3

The Witch and the Nazi

We were all devastated.

There was only one Tony Iommi, and we knew it.

It had just worked with Tony. Maybe it was because all four of us had grown up within a few streets of each other. Or maybe it was because we were all broke and desperate and knew exactly what our lives would be like without rock ’n’ roll. Either way, we understood each other. It was obvious to anyone who saw us play.

After getting home from the rehearsal where Tony broke the news, I remember lying on the bed at 14 Lodge Road with my head in my hands. My dad came into the room and sat down next to me. ‘Go and have a drink with your pals, son,’ he said, pressing a ten-bob note into my hand. I must have looked pretty fucking upset for him to do that, given all the unpaid bills on the kitchen table that my mum was crying over. ‘The world doesn’t revolve around Tony,’ he said. ‘There’ll be other guitarists.’

He was a good guy, my old man. But this time he was wrong. There were no other guitarists.

Not like Tony.

So I went down the pub with Bill, and we got completely lollied. Bill was on the cider, as usual: the farm stuff, basically one step removed from poison. He would mix it with black-currant juice to take the edge off. They sold it for two bob a pint in those days, which was the only reason why anyone drank it. But Bill kept at it, years after he could afford champagne. He really took cider to heart, did Bill. When you had a few pints of that stuff it wasn’t like being drunk, it was like having a head injury.

Tony was the main topic of conversation that night, and I can honestly say that we weren’t jealous of what he was doing. We were just heartbroken. As much as we both liked Jethro Tull, we thought Earth could be better – a hundred times better. Before he left, Tony had been coming up with all these heavy-duty riffs of his own – heavier than anything I’d heard anywhere before – and Geezer had started to write far-out lyrics to go with them. As for me and Bill, we’d been improving with every gig. And unlike a lot of the one-hit-wonder Top-Forty bands at the time, we weren’t fake. We hadn’t been put together by some suit-and-tie in a smoky office in London somewhere. We weren’t one star, a cool name, and a bunch of session players who changed with every tour.

We were the real fucking deal.

Tony left in December 1968.

It was so cold that winter that I started to have flashbacks to the time when I’d worked as a plumber, bending over manholes while my arse-crack frosted over. Without Tony, me and the lads had fuck-all to do apart from sit around all day, moan, and drink cups of tea. All our gigs had been cancelled, and we’d given up our day jobs long ago, which meant none of us had any dough, so even going down the pub wasn’t an option.

No one wanted to think about getting ‘real’ work, though.

‘In 1968, John Osbourne was an up-and-coming rock ’n’ roll star,’ I would say in this fake movie-announcer voice as I wandered around the house. ‘In 1969, he was an up-and-coming garbageman.’

The one thing we had to look forward to was seeing Tony on the telly. The BBC was going to broadcast the gig in London with the Rolling Stones. It was going to be called ‘The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus’. Nothing like it had ever been done before: the Stones would basically play a private show with a few of their rock star pals at Intertel Studios in Wembley, where the set would be made to look like a circus ring with a big top over it. Jethro Tull would open. Then The Who would play. Mick Jagger had even talked John Lennon into doing a version of ‘Yer Blues’ with a one-off band called the Dirty Mac – featuring Eric Clapton on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums and Keith Richards on bass. I didn’t even know Richards could play bass. The press was going nuts about it, because it was going to be the first time Lennon had done a gig since the Beatles’ last show in 1966. (Someone told me later that one of those posh BBC producers called up Lennon and asked him what kind of amplifier he wanted to use, and he just replied, ‘One that works.’ Fucking priceless, man. I wish I could have met that guy.)

In the end, though, the BBC never broadcast the thing. The Stones killed it. I heard that Jagger wasn’t too pleased about how the Stones had sounded during the gig. It was twenty-eight years before the footage was finally shown, at the New York Film Festival. If you ever get to see it, Tony’s the one in the white hat with the king-sized ferret on his upper lip. He does a great job of playing ‘Song for Jeffrey’, although there doesn’t seem to be much chemistry between him and Ian Anderson.

Maybe that’s why he decided to quit after four days.

*

‘What d’you mean, you quit?’ asked Geezer, at an emergency

meeting down the pub a few days before Christmas.

‘It wasn’t my scene,’ said Tony, with a shrug.

The drinks were on him.

‘How can being in Jethro Tull not be your scene?’ said Geezer. ‘You played a gig with John Lennon, man!’

‘I want to be in my own band. I don’t want to be someone else’s employee.’

‘So Ian Anderson’s a tosser, then?’ I asked, getting to the point.

‘No – he’s all right,’ said Tony. ‘He just wasn’t… We didn’t have a laugh, y’know? It wasn’t like this.’

Bill, already on his third pint of cider, looked like he was about to burst into tears.

‘So are we back together?’ said Geezer, trying not to lose his cool by grinning too much.

‘If you’ll have me.’

‘OK. But can we please now find another name?’ I said.

‘Look, forget about the name,’ said Tony. ‘We just need to agree that we’re all serious. We can’t fuck around any more. I’ve seen how guys like Jethro Tull work. And they work, man: four days of rehearsals for one show. We need to start doing that. And we need to start writing our own songs and playing them, even if we get boos. The punters will soon get to know them. It’s the only way we’re going to make a name for ourselves. And we need to think about an album. Let’s go and talk to Jim Simpson in the morning.’

Everyone nodded seriously.

None of us could believe our fucking luck, to be honest with you. Was Tony insane? No one in their right mind would give up the kind of gig he’d just walked away from. Even Robert Plant had eventually gone off to join Jimmy Page in the New Yardbirds, leaving Hobbsbollocks in the dust. And I can’t tell you that I’d have done the same thing if I’d been in Tony’s position. As much as I was heartbroken when Earth split up, if I’d been the one walking into a band with national recognition, headliner status and a record deal, it would have been, ‘Oh, er, see ya!’ The bottom line was you had to take your hat off to Tony Iommi. He knew what he wanted, and he obviously believed that he could get it without taking a ride on Ian Anderson’s coat tails.

