Last rites, p.2
Last Rites, page 2
Sometimes you have some fun at those AA meetings. Sometimes you hear some fucked-up shit. Other times it’s just really sad. Addiction is cunning, powerful and baffling, they tell you. It helped me, all that AA stuff. Got me started on the way back to being sober. If you’re on your own, the voice in your head is too persuasive. But I don’t want anyone to think I’m the patron saint of recovering alcoholics. If you want to drink, and you think you can handle it, good for you. But I had to be honest with me. I couldn’t handle it.
It terrifies me now, alcohol, because I turn into somebody else. One drink, and the demon awakes. I used to be a fun drunk, or so I thought. But now I just argue. All the little niggles I have with people, I bring them up.
The moment I thought I’d finally managed to break free from my addictive personality was when Sharon had some ketamine treatment. Not the off-the-books stuff Matthew Perry was supposedly doing, but a controlled medical thing, with a shrink involved. It’s very effective for depression, I’m told. Every time she went for a session, she’d come home with her eyes all swollen from crying. And I was like, ‘Sharon, what the fuck are they doing to you in that place?’ She said they were helping her face the demons in her past, and that maybe I should try it too, ’cos maybe the reason I couldn’t ever stay sober was some buried shit.
So I went down there and gave it a try. It seemed like a better idea than going on psych meds or whatever they were talking about giving me at the time.
They started me on this tiny dose. A microdose, they call it. But the second I felt it kick in – a very small but unmistakable altering of the mind – I was like, oh yeah, I could have some serious fun with this. It’s totally different from the way Sharon reacts to drugs. She can take ’em as needed. I just want to keep doing it until I’m blacked out and dribbling in the corner. But this time, I recognised it immediately for what it was, and I was like, you can fuck right off with that, no, absolutely not.
For the first time in years, I was able to be really honest with myself.
They say it’s physical and spiritual, addiction. The physical part is the craving from the brain. And that robs you of your spirit. And by getting sober, you’re earning your spirit back. When I walked out of that ketamine clinic, I told myself I’d never let addiction steal my spirit from me again.
For a long time after getting sober, I found harmless things to get addicted to. Yorkshire tea. Wordsearch books. English sweeties. Doodling. Exercise machines. Texting funny shit with Billy Morrison and other friends.
But nothing is really harmless when the word ‘moderation’ ain’t in your dictionary.
I remember the time I decided to give up cigarettes and have the occasional cigar instead. It was after a tour, and I was starting to get freaked out by the damage I was doing to my vocal cords. The idea was that quitting cigarettes would let my voice recover, while the cigars would allow me to enjoy the taste of tobacco once in a while without inhaling the smoke.
Next thing I knew, I was smoking thirty Montecristos a day, inhaling every single one of ’em, and I’d converted half my house into a walk-in humidor. When the time came to start singing again, my voice was so rough my arsehole hurt. So I thought, fuck it, and went back to the cigarettes. But by then I was used to inhaling cigar smoke, so even a pack of full-strength Marlboros felt like having half a wank. It took me years to wean myself off those things. Nicotine is the most addictive substance I’ve ever put into my body, without any shadow of doubt. People whose lives are wrecked with emphysema and lung cancer, they still carry on smoking. That tells you something about the nature of that drug.
Of all the supposedly harmless things I’ve been addicted to, though, the most dangerous have been doctors’ prescriptions. Whether it’s Vicodin or cough medicine, it’s always been the slipperiest of slopes for me. So when I got sober, I forced myself to stay away from the medical profession as much as I could.
But during No More Tours II I started to come down with a bad case of vocal strain. I mean, try screaming your lungs out on stage for an hour and a half every other night for months on end, with the humidity and temperature changing at every venue… at the age of sixty-nine.
Don’t get me wrong, for some singers it’s no problem at all. Take Elton John. I was talking to him one day and he said he’d just come back from a tour. I asked him how many shows. ‘Forty-eight,’ he said. And I was like, ‘That’s a lot of shows, Elton… How long was the tour?’ He just shrugged and said, ‘Forty-eight days.’ I couldn’t believe it. The guy’s unstoppable. He’d do his residency in Las Vegas during the week, then fly halfway around the world to do a couple more shows over the weekend. He works every day of the year, that bloke. The work ethic is insane. I can’t keep up with that. There comes a point when my body just says, fuck off, no.
