. 352
“All in all, the goal of my planning and doing is to find the true meaning in life-peace of mind. I know that the sum of all the possessions I mentioned does not necessarily add up to peace of mind; however, it can be if I devote to real accomplishment of self rather than neurotic combat. In order to achieve this peace of mind, the teaching of detachment of Taoism and Zen proved to be valuable.” Pg. 353
“Classical methods and tradition make the mind a slave-you are no longer an individual, but merely a product. Your mind is the result of a thousand yesterdays.” Pg. 356
“Intensity and/or enthusiasm is this god within us-one that instinctively becomes the art of the physical ‘becoming’ and within this transition we no longer care to know what life means. We are indeed furnishing the ‘what is’ by simply being.” Pg. 358
“Simplicity is the beginning of art, and the beginning of nature.” Pg. 358
“Recognizing the influence of my subconscious mind over my power of will, I shall take care to submit to it a clear and definite picture of my major purpose in life and all minor purposes leading to my major purpose, and I shall keep this picture constantly before my subconscious mind by repeating it daily.” Pg. 361
“Things live by moving and gain strength as they go.” Pg. 361
“You will never get more out of this life than you expect.” Pg. 362
“Keep your mind on the things you want and off those you don’t.” pg. 362
“Be a calm beholder of what’s happening around you.” Pg. 362
“There is a difference-a. the world; b. our vision of or reaction to it.” Pg. 362
“The aphorism ‘as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he’ contains the secret of life. James Allen further added, ‘A man is literally what he thinks.’ This might be a shocking statement, but everything is a state of mind. I ran across some very interesting passages in a magazine and I’m writing them down to let you read it.” Pg. 362
“I’ve always been buffeted by circumstances because I thought of myself as a human being of outside condition. Now I realize that I am the power that commands the feeling of my mind and from which circumstances grow.” Pg. 362
“Defeat is also a state of mind; no one is ever defeated until defeat has been accepted as reality. To me, defeat in anything is merely temporary, and its punishment is but an urge for me to greater effort to achieve my goal. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth.” Pg. 363
“Faith, too, is a state of mind. It can be induced or created by affirmation or repeated instructions to the subconscious mind through the principle of autosuggestion. This is the only known method of voluntary development of the emotion of faith. It is a well-known fact that one comes, finally, to believe whatever one repeats to one’s self, whether the statement be true or false. If a man repeats a lie over and over, he will eventually accept the lie as truth. Moreover, he’ll believe it to be the truth. Every man is what he is because of the dominating thoughts which he permits to occupy his mind.” Pg. 364
“The mind is like a fertile garden, it will grow anything you wish to plant-beautiful flowers or weeds. And so it is with successful, healthy thoughts or with negative ones that will, like weeds, strangle and crowd the others. Do not allow negative thoughts to enter your mind for they are the weeds that strangle confidence.” Pg. 364
“I’ll give you my secret for ridding my mind of negative thoughts. When such a thought enters my mind, I visualize it as being written on a piece of paper. Then I mentally light it on fire and visualize it burning to a crisp. The negative thought is destroyed, never to enter my mind again.” Pg.364-365
“Visualize success rather than failure, by believing ‘I can do it’ rather than ‘I can’t.’ Negative thoughts are overpowering only if you encourage them and allow yourself to be overpowered by them.” Pg. 365
“We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But sometimes it seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents.” Pg. 365
“Here I ask you, are you going to make your obstacles stepping stones to your dreams or stumbling blocks-because unknowingly you let negativity, worries, fear, etc. take over?”
Pg. 365
“Believe me that in every big thing or achievement there are always obstacles, big or small, and the reaction one shows to such obstacles is what counts, not the obstacle itself. There is no such thing as defeat until you admit so yourself-but not until then!” pg. 365
“Don’t waste a lot of your energy in worry and anticipation. Remember my friend to enjoy your planning as well as your accomplishment, for life is too short for negative energy.” Pg. 366
“So action! Action! Never wasting energy on worries and negative thoughts. I MEAN WHO HAS THE MOST INSECURE JOB AS I HAVE? WHAT DO I LIVE ON? My faith in my ability that I’ll make it. Sure my back screwed me up good for a year but with every adversity comes a blessing because a shock acts as a reminder to oneself that we must not get stale in routine. Look at a rainstorm; after its departure, everything grows!” pg. 366
“Remember that one who is possessed by worry not only lacks the poise to solve his own problems, but by his nervousness and irritability creates problems for those around him. Well, what more can I say but DAMN THAT TORPEDO, FULL SPEED AHEAD!” pg. 366
The four idea principles:
1) Find a human need, an unsolved problem.
2) Master all of the essentials of the problem.
3) Give a new twist to an old principle.
4) Believe in your idea-and act!
Five-step idea-getting process
1) Gather materials
2) Masticate the facts.
3) Relax and drop the subject.
4) Be ready to recognize and welcome the idea when it comes.
5) Shape and develop your idea into usefulness.
“There are two ways of making a good living. One is the result of hard work, and the other, the result of imagination (requires work, too, of course). It is a fact that labor and thrift produce competence, but fortune, in the sense of wealth, is the reward of the man who can think of something that hasn’t been thought of before. In every industry, in every profession, ideas are what America is looking for. Ideas have made America what she is, and one good idea will make a man what he wants to be.” Pg. 367
“Probably, people will say I’m too conscious of success. Well, I am not. You see, my will to do springs from the knowledge that I can do. I’m only being natural, for there is no fear or doubt inside my mind.” Pg. 368
“If you don’t aim at an object, how the heck on earth do you think you can get it?” Pg. 368
“All riches begin as a state of mind. And you have complete control of your mind.” Pg. 368
“What you are is because of your habits of thought.” Pg. 368
“Repetition of thought-emotionalized with burning desire.” Pg. 368
“When you drop a pebble into a pool of water, the pebble starts a series of ripples that expand until they encompass the whole pool. This is exactly what will happen when I give my ideas a definite plan of action.” Pg. 368
“A positive mental attitude attracts wealth.” Pg. 369
“Thoughts backed by faith will overcome all problems.” Pg. 369
“The spiritual power of man’s will removes all obstacles.” Pg. 370
“Daily habitual practice-backed by faith.” Pg. 369
“Ideas are the beginning of all achievement.” Pg. 369
“Every circumstance of every man’s life is the result of a definite cause-mode and control yours.” Pg. 369
“Defeat is not defeat unless accepted as a reality-in your own mind.” Pg. 370
“The power can be created and maintained through daily practice-continuous effort.” Pg. 370
“Reading-the mental food (specialized reading).” Pg. 371
“Faith is a state of mind that can be conditioned through self-discipline. Faith will accomplish.” Pg. 371
“Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man’s mind can conceive and believe.” Pg. 371
“The possession of anything begins in the mind.” Pg. 371
“Your state of mind is everything.” Pg. 372
“Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.” Pg. 372
“Persistence, persistence, and persistence.” Pg. 372
“Every man today is the result of his thoughts yesterday.” Pg. 372
“Faith backed by action-applied faith.” Pg. 372
“Your mental attitude is what counts.” Pg. 372
“What you are is because of established habits of thoughts and deeds.” Pg. 372
“He is because he thinks he is-positive or negative.” Pg. 372
“The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.” Pg. 372
“When you look after your thoughts, your thoughts will look after you-magnetize them with positivity.” Pg. 372
“Habits are due to repetition.” Pg. 372
“The ego is fixed entirely by the application of self-suggestion.” Pg. 373
“The subconscious mind favors thoughts inspired by emotional feelings. It also gives preference to dominating thoughts.” Pg. 372
The six-step creative method
1) Develop the creative attitude.
2) Analyze, to focus on the unwanted solution.
3) Seek out and fill your mind with the facts.
4) Write down ideas, sensible and seemingly wild.
5) Let facts and ideas simmer in your mind.
6) Evaluate, recheck, settle on the creative ideas.
