Last rites, p.16
Last Rites, page 16
Our house became like the set of The Andromeda Strain once we got our hands on some protective gear. People were walking around wearing masks and gloves, even full-on face shields. Thanks to the constant swabbing and testing, I was putting more shit up my nose than I had since the making of Vol. 4. Early on, I got a false positive that said I had the virus, then ten minutes later another test said I was in the clear.
I’d had better mornings, I’ll say that much.
As the weeks went by, it became horribly clear just how devastating the lockdowns were for venues, musicians and crew. People were going broke all over the place, on top of getting the virus. I tried to do my bit to help out, working with a group called Sweet Relief to raise cash for people in the music game who were struggling. I can’t tell you how lucky I felt that I wasn’t still out on the road, trying to make ends meet. If the pandemic had happened during the early days of Sabbath, before we made any money, we’d have been fucked.
Obviously, there was no way I was gonna fly to Switzerland for the immunotherapy thing. Even if we’d been allowed to go, we didn’t wanna run the risk of getting Covid while we were away and not being allowed back in the country. Getting the second opinion on my spine also had to be postponed. Anything medical-related that wasn’t urgent, you could forget about it. It was all hands on deck. I remember watching the telly with Sharon and seeing all these refrigerated trucks outside a hospital in New York, ’cos they had nowhere to put the bodies. It’s easy to forget just how freaky that was. Those were some dark days, man.
By early summer, we’d sort of settled into a pandemic routine. I’ve gotta admit, I kind of enjoyed the silence that descended over LA. For the first time ever, you could see the stars at night. The smog disappeared. You couldn’t hear any cars. Even the planes stopped flying overhead.
At some point, me and Andrew got back to work on the follow-up to Ordinary Man. The title we came up with was Patient Number 9. We were going for a mental hospital vibe, ’cos I’ve always been fascinated by those places. I’ve also been in and out of a few institutions over the years. And of course my spine injury and Parkinson’s made me feel like a walking medical experiment, which also played into it.
I got really comfortable working with Andrew. He even started calling me and Sharon Mum and Dad, which was a bit cheeky. But at least he could keep his sense of humour through it all. Apart from the times he and Sharon had screaming arguments, that is – and they had a few. Although they always made up after. The pandemic was a big strain on all of us. It was easy to get dragged down, especially if you watched the news.
Meanwhile, Sharon’s TV show moved to Instagram Live, so she was working again. Then after a few weeks she started using the Zoom app, and did every episode from home. By September, she was back in the studio.
In a weird way, the lockdowns didn’t change much for me. I’d been in a kind of lockdown for a year already thanks to all that time in the ICU, then in bed at home. And, very selfishly, it made feel me less guilty for cancelling the tour dates, ’cos no one could work. Although obviously I didn’t wish that on anyone, ’cos people’s livelihoods were being destroyed.
To pass the time between recording sessions with Andrew, I got back into shooting air rifles in a big way. I’ve always had air rifles, me. But the ones in America… they’re nothing like your average .177 BSA. (If you ain’t familiar, BSA stands for the Birmingham Small Arms Company, although I’m told it’s now owned by an American company.) I saw this guy on YouTube take down a two-thousand-pound bison in Texas with one. They’d never let you buy a rifle that powerful in England. And if you ever tried to bring one into the country, you’d end up in prison.
Shooting has always been very therapeutic for me, ever since I lived at Bullrush Cottage. There’s a picture out there somewhere of me standing in the field behind the house, looking stoned out of my mind, holding a cocked rifle with an ammo belt slung over my shoulder. English gun laws were a lot less strict in the seventies if you owned a bit of land. I’d shoot anything in those days. I sent quite a few chickens off to meet their maker, which I ain’t proud of. And I blew the head off this seven-foot-tall stuffed grizzly bear my old manager gave me. I’d also buy department store mannequins, tie ’em to a tree in the garden and execute ’em at dawn. I was drunk most of the time. I was a danger to myself and to society, honestly. One time, I tried jumping over a fence with a loaded shotgun in my hand, and I almost blew my leg off. Another time, when I was on acid, I pulled a gun on Bill. The chamber was empty – I think – but he had no way of knowing that. Then I went stumbling off into the fields and had a long conversation with a horse.
