I Am Ozzy (10 page)

It's impossible to describe what it feels like to hear yourself on Radio 1 for the first time. It was magic, squared. I ran around the house screaming, 'I'm on the radio!
I'm on the fucking radio!
' until my mum stomped downstairs in her nightie and told me to shut up. '
Evil woman
,' I sang to her, at full volume, '
Don't you play your games with me!
' Then I was off, out of the door, singing my head off all the way down Lodge Road.

But if being played on Radio 1 was good, it was nothing compared with the advance we got from Philips: PS105 each!
I'd never even had ten quid to call my own before, never mind a hundred. It would have taken me a whole year of tuning car horns at the Lucas factory to earn that kind of dough. I thought I was Jack the Lad that week. The first thing I bought was a bottle of Brut aftershave to make myself smell better. Then I got a new pair of shoes, 'cos I'd destroyed my old ones in Denmark. The rest I gave to my mum to pay the bills. But then I kept scrounging it back off her, so I could go down the pub and celebrate.
Then it was back to work.
As far as I can remember, we didn't have any demos to speak of, and there was no official talk about making an album. Jim just told us one day that we'd been booked for a week of gigs in Zurich, and that on our way down there, we should stop off at Regent Sound studios in Soho and record some tracks with a producer called Rodger Bain and his engineer, Tom Allom. So that's what we did. Like before, we just set up our gear and played what amounted to a live set without the audience. Once we'd finished, we spent a couple of hours double-tracking some of the guitar and the vocals, and that was that. Done. We were in the pub in time for last orders. It can't have taken any longer than twelve hours in total.
That's how albums should be made, in my opinion. I don't give a fuck if you're making the next
Bridge Over Troubled Water
- taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N' Roses did, is just fucking ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career's died, been resurrected, and then died again.
In our case, mind you, we didn't have the luxury of taking our time. It wasn't an option. So we just went in there and did it. And then the next day we set off for Zurich in the Transit to do a residency at a joint called the Hirschen Club. We hadn't even heard Rodger and Tom's final mix when we left Soho, never mind seen the album cover. That's how the music business was run in those days. As a band, you had less say in what was going on than the guy who cleaned out the shitter in the record company's executive suite. I remember it being a long, long way to Switzerland in the back of a Transit van. To kill time, we smoked dope. Shitloads of it. When we finally got to Zurich, we were so fucking hungry we found one of those posh Swiss caffs and held a competition to see who could eat the most banana splits in the shortest time. I managed to get twenty-five of the fuckers down my throat before the owner chucked us out. My whole face was covered in cream by the end of it. I could have had a couple more of them, too.
Then we had to go and find the Hirschen Club, which turned out to be even sleazier than the Star Club. They had this tiny little stage with the bar just a few feet away, and it was dark and there were hookers hanging around all over the place. The four of us had to share one crappy room upstairs, so getting a chick with her own place was the order of the day.
One night, these two girls in fishnets invited me and Geezer back to their apartment. They were obviously on the game, but I was up for anything that would spare me from another night of sharing a bed with Bill, who spent the whole time complaining about my smelly feet. So when they sweetened the deal by saying they had some dope, I said, 'Fuck it, let's go.' But Geezer wasn't so sure. 'They're
hookers
, Ozzy,' he kept saying. 'You'll catch something nasty. Let's find some other chicks.'
'I ain't gonna bonk either of 'em,' I said. 'I just wanna get out of this fucking place.'
'I'll believe that when I see it,' said Geezer. 'The dark-haired chick isn't so bad-looking. After a few beers and a few puffs of the magic weed, she'll have her way with me.'
'Look,' I said, 'if she makes a move on yer, I'll kick her up the arse and we'll leave, all right?'
'Promise?'
'If she makes
one move
towards your knob, Geezer, I'll pull her off you and we'll fuck off.'
'All right.'
So we go back to their place. It's all dimly lit, and Geezer's on one side of the room with the darkhaired chick, and I'm on the other side with the ugly one, and we're smoking weed and listening to the album by Blind Faith, the 'supergroup' formed by Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and Ric Grech. For a while it's all serene and trippy - the music's playing and everyone's snogging and fumbling around. Then, all of a sudden, this deep Brummie voice rises out of the mist of dope smoke.
'Oi, Ozzy,' says Geezer. 'Time to put the boot in.'
I looked over and this hooker was straddling him as he lay there with his eyes closed and this pained expression on his face. I honestly thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever seen in my life.
I don't even know if he shagged her in the end. I just remember laughing and laughing and laughing until I cried.

Jim Simpson wanted to see us at his house as soon as we got back from Switzerland. 'I've got something you need to see,' he said, in this ominous voice.

