‘OK, then. If you’re serious, I’ll make some calls.’
So she called the organisers of Lollapalooza.
And they told her to fuck off.
‘Ozzy Osbourne? He’s a fucking dinosaur,’ they said, in not so many words.
That wound Sharon up no end, as you can imagine. So a few days later, she said, ‘Screw it, we’ll do our own bloody festival.’
‘Hang on a minute, Sharon,’ I said. ‘What d’you mean, “We’ll do our own festival”?’
‘We’ll book some venues and we’ll do it ourselves. Screw Lollapafuckinglooza.’
‘Won’t that be expensive?’
‘I’m not going to lie to you, Ozzy, it could be very expensive. But life’s all about taking risks, isn’t it?’
‘OK, but before you start going around booking stadiums left, right and centre, let’s test the ground first, eh? Start off small, like we did with Blizzard of Ozz. Then, if it takes off, we’ll get bigger.’
‘Well, listen to you, Mr Businessman all of a sudden.’
‘What are you planning to call this festival?’
‘Ozzfest.’
As soon as she said the word, I could think of only one thing: ‘Beerfest’. It was fucking perfect.
That’s how it started. Our strategy was to take all the undesirables, all the bands that couldn’t find an outlet anywhere else, and put them together, give them an audience. It worked better than we ever could have expected, ’cos nothing existed for those bands at the time. It had got to the point in the music business where if you wanted to play a gig, the venues made you buy all the tickets in advance, so you had to give them away for free or sell them on your own, which is bullshit. Black Sabbath never had to deal with that kind of bollocks in the early days. We’d never have left Aston, if that had been the case. Where would we have found the dough?
A year later, in 1996, we were ready.
And we did exactly what we said we’d do. We started out small in just two cities—Phoenix and Los Angeles—as part of my tour to promote the Ozzmosis album (the Retirement Sucks tour, as it was known). It couldn’t have gone better. It was a monster, from day one.
As soon as it was over, Sharon turned to me and said, ‘D’you know who would be the perfect band to headline Ozzfest ’97?’
‘Who?’
‘Black Sabbath.’
‘What? Are you kidding? I think Tony’s the only one left. And their last album didn’t even chart, did it?’
‘No, the real Black Sabbath: you, Tony, Geezer and Bill. Back together after eighteen years.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘It’s time, Ozzy. Hatchets buried. Once and for all.’
I’d spoken to Tony only once or twice since Live Aid. Although we had done a gig together, of sorts, in Orange County at the end of the No More Tours tour in 1992. I can’t remember if it was me who called him first, or the other way around, but once the word got out about a reunion, we had a few ‘big talks’ on the phone. During one of them I finally asked him why Black Sabbath had fired me. He told me what I already knew—that I’d been slagging off the band in the press, and that my drinking had become unmanageable—but for the first time I actually got it. I ain’t saying it was right, but I got it, y’know? And I could hardly complain, because if Tony hadn’t kicked me out, where would I be now?
That summer, we went out on the road.
At first, it wasn’t the full original line-up: it was just me, Tony and Geezer, with Mike Bordin from Faith No More standing in on drums for Bill. I honestly don’t know why we couldn’t get Bill to play those first few shows. But I was told he’d had a lot of health issues, including a bad case of agoraphobia, so maybe the rest of us were trying to protect him from the stress. By the end of the year, though, he was back with us to do two gigs at the Birmingham NEC, which were fucking phenomenal. Even though I’ve always played Sabbath songs on stage, it’s never as good as when the four of us do them. Today, when I listen to the recordings of those shows—we put them out the following year on an album called Reunion—I still get chills. We didn’t do overdubs or anything. When you put that album on, it sounds exactly as it did on those two nights.
Everything went so well that we decided to have a go at making a new album together, which would have been our first since Never Say Die in 1978. So off we went to Rockfield Studios in South Wales—where I’d quit the band twenty years before.
At first, it all went smoothly enough. We did a couple of bonus songs for the Reunion album—‘Psycho Man’ and ‘Selling My Soul’. But then the practical jokes started again.
Or so I thought, anyway.
‘Ozzy,’ said Bill, after we’d finished the first rehearsal, ‘can you give me a massage? My hand’s hurting.’
Here we go, I thought.
‘Seriously, Ozzy. Argh, my hand.’
I just rolled my eyes and walked out of the room.
The next thing I knew, this ambulance was coming up the driveway with all its lights flashing. It skidded to a halt in front of the studio, then four paramedics jumped out and ran into the studio. About a minute later they came out again with Bill on a stretcher. I still thought it was a joke. We’d relentlessly been giving Bill shit for his dodgy health, so we thought he was just getting his own back with a wind-up. Part of me was quite impressed: he was putting so much effort into it. Tony thought he was fucking around, too. He was on his way out for a walk when the ambulance arrived, and he just looked at it and said, ‘That’ll be for Bill.’
Bill had always been the boy who cries wolf, y’know? I remember one time, back in the day, I was at his house and he said, ‘Oh, ’ello Ozzy. You’ll never guess what? I’ve just come out of a coma.’
‘What d’you mean, a coma? That’s one stage removed from being dead. You know that, don’t you, Bill?’
‘All I know is I went to bed on Friday, and now it’s Tuesday, and I only just woke up. That’s a coma, isn’t it?’
‘No, that’s taking too many drugs and drinking too much cider and sleeping for three days in a row, you dick.’
But this time it turned out that Bill wasn’t fucking around. His sore hand was the first sign of a major heart attack. Both his parents had died of heart disease, so it ran in the family. He was kept in hospital for ages, and even when he was let out he couldn’t work for a year. So we had to tour without him again, which was a terrible shame. When he finally felt up to it, we gave it another shot in the studio, but by then it just wasn’t happening.
The press blamed my ego for our failure to record a new album. But in all honesty I don’t think that was the problem. I’d just changed. We all had. I wasn’t the crazy singer who spent most of his time getting blasted down the pub but could be called back to do a quick vocal whenever Tony had come up with a riff. That wasn’t how I worked any more. And by then I’d been solo for a lot longer than I’d ever been with Black Sabbath. If I’m honest, being sober probably didn’t help the creativity, either—although I was still a chronic drug addict. I latched on to a doctor in Monmouth in no time, and got him to prescribe me some Valium. I was also taking about twenty-five Vicodins a day, thanks to a stash I brought over from America. I needed something to calm me down. I mean, the expectations for the album were just so high. And if it wasn’t as good as before, what was the point of doing it? There wasn’t a point, as far as I was concerned.
So it never happened.
I was back in LA, staying at a rented place in Malibu, when the phone rang. It was Norman, my brother-in- law.
Oh shit, I thought. This ain’t gonna be good news.
It wasn’t.
‘John?’ said Norman. ‘It’s your mother. She’s not doing very well. You should come home and see her.’
‘Now?’
‘Yeah. I’m sorry, John. But the docs say it’s bad.’
It had been eleven years since the argument about the newspaper retraction, and I hadn’t seen much of my mum since—although we had made up over the phone. Of course, I now wish I’d spent more time with her. But my mum didn’t exactly make it easy for me, talking about money all the time. I should just have given her more of it, I suppose. But I always thought that whatever I had was temporary.
As soon as I got the call from Norman, I flew back to England with my assistant Tony.