For as long as I can remember, the answer’s been a drug called Decadron, or dexamethasone. It’s a type of steroid, basically, used to treat inflammation. It gives you a bit of a shove, y’know? One shot and you can sing higher than the moon. Now, I ain’t gonna lie, I’ve pushed my luck with Decadron in the past. I’ve bullshitted doctors to get more than I needed – whether it was in pill form, liquid drops or injections into my throat. But until No More Tours II it had never given me any serious problems. A lot of singers, they go too far with it. They scream so hard they end up with nodules on their vocal cords that have to be removed with surgery. Not me.
So as soon as I felt my voice giving out I went straight to my gig doctor – not sneaking around this time, but with Sharon’s knowledge – and got myself a couple of bottles of liquid Decadron.
At first, it was like a magic elixir. I could get through a whole show, no problem at all. My range and stamina were so good I could have added a couple of Bee Gees numbers to the setlist. But as with most drugs, it was ‘play now, pay later’… and before long, the cure became worse than the disease.
To be fair, of course, the doc had told me to take just two drops of the stuff every night with dinner. But those couple of drops soon became five or six, dinner or no dinner. Then a few more before bed. Then a top-up the next morning. Then it was back to the old, ‘Hi Doc, it’s Ozzy – can I please have some more?’
‘Ozzy, your voice is fine, you don’t need steroids,’ Sharon kept telling me.
‘But what if it stops being fine when I’m halfway through a show?’
‘That’s why you do warm-ups. So you can tell how you’re feeling.’
‘But the doctor says—’
‘You’ve got that doctor wrapped around your bloody finger. STOP. TAKING. THEM.’
But Sharon was busy doing her talk-show stuff back in LA, and I was hopping between cities on the other side of the world, so there wasn’t much she could do other than give me a bollocking whenever she called.
Which was all well and good until the old ’roid rage kicked in.
Next thing I knew, I’d somehow given myself a black eye that even a couple of layers of stage make-up couldn’t hide. Sharon got heavy with me after that. She hired this military guy with a neck wider than the Watford Gap to come and watch over me. Where she found this bloke, I’ve no idea. He just appeared by my side one day, like an angry mountain in human form, and never left. Sharon kept telling me I was hallucinating at night, either just as I was about to fall asleep or when I was waking up. She said that’s how I’d headbutted a coffee table, giving myself the shiner. I had no recollection of that. To her, that proved her point. To me, it felt like everyone was getting on my case for no good reason.
Sharon kept wanting me to see a neurologist. My son Jack was worried I might have the same thing that took down Sharon’s dear friend Robin Williams – Lewy body dementia. I mean, it wasn’t like I was seeing Martians floating over the bed or anything. But it was bad enough that I was talking to people who weren’t there. I would think the kids were throwing parties in my room, or I’d get angry and pieces of furniture would end up broken – and I’d wake up with no idea how it had happened.
My Parkinson’s was part of the problem. When most people think of Parkinson’s, they think of what the actor Michael J. Fox has got. My case is nowhere near as severe. In fact, my doctors have told me it’s pretty mild. Having said that, the disease has stiffened my muscles, which affects the way I walk and talk, and the pills I take to keep it in check have side effects. This one drug I was taking back then, Sinemet, is known to cause confusion in some people – along with agitation, nightmares, nervousness and all kinds of other shit. And when I added a bottle a day of steroids to the mix, I became more wired than the National Grid.
On top of that, I’d been getting this really bad stage fright, partly ’cos I was so paranoid about my voice giving out. That had given me terrible insomnia, which had thrown me off even more. Sharon was so worried she got the kids to take it in turns flying out to each gig to keep an eye on me.
