with tweezers. Then they gave me some drugs to reduce the swelling. I remember coming to in this white room, with white walls, and people all around me covered in white sheets and thinking, Fuck, I’m in the morgue. Then I heard a hissing noise next to my bed.
Pssst, pssst.
I looked down and there was this kid holding up a pen and a copy of Bark at the Moon.
‘Will you sign this for me?’ he asked.
‘Fuck off,’ I told him. ‘I’m dead.’
By the time the tour ended, we were all still alive, but my prediction that someone would die still came true. It happened when Vince Neil went back to his house at Redondo Beach in LA and got fucked up with the drummer from Hanoi Rocks. At some point they ran out of booze and decided to drive to the local bottle shop in Vince’s car, which was one of those low-slung, ridiculously fast, bright red De Tomaso Panteras. Vince was so loaded he drove head-on into a car coming in the opposite direction. The bloke from Hanoi Rocks was dead by the time they got him to hospital.
I didn’t see much of Motley Crue after the tour, although I kept in touch with Tommy, on and off. I remember going to his house years later with my son Jack, who must have been about thirteen.
‘Wow, dude, come in,’ said Tommy, when I rang the door-bell. ‘I can’t believe it. Ozzy Osbourne’s in my house.’
There were some other guests there, too, and after we’d all been given the tour of his place, Tommy said, ‘Hey, dudes, check this out.’ He tapped a code into a keypad in the wall, a hidden door slid open, and on the other side there was this padded sex chamber with some kind of heavy-duty harness thing swinging from the ceiling. The idea was that you’d take a chick in there, strap her to this contraption, then fuck the living shit out of her.
‘What’s wrong with a bed?’ I asked Tommy. Then I turned around and realised that Jack had walked into the room with the rest of us. He was standing there, his eyes bulging. I felt so embarrassed, I didn’t know where to fucking look.
I didn’t take him to Tommy’s again after that.
By the time the Bark at the Moon tour ended, me and Sharon’s fights had reached another level of craziness. Part of it was just the pressure of being famous. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t complaining: my first three solo albums eventually sold more than ten million copies in America alone, which was beyond anything I could have hoped for. But when you’re selling that many records, you can’t do anything normal any more, ’cos you get too much hassle from the public. I remember one night when me and Sharon were staying in a Holiday Inn. It was maybe three or four in the morning, and we were both in bed. There was a knock on the door, so I got up to answer it, and these guys in overalls just brushed past me and walked into the room.
When Sharon saw them she said, ‘Who the fuck are you? What are you doing in our room?’
They went, ‘Oh, we’re just interested in seeing how you live.’
Sharon threw something at them and they brushed past me again on their way out.
All they wanted to do was come in and stare. That was it.
We stopped staying in cheap hotels after that.
I mean, I’m usually happy to meet fans, but not when I’m asleep with my wife at four in the morning.
Or when I’m eating. It drives me nuts when people come up to me when I’m in a restaurant with Sharon. It’s a big taboo with me, that is. The worst is when they say, ‘Hey, you look like you’re somebody famous! Can I have your autograph?’
‘I tell you what,’ I want to say to them, ‘why don’t you go away and find out who you think I am, come back again, and then I’ll give you my autograph.’
But fame wasn’t the biggest problem for me and Sharon. That was my drinking, which was so bad I couldn’t be trusted with anything. When we were in Germany doing a gig, for example, I went on a tour of the Dachau concentration camp and was asked to leave because I was being drunk and disorderly. I must be the only person in history who’s ever been thrown out of that fucking place.
Another thing I did when I was drunk was get more tattoos, which drove Sharon mental.
Eventually she said, ‘Ozzy, if you get one more tattoo, I’m gonna string you up by your bollocks.’
That night, I went out and got ‘thanks’ tattooed on my right palm. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. I mean, how many times do you say ‘thanks’ to people during your lifetime?
Tens of thousands, probably. Now all I had to do was raise my right hand. But Sharon didn’t appreciate the innovation. When she noticed it the next morning—I’d been trying to keep my hand under the kitchen table, but then she asked me to pass the salt—she drove me straight to a plastic surgeon to get the tattoo removed. But he told me he’d have to cut off half of my hand to get rid of the thing, so it stayed.
When we left the hospital, Sharon thanked the doctor for his time.
I just raised my right palm.
Another time we were in Albuquerque in the middle of winter, freezing cold, ice and snow everywhere. I was pissed and coked out of my fucking mind and decided to take a ride on this aerial tramway thing, which goes ten thousand feet up the Sandia Mountains to a restaurant and observation deck at the top. But there was something wrong with the cable car, and it swung to a halt halfway up the mountain.
‘What do you do if you get stuck up here?’ I asked the bloke at the controls, after we’d been dangling there for ages.
‘Oh, there’s an escape hatch in the roof,’ he said, pointing to this hatch above our heads.
‘But how do you climb up there?’ I asked.
‘There’s a ladder right behind you. All you have to do is pull it out. It’s very simple.’
‘Is the hatch locked?’
‘No.’
Big mistake, telling me that. As soon as I knew there was a ladder and an unlocked hatch I had to try it out. So I pulled out the ladder and started to climb up to the ceiling.
The guy went mental.
‘What the hell are you doing? You can’t do that! Stop! Stop!’
That just egged me on even more. I opened the hatch, felt this blast of icy wind, and pulled myself up on to the roof, by which time the guy and everyone else in the cable car was screaming and begging me to come back down. Then, just as I was getting my balance, the car started to move again. I almost slipped and went splat onto the rocks thousands of feet below, but I kept my balance by putting out my arms like I was surfing. Then I started to sing
‘Good Vibrations’. I stayed up there until we were almost at the top.
The funny thing is I hate heights. I get vertigo going up a doorstep. So when I saw the cable car from the ground the next day—stone-cold sober, for once—I almost threw up. It makes me shiver even now, just thinking about it.
Doing crazy stuff like that always led to another argument with Sharon. On one occasion I lost it so badly with her, I picked up a vodka bottle and threw it in her direction. But the second it left my hand, I realised what I’d done: it was going straight for her head. Oh, fuck, I thought, I’ve just killed my wife. But it missed by an inch, thank God. The neck went straight through the plaster in the wall above her head and just stuck there, like a piece of modern art.
Sharon would always find ways to retaliate, mind you. Like when she’d take a hammer to my gold records. And then I’d retaliate to her retaliation by saying I didn’t want to go on stage that night. One time, I shaved my head to try to get out of doing a show. I was hung over, knackered and pissed off, so I just thought, Fuck it, fuck them all.
But that shit didn’t work with Sharon.
She just took one look at me and said, ‘Right, we’re getting you a wig.’ Then she dragged me and a couple of the roadies to this joke shop which had a Lady Godiva wig in the window that had been there for five hundred years, with dead flies and dust and dandruff and God knows what else embedded in it. I put it on and everyone pissed themselves laughing.
But it turned out to be quite cool in the end, that wig, because I rigged it with blood capsules. Halfway through the show I’d pretend to pull out my hair and all this blood would come running down my face. It looked brilliant. But after the bat-biting incident, everyone thought it was real. At one gig, this chick in the front row almost fainted. She was screaming and pointing and crying and shouting, ‘It’s true what they say! He is crazy!’