“Despair is the conclusion of fools.” Pg. 374
“What is defeat? Nothing but education, nothing but the first step to something better.” Pg. 375
“Damn the ‘15th degree red-belt holders,’ the ‘honorary supermasters’ and those ‘experts’ that graduated from the advanced-super-three-easy-lessons courses!” pg. 376
“False teachers of the way use flowery words.” Pg. 377
“Remember no man is really defeated unless he is discouraged.” Pg. 377
“It is not what happens that is success or failure, but what it does to the heart of man.” Pg. 377
“Genius is the capacity to see and to express what is simple, simply.” Pg. 377
“Remember my friend, everything goes to those who aim to get. Low aim is the biggest crime a man has.” Pg. 378
“One will never get any more than he thinks he can get. You have what it takes. Look back and see your progress-damn the torpedo, full speed ahead.” Pg. 378
“The string is broken and time passes on. Meet again we may, but will it be in the same way? With the same sentiments? With the same feelings? Rarely.” Pg. 378
“Don’t regret the past, but make the most of the hours that last and don’t worry over the day that is well on its way.” Pg. 379
“Self-will seems to be the only virtue that takes no account of manmade laws.” Pg. 380
“Among people, a great majority don’t feel comfortable at all with the unknown-that is, anything foreign that threatens their daily protected mold. So, for the sake of security, they construct chosen patterns to justify.” Pg. 388
Showing posts with label Celebrity Quotes and Excerpts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Celebrity Quotes and Excerpts. Show all posts
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Vince Neil Dishes it Out!!!
If one was to attempt to choose one individual who epitomized the glory days of the heavy metal LA scene in the 1980’s, one couldn’t go wrong by picking Vince Neil. Blond, boisterous and bursting with more charisma than James Bond, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt put together, this native Californian served as the high-pitched vocalist for the infamous Mötley Crüe, a band probably known more for its exploits off stage than on. Here are some quotes taken from Vince’s autobiography titled Tattoos & Tequila (ISBN: 978-0-446-54804-5). Enjoy!
“I was born Vince Neil Wharton on February 8, 1961, in the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles County. My mom, the former Shirley Ortiz, is half Mexican and half white. My dad, Clois Odell Wharton-known as Odie-is half native American. Some people would say that makes me biracial or tri-racial or whatever. But I consider myself Californian. Even though I don’t actually live there anymore, I feel like that’s my home. I’ve always thought that people from California should carry a special passport. We’re a special breed-for better or worse. They used to call California the Land of Fruits and Nuts. I just call it home.” Pg. 22
“Basically, I confess, I was always a terrible student-with the exception of Mrs. Anderson’s class. To be honest, I had a hard time even writing a simple sentence. I found out eventually that I had dyslexia, but not really bad-I can read okay, though I don’t prefer to. I’m just so slow when it comes to reading. When I write it’s worse. When I go to write something down it really takes me a while because I will mix up numbers and it’s just, it takes me forever.” Pg. 41
“Meanwhile, my friend John Marshall and I started going to this roller-skating rink not far from school. We would try to pick up girls there. For some reason we got it in mind to sign up for this lip-synching contest they had. We really got into it. We dressed up in bell-bottom flares and polyester shirts. Some people say we wore huge wigs, but I don’t remember that part. We did a Bachman Turner Overdrive song, “Let it Ride.” It was like air guitar-type stuff. That’s when I realized I liked to perform. I jumped around on stage, danced, threw the microphone around. The crowd ate it up. Particularly the girls. Not only did we win our first contest-I got laid that night.” Pg. 51
“A big milestone of high school for me was the time, during freshman year, that somebody stole my surfboard racks. His name was Horace. He was an asshole. A football player. This one time I came out to my truck at lunchtime and I noticed that somebody had stolen my racks. I’m pretty sure I was amped up on speed and dust at the time. This was just, like, before shop class. Being pissed off, I obsessively looked in everybody’s car until I found my surfboard racks in the back of this guy Horace’s car. Horace was a barrel-chested muscle head who was constantly victimizing underclassmen and anyone else who came within range of his beady eyes. I went looking for him and found him inside school, walking with a bunch of football players in the hallway. I confronted him, you know? I was, like, ‘Did you fuckin’ take my surf racks, you fuckin’ asshole? He looked at me and lied to my face. He was like, ‘No. Fuck you.” So I go, ‘You know what? Fuck you, you motherfucker.’ And boom! I fucked punched him in the face and knocked him out cold. I was suspended for two weeks. But when I got back…The funny thing was…all the football players liked me after that. They hated that guy. I became like an honorary jock.” Pg. 53-54
“After I made the baseball team, the coach told me I had to cut my hair if I wanted to play. I thought about it. I really did. By my hair was pretty important to me then, as now. It was long, down below my shoulders, a sandy blonde color. I wanted to play ball, but I didn’t want to, you know what I mean? What I really didn’t want was to become one of the jocks, I didn’t want to alter my appearance. I didn’t want to have to change the person I was. I just wanted to play ball. (Not to mention the fact that I was good enough to make their team, right? And as a freshman.) But I wasn’t going to cut my hair. No way. So that was it. I quit the team. Who knows? If I decided to cut my hair I could’ve been a pro ballplayer. Maybe my life would have went that way. But I decided to keep my hair-I made the choice about what was important to me. And wouldn’t you know: It was literally my hair that ended up getting me into rock ‘n’ roll.” Pg.55
“Growing up, I never thought for a minute I’d end up in music, I had no idea what I wanted to be. I never even thought about it. Sure there were daydreams. What kid in those days didn’t imagine what it would be like to be Magic Johnson, Buzz Aldrin, Mick Jagger? But me ending up where I did? I would have bet a million dollars against it. I know all my teachers would have, too. And probably my parents if you asked. Let’s face it. I was going nowhere fast.” Pg. 56
“It all started when James Alverson showed up in school. He was a transfer. This was the beginning of my junior year at Charter Oak High School, a month or so before my son, Neil, was born. James was a long-haired rocker guy-he looked like a surfer, you know, with blond curly hair. He fit right in. I’d seen him in the hallway, but that was kind of it. Never talked to him. Never gave him one minute’s thought. He was just the new kid in school, you know? He was obviously a guitar player; he wanted everyone to know. He carried his axe with him wherever he went; he was always playing it. One day he comes up right out of nowhere asks me ‘Would you like to sing in a band?’ And I’m like ‘Why did you ask?’ And he’s like, “’cause you have the longest hair in school.” Pg. 57
“People ask me all the time how I became a singer. It’s a good question. I never sang in the school choir. I don’t really remember ever going to church. I never even sang in the shower. Nobody in my family sings. I never took a lesson. I never knew what I was doing. Basically, I just faked it from the jump. When I think about it now, I guess I just built on the lip-synching-I had the act down; all I needed was the voice to go with it. It was all about the attitude. What they call ‘selling the song’. Out of that came the voice-not that this was conscious on my part. I didn’t even think about it. I just did it. That’s pretty much another subtitle for this book; it kind of defines my whole life. I didn’t even think about; I just did it. So it was with singing too.” Pg 58
“Back then, at these weekend parties, we weren’t doing it because we imagined someday we’d be rock stars. At least I didn’t. James wanted to be a rock star and he made no bones about it. But for me, in high school (and really, in a way, for the rest of my life), being in a band meant free beer and a steady supply of girls. That’s why I was into it. Girls wanted to get with the guys onstage, especially the singer. That was pretty much it. What else was important in high school? That was my entire reason for getting into a band. Fate has obviously been at work on me. To some degree, I’m the object lesson: What happens to someone who always takes the path of least resistance? I’ve never been the type to swim upstream. It’s just too much effort. I don’t want to hassle. I’d just as soon cut bait.” Pg. 60
“Say what you want about me, I’ve always stayed true to the music I love. I never tried to change with the times; I never rode the trends-well, there was that solo album with the Dust Brothers, but that was more of a case of ‘before its time.” Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s for you-you know what I mean? I know who I am as a performer. I sing rock music. That’s what I do. I knew it then and I know it now. Like somebody once said: ‘Keep it simple, stupid.’ It works for me.” Pg. 61
