But Don was crouched down in a ball and couldn’t talk. So Sharon turned to Jake Duncan, our Scottish tour manager. But he couldn’t say anything, either. Next thing I knew, Sharon took off her shoe and just started beating Jake around the head with it.
‘Where are Randy and Rachel? Where are Randy and Rachel?’
All Jake could do was point towards the flames.
‘I don’t understand,’ Sharon said. ‘I don’t understand.’
I didn’t understand, either. Nobody had said, ‘Oh, by the way, Ozzy, on the way to Orlando, we’re gonna stop off at a bus depot in Leesburg to fix the air conditioning.’ Nobody had said, ‘Oh, and by the way, Ozzy, the bus depot is part of this dodgy housing estate with an air strip.’ Nobody had said, ‘Oh, yeah, and your driver—who’s been up all night, out of his mind on cocaine—also happens to be pilot with an expired medical certificate who’s going to borrow some bloke’s plane without his permission and then, while you’re fast asleep, take your lead guitarist and your make-up artist on a sight-seeing trip above the tour bus, before dive-bombing into it.’
Nobody had said anything like that at all.
Then the house next to the garage catches fire, and without even thinking I’m running towards it—still half- pissed, still in my underpants—to make sure no one’s inside. When I get to the front door, I knock, wait for about two seconds, then barge in.
In the kitchen an old bloke is making coffee. He almost falls off his chair when he sees me.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he says. ‘Get out of my house!’
‘There’s a fire!’ I shout at him. ‘Get out! Get out!’
The guy was clearly insane, ’cos he just picked up a broom from the corner and tried to push me away with it. ‘Get out of my house, you little bastard! Go on, fuggarf!’
‘YOUR FUCKING HOUSE IS ON FUCKING FIRE!’
‘GEDDOUT! GEDDOUT, GODAMMIT!’
‘YOUR HOUSE IS—’
Then I realised he was stone deaf. He wouldn’t have heard if the entire fucking planet had exploded. He certainly couldn’t hear a word this long-haired, raving English loony in his underpants was telling him. I couldn’t think what to do, so I just ran to the other side of the kitchen, where there was a door which led to the garage. I opened it, and the fucking thing practically blew off its hinges from the force of the fire.
The old bloke didn’t tell me to get out of his house again after that.
We only learned the full story much later. The bus driver was called Andrew C. Aycock.
Six years earlier, he’d been involved in a fatal helicopter crash in the United Arab Emirates.
Then he’d got a job working for the Calhoun Twins, a Country & Western act who owned the company that was doing the transportation for our tour. When we stopped at the bus depot to fix the air conditioning, Aycock decided to try his luck at flying again. So, without asking, he took a plane belonging to a mate of his.
Don and Jake were the first to go up with him. Everything was fine: the take-off and landing went smoothly. Then it was Randy and Rachel’s turn. There’s a photograph of the two of them standing beside the plane, just before they got on. They’re both smiling. I saw it once, but I could never look at it again. I’m told that Rachel agreed to go up only after Aycock promised not to pull any stunts while they were in the air. If he promised her that, he was a fucking liar as well as a coked-up lunatic: everyone on the ground said he buzzed the tour bus two or three times before the wing clipped the roof a few inches from where me and Sharon were sleeping. But the most insane thing—and the one fact I still can’t get my head around, nearly thirty years later—is that the bloke was going through a heavy-duty divorce at the time, and his soon-to-be-ex missus was standing right next to the bus when he crashed the plane into it.
He’d picked her up at one of the tour venues, apparently, and was giving her a ride home.
A ride home? The woman he was divorcing?
At the time, there was a lot of talk that he might have been trying to kill her, but who the fuck knows? Whatever he was trying to do, he came down so low that even if he’d managed to miss the tour bus, he would have hit the trees behind it.
Don watched the whole thing happen.
