Into the Void: Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath
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Into the Void - Barney Hoskyns
1998)
Prologue: An Ozzynopsis
By Barney Hoskyns
2003 note: In the summer of 2000, long before The Osbournes made Ozzy Osbourne even more of a household name than he already was, I got a call from a New York literary agent informing me that my name was at the top of a list of writers being considered for the job of assisting the singer with his autobiography. I suspect that several other people were probably told the same thing.
Why my name should have been on the list at all I have no idea. I had interviewed Ozzy once, back in the Bark At The Moon days, but none of my published books would have suggested I was an ideal candidate for the job. Still, I couldn’t resist the invitation to spend a weekend with – and around – Brit Family Osbourne, midway through Ozzfest 2000.
Thus I found myself checking into a swanky suite at Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton hotel. A little later I was summoned down to the hotel’s restaurant for a family lunch. Sharon Osbourne and her brood – Aimee, Kelly and Jack – were already at the table, squabbling and vying for their mother’s attention. Impossible and spoiled
as they were, I came to realise that all three of them were essentially secure in their mum’s love, and nothing I’ve seen on The Osbournes has convinced me that that isn’t still the case. I liked Sharon immensely, and she made me howl with laughter.
After a little while, Father Osbourne joined us. I was shocked by just how shaky he seemed, and how clearly he was just another of Sharon’s children. My journal entry for this first encounter reads as follows: The guy is very fragile, badly damaged, with just enough mischief left in him – a mix of latterday/lobotomised Brian Wilson and daft-as-a-brush Paul Gascoigne.
Next day I wrote: Can I get a book out of Ozzy? I’m encouraged by the fact that he called me this morning to suggest we breakfast together – and that he opened up the more he began to trust me.
Ozzy told me he wanted to call the book John – his real name.
The following spring, in Johannesburg, I wrote this proposal for the Ozztome that never was – or, perhaps, the book that became superfluous once The Osbournes had taken over the world of light entertainment.
If much of it is speculative – what I hoped I might get out of him – the piece still answers to my idea of what Ozzy Osbourne is about.
* * *
I’M BACKSTAGE IN Chicago at Ozzfest 2000, soaking up the sheer scale of the event. In the midst of the madness stands Sharon Osbourne, Queen Bee of Monster Rock.
Tommy Lee rushes up and coils himself around Sharon like a tattooed snake in headscarf and nipple rings. Tommy introduces his new squeeze, and Sharon gives the girl a friendly hug. After they’ve gone Sharon whispers, She won’t last … the tits aren’t big enough.
I follow Sharon into the Ozzfest nerve centre inside the complex, past Pantera’s dressing room and into a windowless interior where tour manager Nick Cua sits surrounded by phones and laptops, numbers and schedules plastered across the walls.
I note the sharp contrast between the diabolical imagery of Ozzfest and the sleek efficiency of Sharon’s operation. We watch her dealing with the day’s inevitable hassles: an old friend
who’s threatened Ozzy’s life; Metallica scheduling a free show in Cincinnati on the same day Ozzfest hits town.
That’s just so fucking cheap!
Sharon snorts.
In the Ozzfest canteen, grizzly Texan roadies swap war stories of road life. The roaring stop-start redneck metal of Pantera thunders in the background.
I stand back from all this and reflect on the phenomenon of Ozzfest and what it represents: the endurance of hard rock, the evolution and mutation of nu metal, the alternative to alternative
and the codified hipness of Generation Y. And all of it starting with a working-class boy from Birmingham – heavy metal’s sad madman, the godfather of the tattooed tribes.
* * *
OZZY OSBOURNE MUMBLES about what it’s like for him to arrive at the gig, being led to his dressing room: how he experiences it, what he’s aware of, what he chooses not to take in. What goes through his mind as he prepares for a big show: the little details about riders, set lists, costumes (I’m 51, I don’t want to look like an old queen up there
); about the people around him, his warm-up rituals, the 5000 dumps
he takes before hitting the stage. The fact that he listens to Paul McCartney and Annie Lennox before he goes on.
Sharon pops in to check on him.
Ozzy pauses to consider the paradox of how he’s managed to keep doing this for over 30 years whilst suffering from a drastic lack of self-belief. He reflects on the split personality
of the larger-than-life performer, and what OZZY OSBOURNE has come to represent in the eyes of the world.
Ozzy talks about how few people really know him, and how the world only sees his clowning, outrageous exterior. He reflects that long before he became Ozzy
he was plain John Osbourne, a boy from Birmingham with little belief and even less hope. He looks in the mirror in his dressing room and wonders how many Ozzfests he has left in him.
Ozzy tells me he wants to tell the real story of his life and who he is. How he wants to get past the bat-eating clichés and reveal the truth about what goes on inside him: the comedy and the tragedy, the madness and the sadness, the four nervous breakdowns. How he wants to do something different from all the other rock autobiographies and really open up.
