I am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne

I would like to dedicate this book to all my fans. Because of you I’ve had such an amazing life. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. God bless you all. Ozzy And not forgetting the one special guy who meant so much to me, Mr Randy Rhoads, R.I.P. I will never forget you and I hope we meet again somewhere, somehow.

They said I would never write this book.

Well, fuck ’em – ’cos here it is.

All I have to do now is remember so...

Bollocks. I can’t remembe...

Oh, apart from this . . .* *‘Other people’s memories of the stuff in this book might not be the same as mine. I ain’t gonna argue with ’em. 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 heavy-duty substances to list in this footnote. On more than a few occasions I was on all of those at the same time. I’m not the fucking Encyclopaedia Britannica, put it that way. What you re...

I think that anyone who eats meat should visit a slaughterhouse at least once in their life, just to see what goes on. It’s a bloody, filthy, putrid fucking business.

It doesn’t feel right, eating beef when you’re in the company of a cow.

There was no fucking way I ever wanted to go back to prison after Winson Green, and I never did. Jail, yes. Prison, not a chance. Having said that, I did have a couple of close calls. I’m not proud of the fact that I did time, but it was a part of my life, y’know? So I don’t try to pretend it never happened, like some people do. If it hadn’t been for those six weeks inside, fuck knows what I would have ended up doing.

It killed me that he thought the Beatles had ‘no tunes’. ‘Taxman’? ‘When I’m Sixty-four’? You’d have to be deaf not to appreciate those melodies.

I don’t remember where we first played ‘Black Sabbath’, but I can sure as hell remember the audience’s reaction: all the girls ran out of the venue, screaming. ‘Isn’t the whole point of being in a band to get a shag, not to make chicks run away?’ I complained to the others, afterwards. ‘They’ll get used to it,’ Geezer told me.

We all had our moments at the Star Club. One night, Tony is so out of his skull on dope that he decides he’s gonna play the flute, but he’s lost his sense of distance, so he rests the flute on his chin instead of his lip. So for the entire song he’s just standing there, blowing into a microphone, with the flute nowhere near his mouth, and the audience is going, What the fuck? Priceless, man.

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.

‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka and gin.’

I thought it was what you did: get some dough, find a chick, get married, settle down, go to the pub. It was a terrible mistake.

They just wouldn’t fuck off, those Satanists. I’d walk out of my hotel room in the morning, and they’d be right outside my door, sitting in a circle on the carpet, all dressed in black hooded capes, surrounded by candles. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more. So, one morning, instead of brushing past them as I usually did, I went up to them, sat down, took a deep breath, blew out their candles, and sang ‘Happy Birthday’. They weren’t too fucking happy about that, believe me.

‘There’s nothing else for it,’ I said to Frank. ‘We’re gonna have to snort all the coke.’

It’s funny, because years later Linda Blair – who played the satanic kid in that movie – ended up dating my mate Glenn Hughes from Deep Purple. She definitely liked musicians, it turned out.

Lmfao the dude who creeped on me wtf

y’know, when a band splits up, it’s like a marriage ending – for a while, all you want to do is hurt each other.

for me, the best thing about being managed by Don Arden was getting to see his daughter Sharon on a regular basis. Almost immediately, I began falling in love with her from a distance. It was that wicked laugh that got me. And the fact that she was so beautiful and glamorous – she wore fur coats, and had diamonds dripping from everywhere. I’d never seen anything like it. And she was as loud and crazy as I was.

I don’t have anything bad to say about the guy they hired to replace me, Ronnie James Dio, who’d previously been with Rainbow. He’s a great singer. Then again, he ain’t me, and I ain’t him. So I just wish they’d called the band Black Sabbath II. That’s all.

‘That wasn’t a striptease you were doing, Ozzy. It was a fucking Nazi goose-step. Up and down the table. That poor German bloke looked mortified. Then you put your balls in his fucking wine.’ ‘I thought I pissed in his wine?’ ‘That was before you pissed in his wine.’

The one thing that gave us some comfort was a message from AC/DC saying, ‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know.’ That meant a lot to me, and I’ll always be grateful to them for it. You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan. In fact, AC/DC must have known exactly what we’d been going through, ’cos it had only been a couple of years since their singer Bon Scott had died from alcohol poisoning, also at a tragically young age.

You can see how bad I was on Penelope Spheeris’s documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II.

The bottom line is: Sharon saved my life, Sharon is my life, and I love her. And I was terrified that I was going to lose her. But as much as I wanted everything to be normal and right, I was terribly sick, physically and mentally. I couldn’t even face being on stage any more.

I reckon hating someone is just a total fucking waste of time and effort. What do you get out of it in the end? Nothing. I’m not trying to come over like the Archangel Gabriel here. I just think that if you’re pissed off with someone, call them an arsehole, get it out of your system, and move on. It’s not like we’re on this earth very long.

‘He bit the head off a bat.’ OK. ‘He bit the head off a dove.’ Fair enough. But I ain’t a puppy-killer, or a Devil-worshipper, or someone who wants his fans to blow their heads off. It haunts me, all that crazy stuff. People embellish the stories, y’know?

I’ve said to Sharon: ‘Don’t cremate me, whatever you do.’ I want to be put in the ground, in a nice garden somewhere, with a tree planted over my head. A crabapple tree, preferably, so the kids can make wine out of me and get pissed out of their heads. As for what they’ll put on my headstone, I ain’t under any illusions. If I close my eyes, I can already see it: Ozzy Osbourne, born 1948. Died, whenever. He bit the head off a bat.