Excerpts from Paranoid: Black Days With
Sabbath & Other Horror Stories (continued)
4. Los Angeles, March 1991, where the
author is working as a writer
The only rock star in Hollywood that I
could really relate to was Ozzy. Not just because he was funny,
but because he was real. He was the only one I'd ever known who
really felt his luck. The rest all fooled themselves into
believing they had made it on their own somehow; that they
really were something special.
“I know I'm just some bloke
who won the Lottery,” I recall Ozzy saying more than
once. “It could easily have gone the other way for
me…” And he was right.
Ozzy was the Great Confessor. He was
also the Great Comedian. Over the years, I had met and
interviewed many of the best-known comics on TV, but I had
never met a funnier guy in real life than Ozzy. Ironic then,
that one of my most enduring memories of him is also one of the
saddest -- when I went to visit him at Huntercombe Manor, a
posh people's rehab joint in Buckinghamshire, where he was
incarcerated by the courts as part of his bail after being
arrested for the attempted murder of Sharon.
It was back in September 1989 and
Ozzy himself still swears he can't remember exactly what
happened that night, but for Sharon it was an experience she is
never likely to forget. The couple had recently returned from
Russia, where Ozzy had been appearing on the bill with Bon Jovi
and Motley Crue at the Moscow Music Peace Festival. Although
the festival had been staged to raise funds for the Make A
Difference Foundation -- a charitable trust in the US set up to
help people with drink and drug problems -- behind the scenes,
the organisers had presented Ozzy with a case of Russian vodka.
“It was amazing,” he
told me. “All these little miniatures of different
flavoured vodkas. I couldn't wait to get my hands on it
…”
Sharon described what happened next.
“It was supposed to be a quiet Saturday night at home. It
was Aimee's birthday and we were all having dinner together to
celebrate. But Ozzy started drinking all this blasted vodka
that he'd brought back with him from Moscow and it sent him
crazy,” she told me. “He really did go mad. It was
terrifying. I mean, me and my old man have had fist fights
before, we've broken up rooms and all that, you know. But never
anything like this ...”
At one point, she said, Ozzy got his
hands round her throat and tried to strangle her. That was when
she raised the alarm and called the police. Ozzy had been
bundled into a police car and kept in jail at the station for
the rest of the weekend while he sobered up. After appearing in
court on the Monday morning, at Sharon's suggestion, the judge
ruled that he should enter Huntercombe Manor before being
brought back before the courts for further reassessment a few
weeks later.
The story made headlines around the
world but Ozzy refused to talk to anyone. I was in London at
the time and had seen it on TV and read about it in the papers
like everyone else. Then a couple of nights later, the phone
rang and it was Sharon, asking me if I would go out to the
Manor and visit Ozzy. He was desperate to put his side of
things, she said, but he didn't trust anyone else. When I got
there the next day, I found a much more subdued madman of rock
than I had ever seen before. He was abject with grief. His kids
-- Aimee, Kelly and Jack -- had all been by to visit him
earlier that day and the tears welled-up in his sad clown eyes
as he tried to describe what it felt like having to explain to
the little ones why daddy wouldn't be coming home with them
that night.
“They kept asking me, 'Why are
you here, daddy?' I didn't know what to tell 'em. It nearly
broke my fuckin' heart waving goodbye to them as they all drove
off …”
We sat in his room and talked for a
few hours. Although we taped a lot of it, it wasn't really like
doing an interview, it was more like being a good Samaritan. He
was in a bad way and just needed somebody to talk to. After a
while, I turned the tape off and slipped it back in my bag. He
didn't want me to leave. Or rather, he didn't want to be left
alone.
“What would you do if you were
me?” he asked.
“I don't know,” I
replied. “The same, I suppose.”
We sat there thinking it over. I had
a little lump of hash in my pocket.
“Can't you quit the booze and
just have a little puff of dope now and then?” I asked,
wondering if I had any skins.
“Not according to this lot in
here,” he frowned. “They don't even like it if I
smoke a fag. They make me stand by the window.”