All we had to do was prove he’d made the right decision.

‘OK, lads,’ said Tony, draining his pint and slamming the glass back down on the table. ‘Let’s get to work.’

One of the first things Jim Simpson did as our manager was pack us off on a ‘European tour’. This meant loading our gear into Tony’s van – which by now had been upgraded from a Commer to a Transit – driving it on to a ferry at Harwich, sailing across the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, then hoping the engine would start again when it was time to get off. The temperature in Denmark would be twenty below freezing. From the Hook of Holland, the plan was to drive to Copenhagen, where our first gig had been booked.

I remember taking my entire wardrobe with me on that trip. It consisted of one shirt on a wire hanger, and one pair of underpants in a carrier bag. I was wearing everything else: jeans, second-hand Air Force overcoat, Henry’s Blues House T-shirt, lace-up boots.

Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job – as the band’s ‘public representative’ – to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the fucking thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly.

‘Halløj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door.

‘Oh, thank fuck,’ I said, out of breath and sniffling. ‘Our van’s knackered. Can you gis a tow?’

‘Halløj?’

I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?’

The guy just looked at me and started to pick wax out of his ear. Then he said, ‘Bobby Charlton, ja?’

‘Eh?’

‘Bobby Charlton, betydningsfuld skuespiller, ja?’

‘Sorry mate, speako Englishki?’

‘Det forstår jeg ikke,’ he said, with a shrug.

‘Eh?’

We stood there and looked at each other for a second.

Then he went, ‘Undskyld, farvel,’ and shut the door in my face. I gave it a good old kick and set off back through the waist-high snow. I was so cold, my hands were turning blue. When I reached the road I saw a car coming and almost threw myself in front of it. Turned out it was the Danish cops – friendly ones, thank God. They gave me a sip from a flask they kept in the glove box. I don’t know what was in that thing, but it warmed me up soon enough. Then they organised a tow-truck to take us to a garage in the next village.

Good guys, those Danish cops.

When they waved us off, they told us to send their regards to Bobby Charlton.

‘We’ll tell him you said hello,’ promised Geezer.

Day two, the van broke down.

This time it was due to a dodgy petrol gauge – the tank ran dry without us knowing it. So off I went to get help again. But this time I had a better idea. We’d conked out next to a little white church, and outside was what I guessed was the vicar’s car. I thought he wouldn’t mind being a good Samaritan, so I disconnected the hose from the van’s engine and used it to siphon fuel from his tank to ours. It worked brilliantly, apart from the fact that I got a mouthful of petrol when it came spurting out of the tube. I had toxic, highly flammable burps for the rest of the day.

Every time it happened I’d screw up my face and have to spit petrol and lumps of vomit out of the window.

‘Urgh,’ I’d say. ‘I fucking hate four star.’

Between gigs we started to jam out some ideas for songs. It was Tony who first suggested we do something that sounded evil. There was a cinema called the Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’

Me and Bill thought it was a great idea, so off we went and wrote some lyrics that ended up becoming the song ‘Black Sabbath’. It’s basically about a bloke who sees a figure in black coming to take him off to the lake of fire.

Then Tony came up with this scary-sounding riff. I moaned out a tune over the top of it, and the end result was fucking awesome – the best thing we’d ever done, by a mile. I’ve since been told that Tony’s riff is based on what’s known as the ‘Devil’s interval’, or the ‘tritone’. Apparently, churches banned it from being used in religious music during the Middle Ages because it scared the crap out of people. The organist would start to play it and everyone would run away ’cos they thought the Devil was going to pop up from behind the altar.

As for the title of the song, it was Geezer who came up with that. He got it from a Boris Karloff film that had been out for a while. I don’t think Geezer had ever seen the film, to be honest with you. I certainly hadn’t – it was years before I even knew there was a film. It’s funny, really, because in spite of our new direction we were still quite a straightforward twelve-bar blues band. If you listened closely, you could also hear a lot of jazz influences in our sound – like Bill’s swing-style intro to one of our other early numbers, ‘Wicked World’. It’s just that we played at eight hundred times the volume of a jazz band.

Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song ‘Black Sabbath’. But I’ve always had a bee up my arse about the term ‘heavy metal’. To me, it doesn’t say anything musically, especially now that you’ve got seventies heavy metal, eighties heavy metal, nineties heavy metal and new- millennium heavy metal – which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they’re all the same. In fact, the first time I heard the words ‘heavy’ and ‘metal’ used together was in the lyrics of ‘Born to be Wild’. The press just latched on to it after that. We certainly didn’t come up with it ourselves. As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music. But then, long after we stopped writing scary music, people would still say, ‘Oh, they’re a heavy metal band, so all they must sing about is Satan and the end of the world.’ That’s why I came to loathe the term.

I don’t remember where we first played ‘Black Sabbath’, but I can sure as hell remember the audience’s reaction: all the girls ran out of the venue, screaming. ‘Isn’t the whole point of being in a band to get a shag, not to make chicks run away?’ I complained to the others, afterwards.

‘They’ll get used to it,’ Geezer told me.

Another memorable performance of ‘Black Sabbath’ was in a town hall near Manchester. The manager was there to greet us in a suit and tie when we climbed out of the van. You should have seen the look on his face when he saw us.

‘Is that what you’re going to wear on stage?’ he asked me, staring at my bare feet and pyjama top.

‘Oh no,’ I said, in this fake-shocked voice. ‘I always perform in gold spandex. Have you ever seen an Elvis gig? Well, I look a bit like him – but of course my tits are much smaller.’

