Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

Mind you, we did bump into some members of the Manson Family at the Whiskey A Go Go on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles one night. They were very weird people—somewhere-else people, if you know what I mean. Not on the same wavelength as the rest of the world. They gave me the willies, big time. The funny thing is, though, before he turned psycho, Manson had been a big part of the LA music scene. If he hadn’t gone to jail, we probably would have ended up hanging out with him. It blew my mind when I learned that he’d been pals with Dennis Wilson from the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys had even covered one of Manson’s songs, ‘Never Learn Not to Love’. But from what I heard, Dennis ended up getting so spooked by Manson and his friends that he fled his own house. He just woke up and fucked off one day. Then Manson had a bullet delivered to Wilson’s new place. The bloke must have been shitting bricks.

There was a lot of mad stuff like that going on in those days.

LA was a crazy place in 1970. The flower power thing was still a huge deal. When you drove around, you’d see all these people with long hair and bare feet, just sitting around on street corners, smoking weed and strumming guitars. The locals probably thought we were crazy, too, I suppose. I remember walking into an liquor store on Sunset Boulevard one time and asking for twenty fags. The woman behind the counter said, ‘What do you want twenty fags for? Get out of here, you fucking pervert!’

She must have thought I was a sex fiend. Of course, at the time I didn’t have a clue that ‘fag’ doesn’t mean cigarette in America.

As much as we tried to avoid them, the Satanists never stopped being a pain in the arse.

About a year after the first tour, we were playing a gig in Memphis and this bloke wearing a black cloak ran on stage. Under normal circumstances, if a fan climbed on stage, I’d put my arm around him and we’d have a good old head bang for a bit. But this bloke looked like one of the satanic loonies, so I told him to fuck off out of it and pushed him away, towards Tony.

Before I knew it, one of our roadies was running on stage with a metal bar raised above his head, and he twatted the guy in the face. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. ‘What the fuck are you doing, man?’ I shouted. ‘You can’t do that!’

The roadie turned around and said, ‘Yes I fucking can. Look.’

The satanic bloke was lying on the stage with his cloak wide open. In his right hand was a dagger.

I almost fell backwards into one of the speaker cabinets, I was so freaked out. If it hadn’t been for our roadie, Tony might have been a goner.

By the time we headed back to our motel that night, everyone was shaken up. But the fuckers had found out where we were staying, and in the car park of the motel were more guys in black robes, their hoods up, chanting. We were too knackered to deal with it, so we just ignored them and made our way to our rooms, which faced on to the street. A few seconds later, one of the roadies started jabbering and screaming—it turned out that someone had drawn an inverted cross in blood on his door.

I can’t say we were scared. But after the incident with the guy on the stage, we weren’t in the mood to take any more bullshit. So we called the police. Of course, they found the whole thing extremely funny.

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.

We were on the road non-stop for two years after our first American tour. Between 1970 and 1972, we must have crossed the Atlantic six times. We spent so much time in the air, we ended up being on first-name terms with the PanAm flight attendants. And even though we were exhausted and ill half the time from the jet lag, the booze and the drugs, it was a fucking blast. We did everything, saw everything, met everyone.

We even went to an Elvis gig.

It was at the Forum in LA. We were so far up in the nose-bleeds, it seemed to take longer to get to our seats than it did for the King to do his set. He looked like an ant from where we were sitting, and I couldn’t get over the fact that his band played for ages before he came on.

Then he did only a few numbers before he buggered off again. We were sitting there thinking, Is that it? Then this voice came booming out over the Tannoy: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building.’

‘Lazy fat bastard,’ I said, before remembering where I was.

It was an education, that gig. It was the first time I’d seen merchandising sold so professionally at a venue. You could buy Elvis drinks coasters, Elvis bog-seat warmers, Elvis mug and spoon sets, Elvis dolls, Elvis watches, Elvis jumpsuits. Anything you could think of, they’d put the name ‘Elvis’ on it and wanted to sell it to you with an Elvis Coke and an Elvis hot dog.

And the fans seemed only too happy to buy it.

He must have been the richest bloke on the planet.

It didn’t take us long to start getting into drugs big time. You couldn’t really get cocaine in Birmingham back then, so I didn’t try it until a gig in Denver with a band called Mountain in early 1971. Mountain’s guitarist and lead singer was a guy called Leslie West, and it was him who introduced me to the old waffle dust—we called it that ’cos it made you stay up all night, talking bollocks—although he insists to this day that I’d been taking it long before then. He’s got a bit of a bee up his arse about it, in fact. But I just say to him, ‘Listen, Leslie, when you come from Aston and you fall in love with cocaine, you remember when you started. It’s like having your first fuck!’

We were at a hotel after the show, and Leslie was cutting up a line. ‘D’you want a bit?’ he asked me.

At first I said, ‘Whoa, fucking hell, man, no way.’

But he kept saying, ‘Go on, just a bit, it’s all right.’

He didn’t exactly have to try very hard to persuade me.

Then it was, sniff-sniff-ahh.

I was in love, immediately. It’s the same with just about every drug I’ve ever taken: the first time I try it, that’s how I want to feel for the rest of my life. But it never works out that way. You can chase it all you want, but, believe me, you’ll never get that first-time high again.

The world went a bit fuzzy after that.

Every day I’d be smoking dope, boozing, having a few toots of coke, fucking around with speed or barbiturates or cough syrup, doing acid, you name it. I didn’t know what day it was most of the time. But at some point we made it back to Island Studios in Notting Hill to record our third album, Master of Reality, again with Rodger Bain.

I can’t remember much about it, apart from the fact that Tony detuned his guitar to make it easier to play, Geezer wrote ‘Sweet Leaf’ about all the dope we’d been smoking, and

‘Children of the Grave’ was the most kick-ass song we’d ever recorded. As usual, the critics hated it, although one of ’em described us as ‘Titanic’s house band on the eve of Armageddon’, which sounded about right to me. And the music press obviously didn’t put anyone off buying it, because Master of Reality was another monster hit, reaching number five in Britain and number eight in America.

But we never had a chance to enjoy our success. And I certainly didn’t have much time to enjoy married life. In fact, I was starting to realise that getting married so young might not have been such a clever idea. I would get this crazy restless feeling whenever I was at home, like I was going out of my mind. The only way I could handle it was to get loaded.