The fact me and Bill survived the seventies honestly never ceases to amaze me.
I only do target practice now. I don’t kill living things any more. In fact, I’ve become an avid animal lover. I’ve done some bad shit in my life to all kinds of creatures, but when you get older, you realise everything’s got a right to live. I rescue animals now, including a bulldog who was set on fire by his previous owner. His name’s Walter, and he’s doing great. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to give an animal a good life.
During that first summer of the pandemic, I built myself a whole shooting range in my back garden. I even made my own targets, cutting out these big circles, putting the dots in the middle, mounting ’em on cardboard, putting ’em on stands. I’d spend all day out there. It drove my neighbour fucking crazy. He’d be sitting out by his pool or having a nice lunch on his patio and these big-bore air pellets would be zinging over his head. The poor bloke must have felt like he was in a war zone. Mind you, the rest of LA was so bored during the lockdowns, people were setting off fireworks at all hours. At least I wasn’t firing rockets at him.
Before we knew it, six months had gone by since the lockdown began. It was coming up on October now, when the European dates of No More Tours II were supposed to start. But with social distancing still in force, and the Covid vaccines still not ready, there was absolutely no way anyone was gonna be playing live. Not that I was in any state to travel anyway.
We didn’t want to cancel the shows, like we had the North American leg. But rescheduling ’em also seemed pointless, ’cos no one knew how or when the world would finally get back to normal. In the end, we just said the tour would start up again in January 2022. That was more than a year away. Surely, I thought, the lockdowns couldn’t go on that long. People were already getting restless and doing crazy shit to let off steam. It felt like there’d be a revolution if they didn’t let everyone get back to their regular lives. Meanwhile, with sixteen months to recover – if I kept up with the physical therapy – it seemed impossible I wouldn’t be ready to hit the road by then. But of course, after all the shit we’d been through, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some doubt in my mind.
All those months spent hobbling around in my back garden gave me a lot of time to think. And what I couldn’t get out of my head was what my old friend Lemmy Kilmister used to say: ‘I’d rather go out with a bang than get old.’
‘Do you really mean that, Lemmy?’ I asked him once.
‘Fuck yeah, I mean it,’ he said. ‘What the point of being ninety-five if you can’t live?’
I understood what he was getting at. But I didn’t agree. I was happy to grow old as long as I had Sharon, and as long as my family wanted me around.
But now, thanks to my injury and my Parkinson’s, and all the nerve pain I was having – not to mention all the cancelled shows – there were moments I wondered whether Lemmy had the right idea. I mean, what’s the point of being alive if you can’t enjoy it? For a long time after that first surgery, I wasn’t living, I was just getting through the days. The only thing I had to think about was, when’s my next pill coming up? In my darkest moments, I did wish I’d gone out with a bang rather than ending up semi-paralysed and stuck at home. If it wasn’t for Sharon and my family, I honestly don’t know how I could have kept going. I’d have given up.
Even though I was in a better place by now, I’d still get knocked down by depression sometimes. The thing is, you don’t realise how lucky you’ve been ’til you lose the things you used to take for granted. Like being able to use your right arm. Or just going for a stroll around the block on your own.
Thinking about Lemmy never failed to cheer me up, though.
I first met him when he was in Hawkwind. He played bass and sang. A lot of people ain’t that familiar with Hawkwind, ’cos they never really broke through to the mainstream, but they had some seriously hardcore fans. They were big into phaser effects and all that space-rock psychedelic stuff. But thanks to Lemmy, there was also a bit of pre-punk in there. Sabbath shared a rehearsal space with ’em for a while down in the Wye Valley at Rockfield Studios. This would have been around 1973, a couple of years before Queen went to Rockfield to record ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, which really put the place on the map.