‘Oh,’ he went.

We set up our gear for the tune-up and Tony launched into the opening riff of ‘Black Sabbath’ – doh, doh, doooohnnnn – but before I’d got through the first line of lyrics the manager had run on to the stage, red in the face, and was shouting, ‘STOP, STOP, STOP! Are you fucking serious? This isn’t Top-Forty pop covers! Who are you people?’

‘Earth,’ said Tony, shrugging. ‘You booked us, remember?’

‘I didn’t book this. I thought you were going to play “Mellow Yellow” and “California Dreamin’”.’

‘Who – us?’ laughed Tony.

‘That’s what your manager told me!’

‘Jim Simpson told you that?’

‘Who the hell’s Jim Simpson?’

‘Ah,’ said Tony, finally working out what had happened. He turned to us and said, ‘Lads, I think we might not be the only band called Earth.’

He was right: there was another Earth on the C-list gig circuit. But they didn’t play satanic music. They played pop and Motown covers. The promotional flyer that Jim Simpson had printed for us had probably only added to the confusion: it made us look like a bunch of hippies, with each of our portraits hand drawn in little clouds around a big sun and ‘Earth’ spelled out in wobbly psychedelic lettering.

‘I told you it was a crap name,’ I said. ‘Can we please now think of something that doesn’t sound like—’

‘Look,’ interrupted the manger. ‘Here’s twenty quid for the trouble of comin’ all the way up ’ere. Now fuck off, eh? Oh, and the little hobo is right – you should change yer name. Although I don’t know why anyone in their right mind would ever want to listen to that shite.’

‘Dear Mum,’ I wrote, a few weeks later,

We’re off to do a gig at the Star Club in Hamburg.

That’s where the Beatles played! Am writing this on a ferry to Dunkirk. Hope you like the picture of the white cliffs (other side). That’s what I’m looking at right now. Big news: we’re going to change our name to ‘Black Sabbath’ when we get back to England. Maybe we’ll hit the big time now. Love to all,

John

PS: Will call Jean from Hamburg.

PPS: When are you getting a telephone? Tell Dad it’s almost the 1970s now!!!

It was August 9, 1969: the day of the Charles Manson murders in Los Angeles. But we weren’t looking at the news. In those days it was almost impossible to get an English paper in Europe, and even if you did find one, it would be three or four weeks old. Besides, we were too focused on our next gig to pay much attention to the outside world.

We’d done shows before at the Star Club – which was on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, where all the dodgy hookers stand around in their skimpy dresses and fishnets – so we knew roughly what to expect. This time, though, we had a ‘residency’, which meant they would pay us a wage and put us up in this bombed-out shithole of a room above the stage – it had been gutted by fire more than a few times – and in return we’d have to play as many as seven sets a day, in between gigs from visiting bands.

It was a lot of fun, but it was fucking gruelling, man. Every day we’d start at noon and end at two in the morning. You’d do speed, pills, dope, beer – anything you could lay your hands on – just to stay awake. Someone once added up how many shows we did in the Star Club, and it turned out that we’d played more than the Beatles. Mind you, 1969 was seven years after the Beatles’ heyday, and the place had gone down the shitter a bit. In fact, we were one of the last British bands to do a residency there: the place closed its doors for good on New Year’s Eve of that year.

Then it burned down.

Even so, it was the best training you could ever ask for, playing at the Star Club. A gig’s not like a rehearsal: you’ve got to see it through, even if you’re loaded, which we were, most of the time. It’s not that I needed any training to be the person I am on stage. I’m a lunatic by nature, and lunatics don’t need training – they just are. But the Star Club helped us nail all the new songs we’d written, like ‘The Wizard’, ‘N.I.B.’ (named after Bill’s beard, which we thought looked like the nib of a pen), ‘War Pigs’, ‘Rat Salad’ and ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ (to this day, I have no idea what that song’s about, even though people tell me that I wrote the lyrics). The Star Club also helped me get over my stage fright. Once I’d loosened up a bit, I’d just do crazier and crazier things to keep myself amused. And the lads encouraged me. When the crowd was obviously bored, Tony would shout over to me, ‘Go and organise a raffle, Ozzy.’ That would be my cue to do something fucking mental, to get everyone’s attention. One time, I found this can of purple paint backstage, and when I got the call from Tony I dipped my nose in it. Which would have been fine, if the paint hadn’t been fucking indelible.

I couldn’t get that shit off me for weeks. People would come up to me and go, ‘What the fuck is wrong with you, man?’ Or, more often, they wouldn’t come up to me at all, ’cos they thought I was mad.

We all had our moments at the Star Club. One night, Tony is so out of his skull on dope that he decides he’s gonna play the flute, but he’s lost his sense of distance, so he rests the flute on his chin instead of his lip. So for the entire song he’s just standing there, blowing into a microphone, with the flute nowhere near his mouth, and the audience is going, What the fuck?

Priceless, man.

The trick to having a really good time at the Star Club was to find some local German chick and then stay at her apartment, so you didn’t have to share a bunk bed with one of your farty, ball-scratching bandmates. We didn’t care what the chicks looked like – I mean, we weren’t exactly much to behold ourselves. And if they bought you beers and gave you fags, that was a bonus. And if they didn’t buy you beers and give you fags, you did your best to rob them. In fact, on more than one occasion we used Tony as a honey trap – ’cos he was the one all the chicks wanted to bang. What would happen is, he’d go upstairs to our room and start fumbling around with some groupie on one of the bunks, and I’d crawl over on my elbows – commando-style – to where she’d left her handbag, and swipe whatever dough I could find. I aint proud of it, but we had to fucking eat somehow.

