Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

We used to have a right few laughs, me and Rick—and we’ve remained friends to this day.

The bloke’s a born storyteller. Hanging out with him is like An Evening with… He once told me that he’d legally changed his name to Michael Schumacher in case the cops ever pulled him over for speeding and asked for his name. Then, when PC Plod told him to fuck off and demanded to see his driving licence, there it would be, in black and white. You’ve got to admire that kind of dedication to winding up the boys in blue.

He had a collection of about thirty Rollers and Bentleys back then—although I don’t know when he ever drove ’em, because whenever I saw him he was shitfaced. He was almost as bad as me. Then, a few years later, he had a bunch of heart attacks in a row and had to give it up.

You could tell that Rick was bored out of his mind with Tales from Topographic Oceans.

One of the funniest stories I ever heard about him was from the time when Yes went on tour with that album. He got so fed up that halfway through one of the eight-hour twiddly bits, he got his roadie to order a curry and bring it to him on stage. Then he sat there at his keyboards, eating a chicken vindaloo under his cape while smoking a fag.

He didn’t last much longer in Yes after that.

Anyway, one day at Morgan Studios, when Rick seemed even more bored than usual, I asked him if he’d like to come over to Studio 4 and hear some of our new tracks. I remember playing the melody of ‘Sabbra Cadabra’ to him on my ARP 2600 synthesizer. There I was, murdering this riff with one grubby finger, going duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh-duh, with Rick watching me. And when I finally stopped, Rick just went, ‘Hmm, maybe it would sound better like this…’ leaned over the keyboard, and went diddly-diddly-diddly-diddly-dud-diddly-duh. His fingers moved so fast, I swear you couldn’t see the fucking things.

I asked him right then if he’d play on the album, and he said he’d love to, as long as we paid him his usual fee.

‘How much?’ I asked.

‘Two pints of Director’s best bitter.’

Apart from Rick, though, Yes lived like monks. They didn’t eat meat. They looked like they had yoga classes every day. And you’d never see them getting boozed up. The only rock ’n’ roll thing they did was smoke dope—and, as it happened, I’d just got another shipment of hash in from Afghanistan, and it was phenomenal. Really heavy-duty shit. Now I considered myself a bit of dope connoisseur in those days, and I was interested to see what Yes thought of this stuff. So one morning I took my brick of hash to the studio, went over to see Yes, and gave them a big lump of it. For some reason, the only one of them who was missing that day was Rick.

‘Here, lads,’ I said. ‘Stick a bit of this in your rollies.’

They said they’d try it immediately.

I went back to Studio 4, had a couple of joints myself, did some double-tracking for the vocals, nipped over to the caff for a cheeky five or six at lunchtime, came back, had another joint, then decided to check how Yes were doing.

But when I went into Studio 3, it was empty.

I found the chick from the reception desk and said, ‘Have you seen Yes anywhere?’

‘Oh, they all started to feel very unwell around lunchtime. They had to go home.’

By now, our album had a title—Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, after the track that had broken Tony’s writer’s block—and it was another stonker. Our last truly great album, I think. Even the artwork was spot on: it showed a bloke lying on his bed being attacked by demons in his sleep, with a skull and the number 666 above his head. I fucking loved that cover. And with the music we’d managed to strike just the right balance between our old heaviness and our new, ‘experimental’ side. On the one hand, you had tracks like ‘Spiral Architect’, which featured a full orchestra, and ‘Fluff’, which sounded almost like the Shadows (it was named in honour of Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman, the DJ who always played our records on Radio 1). On the other, there was ‘A National Acrobat’, which was so heavy it was like being hit over the head with a lump of concrete. I even got one of my own songs on the album: ‘Who Are You?’ I’d written it one night at Bulrush Cottage while I was loaded and fiddling around with a Revox tape machine and my ARP 2600.

We were all happy with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, I think. Even Patrick Meehan and the record company were happy. Which meant only one thing, of course: things could only go down-hill from there.

I should have known that bad things were about to happen to Black Sabbath when we flew to America in 1974 and the bloke sitting next to me croaked it halfway across the Atlantic.

One minute I was hearing this choking noise—‘uh, ugh, urrrgh’. The next I was sitting next to a corpse. I didn’t know what the fuck to do, so I pressed the button to call for a flight attendant.

‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’ said the chick, all prim and proper.

‘This bloke’s a goner, I reckon,’ I said, pointing at the lump beside me.

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘He’s kicked the bucket,’ I said, holding up the bloke’s floppy left arm. ‘Look at ’im. Dead as a fucking dodo.’

The stewardess started to panic. ‘What happened?’ she hissed, trying to cover him with a blanket. ‘Did he seem unwell?’

‘Well, he was making a bit of a choking noise,’ I said. ‘I just thought his peanuts had gone down the wrong way. Then he turned white, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the next thing I knew he’d kicked the bucket.’

‘Look,’ said the stewardess quietly. ‘We’re going to prop him up here against the window with this pillow. Please don’t mention this to the other passengers. We don’t want anyone panicking. To compensate for your inconvenience, we can reseat you in first class, if you’d like.’

‘What’s the difference between business and first?’ I asked.

‘Champagne.’

‘Magic.’

That was the beginning of The End.

What I remember most about the tour to promote Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is everyone starting to get pissed off. By now Patrick Meehan had stopped being the magician on the end of the phone line who could get you a Rolls-Royce or a horse or a Scalextric set, and had started to become the annoying flash bastard who never gave you a straight answer when you asked him how much dough you were making.

Meanwhile, Tony was grumbling about doing all the work in the studio, which meant he had no personal life. He had a point. But then again, Tony loved being in the studio—he’d even started to produce the albums himself. Personally, I could never stand all the sitting around, smoking cigarettes, and listening to the same three seconds of guitar solo over and over again. I still can’t handle it to this day. It drives me fucking nuts. Once I’ve done my thing, I have to get out into the fresh air. But as technology improved during the seventies, the temptation was always to add one more track, then another, then another… Tony couldn’t get enough of all that stuff. He had the patience for it. And no one ever argued with him, because he was the band’s unofficial leader.

Geezer was also getting fed up, because he was tired of me asking him for lyrics all the time. I can see how that must have got on his tits after a while, but the guy was a genius.

When we were at Morgan Studios, I remember calling him when he was taking a day off at his country house. I said, ‘C’mon, Geezer, I need some words for “Spiral Architect”.’ He grumbled a bit, told me to call him back in an hour, and put the phone down. When I spoke to him again, he said, ‘Have you got a pen? Good. Write this down: “Sorcerers of madness/Selling me their time/Child of God sitting in the sun…”’