I Am Ozzy (18 page)

So one day I just walked out of a rehearsal and didn't come back.

Then I got a call from Norman, my sister Jean's husband.
Now, he's a lovely guy, Norman - in many ways the older brother I never had. But whenever he called,
it usually meant something heavy was going down with the family.
This time was no different.
'It's your dad,' said Norman. 'You should go and see him.'
'What d'you mean?'
'He's not well, John. He might not make it through the night.'
I immediately felt sick and numb. Losing a parent had always been my worst fear, ever since I was a
little kid, when I would go up to my dad's bed and shake him awake because I thought he wasn't
breathing. Now the fear was coming true. I knew my dad had been ill, but I hadn't thought he was at
death's door.
When I pulled myself together, I got in the car and went to see him.
My whole family was already there by his bedside, including my mum, who was just absolutely
devastated.
Dad was riddled with cancer, it turned out. It was out of control, because he'd refused to go and see a doctor until they had to carry him away in an ambulance. He'd stopped working only a few months before. He was sixty-four, and they'd offered him an early retirement deal. 'I'm gonna have some time to do the garden now,' he'd told me. So he did the garden. But as soon as he'd done the garden, that was it. Game
over.
I was terrified of seeing him, to be honest with you, because I knew what to expect. My dad's younger
brother had died the year before from liver cancer. I'd visited him on the ward and it had shocked the crap
out of me, so much so that I'd burst into tears. He bore no resemblance to the guy I'd known. He didn't
even look human.
When I got to the hospital this time, my dad had just come out of surgery, and he was up and
running. He looked all right, and he managed a smile. They had him on the happy juice, I imagine.
Although, as one of my aunties used to say, 'God always gives you one good day before you die.' We
talked a little, but not much. The funny thing is, when I was growing up, my dad never used to say
anything like, 'You wanna watch those cigarettes,' or, 'Stop going to the pub all the time,' but that day he
told me, 'Do something about your drinking, John. It's too bloody much. And stop taking sleeping pills.' 'I've left Black Sabbath,' I told him.
'They're finished then,' he said. Then he fell asleep.
The next day, he took a dive. One of the worst things about it was seeing my mum so distraught. In
hospitals back then, the sicker you got, the further they moved you from the other patients. By the end of
the day, my dad had been shoved into this broom cupboard in the corner, with mops and buckets and tubs
of bleach all over the place. They'd put bandages around his hands like he was a boxer, and they'd tied him
to the bars of this giant cot, because he'd kept pulling out his IV tube. It really fucked me up, seeing him
like that, the man I adored, the man who'd taught me that even if you don't have a good education, you
can still have good manners. At least he was loaded on all kinds of drugs, so he wasn't in too much pain.
When he saw me, he smiled, stuck his thumbs up through his bandages and went, 'Speeeeed!' - it was the
only drug he knew the name of. Mind you, then he said, 'Take these fucking pipes out of me, John, they
hurt.'
He died at 11.20 p.m. on January 20, 1978: in the same hospital, on the same date, at the same time
as Jess had been born six years earlier. That coincidence still floors me to this day. The cause of death was
given as 'carcinoma of the oesophagus', although he also had cancer of the intestines and cancer of the
bowel. He hadn't eaten or gone to the bog by himself for thirteen weeks. Jean was with him when he
passed away. The doctors told her they wanted to find out why their Frankenstein experiment on him the
previous day in surgery hadn't worked, but she wouldn't let them do an autopsy.
I was in the car, on my way to Bill's house, listening to 'Baker Street' by Gerry Rafferty, at the moment
he passed away. As soon I pulled up in Bill's driveway, he was standing there, with a grim look on his face.
'Someone's on the phone for you, Ozzy,' he said.
It was Norman, giving me the news. To this day, whenever 'Baker Street' comes on the radio, I hear
Norman's voice and feel that intense sadness.
His funeral was a week later, and he was cremated. I really hate the way traditional English funerals
are organised: you're just starting to get over the shock of the death, then you have to go through it all
over again. The Jews have a far better idea: when someone dies, you bury them as soon as possible. At
least that way you get it all out of your system quickly.
The only way I could handle my father's funeral was to get out of my skull. I got up that morning and
poured myself a neat whisky; then I kept going all day. By the time they brought the coffin to the house
where my mum and dad had been living, I was halfway to another planet. The coffin was sealed, but for
some stupid fucking pissed reason I decided I wanted to see Dad again, one last time, so I got one of the
pallbearers to unscrew the lid. A bad idea, that was. In the end, we all took it in turns to look at him. But
he'd been dead a week, so as soon as I peered into the coffin, I regretted it. The undertaker had put all
this greasepaint on him, so he looked like a fucking clown. That wasn't the way I wanted to remember my
father - but as I'm writing this now, that's the picture I see in my head. I'd rather have remembered him
being tied to that hospital cot, smiling and sticking his thumbs up, and going, 'Speeeeed!' Then we all got in the hearse with the coffin. My sisters and my mother started howling like wild
animals, which freaked the fuck out of me. I'd never experienced anything like it before. They teach you
how to handle life in England, but they don't teach you a thing about death. There's no book telling you
what to do when your mum or dad dies.
It's like,
You're on your own now, sunshine
.
If there's one thing that sums up my father, it's the indoor bathroom he built at 14 Lodge Road, so we
wouldn't have to use a tin bathtub in front of the fire any more. He hired a professional contractor to do most of the work, but only a few weeks after it was finished all this damp started coming in through the wall. So my dad went off to the hardware shop, bought what he needed, and replastered the wall himself. But the damp came back. So my dad plastered it again. Then it came back again and again and again. By this time he was on a mission. And you couldn't stop my dad when he was on a mission. He came up with all kinds of crazy concoctions to put on that wall and stop the damp. It went on for ever, his anti-damp crusade. Then, finally, after a few years, he got this heavy-duty industrial tar from the GEC factory, smeared it all over the wall, plastered over the tar, then went out and bought some yellow and white tiles,
and laid them on top.
'
That
should fucking do it,' I remember him saying.
I'd forgotten all about it until years later, when I went back to the house to do a documentary with the
BBC. By that time, there was a Pakistani family living there, and every wall in the house had been painted
white. It was eerie, seeing the place like that. But then I walked into the bathroom - and on the wall were
my dad's tiles, still up there, like the day they were laid. I just thought, He fucking did it in the end, my old
man.
You couldn't wipe the smile off my face for the rest of the day.
I miss my dad a lot, even now. I just wish we could have sat down and had a good old man-to-man
conversation about all the stuff I never knew to ask him when I was a kid, or was too pissed and busy
being a rock star to ask him when I was in my twenties.
But I suppose that's always the way, isn't it?