“Needing a handle for this lofty enterprise, we started throwing names around almost immediately-the idea was to find a commonly used word or phrase, something we could kind of turn upside down, you know, something that would have some shock value, or so Nikki conceived, another one of his high concept ideas. Mick suggested Mottley Cru. He’d been saving the name for, like, five years; it had come to him one night like a vision as he was rehearsing with his old band Whitehorse. We were a motley crew, there was no doubt about it, a foursome of high school dropouts dedicated only to partying and music. Nikki took to the name immediately, but he hated Mick’s spelling. Instead he made it ‘Motley Crue,’ which he felt was more symmetrical or something. Inspired by the typography on the logo of the beer we were drinking, this friend of Mick’s, a guy named Stick, suggested adding an umlaut over the o to give it a militant, German feel. Nikki took it one step further and added the umlaut over the u as well. Mötley Crüe was launched.” Pg. 89-90
“Having a manager is like a necessary evil. In the business world, nobody will do business with you as an artist unless you have a manager. It doesn’t matter who you are, you could be Mick Jagger or fuckin’ Paul McCartney and they’re like, ‘Yes, you’re the greatest, I love you, now lemme talk to your manager.’ They don’t take us seriously. I don’t know if it’s a good ole boy system or what it is, but that’s the way it is.” Pg. 109
“When you listen to Queen or the Cars, the sound is very polished. But Mötley Crüe didn’t need to be polished. You polish it up too much and it loses the rawness. I think I can honestly say that we made up for not having the greatest talent in the world with having great attitude and delivery. It’s that entertainment thing again. A lot of the critics say-and I agree-that the first album we did ourselves was better. It had real emotion to it; RTB took all that out of it. I just felt his production techniques were way too polished for how a Mötley Crüe record should sound. And I still think it sounds terrible to this day. Sorry, Roy. Fact is fact, man.” Pg. 112
“Mostly by word of mouth, Too Fast for Love entered the Billboard chart at #157. It sold over one hundred thousand copies right out of the gate. The record company fat cats might not know what fucking day it is half the time, but the fans vote with their wallets.” Pg. 113
“I was living in Redondo Beach and I was driving to my apartment. It was just a beautiful summer day, like always near the beach. Amazing waves, amazing blue sky, that great cool breeze. And then ‘Live Wire’ comes on the radio. I stopped the car. I was like, Oh my god. But I didn’t…there was nobody…I couldn’t….There were no cell phones then. I was all by myself and there was nobody to call and nothing to do. I was just sitting there by myself, you know, thinking. Holy shit, that’s me on the radio. Yeah. Yeah! I was sitting in Beth’s orange 240Z. Or maybe it was a 260. I always get those confused. But yeah, man. I heard it come on and it was just greater than anything you could describe. It was a pretty proud moment. It was very surreal.” Pg. 129
“We were fucking playing our asses off. I mean we weren’t blowing Kiss away, but we were definitely, like, competition. People were loving us. Which apparently pissed the fuck out of Gene Simmons. He did not like it one bit that these nobodies were hogging the spotlight. At least that’s what I heard. He never hung out with us. There was maybe this little, like, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ But that was basically it. They didn’t stand around and watch us play. We were basically, you know almost still a club band. But we were just doing really good. Every show there were a lot of people there to see us. Most time, people don’t give a shit about the opening act. They come late because all they want to see is the headliner. Which was still the same with the Kiss tour, but there were a lot of people there to see us, way more than it would usually be.” Pg. 137
“In September 1986, we signed a six-plus album deal with Elektra. I don’t know how much money we got, but it was a lot. Suddenly I was rich.” Pg. 184
“When we hit Japan things just got even crazier. There’s something about the Japanese-they were so polite and worshipful that I think it made you want to act out even more than usual. The stories about that trip are well known-if not exactly accurate. It is true that the first official happening of our Japanese tour was Tommy getting busted by customs officials at the airport; they found some marijuana in his drum kit. Luckily, he was saved by our Japanese promoter, who managed to smooth things over without any changes being laid.” Pg. 188
“One thing a lot of people don’t know about me is that for years I studied Tang Soo Do, a Korean martial art, I have a red belt. Which isn’t a black, I know, but I can still kick some ass if I want, I have the arrest record to prove it.” Pg. 199
“As G N’ R was playing, I made my way back to the wings. When Izzy came offstage, I was like, ‘Hey! You fucked with my wife’-or something like that. I don’t remember the exact words I said, but I said something. And he’s like, ‘Fuck you!’ And then I’m like, ‘Yeah really!’ And then I fucking hit him with a solid right and he went down. He was out cold. Suddenly there was security everywhere-these awards shows are lousy with moonlighting cops and other paid thugs. It was a fucking madhouse. Finally they take me into custody or whatever; there’s a guard on either side, holding an arm. That’s when big, tough Axl Rose comes up. He’s so brave with cops holding me back. He’s like, ‘I’m going to fuckin’ kill. How could you hit my guitar player?’ What a fuckin’ puss. I’m like, ‘I’ll fucking go right fuckin’ now, bitch!’ And then security dragged me away.” Pg. 199-200
“As you might remember, this started a whole feud. I don’t even know how Axl got into it. This had nothing to do with Axl. It was between me and Izzy. And as far as I was concerned, the Izzy shit was over. But Axl goes to the press and starts running his mouth, saying that I sucker punched Izzy and all this other shit. Fuckin’ Axl-I had taken that ungrateful motherfucker under my wing when they were touring with us on the Girls tour. I helped him out with his throat when he was having problems; I showed him a few tricks to help his voice. And here he is, challenging me to fight him. He came up with several different challenges. He’d say Tower Records on Sunset. He’d say the boardwalk at Venice Beach. I actually went a few times, but fuckin’ Axl never showed up. Meanwhile, Izzy called me and apologized for his behavior.” Pg. 200
“First of all, let me tell you, when they issued this, the racing season was over. I wasn’t even driving at the time. Then they blame my tardiness all the time? Are you fuckin’ kidding me? There was a fuckin’ storm that day-did they mention that in the press release? Was I racing cars that day? They just wanted an excuse to get rid of me. It was a them-or-me situation-and it’s always been that way, since the accident days. It’s always them against me. They’re just not nice people. They don’t know what friends really are. They think friends are, ‘what can you do for me?’ It’s like Tommy and Nikki were the center of things and Mick was the yes-man. Mick always agreed with whatever Nikki and Tommy said.” Pg. 295
“If I told you the breakup of Mötley Crüe didn’t affect me, I’d be lying. At first I was pissed, especially about the way they announced it on Valentine’s Day and said I was ‘the only Crüe member who didn’t regularly participate in the song writing process.’ That’s pretty funny, because when you look at the songs, all the hits, you see the name Neil there. I wrote the melody for ‘Home Sweet Home.’ I wrote the melody for ‘Same Ol’ Situation.’ You look at all my songwriting credits and there can be only one conclusion. Fuck yeah, he contributed.” Pg. 207
“Kovac remained calm while I went through my rant. Once I finished, he looked at me calmly. ‘Vince,’ he said, ‘you can get as angry as you want with me, but you have to ask yourself, are you a star as a solo artist?’ I answered him with a glare. He knew he had me. Okay, so I hadn’t exactly been filling arenas with the Vince Neil Band. One tour had to be closed halfway through ‘cause we were spending more than we were making. Kovac continued. ‘In the environment of four guys in a band called Mötley Crüe, you are a real star. The audience that comes to see you gets its money’s worth. Is the audience that comes to see the Vince Neil Band really getting what it pays for? The same, he went on to say, was true of Mötley Crüe without me in the lineup. The paying public had voted resoundingly, as was evidenced by sales and critical reviews.” Pg. 249
“Nobody tells me anything. I swear to you. When I have my tombstone they can put that on the B side. “Nobody Told Him Anything.” I’m not sure what I want on the front. That line hasn’t been written yet. You know when the new Motley Crue album came out, the new Greatest Hits? I had no fuckin’ idea that was coming out. It was funny. I was doing this interview with some reporter and they go, ‘So tell us about the new Motley’s Greatest Hits album.” And I go, ‘What are you talking about?’ Nobody told me I had an album coming out. It happens that way all the time.” Pg. 2
“The funny thing is, I really do take pride in being early. I am usually always early. I’ve always been early to everything I’ve ever done. Seriously, that’s why I thought it was pretty hilarious when Motley said they fired me that first time ‘cause I was chronically late for rehearsals. Dude, I am never late for shit.” Pg. 2