* * *
I’M WATCHING THE hilarious video sequence that precedes Ozzy’s headlining set: Ozzy with Britney Spears, Ozzy fighting Joaquin Phoenix in Gladiator, Ozzy as Austin Powers, Ozzy with an outsized Afro shouting Whassup?!
…
Then I see Ozzy on his throne as it swivels round. He jumps down and starts pogoing to ‘Evil’. I watch Ozzy struggling to get into the show – the reality of having to perform when you feel like shit. COME ON, YOU MUTHAFUCKERS!!
He runs to the side of the stage, gulps from a big cup and sprays his throat …
Golden-maned rockchicks in their teens and twenties worship the icon that Ozzy has become. I watch him soaking them in the baking heat of the summer night; hear him sing ‘Paranoid’ for the zillionth time … Finished with my woman/ Coz she couldn’t help me with my mind …
I see Sharon smiling at those words at the side of the stage.
Afterwards, the talk in the sleek nerve centre is all about Ozzy being in a strop, Ozzy getting pissed off with his drummer’s over-elaborate fills, Ozzy coming down with something and throwing up. Every year’s harder,
says Sharon, and he says ‘I can’t do this much longer …’
Kelly Osbourne comes in cradling one of Sharon’s many King Charles spaniels. Sharon listens to Kelly’s complaints about her siblings, responding in a measured, reasonable tone … interspersed with a rich assortment of profanities.
* * *
OZZY RECALLS HIS childhood in Aston, Birmingham: the fourth of six children, with three older sisters and two younger brothers. He remembers his toolmaker dad; remembers his mother testing car horns in a factory. He talks about poverty and neglect; mental and emotional dysfunction; lack of love or affirmation from mother; early self-medicating experiences. He talks about feeling like a piece of shit as a boy, growing up with no belief in himself.
Ozzy describes his memories of school, adopting the clown role as a mechanism for coping with bullies. He talks about his dyslexia and hyperactivity; the way his teachers made him feel dumb. The psychological scars of abuse and ignorance, with which he’s still coming to terms. What being a parent means to him: the rewards and the problems. How his daughters are like two cats in a bag
. How he worries about his son Jack in the minefield
of rock’n’roll.
Ozzy talks about his life as a juvenile delinquent: his burglarising years after he quit school at 15. Dead-end unemployability. The two months Ozzy spent in Winston Green prison. How he tattooed himself in jail with a sewing needle and a tin of grate polish.
He recalls the experience of being turned down by the British army. But he also remembers the impact that music made on him – especially what The Beatles meant, and the possibility of a way out. Ozzy remembers befriending Tony Iommi, and recalls the many hours he spent in Tony’s mother’s shop.
We revisit the sound of heavy blues-rock as psychedelia wound down: the shattering sounds of Cream and Jimi Hendrix. The influence of Jack Bruce on Ozzy’s vocal style. How Ozzy came to be the frontman in The Rare Breed, with Geezer Butler on bass. The blues-rock scene in Birmingham, playing in clubs like Henry’s Blueshouse and the Penthouse.
Ozzy remembers psychedelia and how irrelevant it seemed to an unemployed kid in Aston. (What’s all this flower shit? I’ve got no shoes on my feet.
) The analogy with punk rock a decade later is all too clear. Ozzy remembers his protopunk wardrobe, which included pyjamas held together with safety pins and a tap on a piece of string he wore round his neck!
Ozzy,
says Lars Ulrich, was what brought Black Sabbath down to street level.
Ozzy narrates the formation of the Polka Tulk Blues Company, with Tony Iommi and Bill Ward leaving Mythology in July 1968. His remembers his early impressions of Tony and the others, and what their first rehearsals and gigs were like. Tony’s sideline ambition was to become a bodybuilder, and how he had to stop lifting weights because it was affecting his playing. An Incredible Hulk in an age of druggy skeletons. How Tony lost the tips of two fingers in a welding accident at the car plant where he worked.
Polka Tulk became Earth and were offered a residency at the (in)famous Star Club in Hamburg. Ozzy runs down his memories of Germany: the sleaze and the tedium, the early determination to provoke a reaction on the Reeperbahn. Ozzy talks about the chemistry within the group, and particularly the difficult dynamic between him and Tony.
Ozzy remembers Iommi leaving Earth to replace Mick Abrahams in Jethro Tull – appearing with them in the Stones’ Rock’n’Roll Circus, no less – and then returning with fresh determination to make the Earth move.
Ozzy recalls rock getting louder and louder in 1968. Jimmy Page forms Led Zeppelin with Brum singer Robert Plant and signs to Atlantic. Bands like Ten Years After and Deep Purple turn up the volume, and in the States a parallel movement spawns the likes of Blue Cheer, Steppenwolf and Grand Funk Railroad. This is the year of Wheels Of Fire, drum solos, downers, street fighting men and violent revolution
. Flower power is wilting and evil is in the air.
