I Am Ozzy (16 page)

We were all happy with
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
, I think. Even Patrick Meehan and the record company were happy. Which meant only one thing, of course: things could only go down-hill from there.

I should have known that bad things were about to happen to Black Sabbath when we flew to America in 1974 and the bloke sitting next to me croaked it halfway across the Atlantic.

One minute I was hearing this choking noise - 'uh, ugh, urrrgh'. The next I was sitting next to a corpse. I didn't know what the fuck to do, so I pressed the button to call for a flight attendant.
'Yes, sir, can I help you?' said the chick, all prim and proper.
'This bloke's a goner, I reckon,' I said, pointing at the lump beside me.
'Sorry, sir?'
'He's kicked the bucket,' I said, holding up the bloke's floppy left arm. 'Look at 'im. Dead as a fucking dodo.'
The stewardess started to panic. 'What happened?' she hissed, trying to cover him with a blanket. 'Did he seem unwell?'
'Well, he was making a bit of a choking noise,' I said. 'I just thought his peanuts had gone down the wrong way. Then he turned white, his eyes rolled back in his head, and the next thing I knew he'd kicked the bucket.'
'Look,' said the stewardess quietly. 'We're going to prop him up here against the window with this pillow. Please don't mention this to the other passengers. We don't want anyone panicking. To compensate for your inconvenience, we can reseat you in first class, if you'd like.'
'What's the difference between business and first?' I asked.
'Champagne.'
'Magic.'
That was the beginning of The End.
What I remember most about the tour to promote
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
is everyone starting to get pissed off. By now Patrick Meehan had stopped being the magician on the end of the phone line who could get you a Rolls-Royce or a horse or a Scalextric set, and had started to become the annoying flash bastard who never gave you a straight answer when you asked him how much dough you were making.
Meanwhile, Tony was grumbling about doing all the work in the studio, which meant he had no personal life. He had a point. But then again, Tony loved being in the studio - he'd even started to produce the albums himself. Personally, I could never stand all the sitting around, smoking cigarettes, and listening to the same three seconds of guitar solo over and over again. I still can't handle it to this day. It drives me fucking nuts. Once I've done my thing, I have to get out into the fresh air. But as technology improved during the seventies, the temptation was always to add one more track, then another, then another... Tony couldn't get enough of all that stuff. He had the patience for it. And no one ever argued with him, because he was the band's unofficial leader.
Geezer was also getting fed up, because he was tired of me asking him for lyrics all the time. I can see how that must have got on his tits after a while, but the guy was a genius. When we were at Morgan Studios, I remember calling him when he was taking a day off at his country house. I said, 'C'mon, Geezer, I need some words for "Spiral Architect".' He grumbled a bit, told me to call him back in an hour, and put the phone down. When I spoke to him again, he said, 'Have you got a pen? Good. Write this down: "Sorcerers of madness/Selling me their time/Child of God sitting in the sun..."'
I said, 'Geezer, are you just reading this out of a book or something?'
I couldn't believe it. The bloke had written a masterpiece in the time it took me to read one sentence.
I told him, 'Keep that up and we'll have the whole bloody album done by five o'clock.'
One reason why we weren't getting on so well is that we'd all started to develop these coked-up, rockstar egos.
It was happening to a lot of bands in those days. When we did the CalJam Festival at the Ontario Motor Speedway in 1974, for example, there was all kinds of bollocks going on backstage with the other bands. Things like, 'Well, if he's got a pinball machine, then I want a pinball machine,' or 'If he's got a quadraphonic sound system, then I want a quadraphonic sound system.' People were starting to think they were gods. I mean, the scale of that CalJam thing was unbelievable: about 250,000 fans, with the performances 'simulcast' on FM radio and the ABC TV network. Rock 'n' roll had never been done on that scale before. You should have seen the rig Emerson, Lake and Palmer had. Halfway through their set, Keith Emerson did a solo on a grand piano while it was lifted off the stage and spun around, end-over-end.
