Hell Yeah Ozzy Belongs in the Rock Hall of Fame!
My fun ride on the "Crazy Train" with the lovable Prince of Darkness
There’s many reasons why I call it “my weird life.”
This lifelong rock’n’roll guy is not much of a fan of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, to put it mildly (a rant likely to come in a future missive). But the induction of Ozzy Osbourne into it utterly delights me.
This might surprise many of my regular readers, as he’s stylistically parsecs removed from the music I tend to like and champion. Some of you might also find it odd that the reason why is that I worked doing publicity for Ozzy. And enjoyed doing it as well as knowing him immensely.
It was late 1983 when I was hired on as the East Coast Office for the LA-based music PR shop Jensen Communications. Among their clients was Ozzy, who firm honcho Michael Jensen had already hooked me up to interview him twice as a journalist.
I first met Osbourne as he opened the door to the Arden condo at the Helmsley Palace in midtown Manhattan, a palatial space owned by his wife/manager Sharon’s notorious music mogul father with two-story windows along two sides of the huge open main room on the corner of the ritzy hotel. Ozzy was dressed in medical scrubs that I assumed were from his recent stint in rehab for alcohol and drug abuse. The contradiction between the setting and the scruffy hard rocker was massive yet humorously wonderful.
He was immediately warm and welcoming. As we headed to a couch and chairs in the middle of the room, his gait was unsteady and both his arms were shaking, I assumed from the DTs. As he struggled to take a cigarette from its pack and went to light it, tremors shook his arms and hands. It felt painful to watch; the first time I wondered if he’d even get the cig lit. Yet he succeeded in doing it time and time again throughout our hour together as if it was totally normal. I was impressed.
What won me over was his honesty and sense of humor about everything, even his huge foibles. One tale he told was how started drinking one day in London, “and came out of my blackout three days later in Gernany, and had no fooking idea how the fook I got there,” he said in his British Brummie accent, chuckling at it all. By the end of the hour, I was thoroughly charmed. He was anything but the minion of Satan some imagined him to be.
Ozzy’s recouning of the notorous yet legend-building incident where he bit the head off of a dove was similarly winning. As he explained, it was Sharon’s idea to bring two doves stowed under his coat to a meeting with execs from Epic Records, his label, in a conference room at their LA offices. The plan was to release them into the room at a key moment to celebrate their working union.
But as Osbourne explained to me, “It was this board meeting and I was just so fooking bored. So I pulled one of the doves out and bit off its head.” An act of pure id inspiration. Sharon screamed, “You didn’t!!” jumped up to run out of the room, opened a door and wound up in a closet.
You can’t make this shit up. Nor resist laughing, even if one feels sad for the poor dove.
The first show I covered as his publicist on his tour backing his Bark at the Moon album was at Philadelphia’s Spectrum arena. Afterwards, there was a knock on my hotel room door at the Four Seasons (y’know, the one where Rudy Ghouliani thought he was holding his press conference). I opened it, and there was Osbourne, who managed to slip away from his bodyguard. (“The reason Ozzy has a bodyguard is to protect himself from from his body,” Jensen once noted.)
“Got anything to drink?” he asked as he shuffled towards the minibar.
“Ozzy. Get away from the minibar!” He stopped, not giving me any star of the show attitude, insisting that he could do whatever he wanted. Instead he shrugged and plopped into a chair. We chatted for a bit and then he wandered off to another room in search of booze.
During the months I worked on the tour, I regularly dealt with Sharon, who’s become a media personality in her own right as well. She was firm but fair, with, like Ozzy – of whom she was very protective – a robust sense of humor and irony. Sharon has proven herself to be something of a marketing genius with the Ozzfest tours and festivals. And, of course, the hit family reality TV show, “The Osbournes.”
I like to quip that I was an occassional secondary walk-on star on “The Osbournes: The Prequel.” People of all ages and stripes are almost always impressed when I mention that I worked with the Blizzard of Oz. His fame has gone far beyond the rock world, in which he has sold some 100 million albums and won five Grammy Awards.
The Ozzy I knew was a sweet, rather witty and clever bloke, eminently lovable, super friendly and as bereft of pretensions as any of the many hundreds of rockers I’ve met. Superstardom hasn’t seemed to change him one bit. Like Popeye, he simply is who he is.
Doing PR for him was genuinely fun for a number of reasons. I’d set up phone interviews with local daily and weekly paper music journalists in advance of his shows. They’d often call me afterwards to rave about what a great interview he was, what fun he was to talk to.
All I could say was, yeah, I know….
Then there were the calls I’d get from Jensen every few weeks. “You wouldn’t believe what Ozzy did last night. It’s all over the wire services.” By simply being Ozzy he was a one-man publicity juggernaut.
To me his life story epitomizes the redemption rock’n’roll offers. If it hadn’t been for the music, he might well have spent decades toiling in a slaughterhouse as he did before his singing career started with Black Sabbath, the seminal hard rock group that later canned him. Hence I love the typically Ozzy comment on his HOF induction: “Not bad for a guy who was fired from his last band.”