I feel bad for him, ’cos it must have been a terrible thing to see. When the wing hit the bus, Randy and Rachel were thrown through the windscreen, or so I was told. Then the plane—minus its wing—smashed into the trees behind, fell into the garage, and exploded. The fire was so intense, the cops had to use dental records to identify the bodies.
Even now I don’t like talking or thinking about it.
If I’d been awake, I would have been on that fucking plane, no question. Knowing me, I’d have been on the wing, pissed, doing handstands and backflips. But it makes no sense to me that Randy went up.
He hated flying.
A few weeks earlier, I’d been drinking with him in a bar in Chicago. We were about to take a ten-day break from the tour, and Randy was asking how long it would take him to drive from New York to Georgia, where we were starting up again. I asked why the fuck he would want to drive all the way from New York to Georgia when there was an invention called the aeroplane. He told me he’d been freaked out by the Air Florida plane that had crashed into a bridge in Washington a few days earlier. Seventy-eight people had died. So Randy wasn’t exactly the type of person to go clowning around in a bullshit four-seat piece of shit. He didn’t even want to get on a jet run by a big commercial airline.
Some weird fucking unexplained shit went on that morning, because Rachel didn’t like planes, either. She had a weak heart, so she would hardly have wanted to do a loop-the-fucking-loop. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, they were pissing around, typical fucking rock stars.’ I want to set the record straight: Rachel was in her late fifties and had a heart condition; Randy was a very level-headed guy and he was afraid of flying. None of it makes any sense.
By the time the fire engines arrived, the flames had already burned themselves out. Randy was gone. Rachel was gone. I finally put on some clothes and took a beer from what was left of the fridge in the bus. I couldn’t handle the situation. Sharon was running around trying to find a telephone. She wanted to call her father. Then the cops arrived. Good ol’ boy types.
They weren’t too sympathetic.
‘Ozzy Ozz-Burn, huh?’ they said. ‘The bat-eating madman.’
We checked into some shithole called the Hilco Inn in Leesburg and tried to hide from the press while the police did their thing. We had to call Randy’s mum and Rachel’s best friend Grace, which was horrendous.
All of us wanted to get the fuck out of Leesburg, but we had to stay put until all the paperwork was done.
None of us could get our heads around the situation. Everything had been magic one minute, and the next it had taken such an ugly, tragic turn.
‘Y’know what? I think this is a sign that I ain’t supposed to do this any more,’ I said to Sharon.
By then I was having a total physical and mental breakdown. A doctor had to come over and shoot me up with sedatives. Sharon wasn’t doing much better. She was in a terrible state, poor Sharon. The one thing that gave us some comfort was a message from AC/DC saying,
‘If there’s anything we can do, let us know.’ That meant a lot to me, and I’ll always be grateful to them for it. You learn who your friends are when the shit hits the fan. In fact, AC/DC must have known exactly what we’d been going through, ’cos it had only been a couple of years since their singer Bon Scott had died from alcohol poisoning, also at a tragically young age.
The morning after the crash I called my sister Jean, who told me that my mother had been on a bus when she’d seen a newspaper stand with the headline, ‘OZZY OSBOURNE—AIR-CRASH DEATH’. My poor old mum had gone crazy. Then later that day, I went back to the dodgy housing estate with Randy’s brother-in-law. The bus was still there, twisted into the shape of a boomerang, next to the ruins of the garage. And there, in the corner, untouched in all the ash and rubble, was a perfect little cut-out section of the Gibson T-shirt that Randy had been wearing when he died. Just the logo, nothing else. I couldn’t believe it—it was so spooky.
Meanwhile, outside the hotel, all these kids had started to hang around. I noticed that some of them were wearing the Diary of a Madman tracksuits we’d had made for the tour, so I said to Sharon, ‘We’re not selling those things, are we?’ When she said ‘no’, I walked up to this kid and asked, ‘Where did you get the tracksuit from?’
He said, ‘Oh, I went in and got it off the bus.’