Jack came one weekend, Kelly the next, Aimee after that. I even got to hang out with some of the grandkids. I’ve got ten of ’em now, if you can believe it. There’s Jack’s daughter Pearl, who was six at the time. Andy, who must have been three. And Minnie, who was just a baby then. (His daughter Maple hadn’t been born yet.) Since then, Kelly’s had her little Sid, who’s a proper tearaway. I get knackered just watching him. My other grandkids are from my first marriage. Maia and Elijah from my son Louis, and Harry, Isabelle and Kitty from my daughter Jessica.
Anyway, it did the trick, all the extra support. By the time No More Tours II reached North America, just before my birthday, I was feeling a lot better. Which was just as well, ’cos we still had thirty arenas left to play.
Everything seemed fine again.
But I wasn’t fine. I was heading straight for a brick wall.
Because the Decadron was doing damage no one could see.
2
Clever Accident
When we opened No More Tours II in Jacksonville, Florida, it had been fifty years since I started out as a singer. Where the fuck had all that time gone? Nobody warns you that one day you’ll wake up and half a century’s gone by.
It was a totally different world when I first got into the music game. Telly was still black and white. Steam trains were still running from Birmingham Snow Hill to London Paddington. And the future king of England was still a teenager, like I was – although that was the only thing we had in common. He certainly hadn’t just done six weeks for burglary.
The question I constantly got asked when I was doing press for No More Tours II was, how did you do it? How did you get from there to here – becoming this well-known name, keeping your career going over five decades?
I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t. None of it was planned. When you’re on the inside looking out, you’re just doing your thing, riding the rollercoaster. There’s no good reason why I’m still here, still working – or trying to, anyway – and others aren’t. Maybe I just got lucky. Or maybe it’s just my trip, and everything’s meant to be.
I first became a performer at school, I suppose, in the days when I was still John, not Ozzy. I couldn’t read properly ’cos of my dyslexia, and I couldn’t concentrate ’cos of my ADHD. Whenever I had to read something out loud in class, everyone would piss themselves laughing. But if I hammed it up, did crazy things to distract them, I didn’t feel so ashamed.
The first time I sang in front of anyone was at one of my sisters’ talent shows at 14 Lodge Road. I did a Cliff Richard number – ‘Living Doll’ – of all things. It can’t have been that bad, ’cos no one booed, and none of the windows shattered. But never in a million years did I think singing could be a career. In my mind, I had a better chance of becoming the next prime minister of fucking Sweden.
The first proper band I joined was the Polka Tulk Blues Band. I was nineteen at the time, and straight out of prison. The name came from the brand of talcum powder my mum used. It was me on vocals, Tony Iommi on guitar, Geezer Butler on bass, Bill Ward on drums. We also had a slide guitarist and a saxophone player, but they only lasted about two gigs. Mainly ’cos they couldn’t play the slide guitar or the saxophone.
After a few weeks of gigging, we changed our name to Earth. The only problem with that was, when you said it in a Brummie accent, it sounded like you were throwing up. UURRRGGHHHFFF. So we changed our name again, to Black Sabbath, after an old horror film. We were all into that black magic shit, especially Geezer, who was always carrying around a pile of Dennis Wheatley books with titles like The Satanist and The Devil Rides Out.
In the beginning, it was all Tony Iommi. He’d been in the year above me at Birchfield Road Secondary Modern, which they knocked down not long after we left. Everyone knew Tony, ’cos he had a bright red electric guitar that his parents had given to him one Christmas. He was also tall and good looking, and unbeatable in a fight. Then he lost the tips of his fingers in an accident at the sheet metal place where he worked. I only heard about what happened later, but I’m told this huge machine press came down on his right hand, and when he pulled it out, he could see his finger bones sticking out. Fucking horrible, man. That should have been the end of his guitar playing. But Tony’s an inventor. So he just invented himself a set of new fingertips using an old Fairy Liquid bottle, then he re-taught himself how to play. To this day, I don’t understand how he even knows his fingers are hitting the strings.
After the accident, Tony started using lighter strings – like the ones you’d get on a banjo – ’cos he was in so much pain. He also loosened his strings for the same reason, which lowered the tuning. Not that I knew much about any of that stuff at the time. But his plastic fingertips and de-tuned guitar gave him this really dark, distinctive sound. He was so good Jethro Tull made him a job offer just as Earth was starting to take off. We were devastated when he broke the news. But lucky for us, Tony didn’t like being an employee in someone else’s band.
