Last rites, p.6
Last Rites, page 6
Some people can pull it off, mind you.
I’ll never forget seeing Steve Marriott in action at the Akron Rubber Bowl. Don’t ask me the year, but we’re talking a long time ago. He was in Humble Pie at the time, not the Small Faces. And he was doing coke backstage with the guys in his band like it was going out of style. I was just standing there, looking at him, thinking, okay, there’s no fucking way this bloke’s singing a note after putting that much shit up his nose. I mean, for me, one bump of coke and my vocal cords are shot for the rest of the day. I wouldn’t be able to get through the first verse, never mind a whole set.
So I’m watching Steve from the wings as he walks out onto the stage, picks up his guitar, adjusts the mic… then starts to sing like he’s had nothing more than a sip of hot lemon tea. The guy was pitch perfect… for the whole gig! I couldn’t believe it. Then he comes off stage before the encore, walks over to where some roadie’s set up a little table with a Quaalude and another pile of coke on it, he snorts the blow, pops the Quaalude, then goes back out and does not one but three encores.
You could have knocked me down with a feather. To this day, I’ve never seen anything like it. The guy must have had some kind of cocaine superpower.
At the other end of the spectrum, you get bands that want to treat a gig like a science experiment. I’ve known American bands that come off stage, go to the back of the tour bus and put a tape on of the show they’ve just done. Then they listen to the whole thing again, analysing every note. No fucking way I’d ever do that. When the show’s over, it’s over. What’s the point of sitting around arguing about who fucked up and when? To me, it all comes down to one question: did you have fun? Because chances are, if you were having a good time out there, so were the fans. Mind you, sometimes I think I’m doing a great gig and I’m told afterwards it was shit… and sometimes I think it’s shit, and everyone says it was great. So it’s not always the case. But it’s generally true.
The best gig I ever did – in my opinion, anyway – was the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donington, 1984. I wasn’t even headlining. I was third on the bill behind Van Halen and AC/DC.
The night before at the hotel, I’d been absolutely off-the-charts shitfaced. We’re talking peak human wrecking ball days. And this German guy came up to me – it could have been Wolf Hoffmann from Accept, or someone else in his band – and he goes, ‘Ozzy, vy you get so crazy before show? You have responsibility! Don’t you vant to prepare?!’
I was like, ‘What do you think I’m doing?’
He just shook his head and walked away.
But the thing is, playing with a hangover after you’ve had a great night out is a lot different to going on stage wasted. The next day, I rolled out of bed in the afternoon, got shot up with Decadron, went on stage and absolutely killed it. It’s sod’s law. You over-prepare, and it’s shit. You wing it – going out there with a steaming hangover – and it’s amazing.
Speaking of hangover gigs, another great one was Rock in Rio a year later. I’d just got out of the Betty Ford clinic in Palm Springs, and I thought the flight to Rio would be just a couple of hours. But after three hours had gone by, I realised it would be more like nine or ten. And in my mind, getting through it without a drink was impossible. By the time we came in to land, I was blacked out in the aisle and Sharon was so pissed off with me she was stabbing me with a fork.
You can see for yourself what the gig was like, ’cos someone’s put it on YouTube. For me, it was almost up there with Donington. The only thing that took away from the fun was the smell of the place. The organisers had provided almost no toilet facilities, so people just pissed and shat where they stood in the ninety-degree heat. And they’d been there for almost a week. At some point, someone threw a raw chicken at me – as everyone did in those days, for some reason – and when I bent over to pick it up the stench almost knocked me out. Normally, I’d have fucked around a bit with the thing and taken a bite out of it or whatever, but even my booze-sozzled brain was like, fuck no, not a good idea. A live bat was one thing. A shit-smeared raw chicken was something else.
Queen played after us, and they must have had pretty bad hangovers, too.
Not that I partied with Freddie Mercury or anything. But he was staying in the suite directly above ours, and every time we went up to our room, day or night, the lift was jam-packed full of these kids going up to his penthouse. The ruckus at night, it was unbelievable. I mean, the night we arrived, I was black-out drunk from all the miniatures I’d downed on the plane and it still woke me up. I was like, what’s he doing up there? Beating people with sticks? The whole building was shaking.
