Down To Earth With Ozzy, Part 1
Flashing back on my very first interview with Ozzy Osbourne
Greetings, Jagged Time Lapsers!
As mentioned in my previous post about the late, great Ozzy Osbourne, I had the pleasure (and sometimes frustration) of interviewing the heavy metal icon many times between 2001 and 2018, and the sad news of his recent passing has inspired me to dust off some full transcripts of our chats and share them with my paid subscribers. And we may as well start with my very first conversation with the self-proclaimed “Prince of Fucking Darkness,” which has never been published anywhere in its entirety.
As I explained nearly three years ago upon first launching this Substack, I’ve accumulated a wealth of stories, interviews and experiences in my many decades as a music journalist, and I initially conceived Jagged Time Lapse as a place where I could put them all down for folks to read. The JTL archives currently house the highly entertaining interviews I’ve done over the years with such disparate musical luminaries as (but not limited to) Lemmy, Angus Young, Noddy Holder, Sergio Mendes, Ernie Isley, Esquivel, Rob Halford, Cheech Marin, Eddie Money and (especially relevant to this post) Black Sabbath, all of which initially ran in truncated forms in various publications. And for just five bucks a month — or a mere $4.17 if you shell out for an annual JTL subscription — you can read them all, as well as enjoy full access to the monthly episodes of the CROSSED CHANNELS podcast I’ve been doing with my friend and fellow music journalist Tony Fletcher.
And if that’s not enough to tempt your wallet hand, I’ve also been sharing chapters from my still-in-progress musical memoir with my paid subscribers. I don’t yet have a title for the book, but the concept is similar to what my friend and colleague Josh Wilker did with his wonderful Cardboard Gods. Except where Josh used baseball cards from the 1970s as a means to make sense of his past, I’m using 45 rpm singles as a series of windows into my turbulent adolescence. All the previous chapters I’ve written for the book — like the one about the lone “rehearsal” of my very first band, or the one about how the film Grease mirrored my hellish entry to junior high, or the one about getting high for the first time to the sound of Foghat Live — can be found in the Jagged Time Lapse archive, which of course also contains hundreds of free reads on my wide variety of musical obsessions.
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And now, on to our main program…
I first met Ozzy Osbourne on a brutally hot late August day in 2001, in the lounge of Scream Studios, a small recording and rehearsal facility located on a busy and rather un-scenic stretch of Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, California. I was there to interview him for the above issue of Guitar World, a mag to which I’d been steadily contributing for about a year, and maybe even hear a few snippets of Down to Earth, the new solo album he was mixing at Scream with producer Tim Palmer.
I was also, I don’t mind admitting, incredibly nervous. I’d been a professional journalist for eight years, and had enough experience by this point to feel confident walking into just about any interview situation. But this was fucking OZZY — the man, the myth, the pigeon-chomping legend. And even though it had taken me until college to fully appreciate the brilliance of Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s solo work, he’d nonetheless still been a constant presence on radio, TV and in music mags during my teen years. In his own way, Ozzy occupied the same kind of rarified pop cultural air as other such first-name-basis music icons as Prince, Bruce, Madonna and Cher, and I felt just as rattled as if I were preparing for a sit-down with one of them.
But while I could barely croak out a nervous “Hello” to Ozzy when he first entered the studio lounge resplendent in a black track suit and what looked like about 10 pounds of jewelry, it quickly became apparent that I had nothing to worry about. Ozzy was very much a regular bloke, a sincere straight-shooter, and he was also in an incredibly convivial mood due to his excitement over Down to Earth, his first studio album in six years. As I wrote in my “In Memoriam” piece for FLOOD, he was so thrilled with the just-completed mix of “Dreamer” — the ballad that would serve as the album’s second single — that he almost immediately paused our interview in order to pull me into the studio and play it (along with a few other new songs) for me.
He pulled out a chair for me in front of the mixing desk, then stood behind me with his hands gripping my shoulders. “We won’t let this one get away,” he chuckled evilly, before instructing Tim Palmer, his producer, to crank the playback volume high. My mind already quite blown by the sight of his “Ozzy”-tattooed knuckles resting inches from my chin, I braced myself for what I was sure would be a metallic onslaught, only to be completely caught off guard by a lovely, piano-based ballad that bore more than a slight trace of John Lennon. “It’s like ‘Ozzy’s ‘Imagine,’” he said quietly as the song finished—a remark which came off not as a boast, but rather a humble expression of wonder that he, the Prince of Fuckin’ Darkness himself, could have been part of something so pleasingly melodious.
Once we resumed our interview, Ozzy happily held forth about everything from the new album — on which his once-and-future lead guitarist Zakk Wylde had replaced Joe Holmes between the writing and recording segments — to his songwriting process, his drinking, his reputation for being a madman, his upcoming tour with Rob Zombie, his struggles to make sense of the younger bands on Ozzfest (I’d just recently seen him perform with his Black Sabbath mates at the festival’s Toronto date) and his place in the modern metal playing field, while also dropping hints about “a Real World thing” his family about by MTV, but which had yet to be finalized. It was an entertaining and often quite hilarious chat, one far too long to fit into a single post; Parts 2 and 3 will follow over the next week or so. Enjoy!
From what you just played me, it seems like there’s a really interesting array of stuff on the new album.
You know, I like to make a “piece of work,” more than one track sounding like the next track. I always like to put a couple of mellow songs on there. There’s a really good variety on this album. My last studio album [Ozzmosis] was six years ago, and I’ve been doing the Ozzfest ever since then, you know? When I started the album, I just thought, “Where the fuck do I fit into today’s fucking world? Where does Ozzy Osbourne fit?”My wife said to me, “All you can do is be yourself.” I mean, I can’t do this fucking rap shit, or these [growls] “big Satan growling” voices. That’s not my thing.
[At this point, Ozzy suddenly removes a heavy gold necklace supporting six or seven crucifixes from around his neck, and drops it onto the formica table between us with a loud clatter.]
Hot today, innit?
Yeah, I think we both overdressed. So, how did you approach the songwriting for the new album?
Well, nowadays, with CDs, you have to write and record fuckin’ twenty tracks! I haven’t done twenty tracks for this… I don’t really know how many tracks I’ve done. It’s ten-plus, I know. Japan always wants an extra song. You know you can rent CDs in Japan? I fuckin’ hope they never do that here…