Black Sabbath was not a silly band, nor were any of Ozzy Osbourne’s solo releases particularly playful. But the singer, who died on July 22 at 76, proved to be a surprisingly, compellingly ridiculous presence in front of the camera as the subject, along with his family, of the MTV reality show The Osbournes. In the early aughts, seemingly the whole world tuned in to see the Prince of Darkness bumble through domestic life with his wife, Sharon, and children Kelly and Jack. The show, one of the first of its kind, made Osbourne more famous than his music career ever had and was a surreal legacy for the heavy-metal progenitor. Osbourne discusses the end of his music career in his upcoming memoir, Last Rites, which will be released in the fall. In his 2009 memoir, I Am Ozzy, he reflected on The Osbournes’s bizarre beginnings and how its popularity somehow led to an invitation to the White House.
Our first big mistake was letting them do all the filming at our real house. Most of the time on telly, everything’s recorded in a studio, then they cut to stock footage of a street or a bar or whatever to make you think that’s where the scene’s being shot. But no one had done a show like The Osbournes before, so MTV just made it up as they went along.
First they set up an office in our garage — Fort Apache, I called it, ’cos it was like some military command post. They put all these video monitors in there, and little office cubicles, and this big workboard, where they kept track of everything we had planned for the days ahead. No one slept in Fort Apache, as far as I know. They just staggered the shifts so they had all these technicians and camera operators and producers coming in and out all the time. It was very impressive, the way MTV organised the logistics; those guys could invade a country, they’re so good.
And I have to admit, it was a laugh for a week or two. It was fun having all these new people around. And they were good guys — they became like family after a while. But then it was like, How much longer is this going to go on? I mean, if you’d have taken me aside after those first few weeks of filming in 2001 and told me that I’d still be doing it three years later, I’d have shot myself in the balls, just to get out of it. But I didn’t have a fucking clue.
None of us did.
In the early days, the production team’s life was made a lot easier because I had a very specific routine. Every morning, come what may, I’d get up, have a coffee, blend some juice, and go and work out in the gym for an hour. So all they had to do was put static cameras in those places and leave them running. But after a while these cameras started to appear all over the house, until I felt like I couldn’t get away from the things.
“Right, that’s it,” I said one day. “I need a bunker — a safety zone — or I’m gonna go out of my mind.”
So they taped off this room where I could go to scratch my balls, or pick a zit, or knock one out, without it ending up on the telly. I mean, you want reality only up to a point.
But then one day I was sitting in the safe room, smoking a joint and having a good old rummage under my ballsack, when I started to get this creepy feeling. At first I thought, The stress of this show’s driving me insane, ’cos I’m starting to get an attack of the old paranoia. But I searched the room anyway. And there in the corner, hidden under a pile of magazines, was a little spy-camera. I went apeshit about that. “What’s the point of having a safe room if there’s a fucking TV camera in it!” I yelled at them.
“Don’t worry, Ozzy, it’s not recording anything. It’s just so we know where you are.”
“Bollocks,” I said. “Get rid of it.”
“But how will we know where you are?” “If the door’s closed, that’s where I am!”
The show was broadcast for the first time on March 5, 2002 — a Tuesday night. By Wednesday morning, it was like I’d moved to another planet. One minute I was a dinosaur who’d been told to fuck off by Lollapalooza; the next I was strapped to a rocket and being blasted through the stratosphere at warp factor ten. I can honestly say that I never knew the power of telly until The Osbournes aired. When you’ve got a hit TV show in America, that’s as big as it gets, fame-wise. Bigger than being a movie star. Bigger than being a politician. And a lot bigger than being the ex-lead singer of Black Sabbath.
I can’t say that I ever sat down and watched any of the shows all the way through. But from the clips I saw, it was obvious that the production team had done a phenomenal job — especially when it came to editing down the thousands of hours of footage they must have had. Even the title sequence — Pat Boone doing a jazzy version of “Crazy Train” in that silky voice of his — was genius. I love it when people mess around with musical styles like that — it’s so clever. And the funny thing was we’d lived next door to Pat Boone for a while at Beverly Drive. He’s a lovely bloke, actually: a born-again Christian, but he never gave us a hard time.
We knew immediately that The Osbournes was big. But it took a few days for us to realise just how big. That weekend, for example, me and Sharon went down to Beverly Hills for a little walk around this market they have in the park, just like we often did. But literally the second I got out of the car, this girl turned around, screamed, then ran up to me with her mobile phone and went, “Ozzy! Ozzy! Can I take my picture with you?”
“Oh, sure,” I said.
But then all these other people turned around, then they screamed, which made even more people turn around, then they screamed. Within about three seconds, it seemed like thousands of people were screaming and wanted a fucking picture.
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Having the MTV crew trailing along behind didn’t exactly help matters, either.