But I’ve got to hand it to Freddie and the guys, they were on fire that night. Then a few months later, they stole the show at Live Aid. There’s nothing like it when that happens. The Gods were with ’em. They absolutely killed it as the whole world watched. They hadn’t over-prepared. They weren’t fucked up. They just went out there and had the time of their lives.
For whatever reason, the stage fright I got before the New Year’s Eve Ozzfest was up there with the worst of my life. But it all came back like second nature in the end.
My life flashed before my eyes on the giant video screen above the stage.
Carmina Burana kicked in.
DUH, DUH, DUH-DUH!!
DUH, DUH, DUH-DUH!!
DUH-DUH-DUDH DUUUUUUH DUUUUUH, DUH DUH!!!
Then off I went, legging it up and down the stage as I belted out ‘Bark at the Moon’ like the whole staph infection thing had never happened. Better yet, my old foam cannon had been upgraded to a snow cannon. Meaning the cold wet stuff, not the white powdery stuff that made Geezer write a lyric about climbing mountains on the moon.
I had so much fun shooting that thing at the crowd. And of course I got snow all over myself as I was doing it. Then it melted under the lights, so my T-shirt got soaked through with all this freezing-cold water.
But I barely noticed. I was having an absolute ball.
There did come a point, though, during Tommy’s drum solo, when I thought, fucking hell… what kind of deal must I have done with the devil to still be up here doing this? I mean, I was the last man standing in many ways. David Bowie was gone. George Michael was gone. Prince was gone. Tom Petty was gone. Michael Jackson was gone. All these icons, these huge names from the seventies and eighties, and I was the one still on tour. It made no sense to me. I was the one who’d been to prison. Whose tour bus had been hit by a fucking plane. While I was still in it. Whose guitarist had been killed tragically. Who’d been charged with attempted murder. Who’d broken his neck and spent eight days in a chemical coma, technically dead, after falling off a quad bike. Who’d been a hopeless drug addict and world-class alcoholic for more than half a century.
The biggest shock for me was when David Bowie died. I thought he’d outlive me by decades, he seemed so young and healthy. I was devastated when I heard the news. I kept thinking back to the time he’d shouted out to me from across the street in West Hollywood, ‘OZZZZYY!!’ – but I was so starstruck I could barely even wave back. I was walking into Hugo’s, this breakfast place on Santa Monica Boulevard. Then he came in after us and sat a few tables away. But by that point it was weird, ’cos we hadn’t talked or anything. He just read his newspaper.
For years, I thought I’d blown my one and only shot at ever shaking his hand and telling him how much he meant to me. But we did end up crossing paths again at the AA log cabin many years later. He even called my house in LA a few times to talk about recovery stuff. I’ve no idea what the last thing I said to him was. That’s the thing when you’re younger, it never occurs to you that you might never get to see or talk to someone again.
You just carry on like we’re all gonna live for ever.
Halfway through the set, we stopped playing to watch the clock on the video screen count down to midnight.
TEN… NINE…
As I shouted out the numbers with the crowd, I thought I was counting down to a new start.
… EIGHT… SEVEN…
To the rest of my farewell tour.
… SIX… FIVE…
To that cushy residency in Las Vegas that Sharon kept talking about.
… FOUR… THREE…
But the rock ’n’ roll gods, they had other plans.
… TWO… ONE.
What I was really counting down to…
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
Was the end of it all.
5
Lights Out
The flu.
Of course I got the fucking flu.
And bronchitis for good measure. With a bit of pneumonia on the side.
The doc at Urgent Care didn’t seem all that happy to see me again. ‘Mr Osbourne, you really must remember you’re in your seventies now,’ he said. ‘Have you been making sure to wrap up warm now that it’s cold outside?’
‘Of course I have, doc,’ I croaked. ‘I can’t afford to be ill. I’m back on tour in a couple of weeks.’
