Last Rites, page 24
What a crazy summer that was, man. The moon landing. Woodstock. The Manson Family murders in LA. The Vietnam War still raging on the other side of the world. We were still called Earth, and still doing blues covers, but we’d already decided to rename ourselves Black Sabbath. I remember breaking the news about the new name in a postcard to my mum. I look like a kid in the band pictures we had taken. Tony, Geezer and Bill had the dodgy moustaches and leather jackets, and I’m all fresh-faced, wearing a raggedy old jumper and sandals.
There are a few tapes of those shows knocking around out there somewhere. We’d play things like ‘Early One Morning’ by Little Richard. It’s weird, ’cos we sound like Black Sabbath doing a Little Richard cover. We also did these long jams that were the beginnings of songs like ‘N.I.B.’ and ‘War Pigs’.
Meanwhile, Hamburg in those days was what a real Sin City looks like. Dodgy porno shops. Peep shows. The smell of the sweat and the smoke. And that gated cobbled backstreet where the hookers would pose behind steamed-up shop windows under red lights.
I’m glad we did it, but it was also one of things where you’re like, never again. We’d start playing at noon and end at two in the morning. Sometimes we’d play seven sets a day between the visiting bands. We were absolutely fucking knackered. I’m pretty sure we ended up playing more gigs there than The Beatles did. We’d take anything we could to stay awake. Booze. Speed. A shitload of dope. Then, at the end of every night, we’d crash out in some flea-infested hotel around the corner.
There’s no better way to get tighter as a band, though. You learn how to read each other. How many drinks you can have before you forget how to keep time. How to get the crowd going when they’re bored. Whenever the punters were getting restless, Tony would shout over to me, ‘Ozzy! Go and organise a raffle!’ But the best thing about the residency was earning a regular wage, which until then we’d only ever dreamed about.
If there’s one song on Patient Number 9 that takes me back to our Star-Club days, it’s ‘Darkside Blues’. For most of the early pandemic, I’d be walking around the house singing this one Muddy Waters-type line, over and over, until eventually Jack was like, ‘Dad, how many more times are you gonna sing that? Can’t you turn it into a song already?’ So I did. I even play harmonica on it. If anyone wants to know what Sabbath would have sounded like if we’d stayed as Earth and made a blues album… that’s as close as you’re ever gonna get.
I was almost excited to get my first corrective surgery in September. Anything to reduce the pain, get me walking again. So off I went down to Dr Bray’s medical building in Marina del Rey, hoping for a new start. It was night and day compared with my first operation. There was no extended stay in the ICU. No catheter. No hallucinations of Elvis. I don’t remember how long I was under for, but it was nothing like the five hours I spent with Dr No Socks. Dr Bray just went in there, removed the screws, removed the plates, sucked out the bone debris, made whatever adjustments he needed to make, and closed me back up again. Easy.
But there was no good news at the end of it.
Although my neck was now in much better shape – and would improve with physical therapy – there was still a lot more work to do to fix the vertebrae below my skull. Also, my old quad bike accident was starting to fuck me up in ways that weren’t related to my fall two years earlier. Further down my back, said Dr Bray, I had two vertebrae where the quad bike hit me that had now basically disintegrated.
The bottom line was, I was gonna need at least two more corrective surgeries. And they weren’t gonna happen quickly. Everyone had delayed their treatments during the pandemic, so it was almost impossible to book an operating room for anything that wasn’t life or death. Realistically, I was looking at a couple of years before all the work was done.
It was a heavy blow to take, especially when I was still all banged up from the surgery.
But… at least it was a plan.
What I didn’t know, of course – and I’m glad I didn’t – was that each surgery would wipe out all the physical therapy gains from the previous one. Meaning I’d be starting over again each time. And of course I wasn’t getting any younger, and my Parkinson’s was progressing, which would make it even harder to bounce back. The one thing I did know for sure was that I wouldn’t be playing any gigs any time soon. Not that it mattered. The world was a long way from getting back to normal. Covid restrictions were still in place for large crowds. And flying overseas was a big risk, ’cos if you got the virus there, you were stuck. So in November we postponed the European tour by one more year.
