Black Sabbath bass-player Terence ‘Geezer’ Butler recalls the first time he met John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne with vivid clarity. “My brother told me, ‘There’s something at the front door for you’. It was a skinhead in his dad’s toolmaker’s work gown, with no shoes; he had a chimney brush over his shoulder and was holding one trainer on a dog lead. It was raining and he was soaking wet. I just burst out laughing. I thought he was the local lunatic.”
The ‘something’ was John Osbourne, fresh from serving six weeks in Birmingham’s Winson Green Prison for burglary. Craziness personified. Had Geezer slammed the door, Black Sabbath might never have happened. Instead, he invited Osbourne to join his band – on condition he grew his hair.
Ozzy and Garry circa 2001 in Los Angeles (Image: GARRY BUSHELL)
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Singer Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon Osbourne at a Los Angeles premiere in 2012 (Image: WireImage)
Two years later, I was one of millions watching their debut 1970 appearance of Top Of The Pops, playing their hastily-written smash hit Paranoid, and was won over instantly. If I’d known then, at 15, that ten years later I’d meet Ozzy and tour the world with him, it would have blown my mind.
The working-class boys from the backstreets of Birmingham drank like dockers and fought like cats in a sack, but they touched a nerve with teenagers.
Their powerful mix of doomy lyrics, down-tuned guitars and apocalyptic riffs gave the world heavy metal. Their first five albums went platinum and Sabbath went on to enjoy a career awash with cocaine, chaos and carnage.
By 1979, Ozzy and guitarist Tony Iommi had fallen out and, that April, Ozzy was kicked out of the band. I first interviewed him the following year when Sharon Arden, later his second wife, was rebuilding his career, convincing him to form his new band – Blizzard Of Ozz – with guitar virtuoso Randy Rhoads. He freely admitted that without Sharon he’d have blown his £69,000 pay-off on cocaine and booze and ended up back on the dole.
Ozzy, a former slaughterhouse worker, was one of the funniest rock stars I ever met – and indisputably the most dangerous.
He was half ‘Prince Of Darkness’ and half a devilish version of Jeremy Beadle. I was with Ozzy in Florida when a roadie approached him with a problem. It was the last day of the tour and he’d caught something unmentionable. Ozzy thought for a moment, stroked his chin sagely, and then advised the poor gullible fellow to bathe his bits in Domestos.
“Really Oz?” said the roadie. “Yes,” replied Ozzy, “Because Domestos kills 99% of all known germs, isn’t that right Garry?” – making me complicit to his evil.
The roadie went away happy and we knew he did what Ozzy had advised because half an hour later we heard the agonised screams from the floor below.
On tour, he thought nothing of piddling in people’s pockets and setting fire to roadies. He was prone to passing around a hip-flask full of aftershave and once shaved off all his keyboard-player’s hair.
Ozzy was open about his drug consumption. When I asked him how often he’d dropped acid, Ozzy replied: “Only about 900 times. I used to swallow handfuls at a time. The worst trip I ever had was after I took four tabs of acid and two tabs of mescaline. I wandered into this field totally out of it and started talking to his horse. I talked to this bloody horse for hours and in the end the horse told me to f*** off – that’s when I knew things were getting out of hand.”
In 1981 after he’d bitten the head off a dove while being introduced to CBS executives in Los Angeles, Ozzy asked indignantly: “What’s the difference between a dove and a chicken? No one gives Colonel Sanders the stick I’ve had and he murders about nine million chickens a day.”
In 1982 someone threw a live bat at him on stage in Iowa. Thinking it was a toy, Ozzy bit its head off too – but not before the bat bit him. When he arrived at the nearest hospital, he told shocked nurses: “I’ve got rabies” and started barking. Later he said that the bat reminded him of Sharon’s cooking and claimed that it was rushed to hospital “to get Ozzy Osbourne shots”.
An anti-Ozzy backlash kicked off as Christian campaigners perhaps understandably objected to his unholy presence on their shores. The crazies in his audience responded by bringing dead animal “tributes” to his shows.
The macabre menagerie that got past security included: a dead dog carcass, white rats, a snake, a severed cow’s heads, pigs’ heads, an ox’s head and in Des Moines a skinned 18-inch Louisiana bullfrog.
I was in Providence with Oz when some nut-case hurled a cherry bomb (one eighth of a stick of dynamite) on stage just as the band were about to come on. It exploded knocking Sharon, who was in the wings, unconscious.
Careless urination was a recurring feature of Ozzy’s life. He was arrested for it in Memphis (for using a parked car as a urinal) and arrested in February 1982 for relieving himself on the Alamo. These stories are not extreme – they were daily occurrences.
One night in Leicester, hideously drunk, Ozzy took exception to seeing two uniformed police officers in the hotel reception. He set off to “do” the constables.
“Stop him Garry!” shouted Sharon. So I grabbed one arm, she grabbed the other… somehow we managed to keep him in the bar.
Sharon was the power behind Ozzy’s throne. She once knocked out a 6ft 5ins promoter who tried to push headliner Ozzy down a festival bill. “Listen little lady,” he said. She threw one punch….
Sharon lured Ozzy away from her notorious father Don Arden, who promptly sent her to Coventry for 19 years, and mortgaged their home to put Oz back on the road.
Ozzy Osbourne, former lead singer of Black Sabbath, with son Jack in 1985 (Image: Mirrorpix)
Their triumphant 93-date US tour ended in Daytona Beach, Florida. At around 3.15am, I woke up to what sounded like machine gun fire.
It was Ozzy celebrating by showering the hotel exterior with massive stage fire-crackers. Armed police arrived but Osbourne stayed in his tour bus. No arrests were made.
In Japan, Ozzy, steaming drunk, took a female fan back to his hotel room completely forgetting that Sharon was on tour with him. She took one look at the girl, snatched a painting off the wall and smashed it right over his head. He was found the next morning lying prostrate in the hotel corridor, his head still inside the picture frame.
Booze was Ozzy’s mistress. He thought nothing of breakfasting on an entire hotel mini-bar. At his worst he would consume four litre bottles of brandy daily..
When Sharon tried to stop him boozing by hiding all his clothes, he famously dressed up in hers and went down the pub anyway.
The Osbournes, the 2002 reality TV show, propelled Ozzy to a new level of global fame and launched Sharon on her own TV career. In New York in 1999, Ozzy boasted he hadn’t drunk for seven years. Yet three years later in LA he told me he’d been burying vodka in his back garden and sneaking out to “walk the dog”.
In 1984, the Osbournes invited me to write Ozzy’s autobiography. The 12-hour drinking session that ensued ended with me unconscious. Two days later a guitarist friend comes to my door. His first words were, “Gal, where are your eyebrows?”
I don’t know what’s more worrying – that I hadn’t noticed, or that Ozzy had got that close to my eyes with a razorblade.