By Rex Weiner
I’m not supposed to tell you where the lead singer of Black
Sabbath lives, the guy reputed to have bitten the head of a bat tossed onstage
during a concert. I will tell you only this: even with the address in hand, his
residence in a well-hidden corner of Los Angeles is nearly impossible to find.
It takes me an hour, even with GPS. Circling and re-circling the surrounding
countryside, though it is only a short distance from one of L.A.’s busiest
freeways.
When I finally discover the entrance to the gated community, a security
guard checks my name against a list before lifting the barrier. The guard
doesn’t say, “Oh, you’re looking for the home of the guy who bites the heads
off bats.” The guard doesn’t say anything. This is L.A., after all.
Carved from dusty arroyos, chaparral flats and Miocene
outcroppings by developers in the 1950s and manicured into serene estate
parcels, the community is a maze of streets with Old West names. They wind past
verdant landscapes surrounding mansions erected in various decades and a
grab-bag of styles. I arrive at last at the address marking a steep, curving
driveway leading skyward. At the very end, secure as any Tuscan castle
commanding its hilltop, stands a large two-story manor house with a grand portico
and a Ferrari parked out front. It is
the kind of mid-1980’s Greek Revival-meets-California-Ranch-style home favored
by coke-dealers, refugee ministers escaping the Shah’s Iran with bags of gold,
and heavy metal musicians.
Immediately inside the foyer I know I’m in the right place
because alongside car keys casually tossed on the marble side table beneath an gilt-framed
oval mirror sit a pair of spectacles, the round-lensed blue-tinted wire frames that
can only belong to Ozzy Osbourne.
I am warned by the publicist, as I’m led down a couple of
steps off the foyer into a sunken bookshelf-lined den, not to take any pictures
or request any autographs. For my part, I’ve quietly resolved not to confess: Heavy
metal is my least favorite music, after polka. I fully appreciate that, once an
electrified audio pickup was grafted onto a blues guitar and made commercially
available by the Rickenbacker Electro Stringed Instrument Company in 1934, heavy
metal was the logical and inevitable musical conclusion, just as re-processed
plutonium leads to a nuclear bomb.
And it’s not academic that, drawing upon the brilliant innovations
of sound bombasts like Howlin’ Wolf, Lightning Hopkins, Jimi Hendrix, Eric
Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and even Beethoven and Wagner, the quartet of Ozzy
Osbourne, Terry “Geezer” Butler, Bill Ward, and Tony Iommi was the first to
establish heavy metal as a hugely successful musical genre. Black Sabbath’s musical
accomplishment is a phenomenon that has sold 70 million records worldwide and
spawned legions of imitators.
In any case, there’s a new album—“13,” produced by super-producer
Rick Rubin, and a global tour—and here comes Ozzy.
Descending with a feline sideways motion, one arm held delicately
waist-high, John Michael Osbourne at 65 years old is slim and trim. The vocalist,
survivor of decades of alcohol and drug abuse, and eponymous headliner for the
long-running Ozzfest heavy metal concert series, is entirely dressed in black,
except for bright pink socks tucked into delicate slippers. A necklace of
crosses dangles across his chest. His right hand is bandaged. No, he says, he
was not injured in the house fire reported the previous week on newscasts,
gossip columns and websites.
“Not the first time we’ve had fires,” he says, speaking in
the crumbly Birmingham accent recognizable from the Emmy Award-winning MTV reality
show The Osbournes, and numerous TV commercials. He describes several fire
emergencies that have occurred in their home. The most recent conflagration resulted
from a candle that was a gift from friend and TV talk show host Howard Stern.
“Sharon’s always lighting damn candles around the house,”
Ozzy says, blaming his TV star wife in the style of the ongoing sitcom reality show
that is their life. ”I tell her ‘That’s why they invented fucking electricity.’”
Recent tabloid reports say the couple, after thirty years of marriage, are separating
but nothing has been confirmed.
In fact, his right hand is bandaged following arthritis
surgery the day before. None of us is getting any younger. That includes Geezer,
the band’s bassist. The longhaired, ruddy-cheeked stocky man with a reddish
graying moustache and goatee comes in and sits down. Rumpled and comfortably
paunchy in an un-tucked shirt and jeans, he admits to looking forward to the
band’s upcoming world tour.
“Very much, yes” he says, soft-voiced and British polite. He
is 63, lives in Beverly Hills and has two sons, 28 and 30. One is receiving his
master’s degree at Oxford, the other works as a film editor. “Sent them to
school in England,” says Geezer, with a dig at America’s spate of gun violence,
“so they wouldn’t get shot.”