The day I left Black Sabbath, we were at Rockfield Studios in South Wales, trying to record a new album. We'd just had another soul-destroying meeting about money and lawyers, and I couldn't take it any more. So I just walked out of the studio and fucked off back to Bulrush Cottage in Thelma's Mercedes. I was shitfaced, obviously. And then, like a pissed dickhead, I started to slag off the band in the press, which wasn't fair. But y'know, when a band splits up, it's like a marriage ending - for a while, all you want to do is hurt each other. The bloke they found to replace me after I walked out was another Brummie, called Dave Walker, a guy I'd admired for a long time, actually - he'd been with Savoy Brown and then Fleetwood Mac for a while.

But for whatever reason things didn't work out with Dave, so when I came back a few weeks later, everything was back to normal - on the surface, at least. No one really talked about what happened. I just turned up in the studio one day - I think Bill had been trying to act as peacemaker on the phone - and that was the end of it. But it was obvious things had changed, especially between me and Tony. I don't think anyone's heart was in what we were doing any more. Still, as soon as I came back, we picked up where we'd left off with the album, which we decided to call
Never Say Die

By now, we were starting to get our finances sorted out, thanks to Colin Newman, who advised us to make the album as tax exiles in another country, to avoid having to give 80 per cent of all our dough to the Labour government. We chose Canada, even though it was January and would be so cold that we wouldn't be able to walk outside without our eyeballs freezing over. So we booked ourselves into Sounds Interchange Studios and flew off to Toronto.