CalJam was a good gig for us, actually.
We hadn't played live for a while, so we rehearsed in our hotel room without any amps. The next day we flew in by helicopter, 'cos all the roads were blocked. Then we just ripped through our set, with me wearing these silver moon boots and yellow leggings.
Deep Purple didn't have such a good time, though. Ritchie Blackmore hated TV cameras - he said they got between him and the audience - so after a couple of songs he smashed the neck of his guitar through the lens of one of them, and then set his amp on fire. It was a heavy scene, and the whole band had to fuck off quick in a helicopter, because the fire marshals were after them. ABC must have been well pissed off, too. Those cameras cost an arm and a leg. I remember being on the flight back to England with Ritchie, actually. It was fucking crazy. I had four grams of coke hidden down my sock, and I had to get rid of it before we landed, so I started handing it out to the air hostesses. They were completely whacked out on the stuff after a while. My in-flight meal took a flight of its own at one point. Can you even
imagine
doing that kind of thing nowadays? When I think about it, I shudder.
Another crazy thing that happened around that time was getting to know Frank Zappa in Chicago. We were doing a gig there, and it turned out that he was staying at our hotel. All of us looked up to Zappa - especially Geezer - because he seemed like he was from another planet. At the time he'd just released this quadraphonic album called
Apostrophe (')
, which had a track on it called 'Don't Eat the Yellow Snow'. Fucking classic.
Anyway, so there we were at this hotel, and we ended up hanging out with his band in the bar. Then the next day we got word that Frank wanted us to come to his Independence Day party, which was going to be held that night at a restaurant around the corner.
We could hardly wait.
So come eight o'clock, off we went to meet Frank. When we arrived at the restaurant, there he was, sitting at this massive table, surrounded by his band. We introduced ourselves, then we all started to get pissed. But it was really weird, because the guys in his band kept coming up to me and saying, 'You got any blow? Don't tell Frank I asked you. He's straight. Hates that stuff. But have you got any? Just a toot, to keep me going.'
I didn't want to get involved, so I just went, 'Nah,' even though I had a big bag of the stuff in my pocket.
Later, after we'd finished eating, I was sitting next to Frank when two waiters burst out of the kitchen, wheeling a massive cake in front of them. The whole restaurant went quiet. You should have seen that cake, man. It was made into the shape of a naked chick with two big, icing-covered tits - and her legs were spread wide apart. But the craziest thing about it was that they'd rigged up a little pump, so champagne was squirting out of her vagina. You could have heard a pin drop in that place until the band finally started to sing 'America the Beautiful'. Then everyone had to have a ceremonial drink of the champagne, starting with Frank.
When it was my turn, I took a long gulp, screwed up my face, and said, 'Ugh, tastes like piss.'
Everyone thought that was hilarious.
Then Frank leaned over and whispered in my ear, 'Got any blow? It's not for me - it's for my bodyguard.'
'Are you serious?' I asked him.
'Sure. But don't tell the band. They're straight.'
I saw Frank again a few years later, after he'd done a gig at the Birmingham Odeon. When the show was over, he asked me, 'Is there anywhere we can get something to eat in this town? I'm staying at the Holiday Inn, and the food's terrible.'
I told him, 'At this time of night, there's only the curry house on Bristol Street, but I don't recommend it.'
Frank just shrugged and said, 'Oh, that'll do, I'll have a go.'
So we all went to this dodgy Indian joint - me, Frank, Thelma and some Japanese chick that Frank was hanging out with at the time. I told Frank that the only thing on the menu he shouldn't order, under any circumstances, was the steak. He nodded, looked at the menu for a while, then ordered the steak. When it arrived, I just sat there and watched him try to eat it.
'Like old boots, is it?' I said.
'No, actually,' replied Frank, dabbing his mouth with a napkin. 'More like new ones.'