The thing with Rockfield is, ’cos it’s on a farm in deepest South Wales, miles away from anywhere, you get to know people pretty well when you’re staying there. Me and Lemmy would spend hours outside in the rain with the livestock, smoking fags and shooting the shit while Lemmy swigged jet fuel or whatever the fuck it was he had in his hip flask. Even then, his voice was so rough he sounded like he’d been gargling with ball bearings and lighter fluid. And that was on a good day. He was an original, was Lemmy. The grease-stained black T-shirt and biker jacket. The bushy mutton-chop sideburns and moustache. The bullet belts and cowboy boots. I don’t think I ever saw him wear anything else.
A couple of years later, Lemmy got busted at the Canadian border for drugs – they thought his speed was cocaine, apparently – then he left or got fired from Hawkwind. That was when he formed Motörhead. Apparently, he’d wanted to call the band ‘Bastard’, but his management wouldn’t let him, ’cos it meant they’d never get on Top of the Pops. Not that Lemmy was exactly Top of the Pops material. He got the name Motörhead from a song he’d written for Hawkwind. It meant speed freak, apparently, but Lemmy assumed the BBC types at Top of the Pops wouldn’t know that.
He was right, they had no idea.
The greatest times I had with Lemmy were when Motörhead opened for us on my first solo tour in 1980. Everything was on the line, ’cos I’d just left Sabbath. We were playing anywhere they’d have us. Poole Arts Centre. Nottingham Boat Club. The West Runton Pavilion, wherever the fuck that was. And we blew the doors off everywhere we went, ’cos we had something to prove, and we had Randy Rhoads, who was an unknown at the time. He wouldn’t stay that way for very long, of course.
Motörhead were on fire, too, ’cos they’d just done ‘Ace of Spades’. That was their ‘Paranoid’, as far as I was concerned. It even got ’em on Top of the Pops, so it’s a good job Lemmy hadn’t called the band Bastard. I mean, ‘Ace of Spades’ is just one of the great metal anthems of all time. When that came out, I was like, okay, they’ve made it. They’re gonna be around for ever now.
They lived like pirates, Motörhead. There were just three of ’em. Lemmy on bass and vocals. ‘Fast’ Eddie Clarke on lead guitar. Phil ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor on drums. Their tour rider was a case of Jack Daniel’s, a case of vodka and a boatload of Coke and orange juice. The rider cost more than their booking fee. Like, a lot more. The first thing I came to realise about those guys was, they just didn’t sleep. When they finished a gig, they’d come off stage soaked with sweat, no showers, no towels, nothing, and they’d just get on their bus, open up the case of Jack and go. Then they’d drive however many hours to the other end of the country, get off and just carry on. I asked Lemmy once, ‘When was the last time you went to bed, man?’ And he was like, ‘I dunno, ten days ago?’
It was nuts. I couldn’t do it. Lemmy was the one guy I just could not keep up with. I didn’t even wanna try, man. It was a catastrophic level of partying.
Actually… there was one other guy I couldn’t keep up with. André the Giant. But that was different. If you’ve ever seen The Princess Bride, he’s the guy who played the seven foot four character, Fezzik. I met André when I did an appearance with the British Bulldogs wrestling team at WrestleMania, a few years after Blizzard of Ozz. André had a condition known as acromegaly, I believe, when you basically don’t stop growing. He wasn’t just tall, he was also heavy – like, five hundred pounds or something. The guy would drink whole jugs of vodka and cranberry – and while he was sitting there, waiting for ’em to be made, he’d get through a six-pack of beer. The guy was physically incapable of getting drunk. There’s a story out there that he once drank sixteen bottles of plum wine during a four-hour bus ride, then he got off and did three wrestling matches. Having been out with him a couple of times, I don’t doubt it. Sadly he didn’t live very long. He died of heart failure at forty-six.
With Lemmy, on the other hand, his secret weapon was speed. Speed and methamphetamine, which is bad stuff, man. It’ll make all your teeth fall out. I asked him once, ‘Why d’you do all this speed and meth all the time?’
‘’Cos I like it,’ he said.
‘It’ll kill you, y’know.’
‘Life will kill you,’ he shrugged, lighting up another fag. Lemmy was always lighting up another fag. It was probably the first thing he did after being born. ‘I mean, okay,’ he admitted, ‘maybe the drugs will kill me a bit earlier. But what’s the point of ten extra years if I’m bored shitless?’
