I Am Ozzy (30 page)

The saddest thing about that period wasn't that the Jesus freaks kept giving us a hard time. It was that my old bandmates Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake decided to have a go, too. It started to feel like someone had put a bull's-eye on my forehead, just 'cos I'd made a bit of dough.

They claimed we owed them money for
Blizzard of Ozz
and
Diary of a Madman
, so they sued us. And we fought, because we didn't owe them anything. Bob and Lee were what's known as paid-to-play musicians. They got a weekly rate for recording, a different rate for touring and another rate to stay at home. I even paid for the fucking petrol they used to drive to and from the studio. Yes, they helped write some of the songs on the first two albums, but they got publishing royalties for that - and they still get them to this day. So what more did they want? I'm obviously no great legal brain, but from what I understand they said I wasn't a solo artist and that we were all part of a band. But if I was just the singer and we were all at the same level, how come I auditioned them? And how come I was talking about
Blizzard of Ozz
for years before I met them? And where the fuck are all
their
hit records, before and after the two albums with me?

People ask me why we didn't just settle. But that's what Michael Jackson did, and look what happened to him. If you've got a bit of hard-earned dough in the bank and you say to someone who's suing you, 'OK, how much will it cost to make this go away?' that opens the door for every loony and arsehole in the world to try to get the next load off you. You have to stand up for yourself, 'cos it can be a nasty game, this business - especially when people think you go to bed at night on a big mountain of cash.

In the end Bob and Lee's lawsuit got thrown out of every court in America. What really pisses me off is that Bob and Lee never said to me, 'Ozzy, we've gotta sit down. We wanna have a talk to you.' They just kept blasting off in all fucking directions. The first I knew about it was when I got served. They'd been creeping around behind my back, calling up other people who'd played on my albums and trying to get them involved. I'd done fuck-all wrong, but they made me feel like the criminal of the century, and it really got up my arse after a while.

Sharon protected me from a lot of the details, 'cos she knows how much I worry. In the end she just snapped and re-recorded Bob and Lee's parts on those two albums. When they were re-released, a sticker was put on the covers telling people all about it. I didn't have anything to do with that decision, and I can't say I feel good about it. I told Sharon that I was uncomfortable with it, but I get it, y'know? I understand why she felt she had to do it. Every time we got past one hurdle, another one would come up. It never stopped. The case went on for
twenty-five years
after
Blizzard of Ozz
was recorded. All I wanted to do was get on with being a rock 'n' roller, and instead I ended up being Perry fucking Mason, giving depositions here, there and everywhere.

What really kills me is that I worked with Bob for years, and I was very fond of him and his family. He's a very talented bloke. We were good friends. I certainly didn't turn around and sue him when they put my balls to the fire for 'Suicide Solution', even though he wrote some of the lyrics. But sometimes in life you've gotta move on. Eventually, I had to stop talking to him or seeing him, 'cos I was frightened I might say the wrong thing - and then it would be lawsuit time again. Also, I just hate fucking confrontations. It's one of my biggest failings.

I never want to go through any of that bullshit again. Before I work with anyone now, I tell them to get themselves a lawyer, have their lawyer write up a contract with my lawyer, then read it, think about it, make sure they're happy with it, make double and triple sure they're happy with it, and then
never
say that anyone ripped them off.

Because I don't do that - no matter what Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake might say.

My last good memory of the eighties, before everything went dark, was being sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Not because I'd broken the law again - amazingly - but because I was asked to play a gig there.

What a crazy experience that was. I might have been in a few police station lock-ups over the years, but I hadn't set foot in a proper slammer since I'd walked out of Winson Green in 1966. The iron bars, the balconies, even the guards all looked the same as they had twenty years before, but it was the smell that really brought it all back to me: like a public shitter, times ten. Bad enough to make your eyes water. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to work in one of those places. I suppose they're all ex-army, so they're used to it.