We used to give these chicks nicknames, which, looking back now, was a bit cruel. More than a bit cruel, in some cases. For example, I shacked up with one girl who everyone called ‘The Witch’, ’cos she had a nose on her that was even bigger than Geezer’s.

We didn’t last long, me and The Witch. The morning after she took me back to her place, she got up, made herself a cup of coffee, and said, ‘I’m going off to work now. You can stay here, but don’t touch anything, OK?’ Of course, that’s a fatal thing to say to me. So, the second she’s out of the door I’m rummaging around in her cupboards, wondering what she doesn’t want me to find. And sure enough, at the back of the wardrobe, I come across this perfectly ironed Nazi uniform. It must have been her dad’s or something. Anyway, I’m thinking, Fucking-A, man, I’ve hit the motherlode here. So I put on the uniform, find the drinks cabinet, and before long I’m strutting around the living room, barking out orders to the furniture in this comedy German accent, smoking cigarettes, and getting loaded. I love all that wartime military stuff, me.

After an hour or so of doing that I took off the uniform, put it back in the wardrobe, made sure it was folded up perfectly, and pretended like nothing had happened. But when The Witch came back just before noon, she knew something was up. She went straight over to the wardrobe, threw open the doors, checked the uniform, and went fucking nuts.

Next thing I knew I was on the end of her broom, flying out of the door.

When we got back to England, we had a meeting at Jim Simpson’s house to tell him about our change of name to Black Sabbath. He didn’t seem too keen, although to be honest with you I think he was distracted by my purple nose. He didn’t say anything about it, but I could tell it was on his mind, ’cos he kept staring at me with this worried look on his face. He must have thought I’d picked up some rare disease over in Germany or something. I seem to remember that Alvin Lee from Ten Years After was at that meeting, too. And he was even less keen on the name Black Sabbath than Jim was. ‘I don’t think you’ll get anywhere with that, lads,’ he told us. The exact order of what happened next is a bit of a blur, to be honest with you. All I know is that Jim had done a deal with a bloke called Tony Hall, who owned a freelance A&R/production company. He agreed to help us make an album as long as he got something back if we turned out to be a success – or something like that. I’m no good with business, me. I’m the last person to ask when it comes to contracts and dough and all that.

Anyway, Tony Hall said he thought we were ‘a great little blues band’, but that we needed a debut single – even though bands like ours rarely put out singles in those days. He played us this song called ‘Evil Woman’ by an American group called Crow, and asked if we wanted to cover it. He could tell we weren’t that into the idea, so suggested we could make the guitars heavier. We still didn’t really want to do it, but Tony offered to pay for some time at Trident Studios in Soho, so we thought, Fuck it, why not?

It was a bit embarrassing in the end. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing, so we just set up our equipment, hit the record button, and played our live set. The only vaguely professional thing about us was the fact that one of the roadies had spelled out ‘Black Sabbath’ with black electrician’s tape on the front of Bill’s bass drum.

Producing us was a guy called Gus Dudgeon. We were in awe of him because he’d worked with Eric Clapton, the Moody Blues and the Rolling Stones. Looking back, Gus was very good to us, although he also laid down the law a bit, and we weren’t used to being told what to do. Still, you couldn’t argue with the results – the bloke was a genius. After working on ‘Evil Woman’ he went on to produce some of Elton John’s biggest hits of the seventies and eighties. It was terribly sad when he and his wife Sheila were killed in a car accident in 2002. Gus was one of those guys who made a huge contribution to British music, even though he wasn’t a household name. And although we might not have fully appreciated it at the time, we were incredibly lucky to have him help us so early on in our career.

We played a few clubs while we were down in London. At one of those gigs the DJ put on a record before we went on stage, and it just blew me away. Something about the singer’s voice sounded familiar. Then it came to me: it was Robert Plant. So I went over to the DJ and said, ‘Is that the New Yardbirds’ record you’re playing?’

‘No, it’s a new band called Led Zeppelin.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, man. I swear.’

We played our gig, but I couldn’t get the record out of my mind, so afterwards I went back to the DJ and asked him, ‘Are you sure it’s not the New Yardbirds? I know that singer, and he ain’t in a band called Led Zeppelin. Does it say who the band members are on the sleeve?’

He read out the names: ‘Jimmy Page, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant.’

I couldn’t believe it: the New Yardbirds must have changed their name to Led Zeppelin… and they’d made the best record I’d heard in years. In the van on the way home, I remember saying to Tony, ‘Did you hear how heavy that Led Zeppelin album sounded?’

Without missing a beat, he replied, ‘We’ll be heavier.’

By the end of 1969 we were desperate for anything that could take us to the next level. But we were still on the same C-list gig circuit, night after night. Our last gig of the year was on December 24 in Cumberland – we were still getting a lot of work up there – at Wigton Market Hall. As it happened, there was a women’s mental hospital right next door to the venue, and every year the doctors would let the patients out for a Christmas dance. We didn’t know anything about that, but even if we had, I doubt any of us would have guessed that the funny farm would choose a Black Sabbath gig for its annual outing. But it did. So we’re halfway through ‘N.I.B.’ when all these loony chicks come piling in through the door at the back of the hall, and by the end of the song a riot has broken out. You should have seen it: these chicks were punching the guys, and then the guys’ girlfriends were chinning the mental chicks right back. It was pandemonium. By the time the police showed up there were loads of women lying around on the floor with black eyes and bloody noses and split lips.

Then they started to sing ‘Give Peace a Chance’.

Meanwhile, we were just standing there on stage, amps buzzing. I looked at Tony, and Tony looked at me.

‘This is fucking nuts,’ I mouthed to him.

He just shrugged, turned up his amp, and started to play ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’.

In January 1970, it finally happened.

We got a record deal.

