Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

It would be almost impossible to exaggerate how much coke we did in that house. We’d discovered that when you take coke, every thought you have, every word you say, every suggestion you make seems like the most fabulous thing you’ve ever heard in your life. At one point we were getting through so much of the stuff, we had to have it delivered twice a day.

Don’t ask me who was organising it all—the only thing I can remember is this shady-looking bloke on the telephone the whole time. But he wasn’t shady in the normal sense of the word: he was clean cut and had one of those Ivy League accents, and he’d wear white shirts and smart trousers, like he was on his way to work in an office.

I once asked him, ‘What the fuck do you do, man?’

He just laughed and fiddled nervously with his aviator shades. At that stage I didn’t care, as long as the coke kept coming.

My favourite thing to do when I was high was to stay up all night watching American telly.

In those days there was only one thing on after the normal programming ended at midnight—a sales pitch by a bloke called Cal Worthington, who sold second-hand cars down in Long Beach or somewhere. His big joke was that he always appeared on air with his dog, Spot—but the dog was never actually a dog. It would be an alligator on a lead, or some crazy shit like that. He also had this catchphrase, ‘If I can’t make you a better deal, I’ll eat a bug!’, and did these stunts, like being strapped to the wing of an aeroplane as it did a loop-the-loop.

After a few hours of snorting coke and watching that shit, you thought you were going insane.

The funny thing is, he’s still at it today, old Cal. He must be about a thousand years old.

We fucked around so much at 773 Stradella Road, it’s a wonder we got any songs written at all. And it wasn’t just the coke. We got through a shitload of beer, too. I’d brought over these ‘party cans’ of best bitter from my local boozer. Each can held five pints, and you could fit six of them in one suitcase. It was like taking coal to Newcastle, but we didn’t care, ’cos we missed a good old English pint. We’d sit there by the pool, in ninety-degree sunshine, coked out of our minds, drinking stale Brummie piss, and looking out over Bel Air.

But then we had to tone things down because Thelma came to visit for few days—without the baby. The good behaviour didn’t last long, mind you. The second Thelma left for the airport to go back to England, we went straight back to being animals again. During our songwriting sessions, for example, no one could be arsed to walk upstairs for a slash, so we’d just go outside on to this little balcony and piss over the railing, which was only a couple of feet high. Then, one day, Tony gets this can of blue spray paint and sneaks round to the other side of the railing, and when Bill starts pissing, he sprays his dick with it. You should have heard the scream, man. It was priceless. But then, two seconds later, Bill blacks out, falls headfirst over the railing, and starts to roll down the hillside.

I said to Tony, ‘Gimme a look at that can, will yer?’

He passed it up to me, and there on the side, in big capital letters, it said: ‘WARNING. KEEP AWAY FROM SKIN. MAY CAUSE RASH, BLISTERING, CONVULSIONS, VOMITING, AND/OR FAINTING. IF ANY OF THESE SYMPTOMS OCCUR, SEEK MEDICAL CARE.’

‘Ah, he’ll be all right,’ I said.

And he was, eventually.

Although he did have a blue dick for a while.

In spite of all the arsing around, musically those few weeks in Bel Air were the strongest we’d ever been. For me, Snowblind was one of Black Sabbath’s best-ever albums—although the record company wouldn’t let us keep the title, ’cos in those days cocaine was a big deal, and they didn’t want the hassle of a controversy.

We didn’t argue.

So, after we’d recorded the new songs at the Record Plant in Hollywood, the name Snowblind was dropped, and our fourth album became known as just Vol. 4. We still managed to get a cheeky reference to cocaine in the liner notes, though. If you look closely enough, you’ll see a dedication to ‘the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles’.

And it was true—that album owed a lot to cocaine.

When I listen to songs like ‘Supernaut’, I can just about taste the stuff. The whole album’s like having someone pour a couple of lines into your ears. Frank Zappa once told me that

‘Supernaut’ was one of his favourite rock ’n’ roll tracks of all time, because you can hear the adrenaline. We were flying, y’know? In 1972, it had been only two years since the biggest compliment you could give us was that we were big in Carlisle. Now we had more money than the Queen—or so we thought—with three hit records in the charts, fans all over the world, and as much booze and drugs and chicks as we could ever want.

We weren’t on Cloud Nine. We were on Cloud Ten-and-a-Half.

And we still really cared about the music. We wanted to impress ourselves before we impressed anyone else. If other people happened to like what we were doing, that was just a bonus. That’s how we ended up doing songs like ‘Changes’, which didn’t sound like anything we’d ever done before. When a lot of people hear the name Black Sabbath, all they think of is the heavy stuff. But there was a lot more to us than that—especially when we started making an effort to get away from all that black magic shit. With ‘Changes’, Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff, I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill was going through with his wife at the time.

I thought that song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it.

I had to keep listening to it, over and over again. I’m still like that today: if I put it on my iPod, I’ll drive everyone nuts by singing along to it for the rest of the day.

Eventually we started to wonder where the fuck all the coke was coming from. All we knew was that it arrived in the back of unmarked vans, packed inside cardboard boxes. In each box there were about thirty vials—ten across, three deep—and each one had a screw-on top, sealed with wax.

I’m telling you: that coke was the whitest, purest, strongest stuff you could ever imagine.

One sniff, and you were the king of the universe.

But as much as we loved being human vacuum cleaners, we knew it would have been a big deal, getting caught with one of our dodgy shipments. Especially in America. And I didn’t much fancy the idea of spending the rest of my life bent over in an LA prison with the cock of some 280 lb gang member up my arse. The trouble was, of course, being constantly strung-out just made me even more paranoid, and after a while I’d convinced myself that our Ivy League dealer was FBI, or LAPD, or the fucking CIA.

Then, one night, me and the lads went down to Hollywood to see The French Connection at the cinema. Big mistake, that was. The plot was based on a true story about two undercover New York cops busting an international heroin-smuggling ring. By the time the credits rolled, I was hyperventilating.

‘Where the fuck would someone be getting vials of coke with wax seals on them?’ I said to Bill.

He just shrugged.

Then we went to the bog to do another couple of lines.

A few days later, I was lying by the pool, smoking a joint and drinking a beer, trying to get my heart to slow down, when the shady-looking bloke came over and sat down next to me. It was morning, and he had a cup of coffee in one hand and a copy of the Wall Street Journal in the other.

I hadn’t been to bed.

Now’s my chance to feel this bloke out, see how dodgy he is, I thought. So I leaned over and said, ‘Did you ever see that movie, The French Connection?’