Maybe that's what I would have done in the end if the army hadn't told me to fuck off. I was invited to do the gig because the prison had its own band, called the Scrubs, which had both guards and inmates in it. They'd written a song and donated the royalties to charity. Then they wrote to me and asked if I fancied doing a gig with them. The deal was that they'd play a set, then I'd play my set, then we'd do a jam of 'Jailhouse Rock'.
So we get to the prison and they let me through all the fences and gates and doors, then they show me into this back room where there's a big fat guy making a pot of tea. He's a nice jolly chap, very friendly, and offers me a cup of tea.
I ask him, 'How long are you in here for, then?'
'Oh,' he says, 'I'll never get out of here.'
We keep chatting for a while and I'm drinking this cup of tea, but then curiosity gets the better of me and I say, 'So, how come you're in here for such a long stretch?'
'I murdered eight people.'
That's a bit heavy duty, I think, but we carry on talking. Then curiosity gets the better of me again. 'So, how did you do it?' I ask, taking another sip of my tea. 'I mean, how did you kill all those people?'
'Oh, I poisoned them,' he says.
I just about threw the mug of tea at the wall. And whatever had been in my mouth came out of my nose. It's funny, when you think of a murderer, you always picture some tall, dark, evil-looking monster. But it can be just a nice, normal, jolly fat bloke, with a loose wire somewhere.
The gig itself was surreal.
The smell of dope in the hall where we played almost knocked me off my feet. It was like a Jamaican wedding in there. Another thing that amazed me was that they had a bar right outside, where all the guards went. As for the members of the Scrubs, the bass player was a Vietnamese guy who'd burned thirtyseven people to death a few years earlier by pouring petrol through the letterbox of an underground club in Soho and putting a match to it (the biggest mass killing in British history at the time); the guitarist was a kid who'd murdered a drug dealer by beating him to death with an iron bar; and then there were a couple of guards who sang and played the drums.
I'll never forget the moment when it was our turn to go on stage. Jake E. Lee had just left the band and Zakk Wylde had taken over as lead guitarist. He was young, with ripped muscles and long blond hair, and the second he walked out from the wings, the entire place started to wolf-whistle and scream, 'Bend over, little boy, bend over, little boy!' Then they all started to jump around, stoned out of their minds, while the riot-guards stood guard. It was insane. I'd said to Sharon before we went on, 'At least if we're crap, no one will walk out.' Now I was thinking, No, they'll just kill me.
At one point, I looked down and there in the front row was Jeremy Bamber, the bloke who murdered his entire family with a rifle at a farmhouse in Essex and then tried to make it look like his mentally ill sister had done it. His face had been on the front page of every tabloid in Britain for months. He gave me a big smile, did the old Bambinator.
At the end, when we were playing 'Jailhouse Rock', there was a full-on stage invasion, led by one of the kids who had tried to cut the head off that police officer, Keith Blakelock, during the Broadwater Farm riot. I knew it was him 'cos one of the guards on stage told me. The last thing I saw was this kid taking off a shoe and hitting himself on the head with it.
Fuck this for a game of soldiers, I thought. Nice seeing ya, I'm off now.
And I didn't look back.

*

One morning, not long after that gig, Sharon asked me, 'Did you have a good night last night, Ozzy?' 'What d'you mean?'
'At Kelly's birthday party. Did you have a good time?'
'Yeah, I suppose.'
All I could remember was playing with the kids in the garden, making Jack laugh by tickling his tummy,

telling a few funny jokes, and eating one too many slices of Kelly's birthday cake. We'd even hired a clown for the occasion - a bloke called Ally Doolally - who'd put on a little puppet show. The rest was a bit of a blur, 'cos I'd also had one or two drinks.

'You should have seen yourself,' said Sharon.
'What d'you mean?'
'I mean
you should have seen yourself
.'
'I don't understand, Sharon. I was a bit tipsy, yes, but it was a birthday party. Everyone was a bit