“Mel Gibson is a cool guy, no matter what anybody says. Some people drink and a switch goes off. I know it does for me. They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Believe me, they’re telling the truth. I got to know Mel a little bit during my years living in Malibu-I think we drank together a few times at moonshadows.” Pg. 5
“I know, I know. I was the last one to join the band. I’m just the singer. I’m just the entertainer. I’m the person in front; I’m not the one bringing the songs. But I don’t care about all that. I don’t mind if somebody else writes the songs. It’s my job to interpret the songs, to sell them, to sing the shit out of them. To perform them and make them memorable enough to sell 80 million copies.” Pg. 14
“I was born Vince Neil Wharton on February 8, 1961, in the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles County. My mom, the former Shirley Ortiz, is half Mexican and half white. My dad, Clois Odell Wharton-known as Odie-is half native American. Some people would say that makes me biracial or tri-racial or whatever. But I consider myself Californian. Even though I don’t actually live there anymore, I feel like that’s my home. I’ve always thought that people from California should carry a special passport. We’re a special breed-for better or worse. They used to call California the Land of Fruits and Nuts. I just call it home.” Pg. 22
“Basically, I confess, I was always a terrible student-with the exception of Mrs. Anderson’s class. To be honest, I had a hard time even writing a simple sentence. I found out eventually that I had dyslexia, but not really bad-I can read okay, though I don’t prefer to. I’m just so slow when it comes to reading. When I write it’s worse. When I go to write something down it really takes me a while because I will mix up numbers and it’s just, it takes me forever.” Pg. 41
“Meanwhile, my friend John Marshall and I started going to this roller-skating rink not far from school. We would try to pick up girls there. For some reason we got it in mind to sign up for this lip-synching contest they had. We really got into it. We dressed up in bell-bottom flares and polyester shirts. Some people say we wore huge wigs, but I don’t remember that part. We did a Bachman Turner Overdrive song, “Let it Ride.” It was like air guitar-type stuff. That’s when I realized I liked to perform. I jumped around on stage, danced, threw the microphone around. The crowd ate it up. Particularly the girls. Not only did we win our first contest-I got laid that night.” Pg. 51
“A big milestone of high school for me was the time, during freshman year, that somebody stole my surfboard racks. His name was Horace. He was an asshole. A football player. This one time I came out to my truck at lunchtime and I noticed that somebody had stolen my racks. I’m pretty sure I was amped up on speed and dust at the time. This was just, like, before shop class. Being pissed off, I obsessively looked in everybody’s car until I found my surfboard racks in the back of this guy Horace’s car. Horace was a barrel-chested muscle head who was constantly victimizing underclassmen and anyone else who came within range of his beady eyes. I went looking for him and found him inside school, walking with a bunch of football players in the hallway. I confronted him, you know? I was, like, ‘Did you fuckin’ take my surf racks, you fuckin’ asshole? He looked at me and lied to my face. He was like, ‘No. Fuck you.” So I go, ‘You know what? Fuck you, you motherfucker.’ And boom! I fucked punched him in the face and knocked him out cold. I was suspended for two weeks. But when I got back…The funny thing was…all the football players liked me after that. They hated that guy. I became like an honorary jock.” Pg. 53-54
“After I made the baseball team, the coach told me I had to cut my hair if I wanted to play. I thought about it. I really did. By my hair was pretty important to me then, as now. It was long, down below my shoulders, a sandy blonde color. I wanted to play ball, but I didn’t want to, you know what I mean? What I really didn’t want was to become one of the jocks, I didn’t want to alter my appearance. I didn’t want to have to change the person I was. I just wanted to play ball. (Not to mention the fact that I was good enough to make their team, right? And as a freshman.) But I wasn’t going to cut my hair. No way. So that was it. I quit the team. Who knows? If I decided to cut my hair I could’ve been a pro ballplayer. Maybe my life would have went that way. But I decided to keep my hair-I made the choice about what was important to me. And wouldn’t you know: It was literally my hair that ended up getting me into rock ‘n’ roll.” Pg.55
“Growing up, I never thought for a minute I’d end up in music, I had no idea what I wanted to be. I never even thought about it. Sure there were daydreams. What kid in those days didn’t imagine what it would be like to be Magic Johnson, Buzz Aldrin, Mick Jagger? But me ending up where I did? I would have bet a million dollars against it. I know all my teachers would have, too. And probably my parents if you asked. Let’s face it. I was going nowhere fast.” Pg. 56
“It all started when James Alverson showed up in school. He was a transfer. This was the beginning of my junior year at Charter Oak High School, a month or so before my son, Neil, was born. James was a long-haired rocker guy-he looked like a surfer, you know, with blond curly hair. He fit right in. I’d seen him in the hallway, but that was kind of it. Never talked to him. Never gave him one minute’s thought. He was just the new kid in school, you know? He was obviously a guitar player; he wanted everyone to know. He carried his axe with him wherever he went; he was always playing it. One day he comes up right out of nowhere asks me ‘Would you like to sing in a band?’ And I’m like ‘Why did you ask?’ And he’s like, “’cause you have the longest hair in school.” Pg. 57
“People ask me all the time how I became a singer. It’s a good question. I never sang in the school choir. I don’t really remember ever going to church. I never even sang in the shower. Nobody in my family sings. I never took a lesson. I never knew what I was doing. Basically, I just faked it from the jump. When I think about it now, I guess I just built on the lip-synching-I had the act down; all I needed was the voice to go with it. It was all about the attitude. What they call ‘selling the song’. Out of that came the voice-not that this was conscious on my part. I didn’t even think about it. I just did it. That’s pretty much another subtitle for this book; it kind of defines my whole life. I didn’t even think about; I just did it. So it was with singing too.” Pg 58
“Back then, at these weekend parties, we weren’t doing it because we imagined someday we’d be rock stars. At least I didn’t. James wanted to be a rock star and he made no bones about it. But for me, in high school (and really, in a way, for the rest of my life), being in a band meant free beer and a steady supply of girls. That’s why I was into it. Girls wanted to get with the guys onstage, especially the singer. That was pretty much it. What else was important in high school? That was my entire reason for getting into a band. Fate has obviously been at work on me. To some degree, I’m the object lesson: What happens to someone who always takes the path of least resistance? I’ve never been the type to swim upstream. It’s just too much effort. I don’t want to hassle. I’d just as soon cut bait.” Pg. 60
“Say what you want about me, I’ve always stayed true to the music I love. I never tried to change with the times; I never rode the trends-well, there was that solo album with the Dust Brothers, but that was more of a case of ‘before its time.” Just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s for you-you know what I mean? I know who I am as a performer. I sing rock music. That’s what I do. I knew it then and I know it now. Like somebody once said: ‘Keep it simple, stupid.’ It works for me.” Pg. 61
“Needing a handle for this lofty enterprise, we started throwing names around almost immediately-the idea was to find a commonly used word or phrase, something we could kind of turn upside down, you know, something that would have some shock value, or so Nikki conceived, another one of his high concept ideas. Mick suggested Mottley Cru. He’d been saving the name for, like, five years; it had come to him one night like a vision as he was rehearsing with his old band Whitehorse. We were a motley crew, there was no doubt about it, a foursome of high school dropouts dedicated only to partying and music. Nikki took to the name immediately, but he hated Mick’s spelling. Instead he made it ‘Motley Crue,’ which he felt was more symmetrical or something. Inspired by the typography on the logo of the beer we were drinking, this friend of Mick’s, a guy named Stick, suggested adding an umlaut over the o to give it a militant, German feel. Nikki took it one step further and added the umlaut over the u as well. Mötley Crüe was launched.” Pg. 89-90
“Having a manager is like a necessary evil. In the business world, nobody will do business with you as an artist unless you have a manager. It doesn’t matter who you are, you could be Mick Jagger or fuckin’ Paul McCartney and they’re like, ‘Yes, you’re the greatest, I love you, now lemme talk to your manager.’ They don’t take us seriously. I don’t know if it’s a good ole boy system or what it is, but that’s the way it is.” Pg. 109