For a few months, Jim Simpson had been shopping us around by inviting all these big-wigs from London to come to our gigs. But no one was interested. Then one night a guy from Philips drove up to Birmingham to see us play at Henry’s Blues House and decided to take a bet on us. The name Black Sabbath made a big difference, I think. At the time there was an occult author called Dennis Wheatley whose books were all over the bestseller lists, Hammer Horror films were doing massive business at the cinemas, and the Manson murders were all over the telly, so anything with a ‘dark’ edge was in big demand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure we could’ve done it on the strength of the music alone. But sometimes, when it comes to getting a deal, all these little things have to come together at the right time.

You need a bit of luck, basically.

Another thing that helped was the fact that Philips was setting up a new ‘underground’ label called Vertigo when we were looking for a deal. We were a perfect fit. But the funny thing was that Vertigo wasn’t even up and running in time for our first single, ‘Evil Woman’, so it was originally released on another Philips label, Fontana, before being reissued on Vertigo a few weeks later.

Not that it made any fucking difference: the song went down like a concrete turd both times. But we didn’t care,

because the BBC played it on Radio 1.

Once.

At six o’clock in the morning.

I was so nervous, I got up at five and drank about eight cups of tea. ‘They won’t play it,’ I kept telling myself, ‘They won’t play it…’

But then:

BLAM… BLAM…

Dow-doww…

BLAM…

Dow-dow-d-d-dow, dooooow…

D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d

DUH-DA!

Do-doo-do

DUH-DA!

Do-doo-do…

It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to hear yourself on Radio 1 for the first time. It was magic, squared. I ran around the house screaming, ‘I’m on the radio! I’m on the fucking radio!’ until my mum stomped downstairs in her nightie and told me to shut up. ‘Evil woman,’ I sang to her, at full volume, ‘Don’t you play your games with me!’ Then I was off, out of the door, singing my head off all the way down Lodge Road.

But if being played on Radio 1 was good, it was nothing compared with the advance we got from Philips: £105 each!

I’d never even had ten quid to call my own before, never mind a hundred. It would have taken me a whole year of tuning car horns at the Lucas factory to earn that kind of dough. I thought I was Jack the Lad that week. The first thing I bought was a bottle of Brut aftershave to make myself smell better. Then I got a new pair of shoes, ’cos I’d destroyed my old ones in Denmark. The rest I gave to my mum to pay the bills. But then I kept scrounging it back off her, so I could go down the pub and celebrate.

Then it was back to work.

As far as I can remember, we didn’t have any demos to speak of, and there was no official talk about making an album. Jim just told us one day that we’d been booked for a week of gigs in Zurich, and that on our way down there, we should stop off at Regent Sound studios in Soho and record some tracks with a producer called Rodger Bain and his engineer, Tom Allom. So that’s what we did. Like before, we just set up our gear and played what amounted to a live set without the audience. Once we’d finished, we spent a couple of hours double-tracking some of the guitar and the vocals, and that was that. Done. We were in the pub in time for last orders. It can’t have taken any longer than twelve hours in total.

That’s how albums should be made, in my opinion. I don’t give a fuck if you’re making the next Bridge Over Troubled Water – taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just fucking ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again.

In our case, mind you, we didn’t have the luxury of taking our time. It wasn’t an option. So we just went in there and did it. And then the next day we set off for Zurich in the Transit to do a residency at a joint called the Hirschen Club. We hadn’t even heard Rodger and Tom’s final mix when we left Soho, never mind seen the album cover. That’s how the music business was run in those days. As a band, you had less say in what was going on than the guy who cleaned out the shitter in the record company’s executive suite. I remember it being a long, long way to Switzerland in the back of a Transit van. To kill time, we smoked dope. Shitloads of it. When we finally got to Zurich, we were so fucking hungry we found one of those posh Swiss caffs and held a competition to see who could eat the most banana splits in the shortest time. I managed to get twenty-five of the fuckers down my throat before the owner chucked us out. My whole face was covered in cream by the end of it. I could have had a couple more of them, too.

Then we had to go and find the Hirschen Club, which turned out to be even sleazier than the Star Club. They had this tiny little stage with the bar just a few feet away, and it was dark and there were hookers hanging around all over the place. The four of us had to share one crappy room upstairs, so getting a chick with her own place was the order of the day.

One night, these two girls in fishnets invited me and Geezer back to their apartment. They were obviously on the game, but I was up for anything that would spare me from another night of sharing a bed with Bill, who spent the whole time complaining about my smelly feet. So when they sweetened the deal by saying they had some dope, I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s go.’ But Geezer wasn’t so sure. ‘They’re hookers, Ozzy,’ he kept saying. ‘You’ll catch something nasty. Let’s find some other chicks.’

‘I ain’t gonna bonk either of ’em,’ I said. ‘I just wanna get out of this fucking place.’

‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Geezer. ‘The dark-haired chick isn’t so bad-looking. After a few beers and a few puffs of the magic weed, she’ll have her way with me.’

‘Look,’ I said, ‘if she makes a move on yer, I’ll kick her up the arse and we’ll leave, all right?’

‘Promise?’

‘If she makes one move towards your knob, Geezer, I’ll pull her off you and we’ll fuck off.’

‘All right.’

So we go back to their place. It’s all dimly lit, and Geezer’s on one side of the room with the dark-haired chick, and I’m on the other side with the ugly one, and we’re smoking weed and listening to the album by Blind Faith, the ‘supergroup’ formed by Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and Ric Grech. For a while it’s all serene and trippy – the music’s playing and everyone’s snogging and fumbling around. Then, all of a sudden, this deep Brummie voice rises out of the mist of dope smoke.

‘Oi, Ozzy,’ says Geezer. ‘Time to put the boot in.’