So that afternoon we all met up in his living room and sat there, twiddling our thumbs, wondering what the fuck he was going to say. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out the finished record of
Black Sabbath
. We were speechless. The cover was a spooky-looking fifteenth-century watermill (I later found out it was the Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames in Oxfordshire), with all these dead leaves around it and a sickly looking woman with long dark hair, dressed in black robes, standing in the middle of the frame with a scary look on her face. It was
amazing
. Then, when you opened the gatefold sleeve, there was just black everywhere and an inverted cross with a creepy poem written inside it. We'd had no input with the artwork, so the inverted cross - a symbol of Satanism, we later found out - had nothing to do with us. But the stories that you hear about us being unhappy with it are total bullshit. As far as I can remember, we were immediately blown away by the cover. We just stood there, staring at it, and going, 'Fucking hell, man, this is fucking
unbelievable
.'

Then Jim went over to his record player and put it on. I almost burst into tears, it sounded so great. While we'd been in Switzerland, Rodger and Tom had put these sound effects of a thunderstorm and a tolling bell over the opening riff of the title track, so it sounded like something from a film. The overall effect was fabulous. I still get chills whenever I hear it.

On Friday the thirteenth of February 1970,
Black Sabbath
went on sale.
I felt like I'd just been born.
But the critics fucking hated it.
Still, one of the few good things about being dyslexic is that when I say I don't read reviews, I mean
I

don't read reviews
. But that didn't stop the others from poring over what the press had to say about us. Of all the bad reviews of
Black Sabbath
, the worst was probably written by Lester Bangs at
Rolling Stone
. He was the same age as me, but I didn't know that at the time. In fact, I'd never even heard of him before, and once the others told me what he'd written I wished I still hadn't. I remember Geezer reading out words like 'claptrap', 'wooden' and 'dogged'. The last line was something like, 'They're just like Cream, but worse', which I didn't understand, because I thought Cream were one of the best bands in the world.

Bangs died twelve years later, when he was only thirty-three, and I've heard people say he was a genius when it came to words, but as far as we were concerned he was just another pretentious dickhead. And from then we never got on with
Rolling Stone
. But y'know what? Being trashed by
Rolling Stone
was kind of cool, because they were the Establishment. Those music magazines were all staffed by college kids who thought they were clever - which, to be fair, they probably were. Meanwhile, we'd been kicked out of school at fifteen and had worked in factories and slaughtered animals for a living, but then we'd made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us. So how upset could we be when clever people said we were no good?

The important thing was
someone
thought we were good, 'cos
Black Sabbath
went straight to number eight in Britain and number twenty-three in America.
And the
Rolling Stone
treatment prepared us for what was to come. I don't think we ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews. Whenever I hear someone getting upset about reviews, I just say to them, 'Look, it's their job to criticise. That's why they're called
critics
.' Mind you, some people just get so wound up they can't control themselves. I remember one time in Glasgow this critic showed up at our hotel, and Tony goes over to him and says, 'I wanna have a word with you, sunshine.' I didn't know it at the time, but the guy had just written a hit-piece on Tony, describing him as 'Jason King with builder's arms' - Jason King being a private-eye type character on TV at the time who had this stupid moustache and dodgy haircut. But when Tony confronted him, he just laughed, which was a really stupid thing to do. Tony just stood there and said, 'Go on, son, finish laughing, 'cos in about thirty seconds you ain't gonna be laughing any more.' Then he started to laugh himself. The critic didn't take him seriously, so he kept on laughing, and for about two seconds they were both just standing there, laughing their heads off. Then Tony swung his fist back and just about put this bloke in hospital. I never read his review of the show, but I'm told it wasn't very flattering.

My old man wasn't too impressed with our first album, either.
I'll always remember the day I took it home and said, 'Look, Dad! I got my voice on a record!' I can picture him now, fiddling with his reading specs and holding the cover in front of his face. Then

he opened the sleeve, went 'Hmm' and said, 'Are you sure they didn't make a mistake, son?' 'What d'you mean?'
'This cross is upside down.'
'It's supposed to be like that.'
'Oh. Well, don't just stand there. Put it on. Let's have a bit of a sing-along, eh?'
So I walked over to the radiogram, lifted the heavy wooden lid, put the record on the turntable -

hoping the dodgy speaker that I'd put in there from the PA would work - and cranked up the volume. With the first clap of thunder, my dad flinched.
I grinned nervously at him.
Then:
Bong!
Bong!
Bong!
My dad coughed.
Bong!
Bong!
Bong!
He coughed again.
Bong!
Bong!
Bong!
'Son, when does--'
BLAM! Dow! Dowwwwwww!!!
Dooooowwwwww!!!!!
My poor old man turned white. I think he'd been expecting something along the lines of 'Knees up

Mother Brown'. But I left the record on anyway. Finally, after six minutes and eighteen seconds of Tony and Geezer thrashing away on their guitars, Bill beating the shit out of his drums, and me howling on about a man in black coming to take me away to the lake of fire, my dad rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked at the floor.