When not playing bass with Black Sabbath, he says his
favorite activity is watching the “soccer channel,” using the American term
instead of “football.” He follows his hometown club Aston Villa, but also likes
the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.
“Terry’s into sports,” says Ozzy, “I’m not into sports at
all.”
Ozzy calls him Terry. “Tony always calls me Geezer,” the
bass player explains. So do millions of Black Sabbath fans.
We are looking ahead, and looking back, too, and I want to
know which of all their seventeen albums, since their 1970 hit Paranoid, they might
want to re-record with the benefit of today's digital technology?
“Nah,” says Ozzy without hesitation. “Wouldn’t re-record any
of them.” It’s not so much an issue of modern technological wizardry as
matching the band’s performance to the original, he says. “It’s like capturing
a dream.”
Aside from recording technology, what’s the biggest
difference in the music industry now, from when they began making music and
appearing on concert stages in 1969?
“It’s completely different,” says Geezer. “You can get books
in bookshops now that tell you all you need to know about how to be in a rock
band. We didn’t know any of that. We were just four kids. It’s much more of a
business now. When we started, you expected to do it for about three or four
years and then get a proper job.”
Ozzy laughs. “My mother used to say, when are you going stop
this and get a real job?”
Geezer recalls when Ringo Starr used to say that when the
Beatles were finished he was going to be a hairdresser. “We all thought that
when the Rolling Stones were about twenty-eight they would be too old and
they’d get proper jobs.”
“I used to say I’d never live past forty,” says Ozzy, “but
when I got to be thirty-nine, well…” His years of drinking and drugging are a
recurring motif of his bestselling 2009 autobiography “I Am Ozzy.”
“People want to
establish careers,” says Geezer, “rather for the fun of just playing music.”
“We used to jam all the time,” says Ozzy. “People don’t know
how to jam anymore. You just play, you know.”
They still jam, Geezer says. “That’s how this whole album
came about. That’s how you get your ideas. Do an hour of jamming every day,
loosen up, see what sparks come out. Then we record one of the written songs.”
I am promised a preview of their new album. Then Ozzy’s
talking about how the newest digital technology affects sound. “Our new album,”
he says, “we recorded it the way we would have done on analog. On analog you
couldn’t bend notes and match things up perfectly, the way they do now. That’s
not the way music is. It’s supposed to sound like people are playing it. Not so
clean, you know?”
But Ozzy and Geezer are not so eager to put down the music
being played today.
“I think pop music is really good at the moment,” Geezer
says. “Lots of good stuff. Back in the Sixties and Seventies among all the good
stuff you used to get all the horrible crap stuff, too, especially in England,
all those novelty records. There’s better standards now.”
Ozzy nearly spits with disgust at the memory of English
Sixties Top of the Pops. “One-Horse-Jimmy, or something.” He starts singing “My
Boy Lollipop” in a voice you could wrap fish in. “Drove me fuckin’ nuts!”
Well, then, I ask, who do you listen to?
“Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk,” says Geezer, a solid jazz
fanatic. “Loved Amy Winehouse. I like
Adele. I like people who actually have good talent.”
Ozzy shakes his head.
“To be honest with you,” he says, “I don’t listen to music much
anymore.”
Geezer smiles, knowing what Ozzy means. They’ve been to the
mountaintop—they don’t need to hear anything else. “I’d really rather listen to
audio books,” says Geezer. Currently, it seems he’s listening to Ian Fleming’s
whole James Bond series, “From Casino Royale, right along, in proper order. Not
the way the films came out.” He listens in his car, driving around L.A.
Ozzy goes into a tirade against driving, various
technologies, and the combination of the two, including the phenomenon of text
messaging while driving. He marvels at his young assistant who does that, but
acknowledges it’s a $150 ticket if you are caught in the act.
But getting back onto the subject of reading, Ozzy says he
recently read a biography of John Lennon but couldn’t finish it. “When it got
to the part where he got killed I couldn’t read anymore!”
Well, what about the Beatles—did Black Sabbath and the
Beatles ever get together? “Never met Lennon,” says Ozzy. Neither did
Geezer. But they both met George
Harrison and Ringo, and both like Paul McCartney. “Paul is a nice guy,” says
Ozzy.
But don’t they go to see other musicians play, or check out
new bands at Hollywood clubs?
“My wife always saying to me ‘Why don’t you want to go
out?’” Ozzy frowns, “But I tell Sharon, ‘My job is going out.’”
Ozzy has five children from two marriages, ranging in age
from 27 to 41, three of them with Sharon. He is a grandfather six times over.