I looked over and this hooker was straddling him as he lay there with his eyes closed and this pained expression on his face. I honestly thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

I don’t even know if he shagged her in the end. I just remember laughing and laughing and laughing until I cried.

Jim Simpson wanted to see us at his house as soon as we got back from Switzerland. ‘I’ve got something you need to see,’ he said, in this ominous voice.

So that afternoon we all met up in his living room and sat there, twiddling our thumbs, wondering what the fuck he was going to say. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out the finished record of Black Sabbath. We were speechless. The cover was a spooky-looking fifteenth-century watermill (I later found out it was the Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames in Oxfordshire), with all these dead leaves around it and a sickly looking woman with long dark hair, dressed in black robes, standing in the middle of the frame with a scary look on her face. It was amazing. Then, when you opened the gatefold sleeve, there was just black everywhere and an inverted cross with a creepy poem written inside it. We’d had no input with the artwork, so the inverted cross – a symbol of Satanism, we later found out – had nothing to do with us. But the stories that you hear about us being unhappy with it are total bullshit. As far as I can remember, we were immediately blown away by the cover. We just stood there, staring at it, and going, ‘Fucking hell, man, this is fucking unbelievable.’

Then Jim went over to his record player and put it on. I almost burst into tears, it sounded so great. While we’d been in Switzerland, Rodger and Tom had put these sound effects of a thunderstorm and a tolling bell over the opening riff of the title track, so it sounded like something from a film. The overall effect was fabulous. I still get chills whenever I hear it.

On Friday the thirteenth of February 1970, Black Sabbath went on sale.

I felt like I’d just been born.

But the critics fucking hated it.

Still, one of the few good things about being dyslexic is that when I say I don’t read reviews, I mean I don’t read reviews. But that didn’t stop the others from poring over what the press had to say about us. Of all the bad reviews of Black Sabbath, the worst was probably written by Lester Bangs at Rolling Stone. He was the same age as me, but I didn’t know that at the time. In fact, I’d never even heard of him before, and once the others told me what he’d written I wished I still hadn’t. I remember Geezer reading out words like ‘claptrap’, ‘wooden’ and ‘dogged’. The last line was something like, ‘They’re just like Cream, but worse’, which I didn’t understand, because I thought Cream were one of the best bands in the world.

Bangs died twelve years later, when he was only thirty-three, and I’ve heard people say he was a genius when it came to words, but as far as we were concerned he was just another pretentious dickhead. And from then we never got on with Rolling Stone. But y’know what? Being trashed by Rolling Stone was kind of cool, because they were the Establishment. Those music magazines were all staffed by college kids who thought they were clever – which, to be fair, they probably were. Meanwhile, we’d been kicked out of school at fifteen and had worked in factories and slaughtered animals for a living, but then we’d made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us. So how upset could we be when clever people said we were no good?

The important thing was someone thought we were good, ’cos Black Sabbath went straight to number eight in Britain and number twenty-three in America.

And the Rolling Stone treatment prepared us for what was to come. I don’t think we ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews. Whenever I hear someone getting upset about reviews, I just say to them, ‘Look, it’s their job to criticise. That’s why they’re called critics.’ Mind you, some people just get so wound up they can’t control themselves. I remember one time in Glasgow this critic showed up at our hotel, and Tony goes over to him and says, ‘I wanna have a word with you, sunshine.’ I didn’t know it at the time, but the guy had just written a hit-piece on Tony, describing him as ‘Jason King with builder’s arms’ – Jason King being a private-eye type character on TV at the time who had this stupid moustache and dodgy haircut. But when Tony confronted him, he just laughed, which was a really stupid thing to do. Tony just stood there and said, ‘Go on, son, finish laughing, ’cos in about thirty seconds you ain’t gonna be laughing any more.’ Then he started to laugh himself. The critic didn’t take him seriously, so he kept on laughing, and for about two seconds they were both just standing there, laughing their heads off. Then Tony swung his fist back and just about put this bloke in hospital. I never read his review of the show, but I’m told it wasn’t very flattering.

My old man wasn’t too impressed with our first album, either.

I’ll always remember the day I took it home and said, ‘Look, Dad! I got my voice on a record!’

I can picture him now, fiddling with his reading specs and holding the cover in front of his face. Then he opened the sleeve, went ‘Hmm’ and said, ‘Are you sure they didn’t make a mistake, son?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘This cross is upside down.’

‘It’s supposed to be like that.’

‘Oh. Well, don’t just stand there. Put it on. Let’s have a bit of a sing-along, eh?’

So I walked over to the radiogram, lifted the heavy wooden lid, put the record on the turntable – hoping the dodgy speaker that I’d put in there from the PA would work – and cranked up the volume.

With the first clap of thunder, my dad flinched.

I grinned nervously at him.

Then:

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

My dad coughed.

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

He coughed again.

Bong!

Bong!

Bong!

‘Son, when does—’

BLAM! Dow! Dowwwwwww!!! Dooooowwwwww!!!!!

My poor old man turned white. I think he’d been expecting something along the lines of ‘Knees up Mother Brown’. But I left the record on anyway. Finally, after six minutes and eighteen seconds of Tony and Geezer thrashing away on their guitars, Bill beating the shit out of his drums, and me howling on about a man in black coming to take me away to the lake of fire, my dad rubbed his eyes, shook his head and looked at the floor.

Silence.

‘What d’you think, Dad?’

‘John,’ he said, ‘are you absolutely sure you’ve only been drinking the occasional beer?’

I went bright red and said something like ‘Oh, er, yeah, Dad, whatever.’

Bless him, he just didn’t get it at all.

