Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘What d’you want doves for, anyway?’ I asked Sharon, swigging from the bottle of Cointreau I’d brought with me.

Sharon gave me one of her looks.

‘Don’t you remember, Ozzy? Our conversation? Last night? They’re for the meeting.

When we get in there, you’re going to throw the doves in the air so they fly around the room.’

‘What for?’

‘Because that’s what we agreed. And then you’re going to say “rock ’n’ roll” and give them the peace sign.’ I couldn’t remember any of it. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning, but I was already on Planet Booze. I hadn’t stopped since the night before. Or the night before that.

I’d even forgotten why we were going to see CBS. But then Sharon reminded me: ‘They need a kick up the arse because they bought Blizzard of Ozz from my father for a pathetically small sum of money, so they’re probably expecting it to bomb, which is exactly what Black Sabbath’s last two albums did in America. You’re nothing in this country as a solo artist, Ozzy.

Forget about the sold-out shows in Britain. You’re starting from scratch here. When you go into this meeting, you’ve got to make an impression, show them who you are.’

‘With doves?’ I said.

‘Exactly.’

I put down the bottle and took the birds from Sharon.

‘Why don’t I bite their heads off?’ I said, holding them up in front of my face. ‘That’ll make an impression.’

Sharon just laughed, shook her head, and looked out of the window at the blue sky and the palm trees.

‘I’m serious,’ I said.

‘Ozzy, you’re not going to bite their heads off.’

‘Yeah, I am.’

‘No, you’re not, silly.’

‘Yeah, I fucking am. I’ve been feeling a bit peckish all morning.’

Sharon laughed again. I loved that sound more than I loved anything else in the world.

The meeting was bullshit. A bunch of fake smiles and limp handshakes. Then someone told me how excited they were that Adam Ant was coming to America. Adam Ant? I almost chinned the cunt when he said that. It was obvious none of them gave a shit. Even the PR

chick kept looking at her watch. But the meeting went on and on while all these suits with gold watches spouted meaningless corporate marketing bollocks, until eventually I got pissed off waiting for Sharon to give me the cue to throw the doves in the air. In the end I just got up, walked aross the room, sat down on the arm of the PR chick’s chair, and pulled one of them out of my pocket.

‘Oh, cute,’ she said, giving me another fake smile. Then she looked at her watch again.

That’s it, I thought.

I opened my mouth wide.

Across the room, I saw Sharon flinch.

Then I went chomp, spit.

The dove’s head landed on the PR chick’s lap in a splatter of blood. To be honest with you, I was so pissed, it just tasted of Cointreau. Well, Cointreau and feathers. And a bit of beak. Then I threw the carcass on to the table and watched it twitch.

The bird had shit itself when I bit into its neck, and the stuff had gone everywhere. The PR

chick’s dress was flecked with this nasty brown-and-white goo, and my jacket, a horrible yellow eighties thing with a Rupert the Bear-style pattern on it, was pretty much ruined. To this day, I have no fucking idea what was going on in my head. I mean, the poor dove. But I’ll tell you one thing: it made an impression, all right.

For a split second, all you could hear was everyone taking a breath at the same time and the photographer in the corner going click-click-click.

Then pandemonium.

The PR chick started screaming, ‘Ew, ew, ew!’, while a bloke in a suit ran over to the bin in the corner and puked. Then alarms started going off, as someone yelled into the intercom for security.

‘GET THIS ANIMAL OUT OF HERE! NOW!’

At that moment I took the other dove out of my pocket.

‘Hello, birdie,’ I said to it, giving it a kiss on the head. ‘My name’s Ozzy Osbourne. And I’m here to promote my new album, Blizzard of Ozz.’

Then I opened my mouth and everyone in the room went ‘NOOOOOO!’ People were covering their eyes with their arms and screaming at me to stop it and get the fuck out. But instead of biting its head off, I let it go, and it flapped happily around the room.

‘Peace,’ I said, as two massive security guards burst into the room, grabbed me by the arms, and dragged me out backwards.

The panic in that place was insane, man.

Meanwhile, Sharon was pissing herself laughing. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

I think it was just her reaction to the shock of it, more than anything else. She’d also been pretty pissed off with CBS for not showing enough enthusiasm about the album, so in a way she was probably glad I’d just given them the fright of their lives, even if it was the most horrific thing she’d ever seen. ‘You are banned from the CBS building, you freakshow,’ said the chief security bloke, after he’d pushed me out of the front door of the building into the hundred-degree LA heat. ‘If I see you here again, I’ll have you arrested, d’you understand?’

Sharon followed me outside, then she grabbed me by the collar, and kissed me.

‘That poor fucking creature,’ she said. ‘We’ll be lucky if CBS doesn’t pull the plug on the whole record after that performance. They might even sue us. You bad, bad, bad boy.’

‘So why aren’t you giving me a bollocking, then?’ I asked her, confused.

‘Because the press are going to fucking love it.’

That night, we went back to Don Arden’s house, where we were staying with Rudy and Tommy, our new rhythm section. Don’s house was a big Spanish-style deal at the top of Benedict Canyon, above Beverly Hills, with red tiles on the roof and a huge iron gate to keep the little people away. Apparently Howard Hughes had built the place for one of his girlfriends.

Don had bought it after making a ton of dough from ELO, and now he lived up there like a king, with Cary Grant as his neighbour. When were in town, Don would put us up in the one of the ‘bungalows’ on the grounds. He used another one of the bungalows as the LA headquarters of Jet Records.

I was so shitfaced by the time our limo pulled up in the driveway, I barely knew what planet I was on. Then I went off with Rudy to one of the rooms at the back of the house where Don had a TV, a drinks cabinet and a ‘wet bar’. I’d moved on from Cointreau to beer by that point, which meant I needed to take a slash every five seconds. But I couldn’t be arsed to walk all the way to the bog, so I just pissed in the sink. Which wasn’t a problem until Don walked past the door in his dressing-gown, on his way to bed.

All I heard was this voice from behind me, loud enough to register on the Richter scale.

‘OZZY, ARE YOU PISSING IN MY FUCKING SINK?’

Oh, shit.

I squeezed my dick to stop the piss.

He’s gonna kill me, I thought. He’s gonna fucking kill me.

Then I had an idea: if I whip around really quick while zipping up my fly, everything will be fine. So that’s what I started to do. But I was so loaded, my hand slipped off my dick as I turned, and this jet of piss came spraying out—straight at Don.

He jumped backwards and it missed him by a fraction of an inch.

To this day, I’ve never seen a human being so angry. I swear, I thought he was gonna rip my head off and take a shit down my windpipe. The bloke was livid: red in the face, shaking, spit flying out of his mouth. The whole deal. It was terrifying. When he was done calling me every name under the sun—and a few more—he said, ‘GET OUT. GET OUT OF MY HOUSE, YOU FUCKING ANIMAL. GET OUT! GET OUT NOW!’

Then he stomped off to find Sharon. A couple of minutes later, from the other end of the house, I heard, ‘AND YOU’RE EVEN WORSE, BECAUSE YOU’RE FUCKING HIM!’