“When you listen to Queen or the Cars, the sound is very polished. But Mötley Crüe didn’t need to be polished. You polish it up too much and it loses the rawness. I think I can honestly say that we made up for not having the greatest talent in the world with having great attitude and delivery. It’s that entertainment thing again. A lot of the critics say-and I agree-that the first album we did ourselves was better. It had real emotion to it; RTB took all that out of it. I just felt his production techniques were way too polished for how a Mötley Crüe record should sound. And I still think it sounds terrible to this day. Sorry, Roy. Fact is fact, man.” Pg. 112
“Mostly by word of mouth, Too Fast for Love entered the Billboard chart at #157. It sold over one hundred thousand copies right out of the gate. The record company fat cats might not know what fucking day it is half the time, but the fans vote with their wallets.” Pg. 113
“I was living in Redondo Beach and I was driving to my apartment. It was just a beautiful summer day, like always near the beach. Amazing waves, amazing blue sky, that great cool breeze. And then ‘Live Wire’ comes on the radio. I stopped the car. I was like, Oh my god. But I didn’t…there was nobody…I couldn’t….There were no cell phones then. I was all by myself and there was nobody to call and nothing to do. I was just sitting there by myself, you know, thinking. Holy shit, that’s me on the radio. Yeah. Yeah! I was sitting in Beth’s orange 240Z. Or maybe it was a 260. I always get those confused. But yeah, man. I heard it come on and it was just greater than anything you could describe. It was a pretty proud moment. It was very surreal.” Pg. 129
“We were fucking playing our asses off. I mean we weren’t blowing Kiss away, but we were definitely, like, competition. People were loving us. Which apparently pissed the fuck out of Gene Simmons. He did not like it one bit that these nobodies were hogging the spotlight. At least that’s what I heard. He never hung out with us. There was maybe this little, like, ‘Hi, how you doing?’ But that was basically it. They didn’t stand around and watch us play. We were basically, you know almost still a club band. But we were just doing really good. Every show there were a lot of people there to see us. Most time, people don’t give a shit about the opening act. They come late because all they want to see is the headliner. Which was still the same with the Kiss tour, but there were a lot of people there to see us, way more than it would usually be.” Pg. 137
“In September 1986, we signed a six-plus album deal with Elektra. I don’t know how much money we got, but it was a lot. Suddenly I was rich.” Pg. 184
“When we hit Japan things just got even crazier. There’s something about the Japanese-they were so polite and worshipful that I think it made you want to act out even more than usual. The stories about that trip are well known-if not exactly accurate. It is true that the first official happening of our Japanese tour was Tommy getting busted by customs officials at the airport; they found some marijuana in his drum kit. Luckily, he was saved by our Japanese promoter, who managed to smooth things over without any changes being laid.” Pg. 188
“One thing a lot of people don’t know about me is that for years I studied Tang Soo Do, a Korean martial art, I have a red belt. Which isn’t a black, I know, but I can still kick some ass if I want, I have the arrest record to prove it.” Pg. 199
“As G N’ R was playing, I made my way back to the wings. When Izzy came offstage, I was like, ‘Hey! You fucked with my wife’-or something like that. I don’t remember the exact words I said, but I said something. And he’s like, ‘Fuck you!’ And then I’m like, ‘Yeah really!’ And then I fucking hit him with a solid right and he went down. He was out cold. Suddenly there was security everywhere-these awards shows are lousy with moonlighting cops and other paid thugs. It was a fucking madhouse. Finally they take me into custody or whatever; there’s a guard on either side, holding an arm. That’s when big, tough Axl Rose comes up. He’s so brave with cops holding me back. He’s like, ‘I’m going to fuckin’ kill. How could you hit my guitar player?’ What a fuckin’ puss. I’m like, ‘I’ll fucking go right fuckin’ now, bitch!’ And then security dragged me away.” Pg. 199-200
“As you might remember, this started a whole feud. I don’t even know how Axl got into it. This had nothing to do with Axl. It was between me and Izzy. And as far as I was concerned, the Izzy shit was over. But Axl goes to the press and starts running his mouth, saying that I sucker punched Izzy and all this other shit. Fuckin’ Axl-I had taken that ungrateful motherfucker under my wing when they were touring with us on the Girls tour. I helped him out with his throat when he was having problems; I showed him a few tricks to help his voice. And here he is, challenging me to fight him. He came up with several different challenges. He’d say Tower Records on Sunset. He’d say the boardwalk at Venice Beach. I actually went a few times, but fuckin’ Axl never showed up. Meanwhile, Izzy called me and apologized for his behavior.” Pg. 200
“First of all, let me tell you, when they issued this, the racing season was over. I wasn’t even driving at the time. Then they blame my tardiness all the time? Are you fuckin’ kidding me? There was a fuckin’ storm that day-did they mention that in the press release? Was I racing cars that day? They just wanted an excuse to get rid of me. It was a them-or-me situation-and it’s always been that way, since the accident days. It’s always them against me. They’re just not nice people. They don’t know what friends really are. They think friends are, ‘what can you do for me?’ It’s like Tommy and Nikki were the center of things and Mick was the yes-man. Mick always agreed with whatever Nikki and Tommy said.” Pg. 295
“If I told you the breakup of Mötley Crüe didn’t affect me, I’d be lying. At first I was pissed, especially about the way they announced it on Valentine’s Day and said I was ‘the only Crüe member who didn’t regularly participate in the song writing process.’ That’s pretty funny, because when you look at the songs, all the hits, you see the name Neil there. I wrote the melody for ‘Home Sweet Home.’ I wrote the melody for ‘Same Ol’ Situation.’ You look at all my songwriting credits and there can be only one conclusion. Fuck yeah, he contributed.” Pg. 207
“Kovac remained calm while I went through my rant. Once I finished, he looked at me calmly. ‘Vince,’ he said, ‘you can get as angry as you want with me, but you have to ask yourself, are you a star as a solo artist?’ I answered him with a glare. He knew he had me. Okay, so I hadn’t exactly been filling arenas with the Vince Neil Band. One tour had to be closed halfway through ‘cause we were spending more than we were making. Kovac continued. ‘In the environment of four guys in a band called Mötley Crüe, you are a real star. The audience that comes to see you gets its money’s worth. Is the audience that comes to see the Vince Neil Band really getting what it pays for? The same, he went on to say, was true of Mötley Crüe without me in the lineup. The paying public had voted resoundingly, as was evidenced by sales and critical reviews.” Pg. 249
“Nobody tells me anything. I swear to you. When I have my tombstone they can put that on the B side. “Nobody Told Him Anything.” I’m not sure what I want on the front. That line hasn’t been written yet. You know when the new Motley Crue album came out, the new Greatest Hits? I had no fuckin’ idea that was coming out. It was funny. I was doing this interview with some reporter and they go, ‘So tell us about the new Motley’s Greatest Hits album.” And I go, ‘What are you talking about?’ Nobody told me I had an album coming out. It happens that way all the time.” Pg. 2
“The funny thing is, I really do take pride in being early. I am usually always early. I’ve always been early to everything I’ve ever done. Seriously, that’s why I thought it was pretty hilarious when Motley said they fired me that first time ‘cause I was chronically late for rehearsals. Dude, I am never late for shit.” Pg. 2
“Mel Gibson is a cool guy, no matter what anybody says. Some people drink and a switch goes off. I know it does for me. They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Believe me, they’re telling the truth. I got to know Mel a little bit during my years living in Malibu-I think we drank together a few times at moonshadows.” Pg. 5
“I know, I know. I was the last one to join the band. I’m just the singer. I’m just the entertainer. I’m the person in front; I’m not the one bringing the songs. But I don’t care about all that. I don’t mind if somebody else writes the songs. It’s my job to interpret the songs, to sell them, to sing the shit out of them. To perform them and make them memorable enough to sell 80 million copies.” Pg. 14
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Stephen King Dishes it Out!!!
Horror, fantasy and science fiction author who wrote the best-sellers Carrie, The Shining, Salem’s Lot, The Stand, Cujo, Christine, and The Dead Zone among numerous others. Every one of the titles just mentioned was also successfully portrayed on the big screen. I remember when I was around twelve or thirteen years old, I became so engrossed in The Shining that one day at the urging of my stepmother, my father literally pried that novel out of my hands and confiscated it because they thought the book’s mature contents was having an unhealthy influence on my mind. Maybe they were right. However, I hereby state for the record, that I have never axed anyone to death, yet. All of the following gems have been taken from ‘On Writing-A Memoir of the Craft.’, ISBN: 0-671-02425-6. Also, for some reason (maybe simply because she’s an Asian American just like me), I found it interesting and felt compelled to mention here that Stephen King dedicated this book to Amy Tan (author of The Joy Luck Club).
