Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

I hadn’t seen Thelma or the kids for ages. I’d call them up from the phone in my room, but it felt like they were slipping away from me, which made me feel even more depressed. I’d spent more time with Black Sabbath than I ever had with my family. We’d come back from months on the road, take a three-week break, then go straight off to some farm or castle where we’d fuck around until we came up with some new songs. We did that for a decade, until all our personal lives were ruined: Bill’s marriage failed, Tony’s marriage failed, Geezer’s marriage failed. But I didn’t want to accept it, because it would mean losing my home and my kids, and I’d already lost my dad and my band.

I just wanted to shut everything out, make everything go away.

So I hid in Le Parc and drank.

And drank.

And drank.

Then, one day, this bloke called Mark Nauseef knocked on my door. He was a drummer, also managed by Don Arden, and he’d played with everyone from the Velvet Underground to Thin Lizzy. He told me that Sharon from Jet Records was coming over to pick something up from him—he was staying in one of the other apartments—but that he had to leave town for a gig. Then he handed me an envelope.

‘Would you do me a favour and give this to her?’ he asked. ‘I told Sharon just to call for you at reception.’

‘No worries,’ I said.

As soon as I closed the door, I got a knife and opened it.

Inside was five hundred dollars in cash. Fuck knows what it was for and I didn’t care. I just called up my dealer and bought five hundred dollars’ worth of coke. A few hours later, Sharon came over and asked if I had something to give her. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said, all innocent.

‘Are you sure, Ozzy?’

‘Pretty sure.’

But it didn’t take Einstein to work out what had happened. There was a massive bag of coke on the table next to a ripped-up envelope with ‘Sharon’ written on it in felt-tip pen.

Sharon gave me a monumental bollocking when she saw it, shouting and cursing and telling me I was a fucking disaster.

I guess I won’t be shagging her any time soon, then, I thought.

But she came back the next day, to find me lying in a puddle of my own piss, smoking a joint.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘If you want to get your shit together, we want to manage you.’

‘Why would anyone want to manage me?’ I asked her.

I couldn’t believe it, I really couldn’t. But it was a good job that someone wanted me, ’cos I was down to my last few dollars. My royalties from Black Sabbath were non-existent, I didn’t have a savings account, and I had no new income coming in. At first, Don wanted me to start a band called Son of Sabbath, which I thought was a horrendous idea. Then he wanted me to team up with Gary Moore. I wasn’t too keen on that, either, even though me and Sharon had gone to San Francisco with Gary and his bird one time, and we’d had a lot of fun. (I really thought I was in with Sharon on that trip, to be honest with you, but nothing happened: she just went back to her hotel at the end of the night, and left me dribbling into my beer.) The worst idea that Don Arden had was for me and Sabbath to do gigs together, one after the other, like a double bill. I asked Sharon, ‘Is he having a laugh?’

But then Sharon started to take more control, and we decided that I should make a proper solo album.

I wanted to call it Blizzard of Ozz.

And little by little, things started to come together.

I’d never met anyone who could sort things out like Sharon could. Whatever she said she would do, she’d get it done. Or at least she’d come back to you and say, ‘Look, I tried my best, but I couldn’t make it happen.’ As a manager, you always knew exactly where you stood with her. Meanwhile, Sharon’s father would just shout and bully like some mob captain, so I tried to stay out of his way as much as I could. Of course, before I could make an album and go on tour, I needed a band. But I’d never held auditions before, and I didn’t have a clue how or where to start. So Sharon helped me out, taking me to see all these young, up-and-coming LA guitarists. But I wasn’t really in any state for it. I’d just find a sofa in the corner of the room and pass out. Then a friend of mine, Dana Strum—who’d auditioned to be my bass player—said to me, ‘Look, Ozzy, there’s one guy you really have to see. He plays with a band called Quiet Riot, and he’s red hot.’

So one night this tiny American bloke came over to Le Parc to introduce himself. The first thing that came into my mind was: he’s either a chick or gay. He had long, wet-looking hair, and this weirdly deep voice, and he was so thin he was almost not there. He reminded me a little of David Bowie’s guitarist, Mick Ronson.

‘How old are you?’ I asked, as soon as he walked through the door.

‘Twenty-two.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Randy Rhoads.’

‘Do you want a beer?’

‘I’ll take a Coke, if you have one.’

‘I’ll get you a beer. Are you a bloke, by the way?’

Randy just laughed.

‘Seriously,’ I said.

‘Er, yeah. Last time I checked.’

Randy must have thought I was a fucking lunatic.

Afterwards, we drove over to a studio somewhere so I could hear him play. I remember him plugging his Gibson Les Paul into a little practice amp and saying to me, ‘D’you mind if I warm up?’

‘Knock yourself out,’ I said.

Then he started doing these finger exercises. I had to say to him, ‘Stop. Randy, just stop right there.’

‘What’s wrong?’ he said, looking up at me with this worried expression on his face.

‘You’re hired.’

You should have heard him play, man.

I almost cried, he was so good.

Soon we were flying back to England for rehearsals. I quickly found out that although Randy looked like Mr Cool, he was an incredibly sweet, down-to-earth guy. A real gentleman, too—not at all what you’d expect of a flash American rock ’n’ roll guitar hero.

I couldn’t understand why he even wanted to get involved with a bloated alcoholic wreck like me.

At first, we stayed at Bulrush Cottage with Thelma and the kids. The first thing we wrote was ‘Goodbye to Romance’. Working with Randy was like night and day compared with Black Sabbath. I was just walking around the house one day, singing this melody that had been in my head for months, and Randy asked, ‘Is that your song, or a Beatles song?’ I said, ‘Oh no, it’s nothing, just this thing I’ve got stuck in my head.’ But he made me sit down with him until we’d worked it out.

He was incredibly patient—I wasn’t surprised at all when I found out that his mum was a music teacher. It was the first time I’d ever felt like I was an equal partner when it came to songwriting.

Another vivid memory of working with Randy was when we wrote ‘Suicide Solution’. We were at a party for a band called Wild Horses at John Henry’s, a rehearsal studio in London.

Everyone else was fucked up on one thing or another, but Randy was sitting in a corner experimenting with riffs on his Flying V, and all of a sudden he just went Dah, Dah, D’La-Dah, DAH, D’La-Dah. I shouted over, ‘Whoa, Randy! What was that?’ He just shrugged. I told him to play what he’d just played, then I started to sing this lyric I’d had in my head for a while:

‘Wine is fine, but whiskey’s quicker/ Suicide is slow with liquor’. And that was it, most of the song was written, right there. The night ended with everyone on stage, jamming.

Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy was there. That might have been the last time I saw him before he died, actually. He was a tragic case, was Phil. I mean, I thought he missed his mark so badly. Great fucking performer, great voice, great style, but the old heroin got him in the end.