The shows were now set for May 2023.
There wouldn’t be any more postponements, I’d already decided. If we couldn’t make the gigs happen then, it was time to bow out. But I still had hope.
Not a lot of hope, to be honest with you. And it was fading by the day. But if there was still even a tiny chance I could do the gigs, I wasn’t gonna give up.
The only thing I had to look forward to over Christmas was The Beatles: Get Back, the documentary by the Lord of the Rings guy Peter Jackson. As a fan, I couldn’t wait to see all the unfiltered, behind-the-scenes footage of John, Paul, Ringo and George making the Let It Be album. After all my ups and downs with Sabbath over the years, I was expecting to find it reassuring to know The Beatles had to deal with the same shit. Especially when Yoko Ono started sitting in on their recording sessions.
All I can say is… what a disappointment. It just didn’t seem like the real thing to me. You’re not seriously telling me that in the sixty hours of footage the director had, they were all happy and friendly? If we’d had someone in Sabbath say, ‘Okay, my girlfriend’s gonna be here from now on,’ there’d have been blood on the studio floor. I thought it was gonna be one of those fly-on-the-wall things. But the fly on the wall must have been deaf and blind, ’cos it didn’t see or hear anything interesting at all.
My mood didn’t get much better as 2022 arrived.
It was gonna be a big year for me, in many ways. The fortieth anniversary of the bat thing. Of Randy and Rachel’s deaths. Not that I wanted to be stuck at home, thinking about the past. Fuck that. I’ve never been one to look back, me. I’ve always been about the next big thing. But there were times when the only big thing in front of me seemed to be a headstone with my name on it. It pissed me off. I wanted to fight it. But there’s only so much fighting you can do when your body’s failing.
Then out of nowhere came a phone call.
I don’t know who it was exactly who reached out to Sharon, but they worked for Prince Charles, as he was then. He’d become king just a few months later.
They wanted to talk about the upcoming Commonwealth Games, which Prince Charles would be opening. He’s also the patron of the whole games organisation, I’ve since learned. Now, I didn’t know it at the time, ’cos I’d been so out of it with my injury and recovery, but the 2022 games were being held in Birmingham. The main venue would be Alexander Stadium, which is in Perry Barr, right next to where my old school used to be. They were even expanding the stadium’s seating for the occasion, so it would fit thirty thousand people, double the usual capacity.
Sharon was buzzing when she got off the phone. It was gonna be the biggest games in the history of the Commonwealth, she said. They were spending eight hundred million quid on it. Seventy-two countries were taking part. Five thousand athletes. Meanwhile, a million tickets had already been sold for the main stadium and the other venues around the city. It was a huge deal, she said. Up there with the Olympics.
But I was confused. ‘So why are they calling us?’ I asked. ‘I ain’t gonna be doing the hundred metres any time soon. I suppose I could cut a ribbon…’
‘Actually…’ said Sharon. Then she stopped. She suddenly looked upset. Like she had bad news and good news at the same time. She had to take a breath and wipe away a tear. I was starting to get freaked out.
‘What?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong? What happened?’
‘They wanted to know…’ she continued, pulling herself together, ‘if you’d be interested… in performing at the games. With Black Sabbath.’
‘Like… at the opening or something?’
‘No.’
‘So… what? A side event?’
‘At the closing ceremony.’ Sharon was fully in tears now. ‘The final act. As the fireworks go off. In your home town, Ozzy. Literally a few streets away from where you went to school. They’re asking if you’d do “Paranoid”.’
‘Fuck… me.’ Now I was tearing up too. And grinning so hard my face hurt.