I ask them what’s the biggest misconception about Black
Sabbath that they would like to correct, aside from the business of Ozzy biting
off the head of a bat tossed onstage during a concert (a much disputed
occurrence that has passed the fact-checking desk into legend)?
“The biggest misconception when we first started,” says
Geezer, “was that we were all Satanists. People were totally misinterpreting
the lyrics. They saw the name of the band and immediately put us on the dark
side.”
“It’s just a role we play,” says Ozzy.
"And the lyrics are all against Satanism,” Geezer insists, “if
they care to listen to them properly.” Both Black Sabbath members are eager to
dispel the notion that the band promotes Satanism or has anything do with the
dark arts or occult beliefs.
“We were in Philadelphia,” says Geezer, “Someone said, well,
you’re the Satan band, you’ve got to see this new film called ‘The Exorcist.’
Well, we were that fucking scared after seeing ‘The Exorcist,’ we all spent the
night in the same bedroom. We had to go see “The Sting” afterwards to calm
down, we were so out of our fuckin’ minds, that’s what fuckin’ Satanists we
were.”
“That’s always gotten
me,” Ozzy says. “It’s just a fucking stage role. It amazes me what people
believe.” In the beginning it was just a sort of literary experiment, according
to Ozzy.
“We said, wouldn’t it be good to write scary music, haunted music, like
Halloween. But we don’t burn virgins.”
“Too old for that now,” Geezer grins.
It seems that band reunions, such as the Rolling Stones currently
embarking on their 50th anniversary tour, is one of the few
challenges that remain for Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famers who can still mount a
stage. This is especially true of a band like Black Sabbath, torn asunder over
previous decades by conflicts, substitute lineups, deaths and hobbled by
addictions. It’s certainly not about the money.
“It’s not a job, this album,” says Ozzy, who with his wife
ranks as one the wealthiest rock stars, worth more than $145M according to the London
Sunday Times 2011 “Rich List.”
“We’ve all grown up, there’s nobody better than
anybody. We don’t drink much. We don’t smoke cigarettes. I’ve never been so
fucking healthy in my life.”
In one of those ironies that are almost cliché among rockers
(Alice Cooper’s devotion to golf, for example), Ozzy says he prefers a bit of quiet
these days, and enjoys a solitary hobby.
“I just sit in my own room,” he says.
“I like to paint.” Paint what? “”Things,” he says. “Just things.”
But being in the band still gets them up in the morning. “I
love playing music,” says Geezer, “more than ever. At my age now, to still be
able to play bass and write lyrics, it’s like a blessing, and I’m really
grateful for it. I don’t take it for granted.”
Ozzy says similar feelings among their contemporaries is not
uncommon. “I was in a restaurant one time,” he says, “with one of the guys from
the band Chicago, and he has a small apartment overlooking the 405 Freeway.
That’s it, right, because he tells me ‘That’s all I need. I’m always on the
road,’ and he went back home last week, and looking the window saw all that traffic
bumper to bumper, and he says ‘It got me thinking I’m so fucking lucky just for
the fact that I don’t have to do that
every fucking day.’ That alone is so fucking worth it. And I don’t want the
green M&Ms either.”
Guitar slasher Tony Iommi isn’t present because he’s
undergoing chemotherapy treatments for lymphoma in the UK. “It’s been a long
road in terms of Tony battling cancer,” says Ozzy, whose wife has had her own
battles with cancer. “I spoke to him this morning. He sounded tired. I’m
sixty-five, and I’m thinking—fuck, I look in the mirror and thinking my dada
died at sixty-five. And I remember thinking, well, he was an old guy. Time, as
you get older—time goes by so quickly. Sharon said to me, we only have ten
years. I said, what are you talking about? She says, it’s not that long before
we go under.”
Ozzy is clearly worried about the aging process. “My short
term memory is gone. I go up and down the fucking stairs and go what did I come
up here for? Drives me nuts. I can remember what I was wearing on the stage
twenty years ago but I can’t remember five minutes ago.”
He continues to complain. “I’m deaf as a fucking plank.
Hearing aids!” He takes one out. I ask
if it’s just one ear that’s a problem and Ozzy says, “No! One in each ear. In
me arse, as well!”
Ozzy gets up from the sofa to point his posterior at me. “Eh?
What’d you say?”
I stand up, point my own arse towards Ozzy’s, asking if I might
listen to the new Black Sabbath album now?
They play it for me, the rough mix.
Even I can testify: Black
Sabbath fans will not be disappointed.