“This is a short book because most books about writing are bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do-not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit. Once notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. I’ll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style.” Pg. 11
“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.” Pg. 37
“Don’t staple manuscripts,” the postscript read. Loose pages plus paperclip equal correct way to submit copy.” This was pretty cold advice, I thought, but useful in its way. I have never stapled a manuscript since.” Pg. 40
“From a financial point of view, two kids were probably too many for college grads working in a laundry and the second shift at Dunkin’ Donuts. The only edge we had came courtesy of magazines like Dude, Cavalier, Adam, and Swank-what my Uncle Oren used to call the “ the titty books.” By 1972 they were showing quite a lot more than bare breasts and fiction was on its way out, but I was lucky enough to ride the last wave. I wrote after work; when we lived on Grove Street, which was close to the New Franklin, I would sometimes write a little on my lunch hour, too. I suppose that sounds almost impossibly Abe Lincoln, but it was no big deal-I was having fun. Those stories, grim as some of them were, served as brief escapes from the boss, Mr. Brooks, and Harry the floor-man.” Pg. 69 (On the early, struggling years)
“My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hamden (and washing sheets at New Franklin Laundry during the summer vacation). If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of our rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.” Pg. 74
“I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away. I had four problems with what I’d written. First and least important was the fact that the story didn’t move me emotionally. Second and slightly more important was the fact that I didn’t like the lead character. Carrie White seemed thick and passive, a ready-made victim. The other girls were chucking tampons and sanitary napkins at her, chanting “Plug it up! Plug it up!” and I just didn’t care. Third and more important still was not feeling at home with either the surroundings or my all-girl female cast of supporting characters. I had landed on Planet Female, and one sortie into the girls’ locker room at Brunswick High School years before wasn’t much help in getting there. For me writing has always seemed best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin. With Carrie I felt as if I was wearing a rubber wet-suit I couldn’t pull off. Fourth and most important of all was the realization that the story wouldn’t pay off unless it was pretty long." Pg. 76
“To tell you the truth, Carrie (the novel) had fallen off my radar screen almost completely. The kids were a handful, both the ones at school and the ones at home, and I had begun to worry about my mother. She was sixty-one, still working at Pineland Training Center and as funny as ever, but Dave said she didn’t feel very well a lot of the time. Her bedside table was covered with prescription painkillers, and he was afraid there might be something seriously wrong with her. ‘She always smoked liked a chimney, you know,’ Dave said. One Sunday not long after that call, I got another one from Bill Thompson at Doubleday. I was alone in the apartment; Tabby had packed the kids off to her mother’s for a visit, and I was working on the new book, which I thought of as ‘Vampires in Our Town. ‘Are you sitting down?’ Bill asked. ‘No,’ I said. Our phone hung on the kitchen wall, and I was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. ‘Do I need to?’ ‘You might,’ he said. ‘The paperback rights to Carrie went to Signet Books for four hundred thousand dollars.’ I hadn’t heard him right. Couldn’t have. The idea allowed me to find my voice again, at least. ‘Did you say it went for forty thousand dollars?’ ‘Four hundred thousand dollars,’ he said. ‘Under the rules of the road’-meaning the contract I’d signed-‘two hundred thousand K of it’s yours. Congratulations, Steve.’ I was still standing in the doorway, looking across the living room toward our bedroom and the crib where Joe slept. Our place on Sanford Street rented for ninety dollars a month and this man I’d only met once face-to-face was just telling me I’d just won the lottery. The strength ran out of my legs. I didn’t fall, exactly, but I kind of wooshed down to a sitting position there in the doorway. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked Bill. He said he was. I asked him to say the number again, very slowly and very clearly, so I could be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. He said the number was a four followed by five zeros. ‘After that a decimal point and two more zeros,’ he added. We talked for another half an hour, but I don’t remember a single word of what we said. When the conversation was over, I tried to call Tabby at her mother’s. Her youngest sister, Marcella, and Tab had already left. I walked back and forth through the apartment in my stocking feet, exploding with good news and without an ear to hear it. I was shaking all over. At last I pulled on my shoes and walked downtown. The only store that was open on Bangor’s Main Street was LaVerdiere’s Drug. I suddenly felt that I had to buy Tabby a Mother’s Day present, something wild and extravagant. I tried, but here’s one of life’s true facts: there’s nothing really wild and extravagant for sale at LaVerdiere’s. I did the best I could. I got her a hair dryer. When I got back home she was in the kitchen, unpacking the baby bags and singing along with the radio. I gave her the hair dryer. She looked at it as if she’d never seen one before. ‘What’s this for?’ she asked. I took her by the shoulders. I told her about the paperback sale. She didn’t appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty little four-room apartment, just as I had, and began to cry.” Pg. 85-87
“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you’ll never use ‘emolument’ when you mean ‘tip’ and you’ll never say John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion when you mean ‘John stopped long enough to take a shit.’ I’m not trying to get you to talk dirty, only plain and direct. Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word-of course you will, there’s always another word-but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.” Pg. 118
‘The timid fellow writes ‘The meeting will be held at seven o’clock’ because that somehow says to him, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know.’ Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put the meeting in charge! Write ‘The meeting’s at seven.” There, by God! Don’t you feel better?” Pg. 123
“Two pages of the passive voice-just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction-make me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous as well. How about this: ‘My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was began.’ Oh, man-who farted, right?’ Pg. 123
“THE ADVERB IS NOT YOUR FRIEND! Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They are the only ones that end in –ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seemed to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish mustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point across. Consider the sentence ‘He closed the door firmly.’ It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between ‘He closed the door.” and ‘He slammed the door,’ and you’ll get no argument from me…but what about the context? What about the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant? Someone out there is now accusing me of being anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day… fifty the day after that…and then my brothers and sisters, your lawn is ‘totally’, ‘completely’ and ‘profligately’ covered with dandelions.” Pg. 124-125
“The best forms of dialogue attribution is ‘said’ as in ‘he said’, ‘she said’, ‘Bill said’, Monica said’. If you want to see this put stringently into practice, I urge you to read or reread a novel by Larry McMurty, the Shane of dialogue attribution. That looks damn snide on page, but I’m speaking with complete sincerity. McMurty has allowed few adverbial dandelions to grow on his lawn. He believes in the he-said/she-said even in moments of emotional crisis (and in Larry McMurty novels there are a lot of those). Go and do likewise.” Pg. 127
“While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.”
Pg. 128
“I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry but there are lots of bad writers. Some are on staff at your local newspaper, usually reviewing little-theater productions or pontificating about the local sports teams. Pg. 141
“Let me repeat my basic premise: if you’re a bad writer, no one can help you become a good one, or even a competent one. If you’re good and want to be great…fuhgeddaboutit.” Pg. 144
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. I’m a slow reader but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’ s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.’” Pg. 145
“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rude should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.” Pg. 148
“Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find they enjoy the time they spend reading. I’d like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing. And how much of a sacrifice are we talking about here? How many Frasier and ER reruns does it take to make one American life complete? How many Richard Simmons infomercials? How many whiteboy/fatboy Beltway insiders on CNN? Oh man, don’t get me started. Jerry-Springer-Dr.-Dre-Judge-Jerry-Falwell-Donnie-and-Marie, I rest my case.” Pg. 149
“When my son Owen was seven or so, he fell in love with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, particularly with Clarence Clemons, the band’s burly sax player. Owen decided he wanted to learn to play like Clarence. My wife and I were amused and delighted by this ambition. We were also hopeful, as any parent would be, that our kid would turn out to be talented, perhaps even some sort of prodigy. We got Owen a tenor saxophone for Christmas and lessons with Gordon Bowie, one of the local music men. Then we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Seven months later I suggested to my wife that it was time to discontinue the sax lessons, if Owen concurred. Owen did, and with palpable relief-he hadn’t wanted to say it himself, especially not after asking for the sax in the first place, but seven months had been long enough for him to realize that, while he might love Clarence Clemon’s big sound, the saxophone was simply not for him-God had not given him that particular talent. I knew, not because Owen stopped practicing, but because he was practicing only during the periods Mr. Bowie had set for him: half an hour after school four days a week. Plus an hour on weekends. Owen mastered the scales and the notes-nothing wrong with his memory, his lungs, or his eye-hand coordination-but we never heard him taking off, surprising himself with something new, blissing himself out. And as soon as his practice time was over, it was back into the case with horn, and there it stayed until the next lesson or practice-time. What this suggested to me was that when it came to the sax and my son, there was never going to be any real play-time; it was all going to be rehearsal. That’s no good. If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good. It’s best to go on to some other area, where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher. Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic. That goes for reading and writing as well as for playing a musical instrument, hitting a baseball, or running the four-forty. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them; in fact, you may be following such a program already. If you feel you need permission to do all the reading and writing your little heart desires, however, consider it hereby granted by yours truly.”
