Perfect, I thought, this’ll give me a bit of cover.
So I whip out my dick, but no sooner have I started to give the tire of this car a good old watering than all these coloured bulbs in the back window light up, and I hear this horribly familiar noise.
BLOOP-BLOOP-WHOOOO. BAARRRP!
I couldn’t fucking believe it. Of all the places in Memphis where I could’ve taken a piss, I’d managed to choose the wheel of an unmarked cop car, parked in a lay-by, waiting to bust people for speeding.
Next thing I knew this woman police officer was winding down her window. She leaned out and said, ‘When you’ve finished shaking that thing, I’m taking your ass to jail!’
Ten minutes later, I was in the nick.
Luckily, they only kept me in there for a couple of hours. Then I called Doc McGhee and got him to pick me up in the tour bus.
The first thing I heard when I climbed back on board was ‘Hey, dude, Ozzy. Check this out, man!’ And we were off again, into oblivion.
Someone went to jail for one thing or another every night of that tour. And because Mick and Nikki looked so alike—they both had this long, dark, girly hair—they’d sometimes get locked up for something the other one had done.
One night they’re sharing a room and Nikki gets up, stark naked, to go and buy a Coke from the vending machine in the corridor, next to the lift. Just as he’s pressing the button for the Coke, the lift doors open and he hears this gasping noise. Then he glances over and sees three middle-aged women standing there with these looks of horror of their faces. ‘Hi,’ he says, before turning around and walking casually back to his room. A few minutes later there’s a knock at the door. So Nikki says to Mick, ‘That’s probably one of the groupies. Why don’t you go and answer it.’ So Mick goes off to answer the door and he’s greeted by the hotel manager, a cop and one of the chicks from the lift. The chick shouts, ‘That’s him!’ and they drag Mick off to jail, even though he had no idea what he was supposed to have done.
The thing is, though, we were all so out of our minds all the time, it was quite normal not to know what we’d done.
Apart from waking up in the middle of a freeway, the worst moment for me was after we played Madison Square Garden in New York. For the after-show party, we went to this club in an old church. We were all hanging out in this private room, having a few drinks and a bit of coke, when some bloke came up to me and said, ‘Hey, Ozzy, would you like to have your photograph taken with Brian Wilson?’
‘Who the fuck’s Brian Wilson?’
‘Y’know, Brian Wilson. From the Beach Boys.’
‘Oh, him. Sure. Yeah. Whatever.’
Everyone had been talking about Brian Wilson a lot, because the week before, his brother Dennis—the one who’d been mates with Charles Manson in the 1960s—had drowned in LA.
Dennis was only thirty-nine, so it was terribly sad. Anyway, I was told to go and meet Brian Wilson on the stairwell, so out I went, loaded up on booze and coke, and waited for him. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty minutes. Then thirty minutes. Finally, after another five minutes, Brian appeared. By then, I was thoroughly pissed off, thinking, What a dick. But at the same time I knew about Dennis, so I decided to give him a break. The first thing I said was: ‘Sorry to hear about your brother, Brian.’
He didn’t say anything. He just gave me this funny look, then walked off. That was it for me.
‘First you show up late,’ I said, raising my voice, ‘and now you’re just gonna fuck off without saying a single fucking word? I tell you what, Brian, why don’t we forget about the photograph so you can shove your head back up your arse, where it fucking belongs, eh?’
Next morning, I’m lying in the hotel room, my head pounding. The phone starts ringing and Sharon answers it. ‘Yes, no, yes, OK. Oh, he did, did he? Hmm. Right. Don’t worry, I’ll deal with it.’ Click. She hands me the phone and says,
‘You’re calling Brian Wilson.’
‘Who the fuck’s Brian Wilson?’
I get smacked on the head with the receiver.
Smack.
‘Ow! That fucking hurt!’
‘Brian Wilson is the Living Musical Legend you insulted last night,’ says Sharon. ‘And now you’re going to call him and apologise.’
The memories start to come back.
‘Hang on a minute,’ I say. ‘Brian Wilson was the one who insulted me!’
‘Oh yeah?’ says Sharon.
‘Yeah!’
‘Ozzy, when Brian Wilson reached over to shake your hand, the first thing you said was:
“Hello, Brian, you fucking arsehole, I’m glad to hear your brother’s dead.”’
I sit bolt upright.
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘No, the fucking cocaine you keep shoving up your nose said that.’
‘But I would remember.’
‘Everyone else seems to remember perfectly well. They also remember you told him to shove his head up his arse, because that’s where it belongs. Here, this is Brian’s number. Apologise.’
So I called him and apologised. Twice.
Since then, I’ve bumped into him a few times over the years. We’re cool now, me and Brian. Although we never did get around to taking that photograph.
If any of us had a near-death experience on the Bark at the Moon tour, it was me. Amazingly, though, it didn’t have anything to do with booze or drugs—not directly, anyway. It happened when we took a forty-eight-hour break after a gig in New Orleans to shoot the video for ‘So Tired’ in London. It was an insane distance to travel in that amount of time, but in those days MTV was just starting to become a big part of the music business, and if you could get them to play one of your videos on heavy rotation, it just about guaranteed that your album would go platinum. So we always put a lot of money and effort into them.
The plan was to fly from New Orleans to New York, take Concorde to London, shoot the video, take Concorde back to New York, then connect to the next venue. It was a gruelling schedule, not helped by the fact that I was chronically pissed. The only thing that kept me from passing out was all the cocaine I was snorting.
When we finally got to the studio in London, the first thing the director said to me was,
‘OK, Ozzy, just sit in front of this mirror. When I give the word, it’s gonna explode from behind.’
‘All right,’ I said, wondering what kind of high-tech special effects they were going to use.
But there were no special effects. There was just an old mirror and a bloke standing behind it with a hammer in his hand. I don’t know who the fuck they were using as a props guy, but obviously no one had told him about theatrical mirrors, which are designed to break without killing anyone. So, halfway through the song, the bloke swings his hammer, the mirror explodes, and I get a faceful of glass. It was a good job I was so loaded: I didn’t feel a thing. I just spat out all the blood and glass and went, ‘Yeah, cheers.’
Then I got up and had another can of Guinness.
I didn’t think any more of it until I was halfway across the Atlantic on Concorde. I remember pressing the button for another drink and the stewardess coming over and almost dropping her tray with fright. ‘Oh my God!’ she squealed. ‘Are you OK?’ It turned out the pressure from being up at nearly sixty thousand feet had caused all the tiny bits of glass lodged in my skin to rise to the surface, until my face had literally exploded. It had just popped, like a squashed tomato.
When Sharon turned around to look, she almost passed out.
An ambulance was waiting for me at JFK when we landed. It wasn’t the first time I’d been wheeled off Concorde. I used to get so pissed on those flights, Sharon would have to carry me through immigration on a luggage trolley with my passport Scotch taped to my forehead.
And then when they asked her if she had anything to declare, she’d just point at me and go,
‘Him’.
In the hospital in New York they put me under and tried to pull out as much of the broken glass as they could