But it broke my heart, y’know? I’d always felt as though I’d let my father down. Not because of anything he’d ever said to me. But because I was a failure at school, because I couldn’t read or write properly, because I’d been sent to prison, and because I’d been fired from all of those factory jobs. But now, finally, with Black Sabbath, I was doing something I was good at, that I enjoyed, that I was prepared to work hard at. I suppose I just really wanted my old man to be proud of me. But it wasn’t his fault – it was the way he was. It was his generation.

And I think deep down he was proud of me, in his own way.

I can honestly say that we never took the black magic stuff seriously for one second. We just liked how theatrical it was. Even my old man eventually played along with it: he made me this awesome metal cross during one of his tea breaks at the factory. When I turned up to rehearsals with it, all the other guys wanted one, so I got Dad to make three more.

I couldn’t believe it when I learned that people actually ‘practised the occult’. These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London. I’d say to them, ‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka and gin.’ At one point we were invited by a group of Satanists to play at Stonehenge. We told them to fuck off, so they said they’d put a curse on us. What a load of bollocks that was. Britain even had a ‘chief witch’ in those days, called Alex Sanders. Never met him. Never wanted to. Mind you, we did buy a Ouija board once and have a little seance. We scared the shit out of each other.

That night, at God knows what hour, Bill phoned me up and shouted, ‘Ozzy, I think my house is haunted!’

‘Sell tickets then,’ I told him, and put the phone down.

The good thing about all the satanic stuff was that it gave us endless free publicity. People couldn’t get enough of it. During its first day of release, Black Sabbath sold five thousand copies, and by the end of the year it was on its way to selling a million worldwide.

None of us could believe it.

Not even Jim Simpson could believe it – the poor bloke ended up getting completely overwhelmed. His office was in Birmingham, miles away from the action in London, and he had other bands to look after, no staff, and Henry’s Blues House to run. So it didn’t take long for us to start getting pissed off with him. For starters, we weren’t getting any dough. Jim wasn’t robbing us – he’s one of the most honest people I’ve ever met in the music business – but Philips were taking forever to cough up our royalties, and Jim wasn’t the kind of bloke who could go down there and bully them into paying. Then there was the issue of America: we wanted to go, immediately. But we had to get it right, which meant going easy on all the satanic stuff, ’cos we didn’t want to come across like fans of the Manson Family.

We’d get strung up by our balls if we did.

It didn’t take long for all the sharks down in London to realise there was blood in the water, as far as Jim was concerned. So, one by one, they started circling. They looked at us and they saw big fucking neon-lit pound signs. Our first album couldn’t have cost more than five hundred quid to make, so the profit margins were astronomical.

The first call we got was from Don Arden. We didn’t know much about him apart from his nickname – ‘Mr Big’. Then we heard stories about him dangling people out of his fourth-floor Carnaby Street office window, stubbing cigars out on people’s foreheads, and demanding all his contracts be paid in cash and delivered by hand in brown paper bags. So we were shitting ourselves when we went down to London to meet him for the first time. When we got off the train at Euston Station, he had his blue Rolls-Royce waiting to pick us up. It was the first time I’d ever been in a Roller. I sat there in the back seat, like the King of England, thinking, Three years ago, you were a puke remover in a slaughterhouse, and before that you were doling out slop to child molesters in Winson Green. Now look where you are.

Don had a reputation as the kind of guy who could make you world famous but would rip you off while he was at it. It’s not like he was pulling any complex, high finance, Bernie Madoff-type scams. He just wouldn’t fucking pay. Simple as that. It would be like, ‘Don, you owe me a million quid, can I have the money please?’ And he’d go, ‘No, you can’t.’ End of conversation. And if you ever went to his office to ask for the dough in person, there was a good chance you’d leave in the back of an ambulance.

But the thing with us was, we didn’t really need anyone to make us world famous – we were already halfway there. Still, we sat in Don’s office and listened to his pitch. He was a short bloke, but with the build and presence of a pissed-off Rottweiler, and he had this incredible shouty voice. He’d pick up the phone to his receptionist and scream so loud the whole planet seemed to shake.

When the meeting was over we all stood up and said how great it was to meet him, blah-blah-blah, even though none of us wanted anything more to do with him. Then, as we filed out of his office, he introduced us to the chick he’d spent half the meeting bawling at over the phone.

‘This is Sharon, my daughter,’ he growled. ‘Sharon, take these lads down to the car, will you?’

I grinned at her, but she gave me a wary look. She probably thought I was a lunatic, standing there in my pyjama shirt, with no shoes and a hot-water tap on a piece of string around my neck.

But then, when Don huffed back to his office and closed the door behind him, I cracked a joke and made her smile. I just about fell on the floor. It was the most wicked, beautiful smile I’d ever seen in my life. And she had the laugh to go with it, too. It made me feel so good, hearing her laugh. I just wanted to make her do it again and again and again.

To this day, I feel bad about what happened with Jim Simpson. I think he got the wrong end of the stick with us. I suppose it’s easy to say what he should or shouldn’t have done with hind-sight, but if he’d admitted to himself that we were too big for him to handle, he could have sold us off to another management company, or contracted out our day-to-day management to a bigger firm. But he wasn’t strong enough to do that. And we were so desperate to go to America and get our big break that we didn’t have the patience to wait for him to sort himself out.

In the end it was a wide boy called Patrick Meehan who nabbed us. He was only a couple of years older than us, and he’d gone into the management racket with his father, who’d been a stuntman on the TV show Danger Man and then worked for Don Arden, first as a driver, then as a general lackey, looking after the likes of the Small Faces and the Animals. Patrick had another ex-Don Arden henchman working with him too: Wilf Pine. I liked Wilf a lot. He looked like a cartoon villain: short, built like a slab of concrete, and with this big, tasty, hard-boiled face. I think his hardman routine was all a bit of an act, to be honest with you, but there was never any doubt that he could do some serious damage if he was in the mood. He’d been Don’s personal bodyguard for a long time, and when I knew him he’d often go down to Brixton Prison to see the Kray twins, who’d only just been put away. He was all right, was Wilf. We’d have a laugh. ‘You’re crazy, d’you know that?’ he’d say to me.

