Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘You all right, Dave?’ I said, blowing smoke into the cabin.

‘Yeah, I’m—’

Then he lost it.

Bleeeeeugh!

He threw up all over the dashboard, and these half-digested lumps of cheese and dough and tomato sauce started to dribble into the air vents and on to my box of cigarettes. Just the sight and the smell were enough to make me come out in sympathy.

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘Dave, I think I’m gonna—’

Bleeeeeugh!

So now there were two stomachfuls of vomit all over the inside of this van. The smell was fucking abominable, but Bill didn’t notice a thing—he was still passed out in the back.

We pulled over at the next truck stop and I ran out and asked the chick in the shop if she had any air freshener. There was no way I was even going to try to clean up the puke, but we needed to do something about the smell. It seemed like even the drivers of the cars overtaking us on the freeway were holding their noses. But the chick in the shop didn’t understand a fucking word I was saying. Finally, she goes, ‘Oh, you mean this?’ And she gives me a can of spearmint air spray. Then she says to me, ‘Personally, I don’t recommend it.’

Fuck it, I thought, and I bought it anyway. Then I ran back to the GMC, slammed the door, and while Dave pulled out of the parking spot I started spraying the stuff all over the place.

Then, all of a sudden, there’s this grunt and a rustling noise from behind us. I look over my shoulder and see Bill sitting bolt upright, looking very unwell. He could take the smell of our puke, but the spearmint air spray had tipped him over the edge.

‘Christ!’ he goes. ‘What the fuck is that sm—’

Bleeeeeugh!

Our first gig in America was at a club in New York called Ungano’s, at 210 West 70th Street. Then after that we did a show at the Fillmore East with Rod Stewart and the Faces.

We were pissed off with the Faces, actually, because they didn’t give us any time for a sound check. And Rod kept well out of our way. Looking back now, I don’t suppose he was too happy about having Black Sabbath supporting him. We were the unwashed hooligans and he was the blue-eyed boy. He was all right though, Rod; always very polite. And I thought he was a phenomenal singer.

Two months felt like an eternity to be so far away from home, and we missed England like crazy—especially when we started talking about how much we couldn’t wait to go down the pub and tell everyone about America, which was like going to Mars in those days. Very few Brits ever made it over, because the air fares were so expensive.

Practical jokes ended up being the best way to take our minds off home. One of the things we found hilarious was the American accent. Every time a hotel receptionist called me ‘Mr Ozz-Burn’, we’d all crack up laughing. Then we came up with this prank to play in hotel restaurants. During the meal, one of us would sneak off to the front desk and get them to page a ‘Mr Harry Bollocks’. So the others would be sitting there eating their hamburgers and this bell-hop would rush into the room, ringing his little bell, and shout, ‘Is there a Mr Hairy Bollocks here? I’m looking for Hairy Bollocks.’

Bill would laugh so hard he’d make himself ill.

But 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 realise 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? Just tell me. What is it, eh?’

And he peered down at me with this puzzled look on his face.

‘You guys ain’t black,’ he said.

That was our only bad gig, mind you.

None of us could believe how well the Black Sabbath album had gone down in America. It was a monster. Warner Bros, our American record company, were so pleased with it they told us they were going to delay the release of Paranoid until January the following year.

We were getting such big crowds wherever we played, we even started to get a few groupies.

Our first really crazy groupie experience was in a Holiday Inn, out in California somewhere. Now, usually, Patrick Meehan booked us into the shittiest of places; it wasn’t unusual for all four of us to share a single room in some dodgy motel on the outskirts of town for five bucks a night. So the Holiday Inn was luxurious by our standards: my room had a bath and a shower and a phone and a telly. It even had a waterbed—which were all the rage in those days. I loved those things, actually; it was like falling asleep on a tire floating in the middle of the ocean.

Anyway, so we’re in this Holiday Inn, and I’ve just finished talking to Thelma on the phone when there’s a knock at the door. I open it and there’s this beautiful chick standing there in a little dress. ‘Ozzy?’ she goes. ‘The gig was awesome. Can we talk?’

In she comes, pulls off her dress, we get down to business, and then she fucks off before I can even ask her name.

Five minutes later, there’s another knock on the door. I’m thinking, She probably left something in the room. So I get up to answer it. But it’s a different chick.

‘Ozzy?’ she goes. ‘The gig was awesome. Can we talk?’

Off comes her dress, down go my trousers, and after five minutes of my hairy arse bobbing up and down on top of her while we’re floating around on this waterbed, it was ‘Nice meeting you’, ‘Cheerio’, and off she went.

These Holiday Inns are fucking magic, I thought. Then there was another knock on the door.

You can guess what happened next.

I banged three chicks that night. Three. Without even leaving my hotel room. To be honest with you, I was flagging a bit with the last one. I had to use the special reserve tank.

Eventually I decided to find out where the fuck all these groupies were coming from. So I went to the bar but it was completely empty. Then I asked the guy in the lobby, ‘Where is everyone?’ He went, ‘Your British friends? Try the pool.’ So I took the lift up to the pool on the roof, and when the doors opened I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was like Caligula up there: dozens of the most amazing-looking chicks you could ever imagine, all stark naked, and blowjobs and threesomes going on left, right and centre. I lit up a joint, sat down on a recliner between two lesbian chicks, and began to sing ‘God Bless America’.

But it wasn’t just groupies who followed us around America. We also got a lot of loonies—the kind of people who took the black magic thing seriously. Before we even left for America, someone had sent us a film of a black magic parade in San Francisco, held in our honour.

There was a bloke who looked like 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 the 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 in 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. A lot of people were still freaked out by Sharon Tate’s murder, so we didn’t want to come off like members of Charles Manson’s ‘Family’. I mean, only a few months earlier we’d been playing at Henry’s Blues House in front of a few dozen people, and now we were playing the Forum in LA in front of twenty thousand fans. We loved being big in the US, and we didn’t want to do anything to fuck it up.