“Oh …”
I forgot about offering him a joint
and poured myself another Diet Coke. God, it was boring being
straight. How on earth was he going to cope? How on earth did
any of us cope? By taking it straight? Like a man? Like an
Ozzy?
By 1991, however, we were both
living in LA and Huntercombe Manor was now just a distant
memory. Ozzy was making what would become his 'No More Tears'
album and he was temporarily holed-up in a small apartment a
couple of streets down from mine in West Hollywood. With the
kids at school in England, and Sharon away so much of the time,
he had gone back to his old ways and his prized possession
right then was the big, beautiful green bong he had purchased
from some head shop down on Melrose.
“It's top of the range,”
he'd say proudly as he sat there stoking her up.
It was a lethal weapon and after
three or four hits, even an old stoner like myself had a
struggle to keep his eyes pointing in the same direction. The
trick, Ozzy said, was to take little sips of brandy in-between.
“It helps cool down the lungs,” he explained.
Then out would come the coke. Always
primo gear, and always plenty of it, too. Sometimes I'd bring a
gram or two with me, or a bag of weed or whatever, and
even though I threw them on the table and tried to get him to
share them with me, he would always pull a much bigger bag than
mine out from behind a chair or a cupboard somewhere and insist
we take all we needed from that. Ozzy was always very generous
that way. But then, he was also quite lonely. He had grown
accustomed to paying for company.
I arrived at his apartment one night
and he was sitting there with some kid I didn't recognise. He
had the finished tracks of some of the songs he was putting on
the new album playing on the cassette deck and he was singing
along to them at the top of his voice. The front door was open
as I arrived and the music was playing so loudly they didn't
even notice me enter the room. I looked at the kid, sat there
intently, his eyes in a glaze. I thought it might be one of the
musicians on the album. Ozzy was always picking up younger and
younger musicians for his backing group. Then the song finished
and Ozzy noticed me and turned the machine off.
“Allo, mate, how's it
going?”
The kid jumped up before I could
answer and began spluttering his farewells. It was plain he was
in a hurry to leave.
“Gee, Ozzy, man, thanks, man,
that was awesome, man. And thanks for the autograph, too! But I
gotta go, man. But, gee, you know, thanks so much! And nice
meeting you too, sir,” he said, turning to me. His face
was white and he looked shaken, like he'd just stepped off the
roller-coaster at Disneyland.
“Yeah, awright, then, mate,
cheers,” said Ozzy as the kid made his escape.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“I dunno. Some kid who was
waiting outside for an autograph. When I got home he told me
he'd been waiting there all afternoon, so I thought he might
like to hear a bit of the new album, you know? I think he liked
it as well. Here, let me play you a bit …”
He sat there playing his tape and
singing along while I joined in on the bong. I noticed he had
some good songs on the tape. That made a change. Ozzy hadn't
made a really good solo album since his first two with Randy
Rhoads. Maybe the nineties would be kinder to him, too. And if
they weren't, what the hell, there was always the Black Sabbath
Reunion. Though he continued to deny it, my guess was the
closer to the Millennium we came, the more likely we were to
see a full-on Ozzy and Sabbath reunion. Even if it was just for
one money-raking tour and album.
“No way,” said Ozzy.
“I'm not going near those cunts again!” But I'd
have bet anything on it.
At about 1.00a.m. we went for a
drive down Sunset, stopped off at the Pink Dot and bought a big
chocolate cake which neither of us could eat once we got it
back to the apartment. I told him I liked his pants --
loose-fitting, abstract-patterned beach trousers popular in LA
at the time called Crazy Pants -- and he went to his bedroom
and retrieved an unwrapped pair (he had bought 10 or 12 pairs,
he said) and gave them to me. I put them straight on and we
loaded up the bong again.
“Here, I've just remembered,”
he said. “I've got something that'll make you piss
yourself. It's a video [former Whitesnake guitarist] Steve Vai
gave me …” continue reading
