Batty About Each Other
The couple touring the Beverly Hills villa with a Realtor seem charmed by the decor of cheery, quasi-rustic ornaments complementing the luxurious baroque marble and burnished-gold color scheme. It’s a very warm, inviting environment.
After they leave, though, Sharon Osbourne, the house’s owner, confides that it isn’t an entirely accurate presentation of the house’s usual appearance.
“We had to hide his devil collection and all the big crosses,” she says of some items accumulated by her husband, John--known to the world as Ozzy. “The real estate agents said that they made some people uncomfortable and it would be harder to sell the house.”
The truth is, though, that some of Ozzy Osbourne’s fans might be uncomfortable with this spruced-up setting. Rather than Ozzy and Sharon--he the bat-biting rock ghoul, she his sharp and sharp-tongued manager--the atmosphere around the house on this afternoon is closer to the folksy image of Ozzie and Harriet.
The walls are not painted black, and there are no pentagrams in the tile. The devils and crosses would only slightly challenge the mix of down-home and upper-crust. In a sitting room, a tranquil aquarium displays fluorescent tropical fish. On a couch in the den are pillows bearing photos of some of the Osbournes’ five small dogs--a precious little brood skittering on the wooden kitchen floor.
It all seems at odds with the Osbournes’ public persona. Ozzy’s history of exploits and excesses dates back some 30 years to his Birmingham, England, band Black Sabbath and its ominous, working-class rock--remember the scene in the real 1988 rockumentary “The Decline of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years” with a pudgy, semi-coherent Ozzy struggling to cook some eggs?
But today, trim and relatively focused at 51, he stands as an enduring hero to several generations of rockers, with a worldwide total of 130 million album sales behind him, even if he’s still often portrayed as the ghoulish buffoon who bit the head off a bat during a concert. With Sharon marshaling it all, Ozzy has become the name and cartoonishly scary face of OZZfest, the highly successful hard-rock festival tour that is about to start its fourth full season. It includes a date Sept. 2 at the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion.
And Sharon has gained a reputation as a colorful, shrewd character herself. When she ended her brief stint managing the Smashing Pumpkins, led by the temperamental Billy Corgan, earlier this year, she released a statement attributing the decision to “health reasons--Billy Corgan was making me sick.”
Indeed, they’re the king and queen of heavy metal, and this is their palace.
Looking at the pair, one would assume that the decor reflects the taste of Sharon, who doesn’t seem at all out of place in this tony neighborhood, with her neatly cut hair and chic blue tunic. But it’s Ozzy--in leather pants, black T-shirt, yards of tattoos on his arms and half a dozen gothic crosses hanging on a chain around his neck--who without any prompting defends the lifestyle.
“People often seem disappointed that I don’t live like some horror film character,” he says, peering through deep blue sunglasses while sitting against one of the dog-tribute pillows. “But who would want to live like that? And we try to have as much normalcy for the kids as is possible.”
It seems almost unimaginable that the three Osbourne children--daughters Aimee and Kelly, 16 and 15, and son Jack, 14--could have much of a normal life. The parents talk freely of Ozzy’s long-term fight with addiction (he’s been sober for nine years now) and depression, and with near-amusement about the long years before that, filled with binges that make it seem incredible that he can even walk, let alone talk coherently.
But it’s not as if they want anyone, let alone their children, thinking they’re proud of the old behavior.
“I’m about to start writing a book, all these exploits,” he says. “The drugs, the alcohol, the wife abuse. There is a downside. You don’t think I’d go to bed at night and go, ‘[Expletive]! That’s great!’ ”
He raises his arms in mock triumph.
“I’d go to bed and wake up in the morning and not know what I’d done. I’d get the shakes. I haven’t got away scot-free. I’m on medication for alcoholism. I’m on anti-depression medication. My intention wasn’t to get up that morning, ‘I think I’ll score some coke, [have sex with] a couple of girls, get [messed] up, maybe kill somebody on the way home, get arrested.’ That’s not the way it is.”
Sharon Osbourne used to share in her husband’s excesses. She was raised in London in the music business, her father, Don Arden, having been a top concert promoter and then artist manager who worked with some pretty wild people, including Gene Vincent and Black Sabbath.
“I was taken into the business at 15,” says Sharon, 47. “That’s how things were done. If my dad had been a butcher, I’d be cutting lamb chops today.”
She was running her father’s Los Angeles office and managing guitarist Gary Moore in 1979 when Ozzy was fired by Sabbath. A member of Moore’s band gave Ozzy $500 that was supposed to go to Sharon, who went to his hotel in Los Angeles to collect.
“Of course, I spent the money on drugs,” Ozzy says. “So she shows up and says she is supposed to get the money, and I say, ‘I spent it.’ She says she’ll come back in three days and I’d better have it. I’d always fancied her and I thought, ‘Ah, she’s coming back! Maybe I have a chance.’ I had pizza hanging from my hair, cigarette ashes on my shirt.”
Sharon did come back, and as unlikely as it seems, that was the start of a business relationship-- with her signing on to manage him--and soon a romance. They married in 1982, not long after Randy Rhoads, a young, hotshot guitarist in Ozzy’s band, died when a small plane he was riding in crashed while buzzing the house where the band was staying in Florida during a tour.
