Ozzy Osbourne‘s life story has been told many times. In addition to his 2010 memoir I Am Ozzy there’s a 1998 episode of VH1’s Behind the Music, the 2011 documentary God Bless Ozzy Osbourne, the 2020 documentary Biography: The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne, countless articles and books, and the Paramount+ documentary Ozzy: No Escape From Now, which chronicles Ozzy’s painful last years and his quest to play one final concert. Osbourne died in July.
If you’ve encountered even some of them, you know the broad strokes: working-class upbringing in Birmingham, laying the groundwork for heavy metal as the frontman of Black Sabbath, fucking it all up due to psychotic levels of excess, meeting wife/manager Sharon at a low point, rebuilding his career as a solo star in the early Eighties with help from guitarist Randy Rhoads, the tragic accident that killed Rhoads, No More Tears, Ozzfest, the reality show, brutal injuries and addiction issues, and his uncanny ability to somehow survive it all until his body began failing him in 2018.
It might seem like there’s not much story left to tell, especially when you factor in No Escape From Now and its many revelations. But Osbourne spent the final years of his life working with his I Am Ozzy collaborator Chris Ayres on a follow-up memoir entitled Last Rites, which arrives this week. It focuses largely on the difficult final chapter of his life and the numerous medical setbacks he faced, but it also flashes back to encounters with Keith Moon, Bon Scott, Steve Marriott, and other long-departed rock icons. Here’s 14 things we learned.
A Vegas residency was in the works.
Back in 2018, Ozzy launched the No More Tours II tour. The plan was to finally retire from the road when it wrapped. (As the title suggests, this was his second farewell tour.) But even in the middle of it, Sharon Osbourne was looking ahead. “Sharon was even talking about me taking up one of them golden-oldie residencies in Las Vegas when I got back,” Ozzy writes. “Not that I fancied the idea of becoming the next Barry Manilow.”
He suffered a nasty relapse in 2012.
After years of sobriety and lots of work with addition experts, Ozzy started drinking again in 2012. “At some point I decided I could handle a drink,” he writes. “Probably a pint of Guinness. I dream about Guinness almost every night. I fucking love the stuff, it’s like drinking a glass of pudding. The problem is, one’s too many, and ten’s not enough. And the first thing I want after a Guinness is to go looking for some coke. Cocaine’s the alcoholic’s best friend.”
Steroids also became a problem.
On the farewell tour, Ozzy began using the steroid Decadron to treat vocal inflammation. It didn’t take long for him to become hopelessly addicted. He even began suffering from ‘roid rages that resulted in a black eye. “Sharon got heavy with me after that,” Ozzy writes. “She hired this military guy with a neck wider than the Watford Gap to come and watch over me. Where she found this bloke, I’ve no idea. He just appeared by my side one day, like an angry mountain in human form, and never left.”
The success of the reality show era messed with his head.
For a brief period around 2002 and 2003, Ozzy was the star of one of the biggest shows on television. “I got addicted to the fame for a while, if I’m being honest with you,” he writes. “At the end of the day, though, I’m a singer, not a TV personality. I mean, I liked being in The Osbournes, but I hated working in TV. It’s a vipers’ nest, TV, it really is. It’s not like being in music. You’ve got no friends in TV. The rivalry’s off the charts. Everyone just wants what you’ve got, it’s so phony all the time.”
He was thrilled when it ended.
“For us, by the end of our run, we all were desperate to get our lives back,” Ozzy writes. “Jack was on drugs. Kelly was on drugs. I was sneaking up to my room to smoke weed at every opportunity. Then Sharon got cancer. The toll was bad, man. My poor wife was so sick, it took her the longest time to get over that. It took all of us a long time to come down from the high of the show, the stress of it … to go from reality TV to actual reality again. When the final camera guy left, it was such a relief, man.”
Ozzy was once obsessed with Peter Gabriel.
In 1986, Ozzy became so enthralled with Peter Gabriel’s So that he wore the tape out, and drove everyone in his life crazy. “I’d play [So] all day on the tour bus,” Ozzy writes. “I’d play it all night at whatever hotel we were staying in. I’d crank it up on my boombox if I was by a swimming pool. And at all other times – other than when I was on stage – I’d be singing one of the songs from it at the top of my voice. It got to the point where [my security guard] couldn’t take it any more. It broke him, that record. He had to take time off, just so he could go a day without hearing ‘Sledgehammer.’”
Things got tense when he recorded a new version of “Iron Man” with Busta Rhymes in 2000.
“I’m there on this New York sidewalk pounding on this [studio] door until eventually one of them little peep-hole things pops open,” Ozzy writes, “and a voice on the other side goes, ‘Who’s there?’ And I’m like, ‘It’s Ozzy.’ ‘Ozzy who?’ ‘Ozzy fucking Osbourne, who the fuck do you think?’ ‘Oh. Okay.’ The door opens, and this guy’s standing there packing heat. Meanwhile, there are two blokes behind him, and they’re also packing heat. And I’m like, fucking hell, I should have been a bit more polite.”
He didn’t care much for David Lee Roth.
