Iron Man (11 page)

It was a newly refurbished hotel, but Ozzy's fireworks had burned the carpets and damaged the walls. They made him pay for it big time, so he learned his lesson there.

Or maybe he didn't.

And he's still the same now, always mooning everybody. Even when we were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame and we played ‘Paranoid', Ozzy mooned the crowd. Well, the crowd – there weren't that many people there, but he didn't think they were enthusiastic enough so he decided to pull his pants down again.
You're playing to people in your business, so what do you expect? They're not going to jump up and shout and scream; they just sit there politely. And The Kinks were in the front. You don't expect them to leap up!

It didn't piss me off, though, it didn't bother us. We're used to seeing that.

I've seen Ozzy's arse more times than I've seen my own!

In January 1971 we flew to Adelaide to headline the Myponga Open Air Festival. We were lured into doing this by the promoter, who said: ‘Why don't you come and stay for a week's holiday? All expenses paid!'

Really great for us. We got there and he turned out to be a very generous host. He said to us: ‘While you're here: whatever you want.'

We wanted! Caviar and champagne, it was over the top. There were four limousines at our disposal and on top of that he gave each of us a brand new car. He said: ‘For you to use in case you want to drive anywhere yourselves and have a look around.'

The wrong thing to do. We decided to go down to the beach to have a race along the water's edge. One of the cars got stuck. I tried to tow it out and I got stuck.

‘Ah, fuck!'

Then the tide came in. As the water got closer, we started to
panic. We got these oars off this bloke's boat and we were trying to get them under the wheels. ‘Kchch!' Broke both his oars. No matter what we did, the cars couldn't be moved. We watched helplessly as, finally, the water covered both cars. I phoned the promoter up and told him what had happened. He took it in his stride and sent a truck to tow them out. Of course the cars were completely knackered.

In the run-up to the festival I did some radio interviews and at one of them I said: ‘Oh, we're very lonely, we could do with some women here.'

Live, on air. And what happened? Loads of girls turned up at the hotel. Me and Patrick Meehan ended up with this one girl in our room and then . . . she passed out.

Meehan went: ‘She's dead!'

Oh, fucking hell! I thought, Christ, she's dead. She's
dead
!

I could see the headlines: ‘Girl found dead in hotel room with two guys'. I just thought, they'll think it's us!

Meehan went: ‘We got to get rid of her! We got to get rid of her!'

His idea was to throw her off the balcony and say that she had fallen off it. We were really high up. The thought of it now is absolutely frightening, but in my panic I went along with it. We got her to the balcony, we were trying to pick her up and then . . . she came round.

‘Bloody hell, she's alive!'

She was probably high on drugs, but, we could quite easily have just tossed her off of there and I would have become a twenty-two-year-old murderer.

‘But your honour, she was dead already!'

I bet that girl doesn't even know what happened. I'll probably be arrested now. She will read this book and come out of the woodwork: ‘Yes, there he is!'

‘It was Meehan! It was Meehan!'

Such a shame, really. It was a big festival, everything there went great and the promoter looked after us like you wouldn't believe. We later heard he went bust.

I wonder why . . .

In February 1971 we started our second tour of America. It was great, also thanks to our friends from Mountain. They were a good band, they treated us well and they had plenty of drugs. I really liked their guitar player, Leslie West. Still do. I once said to him: ‘I really like the sound you're getting, I love the guitar.'

He looked and found me a Gibson that was the same as his. He came over to England and gave it to me. But it was stolen. You have a break for a while and your guitars go into storage somewhere. I had about four guitars go from storage once, and that was one of them. Leslie's guitar going: that broke my heart.

It was on this tour that we first stayed at the Los Angeles Hyatt, better known as the ‘Riot', where we met our first groupies. We didn't really know about that. In Europe the women weren't as forward as in America. As soon as we walked into reception at the Hyatt these girls came up to us, saying: ‘How are you? Are you from England?'

Before we knew it, everybody had a girl. We couldn't believe it. ‘Blimey! Is this what America is like?'

And then, later, you'd see them again, with somebody else. We were like: ‘So, that's what they call a groupie!'

In Seattle we stayed at the infamous Edgewater hotel, where you could fish out of the window. The hotel was built on stilts and leaned over the water. You could get a fishing line at reception, so that you could fish out of the window. And that's what we used to do. I don't know why really. Ozzy was fishing out of the window once and caught a shark, which he put in the bath while we did the gig. Of course it died, because the thing was as long as the bath and sharks have to move to breathe. Ozzy then proceeded to cut it up. Blood and shit were everywhere. He tried to . . . I don't know what he was doing.

Bill was below my room and he had his window open. I caught this shark, it dangled on my line and I swung it into Bill's room. He was very surprised. Not pleasantly, but very surprised! To have a bloody shark come flying through your window: ‘Ahhhh!'

He threw it out of the window back into the sea, but the room smelled of fish from then on. Actually, all the rooms smelled of fish. You couldn't wash the floor down or anything, it was all carpeted. I don't know what they expected their guests to do with the fish they caught.

Another time we tied the line to one of the standard lamps there. We left, came back later and the standard lamp was gone. Gone out the window! So we picked up the bill for that one.

During the last tour we did with Sabbath, when we were in Seattle me and Bill went down to the Edgewater again, just for old time's sake. They showed us around: there was a Zeppelin room and they were doing a Sabbath room as well.

