He has bitten the heads off live creatures, tried to strangle his wife, urinated on the Alamo, and he has even been accused of putting subliminal messages in his music that would make listeners want to kill themselves.
To say nothing of the fact that he was the voice behind some of the heaviest songs in the rock ‘n’ roll canon. Despite all of this, in his autobiography, Ozzy Osbourne comes across as quite likable.
“I like to think that I’m a good guy,” says Osbourne, “I’ve done some f—ing crazy f—ing things. I’ve done some things that I’m not proud of.”
Osbourne drops about three F-bombs per minute, and his mumbled British accent is surprisingly easier to understand than when his show on MTV spawned a host of comic impersonations.
His book, I Am Ozzy, is an against-the-odds tale of dead end jobs that included tenures at a car horn tuning plant and a slaughterhouse. After six weeks in prison for burglary, he put a sign up in a music store saying he was available as a singer. Black Sabbath formed soon after, taking his career to new heights, in more than one way.
“I was drinking and doing piles of f—ing drugs,” he says.
The Ozzy saga is a rollercoaster that includes him being fired from the band, starting a solo career the eclipsed that of his former group, losing his best collaborator in a freak airplane accident, and, of course, The Osbournes TV show that put him in living rooms where they had never heard his music.
“I’ve had my ups and downs,” says Osbourne. “Being successful is one thing, but I’ve also been successful and broke.”
Now he seems to have his life under control. He says he gave up the booze a few years ago.
“I don’t think I’d ever written this book if I’d still been drinking,” he says. “I don’t think I’d still be married if I’d still been drinking. There’s a good chance I wouldn’t even be alive if I’d still been doing all that stuff.”
