Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

He’d picked her up at one of the tour venues, apparently, and was giving her a ride home.

A ride home? The woman he was divorcing?

At the time, there was a lot of talk that he might have been trying to kill her, but who the fuck knows? Whatever he was trying to do, he came down so low that even if he’d managed to miss the tour bus, he would have hit the trees behind it.

Don watched the whole thing happen.

I feel bad for him, ’cos it must have been a terrible thing to see. When the wing hit the bus, Randy and Rachel were thrown through the windscreen, or so I was told. Then the plane—minus its wing—smashed into the trees behind, fell into the garage, and exploded. The fire was so intense, the cops had to use dental records to identify the bodies.

Even now I don’t like talking or thinking about it.

If I’d been awake, I would have been on that fucking plane, no question. Knowing me, I’d have been on the wing, pissed, doing handstands and backflips. But it makes no sense to me that Randy went up.

He hated flying.

A few weeks earlier, I’d been drinking with him in a bar in Chicago. We were about to take a ten-day break from the tour, and Randy was asking how long it would take him to drive from New York to Georgia, where we were starting up again. I asked why the fuck he would want to drive all the way from New York to Georgia when there was an invention called the aeroplane. He told me he’d been freaked out by the Air Florida plane that had crashed into a bridge in Washington a few days earlier. Seventy-eight people had died. So Randy wasn’t exactly the type of person to go clowning around in a bullshit four-seat piece of shit. He didn’t even want to get on a jet run by a big commercial airline.

Some weird fucking unexplained shit went on that morning, because Rachel didn’t like planes, either. She had a weak heart, so she would hardly have wanted to do a loop-the-fucking-loop. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, they were pissing around, typical fucking rock stars.’ I want to set the record straight: Rachel was in her late fifties and had a heart condition; Randy was a very level-headed guy and he was afraid of flying. None of it makes any sense.

By the time the fire engines arrived, the flames had already burned themselves out. Randy was gone. Rachel was gone. I finally put on some clothes and took a beer from what was left of the fridge in the bus. I couldn’t handle the situation. Sharon was running around trying to find a telephone. She wanted to call her father. Then the cops arrived. Good ol’ boy types.

They weren’t too sympathetic.

‘Ozzy Ozz-Burn, huh?’ they said. ‘The bat-eating madman.’

We checked into some shithole called the Hilco Inn in Leesburg and tried to hide from the press while the police did their thing. We had to call Randy’s mum and Rachel’s best friend Grace, which was horrendous.

All of us wanted to get the fuck out of Leesburg, but we had to stay put until all the paperwork was done.

None of us could get our heads around the situation. Everything had been magic one minute, and the next it had taken such an ugly, tragic turn.

‘Y’know what? I think this is a sign that I ain’t supposed to do this any more,’ I said to Sharon.

By then I was having a total physical and mental breakdown. A doctor had to come over and shoot me up with sedatives. Sharon wasn’t doing much better. She was in a terrible state, poor Sharon. The one thing that gave us some comfort was a message from AC/DC saying,

‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know.’ That meant a lot to me, and I’ll always be grateful to them for it. You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan. In fact, AC/DC must have known exactly what we’d been going through, ’cos it had only been a couple of years since their singer Bon Scott had died from alcohol poisoning, also at a tragically young age.

The morning after the crash I called my sister Jean, who told me that my mother had been on a bus when she’d seen a newspaper stand with the headline, ‘OZZY OSBOURNE—AIR-CRASH DEATH’. My poor old mum had gone crazy. Then later that day, I went back to the dodgy housing estate with Randy’s brother-in-law. The bus was still there, twisted into the shape of a boomerang, next to the ruins of the garage. And there, in the corner, untouched in all the ash and rubble, was a perfect little cut-out section of the Gibson T-shirt that Randy had been wearing when he died. Just the logo, nothing else. I couldn’t believe it—it was so spooky.

Meanwhile, outside the hotel, all these kids had started to hang around. I noticed that some of them were wearing the Diary of a Madman tracksuits we’d had made for the tour, so I said to Sharon, ‘We’re not selling those things, are we?’ When she said ‘no’, I walked up to this kid and asked, ‘Where did you get the tracksuit from?’

He said, ‘Oh, I went in and got it off the bus.’

I went fucking crazy. Almost ripped his head off.

Eventually all the paperwork was done—the only drug they found in Randy’s body was nicotine—and the cops let us leave. They were glad to see us go, I imagine.

Then we had to do two funerals in one week, and it was fucking heavy-duty on all of us, especially Sharon, who suffered terribly. She couldn’t even listen to the Diary of a Madman album again for years.

Randy’s funeral was held at the First Lutheran Church in Burbank. I was one of the pallbearers. They had big pictures of Randy all around the altar. I remember thinking: It’s only been a few days since I was sitting on the bus with him, calling him mad for wanting to go to university. I felt so bad. Randy was one of the greatest guys who’d ever been in my life. And I suppose I felt guilty, too, because if he hadn’t been in my band, he wouldn’t have died. I don’t know how Randy’s mother survived the funeral—she must be some kind of woman. Her little baby had died. She was divorced, Delores was, so her kids meant everything to her. And Randy really loved her—he absolutely adored her. For years after, every time me and Sharon used to see Dee, we felt terrible. I mean, what can you say? It’s gotta be any parent’s worst nightmare when they lose their child like that.

After the service there was a motorcade from Burbank to San Bernardino, about an hour away. Randy was laid to rest at a place called Mountain View Cemetery, where his grandparents were buried. I made a vow there and then to honour his death every year by sending flowers. Unlike most of my vows, I kept it. But I’ve never been back to his graveside. I’d like to go there again one day, before I finally join him on the other side.

Rachel’s funeral couldn’t have been more different. It was at a black gospel church somewhere in South LA. She was very big on her church, Rachel was. And during the service they’re all singing gospel and diving on the floor and shouting, ‘Jesus Loves You, Rachel!’ I’m thinking, What the fuck’s all this about? It’s a joyous experience, an African-American funeral.

There’s no moping around.

The following week I did the David Letterman show. It was surreal, man. As soon as I’d sat down and the band stopped playing, Dave said to me, ‘Let’s just get right to it, Ozzy. From what I hear, you bit the head off a…’

I couldn’t believe he was going there.

‘Oh, don’t,’ I said. But it was too late.

Dave was very cool with me overall—he was very nice, very sympathetic—but I was in no mood for the bat story. Shock is a very weird thing, and the funerals had been bad.

At the end of the interview, Dave said to me, ‘I know that recently there’s been a personal and professional tragedy in your life. Quite honestly, I’m surprised that you went ahead with your commitment to be here, and I appreciate that, and I know you want to take a minute to explain.’