Clarabelle Talks Back: OZZY OSBOURNE’S No Bozo On This Bus

Clarabelle Talks Back: OZZY OSBOURNE’S No Bozo On This Bus

APRIL '83 The name Ozzy Osbourne conjures up many things. Due to our high journalistic standards, however, we are refraining from printing the bulk of them! As a public service to our readers we nonetheless present the following interview with His Ozziness, and hope it will be read in the spirit in which Toby Gold-stein wrote it. Of course, we could be kidding about all this and just filling up space! You never know with us!

Toby Goldstein

They warn you about the madman. That he wraps himself in scales and chains, fangs and dripping saliva as he prowls arenas of the night. That his shrieks and curses are fearsome to hear, a peril to those who mistakenly perceive the outpourings as mere entertainment. That his acts are foul and loathsome, and his presense is vile. Biting and spitting. Pissing and swaggering. Reprehensible. Far from a productive way to spend a Saturday afternoon, I am direly warned. Consequently, Friday night’s sleep is contorted with a succession of nightmares, and the morning dawn is laced with apprehension.

The man who greets me in a rapidly descending elevator at the plush Parker Meridien Ffotel wears an ecstatically beautiful fur coat, as does his outgoing, dark-haired wife. Underneath the wrap he is dressed simply in a beige button-down oxford cloth shirt and non-designer blue jeans. A heavy gold chain circles his neck and one finger is embellished with a formidable diamond encrusted ring. What an obviously well-to-do couple! How easily they fit into the perfume-clouded ebb and flow of the hotel’s $ 100-plus per-night clientele. The man’s squared, ruddy features are softened somewhat by a cap of silky brown hair. In a strange way, he looks like a younger, fresher version of that perennial jokester, Benny Hill.

Shaking hands warmly, the couple announce their craving for some homegrown New York street vendor hotdogs. “You’re sure we can’t bring you one?” they ask. setting out into the early evening chill and promising to return within minutes, so we can get down to business. I am stupefied—Ozzy Osbourne, was that really you? So much for illusions or the power of rumor and second-hand gossip, when exposed to the clear light of winter’s day!

Sure, there’ll always be more stories about how Ozzy greeted some reporter by hanging from a chandelier with his pants around his ankles, doing something unspeakably rude. Or that Ozz and his second wife, the former Sharon Arden — who is also his manager—enjoy cracking each other over the head with bottles. Let those other purveyors of the truth describe whatever they are privy to. All I can offer is, that for slightly over one hour, during a promotional visit to New York between segments of his never-ending life on the road, Ozzy Osbourne did not misbehave. He was, however, quite willing to speak his mind—and prove that he does really have one. Or as Ozzy puts it, while agreeing that plenty of folks secretly cherish his revolting stunts, “Uurrggh...but bring him ’round to tea.”

Actually, if religious fanatics or the Humane Society want to dog his every onstage move, Ozzy Osbourne can relax within the wide parameters of his success. At present, he’s got no less than three albums (two studio, one live) plus a picture disc in the Top 100—not bad for a guy who released his first solo album to rampant establishment hostility. America has since accepted Ozz so heartily that, while retaining every nuance of his broad syllabled Midlands accent, Osbourne is thinking of buying a house in Connecticut. He’s a pretty happy guy, still in the flush of his second marriage, having reconstructed his band to its current personnel of guitarist Jakey Lou, bassist Don Costa, drummer Tommy Aldridge and keyboardist Lindsay Bridgewater. By April, Ozzy will return to the studio and record a new album, Bark At The Moon. For now, he can jeer at his detractors by waving the soon-to-be-platinum certified live LP, Speak Of The Devil. in their faces. There’s even talk of a movie role—a horror film, natch.

"I consider myself as noemal as one can be."

Unfortunately, none of this will do thing to correct Ozzy Osbourne’s two biggest problems in dealing with the world: his openly-admitted tendency to act like a stupid twit (which everyone knows about) and his fierce, rampaging disgust with a wide variety of hypocritical image-makers (which nobody seems to be aware of). The first category, which includes such endearing actions as biting the heads of bats and doves, urinating on a table in the midst of a meeting with CBS executives, and rattling all sorts of supposedly Satanic-influenced trappings in the air—has brought him no end of grief. After chomping his molars on the aforementioned vermin, Ozzy had to undergo painful rabies shots.which weakened his hair. Eventually, he was advised by a specialist to shave it all off, thus accounting for the quite-flattering Prince Valiant effect. “I don’t think I’ll do that twice,” he says demurely.