‘The eighth of August is the date,’ said Sharon. ‘BUT, Ozzy—’
I didn’t hear anything else she said. I was away with the fairies, thinking about Aston… thinking about how I’d break the news to Tony, Geezer and Bill… thinking about Prince Charles. I’ve met Prince Charles loads of times. Every time I see him, we have a right old laugh. He’s a great guy. After my quad bike accident, he sent me a bottle of Scotch, which was very nice of him. The only problem was, Sharon confiscated it before I could get my hands on it. It went to the ‘loft of no return’ where Sharon hides all the things she wants to keep but doesn’t want me to see.
When I was growing up, if I’d have told anyone the future king of England would be sending me booze in the post, they’d have put me in a room with rubber walls.
When I was born, it was Charles’s grandfather who was king, George VI. I was too young to remember his reign. But my very first memory, funnily enough, is of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth. I must have been four.
The only reason I remember it is ’cos my dad dressed up like his hero Al Jolson, including putting that awful black make-up all over his face. Just writing that down sounds absolutely horrendous, but this was 1953. It was the kind of Victorian music hall shit they’d grown up with – although even by then, people were starting to realise how fucked up it was.
As a four-year-old, all I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with it. I cried and screamed and wouldn’t let my sisters get one speck of that stuff on my face.
The thing I was most excited about after getting the call from the games was just going home. It had been eight or nine years since I’d been back to England, never mind Birmingham. But my home town had been on my mind since my fall, especially during all the months when I was laid up.
In the old days, when I was living in Staffordshire, then Buckinghamshire, I’d jump in the car and drive back to Aston whenever I had any kind of major freak out. Even if it was four o’clock in the morning. I’d park my Range Rover on Lodge Road and sit there for thirty minutes, thinking back to the days when I was young and hungry. And I mean literally hungry. We had a saying in our house – first up, best fed. School dinners were an absolute lifesaver for me. A lot of the other kids wouldn’t touch the food they served. I’d be having triple servings of lukewarm mashed potatoes and lumps of rock-hard mystery meat.
It’s still there, amazingly, 14 Lodge Road. Last time I went back, I realised just how tiny that house was. You could see where I’d carved ‘IRON VOID’ into a brick by the front step. I must have been fifteen when I did that. I thought it would be a cool name for a band. You could also still see the nails they put in the wall to hang the bunting for the Coronation.
It’s funny how the most random things take you back. The smell of candyfloss, for example. One sniff of that and I’m at the old Aston Onion Fair, which they used to hold every year at the Serpentine Grounds, before they built a seven-lane motorway on top of it. I’m told the fair got its name from when they really did sell onions there. People would come from as far as France to set up stalls. Then it became a proper Victorian carnival. Famous boxers had big fights there. They had travelling exhibitions of lions and tigers, and sideshow attractions – like the world’s ugliest woman, or the horse with two heads. But by the time I was a kid, it had turned into more of a funfair. They had shooting games. Ring tossing. But it was the dodgems and waltzers I loved the most.
Then suddenly it was just gone, all of it bulldozed to make way for the Aston Expressway. Although they did put a curve in the road to save the Ansells brewery. And they put a pipeline over the top to carry vinegar between different parts of the HP Sauce factory. They shouldn’t have bothered, mind you – both Ansells and HP are long gone now.
The smell of old houses also brings a lot of memories back. When I was a kid, there were still a lot of old Victorian mansions in Aston that had been hit during the Birmingham Blitz. They were bomb sites, basically. But they weren’t bomb sites as far as me and my mate Patrick Murphy were concerned. They were playgrounds.
We’d smash the windows, start fires, knock holes in the walls, take up the floorboards.
The thing that sticks in my mind is that all the windows were painted black. They did that for the blackouts instead of hanging curtains. You never wanted any light to get out, ’cos it would give the German pilots something to aim at. Our imaginations ran wild in those houses. But I shudder to think how dangerous they must have been, not to mention all the toxic shit we must have been breathing.
It’s crazy to think what it must have been like to live in the Midlands during the nearly three years of the Blitz. Fire and death rained on you every night. Not knowing if you’d wake up the next morning. Or which of your neighbours’ bodies you’d be pulling out of the rubble. And still going to work at the factory every day, churning out more Spitfires, tanks and guns. Whenever it seems like things are getting out of hand in this world, I think about that, and it helps keep things in perspective.
