Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

‘Mr Osbourne, we appear to have found some blood in your alcohol.’

There was a lot of drinking at that wedding, not to mention seven bottles of Hennessy in the wedding cake. If you’d been breathalysed after eating a slice of that stuff, you’d have gone to jail. And I was smoking some killer weed, too.

‘Maui-wowy’, the local dealer called it.

The stag night was a joke. I got so fucked up in the hotel, I missed it. There’s a photograph of me crashed out in the room as everyone’s getting ready to leave. Fucking classic.

The wedding night was even worse. I didn’t even make it back to the room to spend the night with my new wife. At five in the morning, the hotel manager had to call her room and say, ‘Will you please come and get your husband. He’s asleep in the corridor and blocking the maids.’

It wasn’t long after I almost pissed in my new father-in-law’s face that he stopped calling me Ozzy. He took to calling me ‘Vegetable’ instead. As in, ‘Fuck off, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Die, Vegetable,’ or, ‘Get out of my fucking house, right now, Vegetable.’ I could understand why the bloke was upset—no one likes to get piss splashed in their direction—but I thought that was a bit much.

Mind you, it was nothing compared with how he’d talk to Sharon. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have your own father say such fucking horrific things to you, but Sharon could take it. She was unbelievably tough like that. And I suppose she was just used to it.

Most of the time it was me who got upset. I’d sit there and ask myself, How can a human being even come up with that shit? Never mind say it to their own flesh and blood. It was just the vilest stuff, from the depths of the lowest places.

Then, the next thing you knew, they were friends again.

That’s how Sharon was raised—and why she’s so extreme. But I needed someone like her in my life, because she could stand up to me. In fact, standing up to me was nothing compared with standing up to her father.

In the end, what happened between Sharon and her old man was tragic. At the time, I was too out of it on booze and drugs to know exactly what went down, and it’s not my place to say much about it now. All I know is that Sharon found out that Don was having an affair with a girl younger than she was; that we left Jet Records, which made Don go apeshit; and that we had to pay him $1.5 million to buy out our contract and stop him bankrupting us with lawsuits.

There had always been bad blood between the two of them, but it got out of control. Eventually, they stopped talking to each other altogether, and the silence continued for almost twenty years.

If any good came out of that situation, it was that we borrowed as much dough as we could to buy out all of my contracts, so that we weren’t controlled by anyone. I remember Sharon going in for a meeting with Essex Music and saying, ‘OK, how much do you want to fuck off? This is going to get ugly, because we’re not playing along any more. Just give us the number, and we’ll pay it.’

A week later, I had my own publishing company.

Meanwhile, Don might have thought I was a vegetable, but from the moment Sharon bought out my contract, he never stopped trying to get it back—usually by attempting to fuck up our marriage. He could be a really devious guy when he wanted to be, could my father-in-law. One time, for example, I was staying with Sharon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and we’d rented this very conspicuous white Rolls-Royce Corniche to ride around town in. But then I got shitfaced, we had this crazy fight about something, and Sharon fucked off, saying she was going back to England. Literally two minutes after she walked out of the door, the phone rang. It was Don. ‘I need to talk to you, Veg… er, Ozzy,’ he said. ‘It’s urgent.’

Looking back, he must have had someone outside the hotel, looking out for Sharon driving the Roller by herself. Otherwise, how would he have known that I was alone? The last thing I wanted to do was talk to him, but I couldn’t say no. The guy was terrifying. If you believed the rumours, he kept a loaded gun in his desk.

So Don came over and started telling me the most vile things you could ever imagine about my wife. It was the most disgusting stuff I’d ever heard. It was inhuman, what he said.

And he was talking about his own daughter.

Eventually, he paused for breath, then asked me, ‘Did you know all that, Ozzy? Did you know what your wife’s really like?’

Obviously, he wanted me to go crazy, leave Sharon, return to Jet Records, and start over.

But I wasn’t gonna give him the pleasure.

He had no right to come to my room and make up all this horrendous bullshit about my wife. I didn’t believe a single fucking word of it. Anyway, whatever Sharon had done, it couldn’t have been any worse than what I’d done. And it certainly wasn’t anywhere near as bad as what Don himself was doing. But I thought that the best way to piss him off would be just to act like it was no big deal.

‘Yeah, Don,’ I said. ‘I know all that about Sharon.’

‘You do?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’

‘And what, Don? I love her.’

‘If you want to get the marriage annulled, we can always arrange that for you, y’know?’

‘No thanks, Don.’

I could never believe what that guy was willing to do to his own family. Years later, for example, we found out that when he’d been managing me—and before then, even—he’d used Sharon as a shield. All of his companies, credit cards, bank accounts and loans were in her name. Basically Don didn’t exist on paper, so if he didn’t pay his bills, he couldn’t be sued.

And that included his tax bills, which he just fucking ignored—in England and America. Which left Sharon on the hook for everything without her ever knowing it. Then one day, out of the blue, she got a letter from the IRS saying she owed them, big time. By the time they’d added up all the unpaid taxes, interest and penalties, it came to seven figures. Don had taken her to the fucking cleaners.

‘I don’t know what your father’s made of,’ I said to her, ‘because I could never do that to my children.’

It drove Sharon halfway round the bend, that tax bill.

In the end, I said, ‘Look, whatever you’ve got to pay, just pay it, because I don’t want to live another day with this fucking thing hanging over us. You can’t avoid tax, so just get it done, and we’ll cut back on our expenses and work around it.’ That kind of thing happens a lot in the music business. When Sammy Davis Jr died, I heard that he left his wife with a seven-million-dollar tax bill, which took her a fucking eternity to pay off.

And there ain’t nothing you can do about it. You’ve just got to put on a brave face and dig deep.

But it was worth going through all that bullshit with Don to get my freedom. All of a sudden I could do whatever I wanted, no matter what he said. Like when I was in New York one time and I met up with my lawyer, Fred Asis, a great guy, ex-military. He told me that he had a meeting later with another one of his clients, a band called Was (Not Was), who were going crazy because their lead singer hadn’t shown up at the studio for a session.

‘I’ll stand in for him, if you want,’ I said, half joking.

But Fred took it seriously. ‘OK, I’ll ask them,’ he said.

Next thing I know I’m in this studio in New York, doing a rap on this song called ‘Shake Your Head’. I had a right old laugh—especially when I heard the final version, which had all these hot young backing-singer chicks on it. I still love that song today. It’s funny, y’know, because I’d always admired the Beatles for starting out as a bubblegum pop group and then getting heavier and heavier as their albums went on, and here was me going in the opposite direction.