Yet, because of the silly stuff, Ozzy is presumed to be a walking, talking caricature of a rock star—all the time, day in and day out. Hmmm, wonder the executives who keep their jobs because Osbourne’s discs and tix sell like hotcakes, this guy must be a genuine /oony. So they figure Ozzy doesn’t know which'end is up except when it’s attached to a microphone, and after the show is over, he crawls into a cage, chomps on some raw meat, and sleeps the blood-drenched rest of the wicked. Hey, they think again, the records are Top Ten, be sure to smile when Ozzy wakes up.

“Because I bite the heads off things,” says Ozzy, warming up to the topic, “that doesn’t mean to say I don’t fall in love. I consider myself as normal as one can be. I’m very outrageous, I suppose. But rock ’n’ roll is an outrageous business and you have to be outrageous to be in it. It’s nothing new, what I do. It’s all been done in one shape, form or another before,’ Osbourne accurately points out. What he does onstage now was evolved through generations of performers like Kiss, Alice Cooper, Arthur Brown, and going all the way back, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who used to pop out of a coffin singing “I Put A Spell On You.” And don’t think that all of them didn’t, in turn, get accused to voodoo, Satanism and overall digustingness.

" Even clowns gotta sleep, y’know. "

“I enjoy the straights going, ‘Ooooh, fucking ’ell, what’s he done now?’ Cause I believe,” Ozz says with the sincere bluster inherent in much of Britain’s working class, “a lot of people would love to do it, but their postion in life doesn’t allow them to. You go to a pornographic cinema, for instance, and you look around. There’s guys with their collars up, and you’d probably find that one’s a managing director of IBM or something! So he sneaks in and no one knows. He lives in silence in his own little world. But he has to put on a role to act. In the real life, he’s just jerking off in the back of the cinema.

“That’s what so many people are like and I’m out in the open with what I do. And they’re all frightened to death, because I don’t give a fuck, I don’t. I don’t give a shit what people say or do or think about me.

“Every week I think, ‘oh shit, what the fuck have I done now?’ but that’s me! I’ve got to the situation where I think, ‘right, I ain’t gonna do fuck-all craziness.’ I sit in the bar and I’m like this." In the midst of the comfortable hotel room, Osbourne holds himself as rigidly as a bad schoolboy who’s just been threatened with a caning. Playing both roles brilliantly, Ozzy reconstructs a scene that has occurred between himself and one of his entourage whenever he tries to, indeed, “act normal.” It soon becomes obvious that Ozzy Osbourne guards his alter ego as closely as Frankenstein monitored the monster.

“Want a drink?” asks the staffer.

“I’ll have a Perrier, please.”

“Perrier?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s the matter with Ozzy? Is he sick? You OK9"

“Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just sittin’ down relaxing.”

“I think he’s ill! He’s got a problem!”

“Not unless I’m going ‘WAUUGGGHHRR!!’ (He emits a typical stage-shattering roar, which is this encapsulated space is truly awesome.) Then it’s ‘oh yeah, Ozzy’s back on form.’ BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS!” he blurts, in an experated sputter. “If I ain’t diving off buildings like Superman or throwing chairs through the windows or getting drunk and throwing up all over the place, they honestly think I’m ill. I mean, even clowns gotta sleep, y’know.” Such is the reward of making vast sums of money — permanent humiliation. Now that his teeth are firmly grasped on the pants-leg of role playing, Ozzy clamps down hard and hurtles onward.

“I go out with my wife, and I find that when I go out with these record people, I got nothing to say to them. Because I know what they say to me is bullshit, and they know what I say to them is bullshit. There’s a lot of people at CBS that I love, but every now and again, you get some guy that goes yipyimyimyip...and you haven’t got the faintest idea what he’s talkin’ about.

“And these guys wouldn’t even piss on me if I were on fire without my hits! But it’s like, ‘Ozzy! Ohmygawd! Ozzy Osbourne, come and sit down and meet my cousin George!’ (Ozzy delivers this recreation in a spot-on imitation of the typical upwardlymobile asskisser who goes through life “taking" meetings). And the next week your album goes down, (he whistles like a targeted missile) down, down. Then it’s ‘Who? Oh, I remember, that crazy fuck who used to bite the heads off things. Tell him I’m out.’

“The power of the business, and it’s done a lot for me,” he says firmly, “Is that I have to live with it. Hey man, I am a product to a lot of people. Ozzy Osbourne, to a lot of people, is a demigod. Ozzy Osbourne, to a lot of people, is a fucking asshole. Ozzy Osbourne, to most people on the business side, is mucho-mucho (he rubs his palms together like a stereotypical miser). And I make mucho-mucho and they make more. And that’s the name of the fucking game. I accept it, I deal with it, I love it.