Van Halen famously opened up for Black Sabbath in 1978. Ozzy loved Eddie Van Halen, but didn’t care much for the group’s frontman. “He was like Mr. Showbiz,” Ozzy writes. “Always smiling. Never unhappy. He comes from a well-to-do family, I believe, maybe that’s why we had nothing in common. You also never knew if he was spinning you a load of bullshit or telling you something for real. One minute he’s saying he’s getting his law degree, the next he’s saying he’s a part-time paramedic. There’s a story going around that the two of us had a ‘cocaine duel’ during that tour – meaning, who could snort the most coke before they keeled over. I mean, it’s possible it happened. But I doubt it. It just wasn’t the kind of thing I did with Dave.”
Rick Rubin wanted Ginger Baker to join Black Sabbath in 2012.
Ozzy was crushed when drummer Bill Ward dropped out of the Black Sabbath reunion in 2012. Rick Rubin had a very unconventional idea for a replacement: Cream’s Ginger Baker. “God rest his soul,” Ozzy writes. “But Baker was crazier than me. I mean, there was a documentary about him, Beware of Mr. Baker, where he broke the director’s nose with a metal cane at his house in South Africa. And that was after the guy had been thrown out of every other country. Not that he would have taken the job anyway. He was nuts. He’d have been a liability on tour.”
Ozzy kept Brad Wilk from Rage Against the Machine off the tour.
Brad Wilk wound up playing on Sabbath’s last album, but Osbourne didn’t want him to join the tour. “I said, if Tommy [Clufetos] ain’t on drums for the tour, I ain’t doing the tour,” Ozzy writes. “It caused a lot of resentment when I pulled that move. Brad even called me up and said, ‘Why don’t you want me to do this gig?’ All I could say was, ‘Brad, if you were Tommy, and you’d been there for all the writing, and Rick had wanted you gone, how would you feel?’ He had no answer to that. There wasn’t an answer. The truth was, Brad did good work on the album. But in my mind, Tommy should have been there all along, and he deserved to be on the tour. At the same time, I’ll admit I was just so used to doing my own thing and having my own band it was really hard to not be in control. Maybe that’s why the atmosphere on stage never felt that great… The album and the tour were successful beyond what any of us could ever have dreamed of. But it would have been so much better if it had been friendly, and if we’d had Bill there. Tommy did a great job on the drums, don’t get me wrong. But he’d be the first to admit he ain’t Bill and never could be.”
He finally made peace with Bill Ward via text.
After exchanging very sharp barbs in the press, Ozzy and Ward didn’t communicate for a full decade. They finally got back in touch when Ward learned about Ozzy’s injury in 2019. “I ain’t ashamed to say I shed a tear when I spoke to Bill,” Ozzy writes. “‘We may have all got ripped off, Bill,’ I said, ‘but our lives were forever changed by what we did.’ ‘I know, Ozzy, I know,’ he said. ‘We’re lucky guys. We can’t complain.’ ‘I love you, y’know,’ I told him. It went very quiet for a moment on the line. ‘I love you too, Ozzy, you fucking lunatic.’ That’s one of the great things about getting older. Even if you’re a working-class guy from Aston, you stop being as scared of showing your emotions. Because you know that if you wait too long to tell someone how much they mean to you, the chance might never come around again.”
He’d rather not talk about his infidelity.
In 2016, credible reports hit the tabloids that Ozzy was engaged in an affair with his hair colorist. He doesn’t get into any specifics or names, but he admits that he wasn’t faithful to Sharon during this time. “Sharon had every right to dump me when she found out what was going on,” he writes. ‘I’d become addicted to sex, basically. It was no different than when I was addicted to booze, pills, cigars, ice cream or Yorkshire fucking tea…I was a bad guy. I fucked around for a while. I broke my wife’s heart, and I’m lucky she forgave me. I just hope all the people I hurt know how sorry I am – including the kids, who were badly affected. And that’s all I wanna say about any of that, ’cos bringing it up just causes more pain.”
The final full Black Sabbath concert in 2017 wasn’t a joyous occasion to Ozzy because Bill Ward wasn’t there.
“We didn’t talk about it much, but we all felt it,” Ozzy writes. “I could tell. It was sad, man. We’d all started off together. We’d all groveled through the shit together. We’d all got successful together. We’d all traveled the world together. We’d all got fucked over together. There are no two ways about it, Bill should have been there, and he should have been on the album. Without him, it wasn’t Black Sabbath. It was just a close approximation.”
Near the end of his life, scam artists took advantage of Ozzy’s fragile state.
“First was a guy in Canada who said if we paid him $170,000 he’d put me through a new kind of CAT scan, which could show everything that was wrong with me,” Ozzy writes. “So Sharon wired him the money and we went over to his clinic. But the machine was just a regular fucking X-ray machine. Then he gave me this box of ‘special medicine’ that was just a bunch of herbs and whatever, the same stuff you can buy on Amazon. What a con. At least we got our money back after Sharon went stage-five crazy on him. Then we got suckered again, paying $100,000 to another miracle healer who had something called a PAP- IMI machine, which can supposedly cure anything with electromagnetic waves. I spent six days on that thing, three hours a day, only to find out later that it hasn’t been proven to be safe and is illegal in the U.S. After all that, I was like, fuck it, I’ll stick to Tylenol.”
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