‘So you’re telling me you’ve had no prolonged exposure to cold temperatures whatsoever?’ he asked with this sceptical look on his face.
‘Not that I can think of.’
The doc sighed and scratched his head. ‘Well, it’s a mystery how your flu became this bad.’
‘Oh, wait.’
The doc gave me a look like he wanted to punch a hole in the wall. ‘Yes?’ he said.
‘I did get wet from the snow cannon.’
Mystery solved, apparently. Turns out running around a stage in a T-shirt on New Year’s Eve while soaked in freezing-cold water ain’t a good idea, whether you’re seventy or seventeen. But the doc said if I rested and drank plenty of fluids I should be better again in a week to ten days, just in time for the tour. So off I went back home, made myself a few gallons of hot lemony shit to drink, threw a pile of logs on the fire and sat down to watch every Vietnam War and serial-killer documentary on Netflix until the virus fucked off.
I was so pissed off, man. It always seemed to be something. And 2019 had started off so well. After Ozzfest – which had been an absolute blinder of a gig – me and Sharon had a few days of seeing old friends and sharing memories.
But the most mind-blowing thing I did before the flu kicked me in the bollocks was go over to DreamWorks in Glendale to record the voice of King Thrash for Trolls World Tour. I mean, okay, it didn’t exactly take Daniel Day-Lewis to read the couple of lines they gave me. But the fact a Hollywood studio wanted to cast me in this blockbuster family movie was hard to wrap my head around. It still feels like yesterday to me that the same people thought I was either Satan or the enemy of Western civilisation, or both.
But bring it on, that’s what I say.
If Disney ever need a new Snow White, they know where to find me.
No matter how much rest I got, or how many fluids I drank, the flu wasn’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, I was on antibiotics to try and take out the bronchitis and pneumonia. I even ended up in hospital one night to get checked out.
I was losing my mind.
Every day I spent shivering on the sofa was another day closer to when No More Tours II was supposed to start up again in Dublin. I hadn’t played Ireland since The End Tour with Black Sabbath in 2017, and I couldn’t wait to get back there. If I closed my eyes, I could almost taste the Guinness. I was also excited to hang out with my old friends in Judas Priest, who’d be opening for me. Between ‘Diary of a Madman’ and ‘You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’’, it was gonna feel like 1982 all over again. We were gonna have an absolute blast.
But as the days counted down – and the virus just wouldn’t take the hint and fuck off – the reality of the situation became impossible to ignore. Not only would we have to call off the Dublin gig, but also all the UK ones that followed.
Normally, I’d have at least tried to put a brave face on it all for the fans. But between the fatigue and brain fog from the flu, the cost of the cancellations, the disappointment and the guilt of letting everyone down – again – I couldn’t do it. ‘It seems that since October, everything I touch has turned to shit,’ I wrote in a statement that we put out on social media.
I felt so fucking down, man. When I was younger and burned out from touring, I’d try and get out of gigs. I’d shave my hair off. Disappear on a ten-day bender. Check myself into a psych ward somewhere. But as corny as it sounds, now that I was seventy, I realised that every gig was a gift.
The worst part was the feeling that the universe was trying to tell me something.
Maybe I just wasn’t up for this any more.
Maybe I wouldn’t get to experience anything like the New Year’s Eve show again.
Maybe my days of touring were over, and I just didn’t know it yet.
Sharon did her best to talk me down from the ledge. Anyone can get the flu, she said. Anyone can get an infection. I just got unlucky – twice in a row. Besides, she said, hundreds of thousands of fans had already bought tickets. I needed to finish what I’d started. Then I could decide what’s next.
After a few more days of frantic phone calls, there was a plan. We’d start the tour again in March, giving me plenty of time to get back on my feet again. Instead of trying to reschedule the shows we’d missed, we’d jump straight ahead to the Australia, New Zealand and Japan gigs, followed by the remaining twenty-seven or so dates of the North American leg – most of which would be in summer, making it less likely that I’d come down with something. Meanwhile, Sharon would find a way to get the Dublin and UK shows back on the books.