“Through all the jungle of confusion, I still maintain myself. I can still say to myself, ‘you’re OK,’ because I’m aware. Whereas so many people are not aware, and that’s why they get fucked up along the way. I’m aware of everything, but I have learned to switch my brain off. I suppose it’s ignorant, really, but sometimes to be ignorant helps. Because then you don’t lie in bed and hear a thousand voices in your head.”

Let us not forget one thing which underscores Osbourne’s adventures with the bats in his belfry. Ozzy is a professional. He started making records with Black Sabbath in 1969, and crazy or not, he’s still around at the age of 33, to tour nine months out of the year. Possibly, he is nuts. Also possibly, his bizarre behavior is an extension of the tendency to escapism

— a trait of so many poor English kids who wind up in heavy metal bands. If you have to live on a street where indoor toilets are something you only see on telly, and have a whole strata of “proper” educated people laughing every time you open your mouth, the ways to cope are to fantasize and ridicule. I had a hunch that Ozzy Osbourne

— far from being an employee of the Prince of Darkness—was a kid who used to like to scare himself. Hey, I did it too. Conjuring up the boogeyman is an excellent exercise for overactive imaginations.

“Always loved it,” Ozzy agrees. “Loved thinking about Satan and devils and frightening myself to death. Someone said to me. if you pour salt in the front of a mirror, burn a candle at each side and stare at yourself, you’ll see the devil. I never saw it, just used to see a face like mine, hawhawhaw.

“1 was always sittin’ in graveyards. Loved the tranquility of it,” he says seriously. “There’s an eerie silence in there, and there was always a sweet smell. Unearthly. You know you’re there. I visited Dachau when I was in Germany, and that is fuckin’ weird, weird shit. You go in and you get this really creepy feeling...” Highly sensitive to this subject, I probe and discover that Osbourne’s reason for going there in the first place was to attempt to understand, in some small way, what a truly monstrous evil was all about. Later, another journalist tells me that while in Germany, Ozzy found out where Hitler’s bunker was located, and pissed on it. If Ozzy’s accusers weren’t so unabashedly loud and ludicrous, Osbourne could tell them a thing or two about what constitutes a real anti-Christ.

"Because I bite the heads off things, doesn't mean / don't fall In love. "

“You talk about me acting the role,” he says indignantly. “I don’t gas six million people every night. The hardest hurdle I have is to try and put that across. I’m sick to death of being hounded by these freaks who think I am some fucking devil worshiper. For Christ’s sake, if I was a devil worshipper, I wouldn’t have been allowed to come into this country to perform! My name’s not Jim Jones. I don’t get people to take cyanide and kill kids. That was a religion, and that was for big G.

“I don’t wanna see people get killed. I want this fuckin’ world to realize that eventually, we’re gonna blow up! We’re gonna fry on this planet. I have been trying to put that message across for 13 years. But they all judge the book by the cover, and they’ll always do that with me. If I was to do an A1 Jolson album, they’d still say, ‘oh, blackface, black magic, voodoo!’ ” No wonder Ozzy’s single from Speak Of The Devil is “Paranoid.”

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 39

Rather than stew in the rancid juices of religious persecution. Ozzy chooses to concern himself with his fans, the people who really matter. No longer issuing the scathing denunciations of Black Sabbath that used to punctuate his interviews, Ozzy is willing to let his former colleagues try to match his success with their own Live Evil LP. He doubts they can do it. Sure, Ozzy could relax, having solidified a healthy solo career in just three years, but he won’t.

“I’m hoping to go on for as long as I can, as long as I have the following.” Ozzy doesn’t care that his beer belly bulges through the spandex stagegear! “People tend to lay off, thinking, ‘oh, I’ve cracked it, now I’m there. I can just sit in my big luxury house, smoking marijuana, sniffing cocaine, drinking champagne, all the chicks in the world, partypartyparty.’ And suddenly one day they go, ‘I wanna go on tour,’ and think, ‘of course I’ll be able to do it. Four years ago, I was the biggest thing in the world.’ And then they find half-empty halls. Because this business changes around so quickly, that if you forget them, they’ll go somewhere else.”

It’s no cloisters for Ozzy Osbourne. Insisting that he can separate the down-toearth guy from the nutsy rock ’n’ roller, he mingles with his faithful, signs autographs, and tries not to think about being loved by someone too much—which can be just as lethal as being hated. “I’m always afraid,” says Ozzy, unsmiling now and mentally imagining the trap of some real-life boogeyman, “that some guy’s gonna try to be more insane than I am by killing the insane man. That’s a side I have to live with, but I can’t let it totally freak me out, ’cause I’d never go outside. I don’t want to be a prisoner because of my position in this world. I just have to take it as it comes.” So Ozzy Osbourne sets off into the New York night, arriving at a photographer’s studio, where he’ll dress up just like the cutest little devil you ever did see.