Pg. 149-150
The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease, an intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s paper and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processer.” Pg. 150
“I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book-something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh. On some days those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the work comes hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.” Pg. 154
“Your writing room doesn’t have to sport a Playboy Philosophy décor, and you don’t need and Early American rolltop desk in which to house your writing implements. I wrote my first two published novels, Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot, in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer, pounding away on my wife’s portable Olivetti typewriter and balancing a child’s desk on my thighs. The space can be humble, and it really needs only one thing: a door you are willing to shut.” Pg. 155
“As with physical exercise, it would be best to set your daily writing goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest that you take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of the story if you do. With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met.” Pg. 156
“I work to loud music-hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ‘n Roses, and Metallica have always been my favorites-but for me the music is just another way of shutting the door. It surrounds me, keeps the mundane world out. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating you’re creating your own worlds.” Pg. 156
“So okay-there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all…as long as you tell the truth. The dictum in writing classes used to be “write what you know.” Which sounds good, but what if you want to write about starships exploring other planets or a man who murdered his wife and then tries to dispose of her body with a wood-chipper? How does the writer square either of these, or a thousand other fanciful ideas, with the “write-what-you-know” directive? I think you begin by interpreting “write what you know” as broadly and as inclusively as possible. If you’re a plumber, you know plumbing, but that is far from the extent of your knowledge; the heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. ” pg. 160
“You as a beginning writer would do well not to imitate the lawyers-in-trouble genre Grisham seems to have created but to emulate Grisham’s openness and inability to do anything other than get right to the point. John Grisham, of course, knows lawyers. What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.” Pg. 162
“In the early 1980s, my wife and I went to London on a combined business/pleasure trip. I fell asleep on the train and had a dream about a popular writer (it may or may not have been me, but it sure to God wasn’t James Caan) who fell into the clutches of a psychotic fan living on a farm somewhere out in the back of the beyond.” Pg. 165
“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing. Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translating what you see in your mind into words on the page. It’s far from easy. As I’ve said, we’ve all heard someone say, ‘Man, it was so great (or so horrible/strange/funny)…I just can’t describe it!’ If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition. If you can do this, you will be paid for your labors, and deservedly so. If you can’t, you’re going to collect a lot of rejection slips and perhaps explore a career in the fascinating world of telemarketing.” Pg. 174
“Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Over-description buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium. It’s also important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling a story. I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing (I find wardrobe inventory particularly irritating; if I want to read descriptions of clothes, I can always get a J. Crew catalogue). I can’t remember many cases where I felt I had to describe what the people in a story of mine looked like-I’d rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well. If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can’t you? I don’t need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown. We all remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us.” Pg. 174
“Well-crafted dialogue will indicate if a character is smart or dumb. Writers have different skill levels when it comes to dialogue. Your skills in this area can be improved, but as a great man once said (actually it was Clint Eastwood), ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’” Pg. 181
“You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in Oxford, Mississippi, post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills, or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed. Writing-class discussions can often be intellectually stimulating and great fun, but they also often stray far afield from the actual nuts-and-bolts of writing.” Pg. 236
“This is a short book because most books about writing are bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do-not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit. Once notable exception to the bullshit rule is The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. There is little or no detectable bullshit in that book. I’ll tell you right now that every aspiring writer should read The Elements of Style.” Pg. 11
“Let’s get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.” Pg. 37
“Don’t staple manuscripts,” the postscript read. Loose pages plus paperclip equal correct way to submit copy.” This was pretty cold advice, I thought, but useful in its way. I have never stapled a manuscript since.” Pg. 40
“From a financial point of view, two kids were probably too many for college grads working in a laundry and the second shift at Dunkin’ Donuts. The only edge we had came courtesy of magazines like Dude, Cavalier, Adam, and Swank-what my Uncle Oren used to call the “ the titty books.” By 1972 they were showing quite a lot more than bare breasts and fiction was on its way out, but I was lucky enough to ride the last wave. I wrote after work; when we lived on Grove Street, which was close to the New Franklin, I would sometimes write a little on my lunch hour, too. I suppose that sounds almost impossibly Abe Lincoln, but it was no big deal-I was having fun. Those stories, grim as some of them were, served as brief escapes from the boss, Mr. Brooks, and Harry the floor-man.” Pg. 69 (On the early, struggling years)
“My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hamden (and washing sheets at New Franklin Laundry during the summer vacation). If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of our rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think, There’s someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.” Pg. 74
“I did three single-spaced pages of a first draft, then crumpled them up in disgust and threw them away. I had four problems with what I’d written. First and least important was the fact that the story didn’t move me emotionally. Second and slightly more important was the fact that I didn’t like the lead character. Carrie White seemed thick and passive, a ready-made victim. The other girls were chucking tampons and sanitary napkins at her, chanting “Plug it up! Plug it up!” and I just didn’t care. Third and more important still was not feeling at home with either the surroundings or my all-girl female cast of supporting characters. I had landed on Planet Female, and one sortie into the girls’ locker room at Brunswick High School years before wasn’t much help in getting there. For me writing has always seemed best when it’s intimate, as sexy as skin on skin. With Carrie I felt as if I was wearing a rubber wet-suit I couldn’t pull off. Fourth and most important of all was the realization that the story wouldn’t pay off unless it was pretty long." Pg. 76
“To tell you the truth, Carrie (the novel) had fallen off my radar screen almost completely. The kids were a handful, both the ones at school and the ones at home, and I had begun to worry about my mother. She was sixty-one, still working at Pineland Training Center and as funny as ever, but Dave said she didn’t feel very well a lot of the time. Her bedside table was covered with prescription painkillers, and he was afraid there might be something seriously wrong with her. ‘She always smoked liked a chimney, you know,’ Dave said. One Sunday not long after that call, I got another one from Bill Thompson at Doubleday. I was alone in the apartment; Tabby had packed the kids off to her mother’s for a visit, and I was working on the new book, which I thought of as ‘Vampires in Our Town. ‘Are you sitting down?’ Bill asked. ‘No,’ I said. Our phone hung on the kitchen wall, and I was standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. ‘Do I need to?’ ‘You might,’ he said. ‘The paperback rights to Carrie went to Signet Books for four hundred thousand dollars.’ I hadn’t heard him right. Couldn’t have. The idea allowed me to find my voice again, at least. ‘Did you say it went for forty thousand dollars?’ ‘Four hundred thousand dollars,’ he said. ‘Under the rules of the road’-meaning the contract I’d signed-‘two hundred thousand K of it’s yours. Congratulations, Steve.’ I was still standing in the doorway, looking across the living room toward our bedroom and the crib where Joe slept. Our place on Sanford Street rented for ninety dollars a month and this man I’d only met once face-to-face was just telling me I’d just won the lottery. The strength ran out of my legs. I didn’t fall, exactly, but I kind of wooshed down to a sitting position there in the doorway. ‘Are you sure?’ I asked Bill. He said he was. I asked him to say the number again, very slowly and very clearly, so I could be sure I hadn’t misunderstood. He said the number was a four followed by five zeros. ‘After that a decimal point and two more zeros,’ he added. We talked for another half an hour, but I don’t remember a single word of what we said. When the conversation was over, I tried to call Tabby at her mother’s. Her youngest sister, Marcella, and Tab had already left. I walked back and forth through the apartment in my stocking feet, exploding with good news and without an ear to hear it. I was shaking all over. At last I pulled on my shoes and walked downtown. The only store that was open on Bangor’s Main Street was LaVerdiere’s Drug. I suddenly felt that I had to buy Tabby a Mother’s Day present, something wild and extravagant. I tried, but here’s one of life’s true facts: there’s nothing really wild and extravagant for sale at LaVerdiere’s. I did the best I could. I got her a hair dryer. When I got back home she was in the kitchen, unpacking the baby bags and singing along with the radio. I gave her the hair dryer. She looked at it as if she’d never seen one before. ‘What’s this for?’ she asked. I took her by the shoulders. I told her about the paperback sale. She didn’t appear to understand. I told her again. Tabby looked over my shoulder at our shitty little four-room apartment, just as I had, and began to cry.” Pg. 85-87
“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones. This is like dressing up a household pet in evening clothes. The pet is embarrassed and the person who committed this act of premeditated cuteness should be even more embarrassed. Make yourself a solemn promise right now that you’ll never use ‘emolument’ when you mean ‘tip’ and you’ll never say John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion when you mean ‘John stopped long enough to take a shit.’ I’m not trying to get you to talk dirty, only plain and direct. Remember that the basic rule of vocabulary is use the first word that comes to your mind, if it is appropriate and colorful. If you hesitate and cogitate, you will come up with another word-of course you will, there’s always another word-but it probably won’t be as good as your first one, or as close to what you really mean.” Pg. 118
‘The timid fellow writes ‘The meeting will be held at seven o’clock’ because that somehow says to him, ‘Put it this way and people will believe you really know.’ Purge this quisling thought! Don’t be a muggle! Throw back your shoulders, stick out your chin, and put the meeting in charge! Write ‘The meeting’s at seven.” There, by God! Don’t you feel better?” Pg. 123
“Two pages of the passive voice-just about any business document ever written, in other words, not to mention reams of bad fiction-make me want to scream. It’s weak, it’s circuitous, and it’s frequently tortuous as well. How about this: ‘My first kiss will always be recalled by me as how my romance with Shayna was began.’ Oh, man-who farted, right?’ Pg. 123
“THE ADVERB IS NOT YOUR FRIEND! Adverbs, you will remember from your own version of Business English, are words that modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They are the only ones that end in –ly. Adverbs, like the passive voice, seemed to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish mustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point across. Consider the sentence ‘He closed the door firmly.’ It’s by no means a terrible sentence (at least it’s got an active verb going for it), but ask yourself if ‘firmly’ really has to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between ‘He closed the door.” and ‘He slammed the door,’ and you’ll get no argument from me…but what about the context? What about the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before ‘He closed the door firmly’? Shouldn’t this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn’t firmly an extra word? Isn’t it redundant? Someone out there is now accusing me of being anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day… fifty the day after that…and then my brothers and sisters, your lawn is ‘totally’, ‘completely’ and ‘profligately’ covered with dandelions.” Pg. 124-125
“The best forms of dialogue attribution is ‘said’ as in ‘he said’, ‘she said’, ‘Bill said’, Monica said’. If you want to see this put stringently into practice, I urge you to read or reread a novel by Larry McMurty, the Shane of dialogue attribution. That looks damn snide on page, but I’m speaking with complete sincerity. McMurty has allowed few adverbial dandelions to grow on his lawn. He believes in the he-said/she-said even in moments of emotional crisis (and in Larry McMurty novels there are a lot of those). Go and do likewise.” Pg. 127
“While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said’ or ‘she said’ is divine.”