Patrick was nothing like Don or Wilf, or his own father, for that matter. He was a slick, smooth-talking, good-looking guy, very cool, very sharp, didn’t have any problems with the ladies. He’d wear suits all the time, drove a Roller, kept his hair long but not too long. He was also the first guy I ever saw with diamond rings on his fingers. He’d obviously learned a lot from the way Don Arden operated. Patrick threw every trick in the book at us. The chauffeured limo. The champagne dinner. The non-stop compliments and the phoney shock that we weren’t all multi-millionaires already. He told us that if we signed with him, we could have anything we wanted – cars, houses, chicks, whatever. All we had to do was call him up and ask for it. What he told us were like fairy tales, basically, but we wanted to believe them. And there was at least some truth to what he said… The music business is like any other business, y’know? When sales are going well, everything’s hunky-fucking-dory. But the second something goes wrong, it’s all blood and law-suits.

I can’t remember exactly when or how we left Jim – we never actually fired him, although I suppose that makes no difference – but by September 1970 Big Bear Management was history and we were signed up with the Meehans’ company, Worldwide Artists.

It took about three and a half seconds for Jim to sue us. We were served with the writ when we were standing backstage at a venue on Lake Geneva, waiting to go on. It wouldn’t be the last time that happened. Jim sued Meehan, too, for ‘enticement’. It all took years to go through the courts. To a certain degree, I think Jim got a raw deal. I mean, he had brought Philips out to see us in the first place, which had got us the record deal. And even though he won some dough from the courts, he spent years paying his lawyers. So he didn’t really win in the end. It’s always the way with lawyers – we found that out for ourselves, later. The funny thing is, I still run into Jim every so often. We’re like long-lost friends now. He’s done a lot of great things for music in Birmingham, Jim Simpson has. And he’s still at it today. I wish him all the very best, I really do.

At the time, though, getting rid of Jim seemed like the greatest thing we’d ever done. It was like we’d just won the lottery: money was falling from the sky. Every day, I’d think of something new to ask for: ‘Er, hello, yes, is that Patrick Meehan’s office? It’s Ozzy Osbourne. I’d like one of them Triumph Herald convertibles. Can you send me a green one? Cheers.’ Click. Then – ta-dah! – the fucking thing would be sitting outside my house the next morning with an envelope tucked behind the windscreen wiper full of paperwork for me to sign and return. Meehan seemed as good as his word: whatever we asked for, we got. And it wasn’t all about the big things: we were given allowances, so we could afford beer and fags and platform boots and leather jackets, and we could stay in hotels instead of sleeping in the back of Tony’s van.

Meanwhile, we just kept selling more records. One minute we were at the raggedy end of the line when it came to rock bands from Birmingham; the next we’d overtaken just about everybody. What we didn’t know was that Meehan was taking nearly everything. Even a lot of the stuff he ‘gave’ us wasn’t actually ours. Behind the scenes, he was bleeding us dry. But y’know what, I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and I don’t think we can complain too much. We’d come out of Aston with nothing to lose and everything to gain, and by our early twenties we were living like kings. We didn’t have to carry our own gear, we didn’t have to make our own food, we barely had to tie our own shoelaces. And, on top of all that, we could just ask for stuff and it would appear on a silver plate.

I mean, you should have seen Tony’s collection of Lamborghinis. Even Bill got his own chauffeured Rolls-Royce. We were good like that: we split all the dough four ways. The way we saw it, Tony did the riffs, Geezer did the words, I did the melodies, and Bill did his wild drum thing, and each part was as important as the others, so everyone should get the same. I think that’s why we lasted as long as we did. For starters, it meant we never argued over who’d done what. Then, if one of us wanted to branch out – like if Bill wanted to sing, or if I wanted to write some lyrics – it was cool. No one was sitting there with a calculator, adding up the royalties they’d win or lose.

Mind you, another reason why we could do what we wanted was because we had total musical control. No record mogul had created Black Sabbath, so no record mogul could tell Black Sabbath what to do. A couple of them tried – and we told them where to stick it.

Not many bands can do that nowadays.

One thing I regret is not giving more dough to my folks. I mean, if it hadn’t been for my old man taking out a loan on that PA system, I never would have had a chance. In fact, I’d probably have gone back to burglary. Maybe I’d still be in prison today. But I didn’t think about them. I was young, I was loaded most of the time, and my ego was already starting to rule the world. Besides, I might have been rich, but I didn’t have much ready cash. All I did was call Patrick Meehan’s office and put in my requests, which was different to having your own dough to throw around. In fact, the only time I made any real money was when I realised I could just sell the stuff that the management company gave me, which I did one time with a Rolls-Royce. The others soon learned the same trick too. But how was I supposed to explain that to my folks, when they just saw me swaggering around the place like Jack the Lad? It’s not like I gave them nothing, but I know now that I never gave them enough. You could tell from the atmosphere every time I walked through the door at 14 Lodge Road. I’d ask my mum, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, nothing.’

‘Well, it’s obviously something. Just tell me.’

She wouldn’t say, but you could smell it in the air: money, money, money. Nothing but money. Not: ‘I’m proud of you, son. Well done, you finally made it, you worked hard. Have a cup of tea. I love you.’ Just money. It got really ugly after a while. I didn’t want to be at home; it was so uncomfortable. I suppose they’d never had any money of their own, and they wanted mine. Which was fair enough. I should have given it to them.

But I didn’t.

I met a girl and moved out instead.