In the beginning, Sharon was right next to Ozzy when it came to self-destruction.
“We’d both drink until we blacked out and wake up the next morning with black eyes and bruises--he’d hit me, I’d hit him,” she says. “And then one morning I woke up and said, ‘One of us has to be together enough to deal with the business.’ So I quit drinking that day.”
She not only managed Ozzy through a rekindling of his fortune, but also handled clients ranging from Lita Ford in the ‘80s to more recent acts Coal Chamber and the Pumpkins, gaining a reputation for being frank, tough, smart and personable. She credits her moxie to her business heritage and to being a woman in a man’s world.
She delights in telling of kicking a promoter in the groin in the early ‘80s when she felt he was cheating her on a concert payment. And she says her exit from the Smashing Pumpkins job came because Corgan wouldn’t take her advice. (The split led to a lawsuit by the Pumpkins claiming that Osbourne breached her contract; she countersued, and both actions are pending.
And Ozzy doesn’t get any breaks either. It’s clear from observing them that along with open affection, there’s also open head-butting, and Ozzy knows that Sharon’s watching his steps.
Recalls Ozzy, “One day I said to her, ‘What right do you have to tell me what to do? You can’t sing a [expletive] note.’ She said, ‘Maybe I can’t sing, but you can’t read a [expletive] contract.’ Oh, right. Action, reaction.”
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The Osbournes are moving to another part of Beverly Hills because this house proved too accessible to fans, who constantly hang around outside. Anyone who hasn’t really been paying attention, though, might assume that the couple are selling the house because they can’t afford it anymore.
To many, Ozzy’s long been the emblem of the washed-up rock casualty. Take an assessment in the 1992 edition of the “Rolling Stone Album Guide,” in which his album “No More Tears” is given the backhanded praise that it “briefly postpones the inevitable conclusion of Ozzy’s saga--extinction.”
Hardly. In fact, it was right about that time that a new generation of rockers--the grunge phalanx of such notables as Soundgarden and Alice in Chains--arrived, praising Sabbath and Osbourne as being among their biggest influences.
In the late ‘90s, the connection only got stronger. In 1996, a handful of dates on a 100-show Ozzy tour was expanded to include some top young hard-rock acts. Dubbed OZZfest, it was a huge success, including a 35,000-ticket concert at the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion. It quickly became a full tour; each of the last three years has ranked among the top-grossing North American tours, with average ticket sales of about 19,000 a show and a total box-office gross last year of nearly $20 million. It also gained an immediate reputation as a launching pad for star rock attractions.
Combine that with nearly another $20 million for last year’s Black Sabbath reunion for its first full tour in 20 years, and Osbourne ranked sixth among all concert attractions for 1999.
Record sales also maintained a strong pace through the ‘90s, and a lot of those ticket and album purchases are being made by kids who weren’t even born when Ozzy left Black Sabbath.
A lot of those ticket and album purchases are being made by kids who weren’t even born when Ozzy left Sabbath, a demographic that led modern-rock radio station KROQ-FM (106.7) to invite Osbourne to play at its recent Weenie Roast concert and sign on as the presenter of the L.A. area OZZfests. It’s not that the station plays Osbourne, but a recognition that such current KROQ staples as Rob Zombie, Limp Bizkit, Sevendust and Korn have toured with him.
“If nothing else, Ozzy’s presence on KROQ is there through the bands that he’s connected to,” says KROQ’s vice president of programming, Kevin Weatherly. “He’s not only had a second, third and fourth life, but is thriving now. It’s amazing what the franchise of OZZfest stands for. You know you’re going to be turned on to hot, new, up-and-coming bands from that genre. They’ve done an amazing job branding that event.”
Sharon Osbourne says the reason is simple: Kids relate to Ozzy.
“He’s one of them,” she says. “He’s working-class, not out of touch with the world. He still is on the streets.”
Ozzy, looking at his luxurious surroundings, interrupts. “You can hardly say we live on the street,” he says.
“But Ozzy,” Sharon counters, “we’re so much closer to the street than most people of that stature. We still go to clubs on the Strip every week. We don’t go to dinner with princes. He doesn’t arrive in a limo--a van picks him up at the hotel and takes him to the shows.”
Still, for all the success, both Sharon and Ozzy are miffed that interviewers still are often mostly interested in such long-ago incidents as the bat-bite (a fan threw one on stage and Ozzy, thinking it was a rubber toy, decapitated it with his teeth) and his 1982 arrest for urinating on the Alamo.
“It’s like there’s this whole perception that a head of a bat means more than 130 million albums,” Sharon says.
Ozzy is a bit more resigned to not getting recognition in some quarters. He thinks it’s a joke that Black Sabbath has turned up on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot for three years, scoffing that industry executives and journalists who vote will never accept the band as an important act.
“Not everyone’s gonna let you get on with things,” he says. “It’s not a perfect world. But you know what? I had a great [expletive] run. I go to the coffee shop and a woman comes up and says, ‘My son just loves you and it would be the greatest thing if you would sign this for him.’ That’s just an amazing feeling.”
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OZZfest, with Ozzy Osbourne, Pantera, Godsmack, Static-X, Incubus, Methods of Mayhem, others, Sept. 2 at Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion, 2575 Glen Helen Parkway, Devore, noon. $30.75 and$73.75. (909) 886-8742.