tipsy.'
'No, honestly, Ozzy, you should have
seen
yourself. Actually, would you like to see yourself? I have a
video.'
Oh
crap
, I thought.
Sharon had filmed the whole thing. She put the tape in the machine, and I couldn't believe my eyes. In
my mind, I'd been the fun dad that everyone wants to have around. Then I saw the reality. Jack was
terrified and in tears. Kelly and Aimee were hiding in the shed, also in tears. All the other parents were
leaving and muttering under their breath. The clown had a bloody nose. And there was me, in the middle of
it all, fat, pissed, cake all over my face, dripping wet from something or other, raving, screaming drunk. I was a beast. Absolutely terrifying.
After I'd come out of the Betty Ford Center, I'd started to say to myself, 'Well, I might be an alcoholic,
but I have the perfect job for an alcoholic, so maybe it's kind of all right that I'm an alcoholic.' In a way, it was true. I mean, what other occupation rewards you for being out of your brains all the
time? The more loaded I was when I got on stage, the more the audience knew it was gonna be a good
night. The trouble was the booze was making me so ill that I couldn't function without taking pills or
cocaine on top of it. Then I couldn't sleep - or I had panic attacks, or I went into these paranoid delusions
- so I turned to sedatives, which I'd get from doctors on the road. Whenever I overdosed, which I did all
the time, I'd just blame it on my dyslexia: 'Sorry, Doc, I thought it said
six
every
one
hour, not
one
every
six
hours.'
I had a different doctor in every town - 'gig doctors' I called them - and played them off against each
other. When you're a drug addict, half the thrill is the chase, not the fix. When I discovered Vicodin, for
example, I used to keep an old bottle and put a couple of pills in it, then I'd say, 'Oh, Doc, I've got these
Vicodins, but I'm running low.' He'd look at the date and the two pills left in the jar, then whack me up
another fifty. So I'd get fifty pills before every gig. I was doing twenty-five a day at one point. Mind you, in America, if you're a celebrity, you don't have to try very hard to get doctors to give you
whatever you want. One gig doctor would drive out to see me in his pick-up. In the back he had one of
those tool cabinets full of little drawers, and in each drawer he had a different kind of drug. All the heavy shit you could ever want. Eventually Sharon found out what was going on and put her foot down. She grabbed the doc by the scruff of the neck and said, 'Do not give my husband any drugs under any
circumstances or you're going to jail.'
Deep down, I knew that all the booze and drugs had turned sour on me; that I'd stopped being funny
and zany and had started to become sad. I'd run miles to get a drink. I'd do anything for a drink. I used to
keep a fridge full of beer in the kitchen, and I'd get up, first thing in the morning, knock off a Corona, and
by twelve o'clock I was fucking blasted. And when I was doing Vicodin and all that other shit, I was always
playing with my fucking nose. You can see how bad I was on Penelope Spheeris's documentary
The Decline
of Western Civilization Part II
. Everyone thought it was hysterical, me trying to fry an egg at seven o'clock
in the morning after I'd been out on the piss all night, drinking bottle after bottle of vino. Booze does terrible things to you when you drink as much as I did. For example, I started to shit
myself on a regular basis. At first I made a joke out of it, but then it just stopped being funny. One time, I
was in a hotel somewhere in England, and I was walking down the corridor to my room, but suddenly I felt
this turd rumbling down the pipe. I had to go. Right then. It was either do it on the carpet or do it in my
pants, and I'd had enough of doing it in my pants. So I squatted down, dropped my trousers, and took a
dump right there in the corridor.
At that exact moment, a bellboy came out of the elevator, looked at me, and shouted, '
What the hell
are you doing?
I couldn't even begin to think how to explain. So I just held up my room key and said, 'It's all right, I'm
staying here.'
'No you're fucking not,' he said.
A lot of alcoholics shit themselves. I mean, think about it: a gallon of Guinness makes enough tarmac
to pave ten miles of the M6. And when you come round the following day, your body wants to get rid of
everything: it just wants to expel all the toxic crap you forced into it the night before. I tried to stop it by
switching from Guinness to Hennessy. But I was fruiting it up with orange juice or Coca-Cola the whole
time, which made it just as bad. And I was drinking four bottles of Hennessy a day, plus the cocaine and
the pills and the beer. At first, I would barely get hangovers, but as time went on they started to get worse
and worse, until I couldn't handle them any more.
So I went back to rehab. I was just so sick and tired of feeling sick and tired. If you drink a liquid that
makes you feel better, then that's one thing. But if you drink a liquid that makes you feel worse than you
did originally, then what's the point? And I felt like I was
dying
.
I couldn't face Betty Ford again, so I went to the Hazelden Clinic in Center City, Minnesota. It was
winter, freezing cold. I spent the whole time shivering, throwing up and feeling sorry for myself. On the first day, the therapist got a bunch of us together and said, 'When you go back to your rooms
tonight, I want you to write down how much you think drink and drugs have cost you since you started
doing them. Just add it all up and come back to me.'
So that night I got out a calculator and started to do some sums. I kind of wanted to get a big
number, so I grossly exaggerated a lot of things, like how many pints I had each day - I put twenty-five -
and how much each of them cost. In the end I came up with this obscene number. Just a huge, ridiculous
number. Something like a million quid. Then I tried to get some sleep, but I couldn't.
The next day, I showed my calculations to the bloke, and he said, 'Oh, very interesting.' I was surprised, 'cos I thought he was gonna say, 'Oh, come off it, Ozzy, give me some real numbers.' Then he said, 'So is this just from drinking?'
'And drugs,' I said.
'Hmm. And you're sure this is
everything
?' he asked me.
'It's a million quid!' I said. 'How much more could it be?'
'Well, have you ever been fined because of drinking?'
'A few times, yeah.'
'Have you ever missed any gigs or been banned from any venues because of drinking?' 'A few times, yeah.'
'Had to pay lawyers to get you out of trouble because of your drinking?'
'A few times, yeah.'
'Medical fees?'
'Big time.'
'And d'you think you might have lost record sales because your work was affected by drinking?' 'Probably.'
'
Probably?