The Lurchworld Blog

This is a man who needs no introduction, although I’ll give a short one for the youngsters. Ozzy Osbourne is the superstar of rock ‘n’ roll who put heavy metal on the radar in pop culture starting with Black Sabbath way back in the early seventies with the novel idea to write “scary music.” Their blues influences and the direction of their peers in England lead to a sound that spells doom, gloom and many decibels of hard guitar licks and thundering drums. Ozzy Osbourne is not a traditional musician and his upbringing in society came after the shock of a nation subjected to a world war. It was bleak to say the least, but that didn’t stop Ozzy in his journey through music ingesting every drug known to mankind, shagging the hottest women all around the world and earning his legend in the annals of rock ‘n’ roll. What’s even more impressive is how he survived it to write this book, ghost written by Chris Ayres to translate Ozzy’s life story into literary form. Ozzy is a man I’ve admired for as long as I can remember when I discovered rock music, and being able to know what brought him to where he is makes for a great read.

Ozzy’s life begins in Aston, England where he grew up within a working class family. He had great difficulty getting through his studies due to his dyslexia, not commonly diagnosed back then, while fulfilling the role of the class clown. Ozzy’s escapades and difficulty with authority start to show, culminating in his early life with his three-month prison sentence. It leads to a series of suffering moments in his life, but that’s where the great music comes from with Ozzy. He’s suffered in his life and it shows in his music, and his courage to live life to the fullest as a rock star. He could have just as easily gone back to prison, or kept his job at the car horn tuning factory and lose his hearing to endless conveyor belts of car horns instead to stacks of Marshall amplifiers and massive P.A. systems. His incredible luck of getting big with Black Sabbath and a successful solo career is juxtaposed with the hopeless situation he had to deal with growing up, and the craziness of it all coming from his meager surroundings, make Ozzy’s life very unique. Ozzy definitely has something wrong with him but it doesn’t affect his desire to make music, to have a career and a family no matter how dysfunctional. Later in the book, Ozzy has trouble with physical tremors and learns he suffers from a rare genetic disorder, the result of his two parents having the same damaged chromosome. The odds against Ozzy during his rise to fame were staggering, but he persevered and even lived through it.

While growing up as a teenager, Ozzy is inspired by the Beatles hitting it big with Beatlemania. John, Paul, George and Ringo were all middle class boys out of Liverpool who went on to rock the world, and Ozzy wanted the same fame and fortune. He met Tony, Geezer and Bill to form a band that gelled and filled a niche. With Tony’s searing guitar leads, Geezer’s scary lyrics and bass lines, and Bill’s precision percussion they made the band that influenced an entire generation of rockers and more. Nobody played music like Black Sabbath at the time, their signature song based on a forbidden chord arrangement banned by the Catholic Church in medieval times as the devil’s music. My favorite Black Sabbath song, “Paranoid”, was written as a filler track and became a punk song in a time before punk rock. Ozzy goes on to describe the accelerating rate of good fortune and his reaction. Immediately after marrying his first wife Thelma, Ozzy takes a liking to big English country houses, all the liquor and drugs from the Foof and Drug Administration that he wanted (allegedly), and big noisy shotguns. This fascination with firearms leads to some nights of raging drunken gunfights with a teddy bear, or a coup of chickens. The pressures of being the frontman for Black Sabbath wears on Ozzy beyond the first five albums the band produced. Taking the music in new directions Ozzy didn’t like, the eventual split between Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath happened with many legal battles following. The divorce of Ozzy and his spouse Thelma leads to more emotional turmoil, which leads to more drug addiction and cocaine fueling drinking binges. But somehow Ozzy makes it work in his career, putting his craziness on gold and platinum selling records. The success of his solo career is largely thanks to the second wife Sharon. You may know her from “America’s Got Talent” as one of the judges. She’s made her name in show business from her management of Ozzy’s musical career. Ozzy is lucky to have her and he knows it. Some of the things he’s done to her were downright despicable. The book describes the domestic abuse, or at least Ozzy’s hazy recollection of the consequences, with shocking honesty. Ozzy’s father-in-law Don Arden makes life hell for the rock ‘n’ roll couple as well, saying awful things behind each other’s backs and open confrontations with insults on the street. Also there’s the time a teenager killed himself and his parents blamed one of Ozzy’s songs as responsible the death. Ozzy’s life is filled with insanity, but he lives with it, breathes it, eats it, loves it and lives his life on the edge. It’s an extraordinary life lived under bizarre circumstances. It even evolves into revolutionary television with “The Osbournes” on MTV, setting off a wave of reality shows that continue to impact society and culture today. There’s plenty of adventure in “I Am Ozzy”, and it contains more craziness than I can describe.

“I Am Ozzy” chronicles the life of one of the most accomplished people in the music industry. Ozzy’s antics and excesses are the epitome of rock ‘n’ roll. His life is marked by many tragedies, along with being an alcoholic wreck, getting on the wagon, and falling off the wagon again. His autobiography gives psychological insight into a man who earned everything he wanted doing what he loved, even if he didn’t always know how he was going to survive the next tour, or the next recording session. Ozzy is not the crazed bat-biting madman his stage persona or media reputation makes him out to be. He has a family to support throughout his entire career, and this is where Ozzy’s life becomes insightful. How much do you love rock ‘n’ roll, you’re willing to sacrifice the important moments in a child’s life touring around the world playing that music? It’s had a definite impact on Ozzy’s life raising his kids Elliot, Jessica and Louis from his first wife Thelma and Aimee, Kelly and Jack from his current wife Sharon. Ozzy is flawed and he has his regrets over what he did to that poor bat and other creatures. His imperfections make for a very entertaining book, a satisfying read for anybody even remotely interested in rock ‘n’ roll.