It should have been a relief.
But something still didn’t feel right.
I told myself it was just that horrible heavy feeling you get when you’re all stuffed up.
To say that I didn’t have high hopes for February would be an understatement. At this point, I’d learned to just expect the worst. Which was a good job, ’cos that’s exactly what February was about to give me.
I mean… where do I even start?
Okay.
This is what I remember.
It was a Saturday night, I’m pretty sure. The first weekend of the month.
I’ve no clue exactly what I was doing that day, but it wouldn’t have been much, ’cos I was still feeling about as fresh as a gorilla’s arsehole. I probably had a bit of soup for lunch, if I ate anything at all. Took some flu medicine. Started watching a war documentary. Took a bit more flu medicine. Finished the war documentary. Finished the flu medicine. Then at around midnight I would have switched off the telly, gathered up my little pack of four-legged friends, got into my private elevator – that’s not a joke, my house really does have a private elevator – and toddled off to bed.
Sharon was already under the covers, tossing and turning, trying to get to sleep, her face lit up by her phone every so often when she checked her texts.
Now, it’s a rule of being a seventy-year-old bloke that you never go to bed and stay there. Every other minute, your brain gets an urgent message from your bladder saying if you don’t get up and piss right now you’re gonna explode. But it’s a pain in the arse to get up, so you end up leaving it longer than you should, until suddenly you have to do an Usain Bolt to the bog.
That’s exactly what went down that night. I needed to piss, but it was pitch dark in the room and my head felt like it was floating in an ocean of snot. So I waited… and waited… and waited… until finally – oh, for fuck’s sake! – I flopped out of bed and staggered off to shake the ol’ snake.
Ahhhhhhhhh…
That was better.
Then back I came, banging into walls, feeling my way around in the dark.
I could have switched on the lights, I suppose. But I didn’t want to wake up Sharon, who was by now fast asleep. And unless I went and got my reading glasses – a major operation, since I can never remember where the fuck I put them – there was no way I was gonna find the flashlight on my phone.
But whatever.
I found my way, mumbling and cursing as I went.
Then, once I was a few steps away from the bed, I did what I always did.
Whheeeeeeee…
BLA-BANG!
‘Ozzy?’
‘Ozzy?? Ozzy!!? What the fuck just happened?’
I could only gurgle.
The first thing I felt was this incredibly sharp pain in my eyes.
It was Sharon, switching on all the lights.
She was confused, her brain still booting up. She couldn’t see me anywhere.
‘Ozzy?! Ozzy, where are you? What on earth—’
She saw me.
‘Oh my God.’
I was on the floor. Absolutely nowhere near anything resembling a bed. To this day, I don’t understand how the fuck I could have missed it. The thing’s massive. It’s like having a Sherman tank parked in the middle of the room.
There was so much I wanted to say.
Like how I couldn’t feel anything.
Like how I couldn’t stand up.
Like how I couldn’t remember what had happened just a couple of seconds ago.
Like how the pain was worse than anything I’d ever felt before.
But once I was done with all the gurgling, all I could manage was three words.
‘My fucking neck!’
The second I hit the floor, my mind was back in the nineties, just after the original No More Tours tour.
At the grand old age of forty-five, I’d just bought myself a ‘retirement’ present: a Yamaha Banshee 350 quad bike. It had red fenders and gold rims.
I loved that thing, man. It was like a bullet on wheels. I could spend days racing it around the three hundred acres behind Welders House, the old Second World War officers’ convalescent home we’d just bought in Buckinghamshire. I had many, many years of enjoying that bike, to the point where I’d pretty much forgotten just how powerful it was.
Then on 8 December 2003, I took it out while we were filming for The Osbournes. The crew were complaining about something or other, so I sped off ahead of them, skidding down this muddy embankment, and at the bottom of it my front wheels hit a pothole. I later found out it was one of the craters left by Luftwaffe pilots who didn’t fancy getting shot down in flames over London. They’d just empty their bomb bays over the fields, turn around and fuck off home.