Silence.
'What d'you think, Dad?'
'John,' he said, 'are you absolutely sure you've only been drinking the
occasional
beer?' I went bright red and said something like 'Oh, er, yeah, Dad, whatever.'
Bless him, he just didn't get it at all.
But it broke my heart, y'know? I'd always felt as though I'd let my father down. Not because of

anything he'd ever said to me. But because I was a failure at school, because I couldn't read or write properly, because I'd been sent to prison, and because I'd been fired from all of those factory jobs. But now, finally, with Black Sabbath, I was doing something I was good at, that I enjoyed, that I was prepared to work hard at. I suppose I just really wanted my old man to be proud of me. But it wasn't his fault - it was the way he was. It was his generation.

And I think deep down he
was
proud of me, in his own way.

I can honestly say that we never took the black magic stuff seriously for one second. We just liked how theatrical it was. Even my old man eventually played along with it: he made me this awesome metal cross during one of his tea breaks at the factory. When I turned up to rehearsals with it, all the other guys wanted one, so I got Dad to make three more.

I couldn't believe it when I learned that people actually 'practised the occult'. These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I'd say to them, 'Look, mate, the only evil spirits I'm interested in are called whisky, vodka and gin.' At one point we were invited by a group of Satanists to play at Stonehenge. We told them to fuck off, so they said they'd put a curse on us. What a load of bollocks that was. Britain even had a 'chief witch' in those days, called Alex Sanders. Never met him. Never wanted to. Mind you, we did buy a Ouija board once and have a little seance. We scared the shit out of each other.

That night, at God knows what hour, Bill phoned me up and shouted, 'Ozzy, I think my house is
haunted
!'
'Sell tickets then,' I told him, and put the phone down.
The good thing about all the satanic stuff was that it gave us endless free publicity. People couldn't get enough of it. During its first day of release,
Black Sabbath
sold five thousand copies, and by the end of the year it was on its way to selling a million worldwide.
None of us could believe it.
Not even Jim Simpson could believe it - the poor bloke ended up getting completely overwhelmed. His office was in Birmingham, miles away from the action in London, and he had other bands to look after, no staff, and Henry's Blues House to run. So it didn't take long for us to start getting pissed off with him. For starters, we weren't getting any dough. Jim wasn't robbing us - he's one of the most honest people I've ever met in the music business - but Philips were taking forever to cough up our royalties, and Jim wasn't the kind of bloke who could go down there and bully them into paying. Then there was the issue of America: we wanted to go, immediately. But we had to get it right, which meant going easy on all the satanic stuff, 'cos we didn't want to come across like fans of the Manson Family.
We'd get strung up by our balls if we did.
It didn't take long for all the sharks down in London to realise there was blood in the water, as far as Jim was concerned. So, one by one, they started circling. They looked at us and they saw big fucking neonlit pound signs. Our first album couldn't have cost more than five hundred quid to make, so the profit margins were astronomical.
The first call we got was from Don Arden. We didn't know much about him apart from his nickname - 'Mr Big'. Then we heard stories about him dangling people out of his fourth-floor Carnaby Street office window, stubbing cigars out on people's foreheads, and demanding all his contracts be paid in cash and delivered by hand in brown paper bags. So we were shitting ourselves when we went down to London to meet him for the first time. When we got off the train at Euston Station, he had his blue Rolls-Royce waiting to pick us up. It was the first time I'd ever been in a Roller. I sat there in the back seat, like the King of England, thinking, Three years ago, you were a puke remover in a slaughterhouse, and before that you were doling out slop to child molesters in Winson Green. Now look where you are.
Don had a reputation as the kind of guy who could make you world famous but would rip you off while he was at it. It's not like he was pulling any complex, high finance, Bernie Madoff-type scams. He just wouldn't fucking pay. Simple as that. It would be like, 'Don, you owe me a million quid, can I have the money please?' And he'd go, 'No, you can't.' End of conversation. And if you ever went to his office to ask for the dough in person, there was a good chance you'd leave in the back of an ambulance.
But the thing with us was, we didn't really need anyone to make us world famous - we were already halfway there. Still, we sat in Don's office and listened to his pitch. He was a short bloke, but with the build and presence of a pissed-off Rottweiler, and he had this incredible shouty voice. He'd pick up the phone to his receptionist and scream so loud the whole planet seemed to shake.
When the meeting was over we all stood up and said how great it was to meet him, blah-blah-blah, even though none of us wanted anything more to do with him. Then, as we filed out of his office, he introduced us to the chick he'd spent half the meeting bawling at over the phone.
'This is Sharon, my daughter,' he growled. 'Sharon, take these lads down to the car, will you?'
I grinned at her, but she gave me a wary look. She probably thought I was a lunatic, standing there in my pyjama shirt, with no shoes and a hot-water tap on a piece of string around my neck.
But then, when Don huffed back to his office and closed the door behind him, I cracked a joke and made her smile. I just about fell on the floor. It was the most wicked, beautiful smile I'd ever seen in my life. And she had the laugh to go with it, too. It made me feel so good, hearing her laugh. I just wanted to make her do it again and again and again.