Iron Man (18 page)

We had a fantastic time!

After Europe, Ozzy hurt himself in a motorcycle accident, so we had to postpone a couple of UK gigs. When he healed we went back to America. We started off in Madison Square Garden, with Aerosmith supporting us. All sorts of strange stuff happened that night. The worst of it was somebody jumping off a balcony. We were told about it after the show. Apparently the guy broke his neck.

Over the years many things like that happened. We've had people climbing up the side of the sound system and falling off, hurting themselves. In America, in the very early days, we had gigs where people got squashed against the railings in front; they'd go underneath and get trampled on. You'd see them being pulled on stage and then carried off over the stage, dead. We heard of kids driving home from the gig and getting killed. And then they had all this Black Sabbath stuff with them . . .

It's horrible, but it has happened a few times.

That same Madison Square Garden show, I got hit on the head by a full can of beer and all this blood poured down my face. I still kept playing away, we finished the song, I went off stage and somebody said: ‘Look, the guy who works for Muhammad Ali is here, who does all the repairs.'

Being a huge boxing fan, I thought, what's good enough for Muhammad Ali is good enough for me: ‘Yeah, I'll have that!'

He stitched it and put all this sealer stuff on it and he did it in no time at all. I came back on stage and carried on. But I had a hell of a headache.

Some people go a bit mad; they throw all sorts of stuff. They don't think about hurting you, they just get a bit stupid. After it happened Ozzy shouted: ‘Fucking idiots!' but he was allowed to. It was his birthday that day. A cake was wheeled on to the stage to celebrate this, and a girl jumped out of it.

As Madison Square Garden shows go, this one certainly took the cake.

When we wrote the songs for what was to become
Technical Ecstasy
, Gerald Woodroffe was a great help to me because I now had somebody I could try out ideas with. The band didn't get up until something like 2 p.m., so I often went into our rehearsal room earlier to run over some ideas with Gerald. It was good to have somebody along who could play the chords as I was playing the solos.

Again a pub was not far away, so quite often everybody would go down there, including me. We still managed to write
Technical Ecstasy
in six weeks and get it all rehearsed and ready to go. Off we went to the Criteria Studios in Miami. We'd heard that The Bee Gees, Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles used it. In fact, The Eagles were recording
Hotel California
while we were there. They sometimes had to stop because of us, because we were too loud and it was leaking through into their studio: ‘Wrrooaarr!'

But it was a great place. Again, I was in the studio full time, being very much involved in the production. I was in there night and day, to the point that Ozzy even said: ‘It's a Tony album.'

We stayed in West Palm Beach and everybody else was always on the beach. I know it sounds like I'm blowing my own trumpet,
but that's what happened. They wanted to leave it to me, they trusted me to do it and so I was left to do it.

We also had some bloody laughs there, especially when we played jokes on Bill. He would never allow the maids in to clean his room. One day we got a big load of this really horrible, smelly Gorgonzola cheese, and while somebody kept him talking I sneaked into his room and piled it up under his bed. Many days later I came in again and the smell was atrocious. I went: ‘Phew, Bill, what's that smell?'

‘I don't know what it is, it must be my clothes.'

Bill is a dirty bugger; he'd pile his filthy clothes up in a corner.

‘When are you going to clean them?'

‘I will, yeah.'

He never sussed out the cheese under the bed. It smelled absolutely vile. He actually started smelling like cheese himself. When the maids eventually went into his room, they must have died.

One night in the studio, we dressed Bill up as Hitler. He'd had a few drinks, so it was easy. We got some gaffer tape, really strong tape that sticks to most things, and we put it on his head, making his hairstyle like Hitler's. We made him a skinny moustache as well. We gave him this uniform and whatnot, and he was enjoying it all until we tried to take this stuff off him. We couldn't get it off his head, because pulling the tape off would mean ripping his hair out. So we basically cut all his hair off. By this time he was well sloshed and he didn't even realise what we'd done until the next day. He wasn't very pleased. He looked even scruffier than he usually did.

Andy Gibb was recording in the studio next to us. He had a doll out at the time, all immaculate with the blond hair and the nice clothes. We decided to buy one of them and transform it into a Bill Ward doll. One of the guys who worked for us was a real artist, and he messed up the hair, put a beard on it and ruined the
clothes. It really looked like Bill. We set it up on the recording desk. One day Andy Gibb came in to have a listen to what we'd been doing. He saw this doll and went: ‘Who's that?'

We said: ‘It's Bill Ward.'

Andy was all taken aback, going: ‘Bill's got a doll out as well?'

One time we all came out of a club in Birmingham at some ridiculous hour. We'd had a few drinks and we went down to a nearby lake. Bill was completely rat-arsed and we put him on this boat and shoved him out on this lake.

And left him.

Another time we carried a very drunk Bill into a park, put him on a bench and covered him with newspapers so that he looked like an old tramp.

And abandoned him again.

Once when he got sloshed we put him to bed and tried to take his trousers off. As we pulled at them, one of the trouser legs just ripped off. The next day he came down still wearing the same trousers, one leg on and one leg gone. He just didn't care.

One time at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Los Angeles we made a big banner saying: ‘I am gay, come and visit me.' We climbed up on his balcony on the third floor and hung this banner from it. One of those stupid things you do. The manager of the hotel saw it and wanted him to take it down, but Bill didn't know anything about it and didn't know what he was going on about. The manager said: ‘There's this big banner I want you to take down.'

And Bill went: ‘Banner? What banner!'

Of course he went out on the balcony and saw it.

‘Aargh!'

He used to put his shoes out to air on the balcony. He would get up so late, I'd have been up for hours already, so I'd climb over to his balcony, fill his shoes up with soil and put plants in them. And he'd fall for it every time.

