I dug it. I figured it was the next big group. This is the most Stooge-esque group of the 80s, I reflected casually. Seconds later, I wondered if Redd Kross could have grown up so fast.
When the little tag came on at the end, it said the song was Paranoid by Black Sabbath. But it was not too late for me to meet Ozzy Osbourne. Ozzy is on tour. His tours last years. He travels the country by bus with his band, his crew, and the guitars and flamethrowers and hardware.
When you first see Ozzy, sitting there getting his hair blown dry by his personal hairdresser, you realise that you are in the presence of somebody. He looks like somebody. Ozzy reminded me a little of Iggy Pop and a little of Mason Reese.
His eyes are too big for his head. Baby fat makes him look smooth and cute. Ozzy looks like a wild, fat, happy kid, like Piggy from Lord of the Flies grown up. Ozzy looks like the perfect scapegoat. He looks like the chunky kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Is Ozzy the devil? It looks doubtful.
Is he in league with the devil? Well, what league? The majors, the minors? Ozzy is certainly not a devil. If anything, he is a benign gremlin, not dissimilar from the early Americann TV star Froggy the Gremlin. I think Ozzy is basically into a demiurgically wholesome boogeyman mode. Like postmodern Visigoth minstrelsy. Oz is a panic, and as such rates as something of a landmark and deserves all the protections accorded landmarks.
Ozzy moves his chair into the sun. I started jogging a lot. At one point, I was jogging three miles a day. They counted those miles on the speedometer of the bus from which dangled the bottle of wine Ozzy chased. Just kidding. You know, they sort of suck of all the shit out of your body, clean your whole system out.
He says red meat is fucking disgusting shit. It stays in there forever. I work hard. Play hard. Father of five children who I love dearly. I take vitamins every day.
He had a good day and a bad day, you know? It fucks your lungs up. How has writing been going? Do you have a lot of song ideas? I have a couple ideas; not many. With Andrew, it just comes out in the moment. Oh, man. Not for me. The only thing I do regret is not doing the last farewell show in Birmingham with [drummer] Bill Ward.
I felt really bad about that. It would have been so nice. This year marks half a century since the first two Black Sabbath albums, Black Sabbath and Paranoid , came out. What does that anniversary mean to you? Those guys my brothers, you know? They go back to my childhood. Once the pandemic is done, are you eager to get back on the road with your solo band? How can you retire from a rock band?
One night, while drunk, he took his shotgun to the coop and began shooting the birds. Then he set fire to the coop and into the flames he threw live shotgun cartridges, and they soon went bang-bang-bang!
During a meeting at CBS records, Ozzy, then a solo artist, in order to intimidate the public relations people, pulled out a dove, bit off its head, and threw it on a table, where it twitched about, spilling blood and feces everywhere. During one performance, somebody in the audience threw something at Ozzy. He thought it was a rubber bat, so he picked it up and chomped down on it.
Soon, realizing something was wrong, Ozzy spit out a live bat. Later, as a precautionary measure, Ozzy had to get rabies shots. Later, while still dressed in drag, he took a leak on the walls of the Alamo, a historic national monument, where the cops soon busted him.
It was a decade before the authorities allowed Ozzy to play in San Antonio again. When Ozzy had guests stay at his house at Outland Cottage in England, he would slip into their rooms at night and shave off their eyebrows. Ozzy thought this was hilarious fun. One night, in Memphis, Tennessee, Ozzy, drunk and looking for a place to urinate, chose a white car parked in a lay-by. Then he soon discovered this was an unmarked police car, and the lady cop at the wheel arrested him and threw him in jail for the rest of the night.
While in Germany, once again, Ozzy Osbourne, drunk while seeing the sights, may have been the only person ever thrown out of Dachau concentration camp. This time, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while drunk and coked out of his head, Ozzy took a ride in an aerial tramway. When the vehicle suddenly stopped, a thousand feet up, Ozzy took a ladder to the roof of the vehicle, lifted the hatch, and climbed atop it.
Then, when the thing started moving again, Ozzy rode on top, his arms wide, as if surfing at Malibu. So, one time, after sleeping with a groupie, he had himself checked for the virus. Ozzy was so freaked out by the experience that he vowed to never again cheat on Sharon. One time, while flying, a woman sitting in front of Ozzy kept annoying him, so he slipped a Doom Dot into her drink and soon the lady fell asleep.
This Doom Dot was a so-called "Mickey," which is a gel cap containing chloral hydrate. Later, Sharon dropped the charges. Invited to a White House dinner during the administration of George W. Recently, he and his friend Zakk Wylde pushed a inch TV set through the ninth floor window of a hotel and let it fall to the pavement below it was something Ozzy had always wanted to do.
When this huge TV set hit the ground, it exploded like a nuclear bomb. Iommi lost the tips of two fingers in an accident at a factory where he worked.
He uses two thimbles to replace the tips. Ozzy sleeps naked and did in fact chase a robber from his home in the buff. There's a terrifying image for you!
Before the famed bat incident ever happened, Ozzy was already prone to decapitations of winged creatures. In , he bit the head off a live dove in Los Angeles, during a meeting with terrified record executives. The legendary bat incident in Des Moines has been prone to mythologizing.
Fortunately, the bat was already dead. In fact, according to Mark Neal, the kid who threw the bat on stage, it had been dead a while and was close to rancid. He was 17 at the time he tossed the bat corpse on stage. Neal's younger brother had brought the bat home from school, alive and flapping, about two weeks before the concert. The Neals, obviously, failed to keep the bat alive as a household pet. Mark's friends, who were more than aware of Osbourne's bizarre antics, convinced him to seal the bat remains in a baggy and tuck them inside his coat.
When he threw the bat on stage, Mark assumed that Ozzy might just make a silly comment or find it cool in a gross way. He never expected that Ozzy would actually take a bite. Mark told the Des Moines Register, "It really freaked me out I won't get in any trouble for admitting this, will I?
After the concert, Osbourne was rushed to Broadlawns Medical Center for rabies shots. Pam Culver, the nurse supervisor that night, remembers the circus that surrounded his visit. Reporters were everywhere and wanted to know every annoying detail. Culver told the Des Moines Register, "For a week that [handling the fall out of Ozzy's visit] was probably 50 percent of my job—fielding calls from England and Canada and all over the United States.
People wanted to know how much did it cost to do that, and did it hurt, and how many shots did he have to have, what part of his body did we have to attack? By October , the auditorium directors in Des Moines had to create new rules which would "prohibit concert performers from using, presenting or in any way making live animals a part of a program at Vets without the consent of management. Ozzy says he thought it was a toy bat. Although, knowing his drug abuse, can we be sure he would have cared either way?
Osbourne has since lamented that he will be asked ridiculous questions about the bat incident until his death. He said, "[They'll ask me] How did it taste, Ozzy?
Why did you do it, Ozzy!? But how much longer will Ozzy Osbourne survive? Answer: As far as I know, Ozzy has never had sex while performing rock and roll. Question: I got to see Ozzy and Black Sabbath in , do you know what colors they were using? Answer: I saw Black Sabbath about that time, and their colors seemed to be black and silver, with Celtic crosses around their necks. Thanks for the comment, DJ Hurst. I think we agree that Ozzy is your quintessential out-of-control rocker.
It's too bad many rockers, particularly the young ones, idolize this reckless, irresponsible guy at least he used to be that way. And if he wasn't a rich rock star he'd be avoided like the plague. It's all very well idolising him from a distance but if he was your neighbour you'd have something to say.
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