Ozzy tells the story of walking past the cinema where Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath was playing: The most gruesome day in the calendar of the undead …
How the song became the band’s new monicker, and how Geezer’s collection of Dennis Wheatley novels helped to inspire rock’s most menacing new act.
Ozzy describes the recording of the first Sabbath single ‘Evil Woman (Don’t Play Your Games With Me)’ for Fontana – and how it stiffed. He explains how the band was moved across to the progressive
Vertigo subsidiary label.
In late 1969, Black Sabbath’s first album was recorded at London’s Regent Sound, made for a mere £600 advanced by Tony Hall Enterprises. The album had one foot in heavy blues (‘Wicked World’, ‘The Wizard’) and the other in Hammer-horror metal (‘Black Sabbath’, ‘N.I.B.’).
The album took off almost instantly after its release on February 13, 1970. Welcome to the new decade: the protogrunge sound of peace and love going through their death throes. From The Beatles to Black Sabbath, via Altamont and Charles Manson …
Ozzy talks about the early days of heavy metal stardom: what it felt like to be propelled out of the grotty Midlands club circuit and into the Top 10, and what it did to Black Sabbath. Geezer’s stories of Ozzy crapping on the bonnet of a clubowner’s car after the band had been stiffed; of Ozzy disrobing at a strip club in Belgium and being carried out by a bouncer on whose back he urinated.
How did John Osbourne feel as he turned into Ozzy
? What did he think of the band’s Satanic themes and imagery and did it make him nervous? And why didn’t he like himself any better than he’d liked himself as a 14-year-old burglar?
* * *
THE BAND CUT a second album – Paranoid, originally War Pigs – for Vertigo. Hit single ‘Paranoid’ itself was written in minutes as filler
. Ozzy talks about writing classic mogadon rockers like ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Iron Man’ – about the backdrop of the Vietnam war, and the fact that hippiedom had made zero difference to American involvement in southeast Asia.
Ozzy remembers Black Sabbath’s first visit to America in October 1970: what it felt like to be four Brummie oiks at large in the USA. Stories from that first tour. Introductions to Class A pharmaceuticals and Class A females. Ozzy’s frustration at the apathetic reaction of a New York audience, and Bill Ward throwing his drums at them.
Introductions were made to assorted Satanists and bikers. With the Manson Family on trial, did Sabbath know what they’d got themselves into? How did they feel when they heard about the nurse who killed herself while listening to Paranoid?
Ozzy talks about the life he’d left behind: his family back in Birmingham, what his relationships with his parents and siblings were like at this point. He talks about his first girlfriends.
He describes the making of 1971’s Master Of Reality, with its sludge-rock anthems ‘Sweet Leaf’, ‘Children Of The Grave’ and ‘Into The Void’. He talks about how quickly life became a blur of touring and drugs, and how naive the band was when it came to business and management.
Ozzy recalls life in the LA mansion where much of the band’s material was written: the group getting more and more insulated and out of touch with the grimy working-class streets which had spawned them.
1972’s Volume 4, featuring the awesome ‘Supernaut’, was recorded at the Record Plant in LA. Tony Iommi wanted to stay in the studio all day and night. The band’s cocaine use was now out of control, as reflected on ‘Snowblind’ and the sleeve’s thanks to the COKE-Cola Company of Los Angeles
. The 1972 US tour was a new nadir: Ozzy talks about the monotony and repetition eating away at Sabbath’s spirit. Ozzy wanted to get back to hard rock basics, Iommi to experiment and up the production values.
The reality of the band’s financial situation emerged with the collapse of World Wide Artists management in 1974. Ozzy remembers the legal battles of 1974–76, along with the spiralling drug abuse. On the 1974 tour, Geezer Butler went down with hepatitis, Ozzy had a virtual breakdown, and Tony Iommi almost OD’d at the Hollywood Bowl.
Ozzy talks about the recording of 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, which he regarded as effectively the band’s final record. The misery of the year spent recording 1975’s Sabotage. ‘Am I Going Insane?’ as a virtual cry for help. Sabbath’s irrelevance as their brand of heavy metal begins to sound hollow.
Ozzy recalls the slow, inevitable deterioration of the band, the soulless misery of recording Technical Ecstasy (1976) … and how he quit Sabbath in 1977. He returned for 1978’s Never Say Die, a desperate title for a desperate record. He was deeply affected by his father’s death, which held up the recording in Toronto. Ozzy yearned to get back to metal basics after the overdub hell of the album.
Ozzy remembers the ugly legal mess surrounding him and Sabbath at this point. He talks about the horrendous politics involved in Sabbath … everybody was suing us and we were slogging our balls off just to pay the lawyers.
* * *