Pg. 128
“I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry but there are lots of bad writers. Some are on staff at your local newspaper, usually reviewing little-theater productions or pontificating about the local sports teams. Pg. 141
“Let me repeat my basic premise: if you’re a bad writer, no one can help you become a good one, or even a competent one. If you’re good and want to be great…fuhgeddaboutit.” Pg. 144
“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. I’m a slow reader but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’ s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.’” Pg. 145
“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rude should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.” Pg. 148
“Once weaned from the ephemeral craving for TV, most people will find they enjoy the time they spend reading. I’d like to suggest that turning off that endlessly quacking box is apt to improve the quality of your life as well as the quality of your writing. And how much of a sacrifice are we talking about here? How many Frasier and ER reruns does it take to make one American life complete? How many Richard Simmons infomercials? How many whiteboy/fatboy Beltway insiders on CNN? Oh man, don’t get me started. Jerry-Springer-Dr.-Dre-Judge-Jerry-Falwell-Donnie-and-Marie, I rest my case.” Pg. 149
“When my son Owen was seven or so, he fell in love with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, particularly with Clarence Clemons, the band’s burly sax player. Owen decided he wanted to learn to play like Clarence. My wife and I were amused and delighted by this ambition. We were also hopeful, as any parent would be, that our kid would turn out to be talented, perhaps even some sort of prodigy. We got Owen a tenor saxophone for Christmas and lessons with Gordon Bowie, one of the local music men. Then we crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. Seven months later I suggested to my wife that it was time to discontinue the sax lessons, if Owen concurred. Owen did, and with palpable relief-he hadn’t wanted to say it himself, especially not after asking for the sax in the first place, but seven months had been long enough for him to realize that, while he might love Clarence Clemon’s big sound, the saxophone was simply not for him-God had not given him that particular talent. I knew, not because Owen stopped practicing, but because he was practicing only during the periods Mr. Bowie had set for him: half an hour after school four days a week. Plus an hour on weekends. Owen mastered the scales and the notes-nothing wrong with his memory, his lungs, or his eye-hand coordination-but we never heard him taking off, surprising himself with something new, blissing himself out. And as soon as his practice time was over, it was back into the case with horn, and there it stayed until the next lesson or practice-time. What this suggested to me was that when it came to the sax and my son, there was never going to be any real play-time; it was all going to be rehearsal. That’s no good. If there’s no joy in it, it’s just no good. It’s best to go on to some other area, where the deposits of talent may be richer and the fun quotient higher. Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic. That goes for reading and writing as well as for playing a musical instrument, hitting a baseball, or running the four-forty. The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them; in fact, you may be following such a program already. If you feel you need permission to do all the reading and writing your little heart desires, however, consider it hereby granted by yours truly.”
Pg. 149-150
The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease, an intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one’s paper and identification pretty much in order. Constant reading will pull you into a place (a mind-set, if you like the phrase) where you can write eagerly and without self-consciousness. It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn’t, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what just lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processer.” Pg. 150
“I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book-something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh. On some days those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the work comes hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.” Pg. 154
“Your writing room doesn’t have to sport a Playboy Philosophy décor, and you don’t need and Early American rolltop desk in which to house your writing implements. I wrote my first two published novels, Carrie and ‘Salem’s Lot, in the laundry room of a doublewide trailer, pounding away on my wife’s portable Olivetti typewriter and balancing a child’s desk on my thighs. The space can be humble, and it really needs only one thing: a door you are willing to shut.” Pg. 155
“As with physical exercise, it would be best to set your daily writing goal low at first, to avoid discouragement. I suggest a thousand words a day, and because I’m feeling magnanimous, I’ll also suggest that you take one day a week off, at least to begin with. No more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of the story if you do. With that goal set, resolve to yourself that the door stays closed until that goal is met.” Pg. 156
“I work to loud music-hard-rock stuff like AC/DC, Guns ‘n Roses, and Metallica have always been my favorites-but for me the music is just another way of shutting the door. It surrounds me, keeps the mundane world out. When you write, you want to get rid of the world, do you not? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating you’re creating your own worlds.” Pg. 156
“So okay-there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all…as long as you tell the truth. The dictum in writing classes used to be “write what you know.” Which sounds good, but what if you want to write about starships exploring other planets or a man who murdered his wife and then tries to dispose of her body with a wood-chipper? How does the writer square either of these, or a thousand other fanciful ideas, with the “write-what-you-know” directive? I think you begin by interpreting “write what you know” as broadly and as inclusively as possible. If you’re a plumber, you know plumbing, but that is far from the extent of your knowledge; the heart also knows things, and so does the imagination. ” pg. 160
“You as a beginning writer would do well not to imitate the lawyers-in-trouble genre Grisham seems to have created but to emulate Grisham’s openness and inability to do anything other than get right to the point. John Grisham, of course, knows lawyers. What you know makes you unique in some other way. Be brave. Map the enemy’s positions, come back, tell us all you know. And remember that plumbers in space is not such a bad setup for a story.” Pg. 162
“In the early 1980s, my wife and I went to London on a combined business/pleasure trip. I fell asleep on the train and had a dream about a popular writer (it may or may not have been me, but it sure to God wasn’t James Caan) who fell into the clutches of a psychotic fan living on a farm somewhere out in the back of the beyond.” Pg. 165
“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s also a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing. Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with your translating what you see in your mind into words on the page. It’s far from easy. As I’ve said, we’ve all heard someone say, ‘Man, it was so great (or so horrible/strange/funny)…I just can’t describe it!’ If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition. If you can do this, you will be paid for your labors, and deservedly so. If you can’t, you’re going to collect a lot of rejection slips and perhaps explore a career in the fascinating world of telemarketing.” Pg. 174
“Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Over-description buries him or her in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium. It’s also important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling a story. I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing (I find wardrobe inventory particularly irritating; if I want to read descriptions of clothes, I can always get a J. Crew catalogue). I can’t remember many cases where I felt I had to describe what the people in a story of mine looked like-I’d rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well. If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can’t you? I don’t need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown. We all remember one or more high school losers, after all; if I describe mine, it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us.” Pg. 174
“Well-crafted dialogue will indicate if a character is smart or dumb. Writers have different skill levels when it comes to dialogue. Your skills in this area can be improved, but as a great man once said (actually it was Clint Eastwood), ‘A man’s got to know his limitations.’” Pg. 181
“You don’t need writing classes or seminars any more than you need this or any other book on writing. Faulkner learned his trade while working in Oxford, Mississippi, post office. Other writers have learned the basics while serving in the Navy, working in steel mills, or doing time in America’s finer crossbar hotels. I learned the most valuable (and commercial) part of my life’s work while washing motel sheets and restaurant tablecloths at the New Franklin Laundry in Bangor. You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself. These lessons almost always occur with the study door closed. Writing-class discussions can often be intellectually stimulating and great fun, but they also often stray far afield from the actual nuts-and-bolts of writing.” Pg. 236
Friday, August 6, 2010
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
“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
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