It was terrifying, man. I mean, I ain’t complaining, ’cos The Osbournes had given me a completely new audience, but the whole thing felt like Beatlemania on LSD. I couldn’t believe it. And I certainly couldn’t understand it. I’d never been that famous before — not even close. So I fucked off back to England to get away from it. But the same thing happened there. The moment I got off the plane at Heathrow, there was this wall of flash-bulbs and thousands of people shouting and screaming and going, “Oi, Ozzy! Over ’ere! Gis a picture!”
Obviously, I was no longer famous for being a singer. I was famous for being that swearing bloke on the telly — which felt very strange, and not always in a good way.
I got a lot of flak for it, too. Some people said that I’d sold out ’cos I was on the telly. But that’s a load of bollocks, that is. The thing is, no one like me had done a reality show before. But I’ve always believed that you’ve got to move with the times. You’ve got to try and take things to the next level, or you’ll just get stuck in a rut. If you stay the same you might keep a few people happy — like the ones who think that any kind of change is a sell-out — but sooner or later, your career will be fucked. And a lot of people forget that in the beginning, The Osbournes was just an MTV experiment. No one expected it to blow up in the way it did. But it didn’t change me at all. When I was on the show, I never pretended to be anyone other than who I am. Even now when I’m doing ads on the telly, I’m not pretending to be anyone other than who I am. So how’s that selling out?
Mind you, there are things that happened on The Osbournes that I still can’t get my head around to this day. Like when Sharon got a call from Greta Van Susteren, one of the anchors at Fox News.
“I was wondering if you and Ozzy wanted to have dinner next week with the President of the United States,” she said.
“Is he in trouble again?” asked Sharon. Greta laughed. “Not that I know of, no.” “Thank God for that.”
“Will you come?”
“Of course we will. It would be an honour.”
When Sharon told me, I couldn’t believe it. I always thought I’d be on a “Wanted” poster on the Oval Office wall, not invited over for tea. “What does President Bush want to talk about, anyway?” I said. “Black Sabbath?”
“Don’t worry,” said Sharon, “it won’t be just the four of us. It’s the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Fox News has a table, so there’ll be plenty of other people there.”
“George Bush used to be the Governor of Texas, didn’t he?” I said.
“Yes?”
“Well, I pissed on that Alamo thing once. He’s gonna be cool with that, is he?”
“I’m sure he’s forgotten all about it, Ozzy. He used to like a drink or two himself, y’know.”
“He did?” “Oooh yeah.”
So off we went to Washington. The dinner was at the Hilton, where Ronald Reagan had been shot. It wasn’t long after 9/11, so I was feeling really paranoid about the security situation. Then, when we got there, it was pandemonium. They had about five thousand TV cameras outside, and just one little metal detector with a couple of guys manning it. I had to cling on to Greta’s jacket just to get through the crowd.
Meanwhile, my assistant Tony — who’s only a little fella — skipped over the rope and walked behind the metal detector without anyone even noticing. It was a joke, man. I could have smuggled a ballistic fucking missile into that place, and no one would have said a word.
Then the dinner started, and I started to have this horrendous panic attack. There I was, this half-baked rock star, in a room with all these Great Brains and the Leader of the Free World. What the fuck was I doing there? What did all these people want from me? The Osbournes had only been on air for about two months, and my brain was already struggling to process it all.
In the end, I just snapped. I couldn’t survive one more second in that place without being pissed out of my mind. So I grabbed a bottle of vino from one of the waiters, filled my wine glass, downed it, refilled it, downed it, refilled it, and carried on until the bottle was empty. Then I got another. Meanwhile, Sharon was glaring at me from the other end of the table. I ignored her. Not tonight, darling, I thought.
Then the First Lady walked into the room, with George W. Bush following her. And the first thing he said when he reached the podium was: “Laura and I are honoured to be here tonight. Thanks for the invitation. What a fantastic audience we have tonight: Washington power-brokers, celebrities, Hollywood stars … and Ossie Ozz-Burn!”
By that time I was well and truly blasted, so as soon as I heard my name, I jumped up on the table like a drunken arsehole and screamed, “Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!” It brought the fucking house down. But I was fucked, so I didn’t know when to stop. I just stayed up there, going, “Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!” until the whole room of eighteen hundred people went silent.
Bush looked at me. “Yeeeeeeeehhaaaaaa!!” I screamed again. Silence.
“Yeeeeee—”
“OK, Ozzy,” snapped Bush. On the tape, you can even hear him say, “This might have been a mistake.”
I finally climbed down from the table — actually, I think Greta might have pulled me down. Then Bush started to tell this joke about me: “The thing about Ozzy is he’s made a lot of big hit recordings: ‘Party With the Animals,’ ‘Face in Hell,’ ‘Bloodbath in Paradise’ …”
I was about to get back up on the table and tell him that none of those were big hits, but then he delivered the punchline.
“Ozzy,” he said, “Mom loves your stuff.” The whole room went crazy.
I don’t remember much after that.
