Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

I didn’t stick around to see what happened next. I just elbowed the preacher in the nuts and legged it.

The funny thing is, I’m actually quite interested in the Bible, and I’ve tried to read it several times. But I’ve only ever got as far as the bit about Moses being 720 years old, and I’m like,

‘What were these people smoking back then?’ The bottom line is I don’t believe in a bloke called God in a white suit who sits on a fluffy cloud any more than I believe in a bloke called the Devil with a three-pronged fork and a couple of horns. But I believe that there’s day, there’s night, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s black, there’s white. If there is a God, it’s nature. If there’s a Devil, it’s nature. I feel the same way when people ask me if songs like

‘Hand of Doom’ and ‘War Pigs’ are anti-war. I think war is just part of human nature. And I’m fascinated by human nature—especially the dark side. I always have been. It doesn’t make me a Devil worshipper, no more than being interested in Hitler makes me a Nazi. I mean, if I’m a Nazi, how come I married a woman who’s half Jewish?

All those Jesus freaks ever had to do was listen to my records, and it would have been obvious. But they just wanted to use me for publicity. And I suppose I didn’t care that much, ’cos every time they attacked me, I got my ugly mug on the telly and sold another hundred thousand records. I should probably have sent them a Christmas card.

But in the end, even the American legal system came down on my side.

The ‘Suicide Solution’ lawsuit was filed in January 1986, and was thrown out in August of that year. At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban

‘Suicide Solution’ and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they’d have to ban Shakespeare, ’cos Romeo and Juliet’s about suicide, too. He also said that the song lyrics were protected by the right of free speech in America. The judge agreed, but his summing up wasn’t exactly friendly. He said that although I was ‘totally objectionable and repulsive, trash can be given First Amendment protection, too’.

I had to read that sentence about five times before I realised that the bloke had actually ruled in our favour.

The one thing the McCollums were right about was that there was a subliminal message in ‘Suicide Solution’. But it wasn’t ‘Get the gun, get the gun, shoot-shoot-shoot’. What I actually say is ‘Get the flaps out, get the flaps out, bodge-bodge-bodge’. It was a stupid dirty joke we had at the time. If a chick took her kit off, we said she was getting her flaps out—her piss flaps. And ‘bodge’ was just a word we had for fuck. So I was basically saying, ‘Get a chick naked and give her one,’ which was a whole fucking lot different to saying, ‘Blow your brains out.’

But the media was obsessed with that stuff for a long time. Which was great PR as far as we were concerned. It got to the point where if you put a ‘parental advisory’ sticker on your album saying it contained explicit lyrics, you sold twice as many copies. Then you had to have one of those stickers, otherwise the album wouldn’t chart.

After a while, I started to put subliminal messages in as many of my songs as I could. For example, on No Rest for the Wicked, if you play ‘Bloodbath in Paradise’ backwards, you can clearly hear me saying, ‘Your mother sells whelks in Hull.’

The saddest thing about that period wasn’t that the Jesus freaks kept giving us a hard time. It was that my old bandmates Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake decided to have a go, too.

It started to feel like someone had put a bull’s-eye on my forehead, just ’cos I’d made a bit of dough.

They claimed we owed them money for Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman, so they sued us. And we fought, because we didn’t owe them anything. Bob and Lee were what’s known as paid-to-play musicians. They got a weekly rate for recording, a different rate for touring and another rate to stay at home. I even paid for the fucking petrol they used to drive to and from the studio. Yes, they helped write some of the songs on the first two albums, but they got publishing royalties for that—and they still get them to this day. So what more did they want? I’m obviously no great legal brain, but from what I understand they said I wasn’t a solo artist and that we were all part of a band. But if I was just the singer and we were all at the same level, how come I auditioned them? And how come I was talking about Blizzard of Ozz for years before I met them? And where the fuck are all their hit records, before and after the two albums with me?

People ask me why we didn’t just settle. But that’s what Michael Jackson did, and look what happened to him. If you’ve got a bit of hard-earned dough in the bank and you say to someone who’s suing you, ‘OK, how much will it cost to make this go away?’ that opens the door for every loony and arsehole in the world to try to get the next load off you. You have to stand up for yourself, ’cos it can be a nasty game, this business—especially when people think you go to bed at night on a big mountain of cash.

In the end Bob and Lee’s lawsuit got thrown out of every court in America. What really pisses me off is that Bob and Lee never said to me, ‘Ozzy, we’ve gotta sit down. We wanna have a talk to you.’ They just kept blasting off in all fucking directions. The first I knew about it was when I got served. They’d been creeping around behind my back, calling up other people who’d played on my albums and trying to get them involved. I’d done fuck-all wrong, but they made me feel like the criminal of the century, and it really got up my arse after a while.

Sharon protected me from a lot of the details, ’cos she knows how much I worry. In the end she just snapped and re-recorded Bob and Lee’s parts on those two albums. When they were re-released, a sticker was put on the covers telling people all about it. I didn’t have anything to do with that decision, and I can’t say I feel good about it. I told Sharon that I was uncomfortable with it, but I get it, y’know? I understand why she felt she had to do it. Every time we got past one hurdle, another one would come up. It never stopped. The case went on for twenty-five years after Blizzard of Ozz was recorded. All I wanted to do was get on with being a rock ’n’ roller, and instead I ended up being Perry fucking Mason, giving depositions here, there and everywhere.

What really kills me is that I worked with Bob for years, and I was very fond of him and his family. He’s a very talented bloke. We were good friends. I certainly didn’t turn around and sue him when they put my balls to the fire for ‘Suicide Solution’, even though he wrote some of the lyrics. But sometimes in life you’ve gotta move on. Eventually, I had to stop talking to him or seeing him, ’cos I was frightened I might say the wrong thing—and then it would be lawsuit time again. Also, I just hate fucking confrontations. It’s one of my biggest failings.

I never want to go through any of that bullshit again. Before I work with anyone now, I tell them to get themselves a lawyer, have their lawyer write up a contract with my lawyer, then read it, think about it, make sure they’re happy with it, make double and triple sure they’re happy with it, and then never say that anyone ripped them off.

Because I don’t do that—no matter what Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake might say.

My last good memory of the eighties, before everything went dark, was being sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Not because I’d broken the law again—amazingly—but because I was asked to play a gig there.

What a crazy experience that was. I might have been in a few police station lock-ups over the years, but I hadn’t set foot in a proper slammer since I’d walked out of Winson Green in 1966. The iron bars, the balconies, even the guards all looked the same as they had twenty years before, but it was the smell that really brought it all back to me: like a public shitter, times ten. Bad enough to make your eyes water. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to work in one of those places. I suppose they’re all ex-army, so they’re used to it.