As for why he chose speed, Lemmy said if you were gonna get high, you might as well do it with a drug that also helped you keep working. Of course, no one but Lemmy could do anything while taking that shit.
I tried some of it once. I was in a club, totally fucked up on booze, somewhere in London. Noddy Holder from Slade was jamming on stage. I’d known Noddy for years. He’d been Robert Plant’s roadie in the early days, and Geezer knew him well. It was just one of those nights you didn’t want to end. And I’m bouncing around this club at two o’clock in the morning after God knows how many hours of drinking, but the exhaustion’s starting to set in. Then out of the darkness comes this dagger with some powder on the end. It’s Lemmy. ‘You’ll probably want a bit of this,’ he goes.
Fuck it, I thought, how bad can it be?
Never again. It was like snorting fucking rust filings. I felt like I’d be having nosebleeds for the rest of my life. And I didn’t sleep for days. How the fuck he could put that shit up his nose every night and keep working, I’ve no idea.
People underestimated Lemmy, though. Because he looked like a biker, people thought he was some kind of yobbo, the kind of guy who’d get into bar brawls or steal your wallet for drug money. But he was this peaceful, educated, highly intelligent man. On that first tour we did with him, he had this little plaid suitcase, and all he had in there was a pair of knickers, a pair of socks and a pile of books on every subject you could imagine. He loved reading, Lemmy. He was like a walking Encyclopædia Britannica.
We got on so well with Motörhead on the British and European legs of the Blizzard of Ozz tour, they also joined us for the American shows. When we got to LA, we all went to stay at Don Arden’s house, a big Spanish-style mansion at the top of Benedict Canyon. Howard Hughes had once owned it, apparently. Cary Grant lived in the house next door. And it had all these bungalows around the grounds for guests to stay in, like a resort. We couldn’t get Lemmy out of the library. He’d just stay up all night doing speed and reading books. Don was like, ‘Who the fuck is that caveman in my library? Get him out of my house!’ Sharon had to explain to him that he was the lead singer of the support band.
Meanwhile, whenever Lemmy had a hangover – which was rare for him, ’cos his tolerance was off the charts – he’d say he’d had a ‘heavy night on the chemistry set’.
At Don’s house, I saw him emerging from his room after one of those nights. He looked like he’d been dug up after five hundred years under a slab. He stank. His eyes were redder than a bulldog’s. And the first thing he said to me was, ‘Fucking hell, Ozzy, if I look half as bad as you, I’m going back to bed.’
I almost called an ambulance for us both.
Many years after that Blizzard of Ozz tour, I bumped into Lemmy in Japan. We must have both been on tour there. It was towards the end of the eighties by then, and I was starting to write the No More Tears album.
‘How’s it going, Ozzy?’ he asked.
‘Not well,’ I said.
‘How come?’
‘It’s the lyrics for the new album,’ I groaned.
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I’ll know what I want a song to be about,’ I told him, ‘but I can never get past the first line.’
‘Well, if you want… I’ll help,’ he said.
I couldn’t say yes fast enough. The thing with Lemmy was, he’d read so many books, words came naturally to him. He had a gift for it, honestly. And I knew he’d written for other artists, including ‘Can’t Catch Me’ for Lita Ford. That was on the same album as the duet I did with her, ‘Close My Eyes Forever’.
On the plane back to LA after that first conversation, some guy came up to me in first class and gave me a book about a German general. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I was never gonna read it. Not ’cos I wasn’t interested. I love history, me. Especially anything war related. I must have watched every Second World War documentary that’s ever been made. It’s just my dyslexia and ADHD make reading a form of torture. Then I thought to myself, you know who’ll like this? Lemmy.
A few days later, I went over to Lemmy’s place to give him one of the demos for the songs that needed words. He had this bachelor pad in West Hollywood just around the corner from his local, the Rainbow on the Sunset Strip. He was like the mayor of that place. He had his own seat at the bar with plaque on it that said ‘Lemmy’s Chair’. He’d spend hours there drinking his Jack and Cokes and playing the video poker machine in the corner. Then when it closed at two o’clock in the morning, he’d stagger back down the hill and around the corner to his place.
