Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

Patrick was nothing like Don or Wilf, or his own father, for that matter. He was a slick, smooth-talking, good-looking guy, very cool, very sharp, didn’t have any problems with the ladies. He’d wear suits all the time, drove a Roller, kept his hair long but not too long. He was also the first guy I ever saw with diamond rings on his fingers. He’d obviously learned a lot from the way Don Arden operated. Patrick threw every trick in the book at us. The chauffeured limo. The champagne dinner. The non-stop compliments and the phoney shock that we weren’t all multi-millionaires already. He told us that if we signed with him, we could have anything we wanted—cars, houses, chicks, whatever. All we had to do was call him up and ask for it. What he told us were like fairy tales, basically, but we wanted to believe them. And there was at least some truth to what he said… The music business is like any other business, y’know? When sales are going well, everything’s hunky-fucking-dory. But the second something goes wrong, it’s all blood and law-suits.

I can’t remember exactly when or how we left Jim—we never actually fired him, although I suppose that makes no difference—but by September 1970 Big Bear Management was history and we were signed up with the Meehans’ company, Worldwide Artists.

It took about three and a half seconds for Jim to sue us. We were served with the writ when we were standing backstage at a venue on Lake Geneva, waiting to go on. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened. Jim sued Meehan, too, for ‘enticement’. It all took years to go through the courts. To a certain degree, I think Jim got a raw deal. I mean, he had brought Philips out to see us in the first place, which had got us the record deal. And even though he won some dough from the courts, he spent years paying his lawyers. So he didn’t really win in the end. It’s always the way with lawyers—we found that out for ourselves, later. The funny thing is, I still run into Jim every so often. We’re like long-lost friends now. He’s done a lot of great things for music in Birmingham, Jim Simpson has. And he’s still at it today. I wish him all the very best, I really do.

At the time, though, getting rid of Jim seemed like the greatest thing we’d ever done. It was like we’d just won the lottery: money was falling from the sky. Every day, I’d think of something new to ask for: ‘Er, hello, yes, is that Patrick Meehan’s office? It’s Ozzy Osbourne.

I’d like one of them Triumph Herald convertibles. Can you send me a green one? Cheers.’

Click. Then—ta-dah!—the fucking thing would be sitting outside my house the next morning with an envelope tucked behind the windscreen wiper full of paperwork for me to sign and return. Meehan seemed as good as his word: whatever we asked for, we got. And it wasn’t all about the big things: we were given allowances, so we could afford beer and fags and platform boots and leather jackets, and we could stay in hotels instead of sleeping in the back of Tony’s van.

Meanwhile, we just kept selling more records. One minute we were at the raggedy end of the line when it came to rock bands from Birmingham; the next we’d overtaken just about everybody. What we didn’t know was that Meehan was taking nearly everything. Even a lot of the stuff he ‘gave’ us wasn’t actually ours. Behind the scenes, he was bleeding us dry. But y’know what, I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and I don’t think we can complain too much. We’d come out of Aston with nothing to lose and everything to gain, and by our early twenties we were living like kings. We didn’t have to carry our own gear, we didn’t have to make our own food, we barely had to tie our own shoelaces. And, on top of all that, we could just ask for stuff and it would appear on a silver plate.

I mean, you should have seen Tony’s collection of Lamborghinis. Even Bill got his own chauffeured Rolls-Royce. We were good like that: we split all the dough four ways. The way we saw it, Tony did the riffs, Geezer did the words, I did the melodies, and Bill did his wild drum thing, and each part was as important as the others, so everyone should get the same. I think that’s why we lasted as long as we did. For starters, it meant we never argued over who’d done what. Then, if one of us wanted to branch out—like if Bill wanted to sing, or if I wanted to write some lyrics—it was cool. No one was sitting there with a calculator, adding up the royalties they’d win or lose.

Mind you, another reason why we could do 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 it.

Not many bands can do that nowadays.

One thing I regret is not giving more dough to my folks. I mean, if it hadn’t been for my old man taking out a loan on that PA system, I never would have had a chance. In fact, I’d probably have gone back to burglary. Maybe I’d still be in prison today. But I didn’t think about them. I was young, I was loaded most of the time, and my ego was already starting to rule the world. Besides, I might have been rich, but I didn’t have much ready cash. All I did was call Patrick Meehan’s office and put in my requests, which was different to having your own dough to throw around. In fact, the only time I made any real money was when I realised I could just sell the stuff that the management company gave me, which I did one time with a Rolls-Royce. The others soon learned the same trick too. But how was I supposed to explain that to my folks, when they just saw me swaggering around the place like Jack the Lad? It’s not like I gave them nothing, but I know now that I never gave them enough. You could tell from the atmosphere every time I walked through the door at 14 Lodge Road. I’d ask my mum, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Well, it’s obviously something. Just tell me.’

She wouldn’t say, but you could smell it in the air: money, money, money. Nothing but money. Not: ‘I’m proud of you, son. Well done, you finally made it, you worked hard. Have a cup of tea. I love you.’ Just money. It got really ugly after a while. I didn’t want to be at home; it was so uncomfortable. I suppose they’d never had any money of their own, and they wanted mine. Which was fair enough. I should have given it to them.

But I didn’t.

I met a girl and moved out instead.

I was never the Romeo type, me.

Even after our first album went gold, I never got any good-looking chicks. Black Sabbath was a blokes’ band. We’d 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.

That was a rough night, that was. A lot of gin was involved, if I remember correctly.

But none of that stopped me trying to get my end away.

One of the places where I used to go cruising for a good old bonk was the Rum Runner nightclub on Broad Street in Birmingham, where an old school mate of Tony’s worked on the door. It was a famous place, the Rum Runner—years later, Duran Duran would become the resident band there—so it was magic to have someone on the inside who could get you in without any trouble.

One night, not long after we’d signed the record deal, I went to the Rum Runner with Tony. This was before we’d met Patrick Meehan, so we were still broke. We drove there in Tony’s second-hand car, which I think was a Ford Cortina. It was a piece of crap, anyway. Albert greets us at the door as usual, the bouncers unclip the rope to let us through, and the first thing I see is this dark-haired chick behind the counter in the cloakroom.