It's a wonder we didn't drive him loony. It was always Bill who
got it. And if you didn't do anything to him for a while, he'd actually say: ‘Is something wrong?'

‘No, why?'

‘Well, you haven't done anything to me today.'

He's different now. The last tours at least he was actually up for breakfast. He's changed his lifestyle and he's a lot more healthy now. Since his heart attack he had to stop smoking and, well, he had to stop everything.

‘It's Alright' was Bill Ward's song. Although he used to be the singer with The Rest all those years ago, this was the first song Bill ever sang on a Sabbath album. We encouraged him to put it on because we thought it was a good song and Ozzy liked it as well.

‘Dirty Woman' was a song about prostitutes, because we were in Florida and Geezer had seen all these hookers around there so he wrote about that. It's not like we were into prostitutes. Well, we did have one or two in the early days. One night back then we were in the Amsterdam red-light district and I went into one of these places. I was sloshed and I fell asleep. Soundly snoring away, I went into extra time and the next thing I knew this guy was screaming at me: ‘Where's the money!'

And then he threw me out. I hadn't done anything, except pass out in there.

There were keyboards on all of the tracks, which was a bit different for us. I liked it, but
Technical Ecstasy
didn't sell as many as the previous albums.
Sabotage
hadn't broken any sales records either, but with this one the decline really started. It was especially disappointing for me, because I was really involved with the album from start to finish. But it was just one of those things. It was 1976, it was the time of punk, and there was a whole new generation of kids.

For the Technical Ecstasy tour we didn't have a very big production; just musical equipment, a snow machine and dry ice. Nothing fancy, no coming in through the stage or flying in from the rafters. But Bill had this brilliant brainwave of having a big sea shell built behind his drums. It was made out of fibreglass and it was loud, as it projected the sound. And every night he had tons of fresh flowers around his kit as well. He started getting more loony, but the shell was better than his original idea, where he wanted all these tubes around his kit with water going through it, changing colour. He had all these fancy ideas. They were great until you tried to get them to work: impossible.

We started touring America in October. We had acts like Boston, Ted Nugent, Bob Seeger and the Silver Bullet Band supporting us. The shows were all sold out. At the Halloween gig in Denver, Heart opened for us. When we were playing two girls stood on the side of the stage to watch us and Albert threw them off because he thought they were groupies. He said: ‘I fucked them two off. They were on the side of the stage, dancing around.'

I said: ‘That was the other band!'

‘What band?'

‘Heart!'

‘Oh no!'

Linda Blair from the movie
The Exorcist
came to our gig in New Haven, Connecticut. Ozzy was a bit infatuated with her, probably because he'd seen the movie. Or maybe he identified with her, because in the movie she also peed all over the place.

As a matter of fact, we all were very impressed by Linda once. We went to see
The Exorcist
at a cinema in Philadelphia a couple of years before and it scared the shit out of us. Back at the hotel we went into the bar to have a drink to calm ourselves down. The television there showed a programme with this priest talking about exorcism. That made it even worse. We got so scared that none of us could sleep, so we spent the night in the same room. Just pathetic.

The bar of our hotel in New Haven had a glass wall behind it, so you could see into the swimming pool. Albert Chapman and me had a few drinks and we got this great idea: ‘Why don't we go out there and jump in with no clothes on!'

And so we did. It was one of those stick your arse against the window deals. I don't know what they must've thought in the bar. Absolute madness.

When we got out we needed a quick getaway, so we nicked a golf cart that was parked there. Two grown-up naked men in a golf cart driving around the hotel grounds! We made it back to the room, dried off, got dressed and went back into the bar like nothing had happened. Most of the people didn't even know it was us, because all they'd seen was two arses up against the window.

A pretty picture.

We had met Frank Zappa at a party in New York a couple of years before. He took us all out to a restaurant, telling us how much he liked ‘Snowblind'. It was very kind of him and we became friends. On 6 December we played Madison Square Garden, with Frank introducing the band. He wanted to play as
well. We'd put his stuff on stage but we had a really bad night. Frank was waiting to walk on and I thought, he can't, it's disastrous, everything is going wrong, my guitar is going out of tune, there's noise and crackles and God knows what. So I said to him: ‘It would be best if you don't play, really.'

We got on well with him. In fact later on with Ronnie James Dio I phoned Frank, because Geezer had left. I said: ‘You don't know any bass players, do you?'

He went: ‘Yeah, you can use mine.'

‘No, we want a bass player that might be with us for a long time.'

Me and Ronnie went over to his house. Frank opened the door with a parrot on his shoulder. He said: ‘Do you want a drink? A soda, ice tea?'

We were thinking more along the lines of a beer.

‘No beer.'

All he had were the more hippie sort of drinks. We went down to his studio and he said: ‘Can I play you my new album?'

‘Yes, please do.'

I like some of his stuff, like
Hot Rats
, but when he played me this new album it wasn't my cup of tea at all. There was so much going on and it was such off-the-wall stuff that I couldn't absorb it. I thought, well, I don't want to be rude, what am I going to say to him when it stops? Because he's going to go: ‘What do you think?'

And he did: ‘What do you think?'

‘Erm . . . what was that . . . on the third track . . . that eh . . .'

‘Oh, that was . . .'

He started to explain the whole thing: ‘That's these drums and . . .'

And I only went there looking for a bass player!

As a musician I think Frank was very clever, especially at arranging, and his band was tight as shit.

When I went to see them once in Birmingham, he said: ‘I've got a surprise for you tonight.'

‘Ah?'

They played ‘Iron Man'. I was in the bar and I heard them play it and I thought, bloody hell! I went back out and I thought, I'll thank him after the show. But he had such a bad night that he stormed off stage, really pissed off. So I thought, hmm, I don't think I'm going to go back. Even so, it was a nice surprise.