*

By the mid-seventies, everything had changed with Black Sabbath. In the early days, we used to hang out with each other all the time, and whenever we arrived in a new place for a gig, we'd walk around the town like a little gang, trying out the pubs and clubs, hitting on chicks, getting pissed. But as time went on, we saw less and less of each other. When me and Bill did our road trips, for example, we hardly spent any time with Tony or Geezer. Then even me and Bill started to drift apart. I was the noisy fucker who would always be throwing parties and having chicks in my room and getting up to all sorts of debauchery, and Bill would just want to stay in his bed and sleep.

After all that time on the road, we'd just had enough of each other's company. But when we didn't spend any time together, all our problems grew in our heads, and we stopped communicating.
Then, all of a sudden, everything just blew up. For a start, the publishing rights to a lot of our early work had already been sold to a company called Essex Music 'in perpetuity', which was a posh way of saying for ever.
And there'd been other signs of trouble, like when London & County Bank went bust. I don't know exactly what the deal was - I'm hardly the financial brain of Britain - but I know I had to sell the deeds to the land I'd bought from the cross-dressing farmer in order to save Bulrush Cottage. If me and Thelma hadn't paid for the land with our own money, we'd have been fucked.
The biggest problem was our management. At some point we realised that we'd been stitched up. Although in theory Meehan would send us an allowance for whatever we wanted, whenever we asked for it, we didn't actually have any control. We were supposed to have our own individual bank accounts, but it turned out they didn't exist. So I'd have to go to his office and ask for a thousand quid or whatever. He'd say, 'OK,' and the cheque would turn up in the post. But after a while the cheques started to bounce.
So we fired him. Then all this legal crap started, with law-suits flying around all over the place. While we were working on the follow-up to
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
- which we ended up calling
Sabotage
, in reference to Meehan's bullshit - writs were being delivered to us at the mixing desk. That was when we came to the conclusion that lawyers rip you off just as much as managers do. You get charged for every penny they spend while they're working for you, down to the last paperclip. And they're happy to fuck around in court for the rest of their lives, as long as someone's paying the bills. If it takes fifty years to win, that's fine, as far as those guys are concerned.
We had this one lawyer working for us, and I ended up hating him. I just couldn't stand the bloke because he was taking the piss. When we were recording
Sabotage
in Morgan Studios, he came over to see us one day and said, 'Gentlemen, I'm going to buy you all a drink.' I thought, Wow, I can't believe this, the guy's actually getting his wallet out for something. Then, at the end of the meeting, he took out this little notepad and started adding up what we'd all had, so he could bill us later. 'Right. Ozzy, you had two beers, so that's sixty pence,' he went, 'and Tony, you had one beer and--'
I said, 'You're fucking
joking
, right?'
But of course he wasn't. That's what lawyers do. They grease you down and stick their fist up your arse.
You can hear the frustration on
Sabotage
. There's some heavy-duty shit on that album. One incredible track is 'Supertzar'. I remember the day it was recorded: I walked into Morgan Studios and there was an entire forty-member choir in there along with an eighty-six-year-old harpist. They were making a noise like God conducting the soundtrack to the end of the world. I didn't even attempt to put a vocal over the top of it.
One song I'm very proud of on that album is 'The Writ'. I wrote most of lyrics myself, which felt a bit like seeing a shrink. All the anger I felt towards Meehan came pouring out. But y'know what? All that bullshit he pulled on us didn't get him anywhere in the end. You should see him now: he looks like a fat, boozy old fuck. But I don't hate him. Hating people isn't a productive way of living. When all's said and done, I don't wish the bloke any harm. I'm still here, y'know? I still have a career. So what's the point in hating anyone? There's enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it. And I got a song out of it, at least.

Aside from 'The Writ', I can't say I'm very proud of much else that happened in that period.

Like pulling a gun on Bill while I was having a bad acid trip at Bulrush Cottage. The gun wasn't loaded. But he didn't know that, and I didn't tell him. He was very cool about it at the time, but we've never talked about it since, which means it was probably quite a big deal.

I had a few bad acid trips around that time, actually. Another night we were at Fields Farm, Bill's old rented house, which a couple of roadies had taken over, and we were getting badly fucked up for some reason. There was a terrible vibe that night, because a kid had just drowned in the lake on the property while pissing around in a canoe, and the cops had torn the place apart, dredging the lake for the body, and searching for drugs. Not exactly the best time to be doing acid, in other words. But that didn't stop us. All I can remember is wandering off into a field and meeting these two horses. Then one of them said to the other, 'Fuck me, that bloke can
talk
,' and I freaked out, big time.

I hit Thelma, too, which is probably the worst thing I ever did in my life. I started to get overpowering with her, and the poor woman must have been frightened to death. What made it even worse was that we'd just had our second kid - little Louis. Thelma really suffered with me, y'know, and I really regret that. If there's one thing I wish for in my life, it's that I could take it all back. But of course you never can never take violence back - of any kind - and I'll take it to the grave with me. My own parents used to fight a lot, so maybe I thought that's just what you do. But there's no excuse. One night, when I was out of my tree on booze and pills, I hit Thelma so hard I gave her a black eye. We were meeting her father the next day, and I thought, Fucking hell, he's gonna beat the crap out of me now. But all he said was, 'So which one of you won, eh?'