‘Yes!’ I said to Sharon. ‘Call ’em back and say yes! The closing ceremony? Of the Commonwealth Games? That’s amazing! Will it be on the telly? Can we do “Iron Man”, too? I need to call Tony. I can’t wait to get back there—’
‘OZZY! Ozzy…’
I didn’t understand why Sharon looked so down. I thought she’d be excited.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said. ‘I can do it, can’t I? I’ll just have to sit down when I sing…’
‘It’s Dr Bray,’ she said.
‘What about him?’
‘I already talked to him. He needs to do another surgery. In the middle of June. That’s as fast as he can get you into the operating room. It’s a big one. The surgery that will decide your quality of life from here on.’
‘But the show’s in August.’
‘You’d only have seven weeks. Seven weeks to make a full recovery.’
‘That’s enough… right?’
‘Ozzy – it’s major spinal surgery. He’s going to be fixing vertebrae all the way to your middle back. You’re going to be bedridden for a long time. You’ll be starting physical therapy from scratch. We don’t know if you’ll end up in the ICU again. How bad the swelling will be. How long it’ll take before you can even do physical therapy. There are so many unknowns, Ozzy. You know that. You’ve lived it for the last three and a half fucking years. We all have. And you’d be telling Prince Charles and everyone at the games, yes, you can do it, even though you know deep down there’s a very good chance you won’t be ready. And it’s not just the performance, Ozzy. It’s the eleven-hour flight. The jet lag. The long drive. The hotel…’
She had to stop, she was getting too emotional again.
I was feeling pretty emotional myself.
Sharon was right.
I felt like I was sinking to the bottom of an ocean of shit.
I was gonna have to turn down what would have been one of the greatest gigs of my life.
13
Good as It Gets
I’d hit rock bottom a few times in my life, but always from booze and drugs.
In June of 2022, I hit rock bottom from spinal surgery and Parkinson’s.
It started in April when I finally got Covid. Fortunately, I’d been shot up with about a gallon of vaccines by then, ’cos like I said before, my Parkinson’s makes me a high-risk case. Sharon freaked out when I lost my sense of smell and started to sniffle, fearing the worst. But I was fine. I didn’t get pneumonia. It just felt like a really bad cold that dragged on a bit.
But as always with me now, there was a domino effect.
Because I was in bed for so long, I started getting blood clots. If you’ve got a queasy stomach, you might wanna jump ahead. Basically, a haematology guy had to cut a hole in my groin, find a thick vein and stick a catheter in there. Then he inserted a folded-up filter thing into the catheter and pushed it up into the vein. Once it was in, it opened up like an umbrella. It’s like I’ve got a little tea strainer next to my left bollock, basically. It lets your blood flow but catches the clots before they travel to your heart. When the clots are caught, meanwhile, they just break down naturally. Or the doc goes in there and removes ’em manually.
But of course the whole thing was a shitshow, ’cos halfway through the procedure, a rogue clot ended up in my stomach. So all these nurses were running around, pumping me full of anticoagulants – blood thinners – as about ten different klaxons went off. The side effects were absolutely horrific. Pissing blood. Bleeding gums. Nosebleeds. Bruising.
But at least when it was all over I could relax.
Yeah, fucking right.
The second I’d recovered, I was getting wheeled into an operating room for my second corrective surgery with Dr Bray. This was the BIG ONE. Half of my backbone was gonna be under construction. They were gonna need traffic cones, hard hats and pneumatic drills. I was nervous this time. Part of me expected to wake up in the ICU. Or not wake up at all. Even if it went well, I knew it was gonna be a long, hard road back. And I was tired, man. I was seventy-three. I was officially too old for this shit.
To say I was a wreck when I came out would be putting it mildly.
I felt like I’d been shat up a wall. Nothing worked. Not my arm. Not my legs. My neck was better without the screws, but it was still fucked.
