Ozzy Osbourne - I Am Ozzy

Look what happened to my old mate Steve Clark from Def Leppard. All it took was a bit of brandy, a bit of vodka, some painkillers and some antidepressants, and that was the end of it. Lights out.

For ever.

Then, one day, Sharon said to me, ‘Right, Ozzy, we’re going to Boston. There’s a doctor I want you to see.’

‘What’s wrong with going to a doctor in England?’

‘This one’s a specialist.’

‘A specialist in what?’

‘In what’s wrong with you. We’re leaving tomorrow.’

I presumed she just meant a doctor who knew a lot about drug addiction, so I said, ‘OK,’

and off we went to Boston.

But this doc was a hardcore guy. The best of the best. He worked out of a teaching hospital—St Elizabeth’s Medical Center—and he had more qualifications hanging on his office wall than I had gold records.

‘OK, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to stand in the middle of the room, then walk towards me, slowly.’

‘Why?’

‘Just do it,’ hissed Sharon.

‘All right then.’

So I walked towards this bloke, and I mustn’t have been drinking that day, ’cos I managed to go in a straight line.

More or less.

Then he got me to follow his finger as he moved it up and down, and from side to side.

What the fuck does this have to do with being a drug addict? I kept thinking to myself. But that wasn’t the end of it. Next thing I knew I was hopping across the room on one leg, doing lifting exercises, and jogging around in circles with my eyes closed.

It felt like a fucking PE class.

‘Hmm, OK,’ he said. ‘Well, I can tell you this much, Mr Osbourne. You don’t have multiple sclerosis.’

What the—?

‘But I never thought I did have multiple sclerosis,’ I spluttered.

‘And you don’t have Parkinson’s.’

‘But I never thought I did have Parkinson’s.’

‘Nevertheless,’ he went on, ‘you clearly have some symptoms that could be caused by both of those conditions, and diagnosis can be difficult. All I can say is that, for now, you’re one hundred per cent clear.’

‘What?’

I looked at Sharon.

She looked at the floor. ‘Ozzy, I didn’t want to tell you,’ she said, sounding like she was trying hard not to cry. ‘But after your last couple of physicals, the doctors told me they were worried. That’s why we’re here.’

All this had been going on for six months, apparently. My doctors in LA were pretty much convinced that I either had MS or Parkinson’s, which is why we’d had to come all the way to Boston to see this specialist. But even though the doc had given me the all-clear, just the sound of the words ‘MS’ and ‘Parkinson’s’ set me off into a panic. The worst thing was, if I’d had either of those diseases, it would have made a lot of sense—my tremor was out of fucking control. That’s why both me and Sharon wanted to get another opinion. So the doc recommended that we go and see a colleague of his who ran a research centre at Oxford University, and off we went. He did the exact same tests on me as before, and told me the exact same thing: I was clear. ‘Aside from your drug addiction and your alcoholism, you’re a very healthy man, Mr Osbourne,’ he said. ‘My considered medical opinion is that you should leave my office and go and live your life.’

So I decided to retire. In 1992 I went on tour to promote No More Tears. We called it the No More Tours tour. That was it. I was done. The end. I’d been on the road for twenty-five years, pretty much. I was like a mouse on a wheel: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, album, tour. I mean, I’d buy all these houses, and I’d never fucking live in them. That’s the thing about being working class: you feel like you can never turn down work. But after seeing the doc in Boston I thought, Why am I doing this? I don’t need to work. I don’t need the dough.

Then, when we got back to England, Sharon said, ‘Don’t go crazy, but I’ve bought us a new house.’

‘Where?’

‘It’s called Welders House. In a village called Jordans in Buckinghamshire.’

‘Is there a pub near by?’

‘It’s a Quaker village, Ozzy.’

She wasn’t fucking kidding, either. Welders is probably further away from a pub than any other house in England. I was seriously pissed off with Sharon for buying that place—I didn’t talk to her for about six months because it was in such a dreadful state. ‘Dilapidated’ doesn’t even begin to describe it, and we had to rent a place in Gerrards Cross for a year while it was being done up. Even now, I don’t think it’s anywhere near as attractive as Beel House. But on the inside it’s magnificent. Apparently, it was built by the Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as a wedding present for his daughter. Then it became a convalescent home for army officers during World War Two. By the time Sharon came along, it was owned by one of the special-effects guys who’d worked on Star Wars.

I forgave Sharon eventually, because when we finally moved in it was magic. The weather was perfect that summer, and suddenly I had all this land—two hundred and fifty acres—and I could just fuck around all day on my quad bikes, without having to worry about anything. My health improved dramatically. I even stopped worrying about MS and Parkinson’s disease. I just thought, Well, if I get it, I get it.

But as soon as I felt better, I got bored. Crazy bored. I started to think about my dad—about how he’d taken early retirement and then ended up in hospital as soon as he’d finished the garden. I started to think about the bills for the renovation, and the cost of the staff at the management company, and how all the money to keep the whole machine up and running was now coming out of my savings. Then I thought, How can I retire at the age of forty-six? I mean, it’s not like I worked for anyone other than myself.

And what I do for a living isn’t a job, anyway. Or if it is, it’s the best fucking job in the world, hands down.

So one morning I got up, made myself a cup of tea, and said to Sharon, all casual, ‘Can’t you get me a gig at one of those American festivals this year?’

‘What d’you mean, Ozzy?’

‘I’d like to do a gig. Get back in the game.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m bored out of my fucking brains, Sharon.’

‘OK, then. If you’re serious, I’ll make some calls.’

So she called the organisers of Lollapalooza.

And they told her to fuck off.

‘Ozzy Osbourne? He’s a fucking dinosaur,’ they said, in not so many words.

That wound Sharon up no end, as you can imagine. So a few days later, she said, ‘Screw it, we’ll do our own bloody festival.’

‘Hang on a minute, Sharon,’ I said. ‘What d’you mean, “We’ll do our own festival”?’

‘We’ll book some venues and we’ll do it ourselves. Screw Lollapafuckinglooza.’

‘Won’t that be expensive?’

‘I’m not going to lie to you, Ozzy, it could be very expensive. But life’s all about taking risks, isn’t it?’

‘OK, but before you start going around booking stadiums left, right and centre, let’s test the ground first, eh? Start off small, like we did with Blizzard of Ozz. Then, if it takes off, we’ll get bigger.’

‘Well, listen to you, Mr Businessman all of a sudden.’

‘What are you planning to call this festival?’

‘Ozzfest.’

As soon as she said the word, I could think of only one thing: ‘Beerfest’. It was fucking perfect.

That’s how it started. Our strategy was to take all the undesirables, all the bands that couldn’t find an outlet anywhere else, and put them together, give them an audience. It worked better than we ever could have expected, ’cos nothing existed for those bands at the time. It had got to the point in the music business where if you wanted to play a gig, the venues made you buy all the tickets in advance, so you had to give them away for free or sell them on your own, which is bullshit. Black Sabbath never had to deal with that kind of bollocks in the early days. We’d never have left Aston, if that had been the case. Where would we have found the dough?