He was back after two gigs.
At some point over the years, Black Sabbath got credited with inventing heavy metal. People even call me the ‘Godfather of heavy metal’, whatever the fuck that means. But I’m not totally sure that’s right.
For me, the first proper ‘heavy’ song was ‘You Really Got Me’ by The Kinks, which came out the summer I left school. When I first heard that riff – DUH-N-N-N-NUH! DUH-N-N-N-NUH! – it did something to me. It was like a drug. Listening to it was like having a fucking orgasm. I had to buy the single five times, ’cos I kept wearing out the grooves. It might have been the first thing I ever got addicted to. It drove my poor old man halfway round the bend. ‘IF I HEAR THAT ONE MORE TIME, I SWEAR I’LL…’
I did eventually stop playing it, but only ’cos I blew out the speaker of his record player. It was one of them polished wood things with a built-in radio that took up about half the living room. And of course there was no way I was ever gonna own up to doing that kind of damage. There was just this sudden, very suspicious silence… until eventually he put on one of his Al Jolson records and all that came out was this dribbly, farty noise. PPFFTTHHHHHH.
You could hear the scream from a mile away.
Years later, I was lucky enough to meet Ray Davies from The Kinks. We were at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s twenty-fifth anniversary show at Madison Square Garden in New York. I was playing with Metallica, jumping around on stage like a jackrabbit. I told him I thought ‘You Really Got Me’ was basically the perfect song. He couldn’t have been nicer about it. He even returned the compliment, saying he liked ‘Paranoid’. You couldn’t wipe the grin off my face. I wanted to phone my dad and tell him what he’d said, but of course he wasn’t around any more by then.
Whatever the history books decide when it comes to heavy metal, it’s certainly true we wanted the first Sabbath album to be heavier than anything that had come before. Not just the music, but also the lyrics. Back then, no one was singing about Satan, demons and corpses. I mean, okay, Fleetwood Mac had done ‘Black Magic Woman’, which Santana then covered. But you didn’t see girls running out of Fleetwood Mac gigs screaming ’cos they were terrified. You did at our gigs. You’ve gotta remember, a lot more people went to church back then. They thought the Devil was real. So when they heard that spooky three-note riff with me howling about a figure in black with eyes of fire coming to take me away, they thought he’d be coming for them next.
At the same time, the image that first album created was so strong, for a long time people thought Devil stuff was all we did. That’s why people started calling me the Prince of Darkness, supposedly after a line in Paradise Lost, the John Milton poem… not that I knew who the fuck John Milton was.
The truth is, although Sabbath always had a dark vibe, the song ‘Black Sabbath’ was basically the only full-on ‘scary music’ thing we ever did. I mean, go and listen to ‘Changes’, a soulful piano ballad about a marriage falling apart, or ‘Supernaut’, with that awesome funk-rock rhythm break, or the trippy ‘Planet Caravan’, which I’m told they played in the SpaceX Crew Dragon before it docked with the International Space Station.
Still… we did all right in the end. So it ain’t like you’re gonna hear any of us complaining.
It’s a miracle I had any kind of career after Sabbath.
After I got fired – for being too fucked up, according to them, but that’s a story for later – I ended up living in a little apartment with its own kitchen and living room at a temporary housing place called Le Parc in West Hollywood.
I had no clue what I was gonna do next. The stress was killing me. I just kept ordering in booze from Gil Turner’s on the Sunset Strip, keeping the blinds drawn all day, running the AC full blast – with the gas fire on at the same time, ’cos it reminded me of home – while drinking and smoking myself into oblivion. Meanwhile, my wife at the time was back in England with the kids, waiting for me to land a new gig so we wouldn’t go broke.
The problem was, I’d just turned thirty-one, which was dangerously close to over the hill for a rock star. In my mind, there was a good chance I’d end up draining whatever was left of our savings, leaving me with no choice but to go and find a job on a building site somewhere.