But even three thousand miles away from England the old problems soon came up again. For example, I spent just about every night getting seriously fucked-up at a place called the Gas Works, opposite the apartment block where I was staying. One night I went over there, came back, passed out, and woke up an hour later with this incredible heartburn. I remember opening my eyes and thinking, What the
fuck
? It was pitch black, but I noticed this red glow in front of me. I had no idea what it was. Meanwhile, the heartburn was getting worse and worse. Then suddenly I realised what had happened: I'd fallen asleep with a cigarette in my hand.
I was on fire!
So I jumped out of bed, tore off my clothes, bundled them up with the smouldering sheets, ran to the bathroom, dumped the whole lot in the bath, turned on the cold water, and waited for the smoke to clear. By the time I was done, the room was a fucking bomb site, I was stark bollock naked, my sheets were ruined and I was freezing to death.
I was thinking, What the fuck do I do now? Then I had an idea: I ripped down the curtains and used them as sheets instead. It worked great, until the boot-faced maid came in the next morning.
She went mental.
'WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO MY APARTMENT?' she screamed at me. 'GET OUT! GET OUT! YOU ANIMAL!'
Things weren't going much better in the studio. When I mentioned in passing that I wanted to do a side project of my own, Tony snapped, 'If you've got any songs, Ozzy, you should give them to us first.' But then whenever I came up with an idea, nobody would give me the time of day. I'd say, 'What do you think of this, then?' and they'd go, 'Nah. That's crap.'
Then, one day, Thelma called the studio and said she'd just had a miscarriage, so we all packed up our stuff and went back to England. But going home didn't improve things between us, to the point where me and Tony weren't speaking to each other at all. We didn't argue. The opposite, really: just a complete lack of communication. And during the last sessions for the album in England, I'd given up. Tony, Bill and Geezer decided they wanted to do a song called 'Breakout', with a jazz band going
da-dah-da-dah, DAH
and I just went, Fuck this, I'm off. That's why Bill sang the vocals on 'Swinging the Chain'. The bottom line was that 'Breakout' was stretching it too far for me. With tracks like that on the album, I thought, we might as well have been called Slack Haddock, not Black Sabbath. The only impressive thing about that jazz band as far as I was concerned was how much they could drink. It was incredible. If you didn't get the takes done by midday, you were fucked, 'cos they were all too pissed.
Never Say Die
bombed like none of our albums had ever done before in America, but it did OK in Britain, where it went to number twelve in the album charts, and got us a slot on
Top of the Pops
. Which was good fun, actually, 'cos we got to meet Bob Marley. I'll always remember the moment he came out of his dressing room - it was next to ours - and you literally couldn't see his head through the cloud of dope smoke. He was smoking the biggest, fattest joint I'd ever seen - and believe me, I'd seen a few. I kept thinking, He's gonna have to lip-synch, he's gonna have to lip-synch,
no one
can do a live show when they're that high. But no - he did it live. Flawlessly, too.
There were other good things happening for Black Sabbath around that time, too. For example, after sorting out our finances, we'd decided to hire Don Arden as our manager, mainly because we'd been impressed by what he'd done for the Electric Light Orchestra. And for me, the best thing about being managed by Don Arden was getting to see his daughter Sharon on a regular basis. Almost immediately, I began falling in love with her from a distance. It was that wicked laugh that got me. And the fact that she was so beautiful and glamorous - she wore fur coats, and had diamonds dripping from everywhere. I'd never seen anything like it. And she was as loud and crazy as I was. By then, Sharon was helping to run the business with Don, and whenever she came over to see the band, we'd end up having a laugh. She was great company, was Sharon - the best. But nothing happened between us for a long time.
But I knew it was all over with Black Sabbath, and it was clear they'd had enough of my insane behaviour. One of my last memories of being with the band was missing a gig at the Municipal Auditorium in Nashville during our last US tour. I'd been doing so much coke with Bill while driving between shows in his GMC mobile home that I hadn't slept for three days straight. I looked like the walking dead. My eyeballs felt like someone had injected them with caffeine, my skin was all red and prickly, and I could hardly feel my legs. But at five o'clock in the morning on the day of the gig, after we pulled into town, I finally hit the sack at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. It was the best fucking sleep I'd ever had in my life. It was like being six feet under, it was so good. And when I woke up, I felt almost normal again.
But I didn't know that the key I'd used to get into my room was from one of the other Hyatt hotels we'd stayed at earlier in the tour, in another city. So while my bags had been sent to the right room by the tour manager, I'd gone to the wrong room. Which wouldn't normally have been a problem: the key I had in my pocket just wouldn't have worked and I would have gone down to reception and realised the mistake. But when I got to the room, the maid was still in there, plumping the pillows and checking that the minibar was full. So the door was open and I walked straight in. I just showed her the key - which had the right number and the Hyatt logo on it - and she smiled and told me to enjoy my stay. Then she closed the door behind her while I got into the wrong bed in the wrong room and fell asleep.
For twenty-four hours.
In the meantime, the gig came and went. Of course, the hotel sent someone up to my room to look for me, but all they found was my luggage. They had no idea I was zonked out on a different floor, in another wing of the hotel. The lads panicked, my ugly mug was plastered all over the local TV stations, the cops set up a special missing persons unit, the fans began to plan a candlelit vigil, the insurance company was on the phone, venues across America were preparing for the tour to be cancelled, the record company went apeshit, and Thelma thought she'd become a widow.
Then I woke up.
The first thing I did was call down to the front desk and ask them what time it was. 'Six o'clock,' the woman told me. Perfect timing, I thought. The gig was at eight. So I got out of bed and started looking for my suitcase. Then I realised that everything seeemed very quiet.
So I called back down to the front desk.
'Morning or evening?' I asked.
'Sorry?'
'You said it was six o'clock. Morning or evening?'
'Oh, morning.'
'Ah.'
Then I called the tour manager's room.
'Yeah?' he croaked.
'It's me, Ozzy,' I said. 'I think there might be a problem.' First there was silence.
Then tears - of rage. To this day, I've never had a bollocking like it.