In the early days there were only certain hotels that allowed bands in, because of the reputation that everybody had. But now we stay all the time at the Ritz-Carltons and Four Seasons, the top hotels. And at sixty-plus years old we don't throw televisions out of windows any more.

Can't pick 'em up now.

Paranoid
went to No. 1 in the UK album charts and, although it hadn't even been released in America yet, we did feel pressure when we had to come up with our next album,
Master of Reality
. Because once you've had a No. 1 album, where do you go? If you don't go to No. 1 again, you're not doing as good, so you've got to come up with songs that are going to make the next album at least equally as popular.

Management had us out on the road all the time, with weird schedules. Sometimes we did two shows a day, in different cities. We hardly had any breaks at all. Because of this, and because we didn't have any songs lying around from previous studio sessions, we went into a rehearsal room and started writing them. I'd come up with riffs and once we got started we came up with songs quite easily. Sometimes it was a bit of a struggle to get enough for an album, because you needed some time to think about them and live with them. And we didn't have that time. Especially after
Paranoid
. If we didn't have enough songs for an album, we'd have to write an extra song in the studio. We'd add little guitar bits to songs as well, to extend them a bit. I also liked to come up with some instrumental guitar tracks, like ‘Embryo', which serves as an
intro to ‘Children Of The Grave' on the
Master of Reality
album. It's a little classical thing to give it all a little space and create some light and shade. If you listen to an album or even a song from start to finish and it's all pounding away, you don't notice the heaviness of it because there is no light in between it. And that's why, sometimes in the middle of songs as well, I put a light part in, to make the riff sound heavy when it comes back in. ‘Orchid' served a similar purpose, leading into ‘Lord Of This World'. It was just me on acoustic guitar, a nice little bit of calm before the storm to make the dynamics pop out. At first everybody thought, hmm, that's a bit odd. But we liked doing stuff outside the box. We wouldn't think, you can't do that, you can't do acoustic stuff, you can't use orchestras, so we did much more than heavy stuff.

When we recorded
Master of Reality
in February and March 1971, I got quite involved in it and really started coming up with ideas. We did some stuff that we had never done before. On ‘Children Of The Grave', ‘Lord Of This World' and ‘Into The Void' we tuned down three semitones. It was part of an experiment: tuning down together for a bigger, heavier sound. Back then all the other bands had rhythm guitarists or keyboards, but we made do with guitar, bass guitar and drums, so we tried to make them sound as fat as possible. Tuning down just seemed to give more depth to it. I think I was the first one to do that.

We just weren't afraid to do something unexpected. Like ‘Solitude', maybe the first love song we ever recorded. Ozzy had a delay on his voice, and he sang that quite nice. He has a really good voice for ballads. I'm playing the flute on that song as well. I tried all sorts of things in the course of doing albums, even though I couldn't play them, and after being with Jethro Tull for that short stint, I thought I might try the flute. I did it only to a very amateurish extent, I must admit. But I've still got that flute.

We all played ‘Sweet Leaf ' while stoned, as at that time we were
doing a lot of dope. While I was recording an acoustic guitar bit for one of the other songs, Ozzy brought me a bloody big joint. He said: ‘Just have a toke on this one.'

I went: ‘No, no.'

But I did, and it bloody choked me. I coughed my head off, they taped that and we used it on the beginning of ‘Sweet Leaf'. How appropriate: coughing your way into a song about marijuana . . . and the finest vocal performance of my entire career!

‘Into The Void' is one of my favourite songs from that line-up; ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' is my other one. The structure of those songs is really good, because they have lots of different colours, there's lots of different stuff happening in them. ‘Into The Void' has this initial riff that changes tempos in the song. I like that. I like something with interesting parts in it.

For Ozzy getting Geezer's lyrics right wouldn't always be easy. He certainly struggled on ‘Into The Void'. It has this slow bit, but then the riff where Ozzy comes in is very fast. Ozzy had to sing really rapidly: ‘Rocket engines burning fuel so fast, up into the night sky they blast', quick words like that. Geezer had written all the words out for him.

‘Rocket wuhtuputtipuh, what the fuck, I can't sing this!'

Seeing him try, it was hilarious.

Just like our previous albums
Master of Reality
had some controversial moments. ‘Sweet Leaf ' upset some people because of the reference to drugs, and so did ‘After Forever', thanks to Geezer's tongue-in-cheek line ‘would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope'. The cover was unusual again as well: this time it just had words in purple and black on a black background. Slightly Spinal Tap-ish, only well before Spinal Tap. Although this time we were allowed two weeks to record the album, what with Rodger Bain producing and Tom Allom engineering again, musically
Master of Reality
was a continuation of
Paranoid
. At the time I thought the sound could've been a bit better. That's the thing when you're a
musician: you like things to be a certain way, to sound a certain way, and therefore it's difficult to leave it up to other people. When it goes into somebody else's hands you've got no control over it, and when you hear it it's not like you expected it to be. That's why I got involved more and more after those first albums.

When we recorded
Paranoid
I still lived at home. My parents had bought another place in Kingstanding, near Birmingham. They planned to move there as soon as they got rid of the shop. Mum wanted to get out of it. It was just a burden. You'd wake up in the morning and the shop opened and after you closed you'd go to bed. They could never go away. We never went on a holiday as a family, they had never been abroad.

I was proud of that new place. Before they moved in I had a key and if I had met a girl I'd take her up there: ‘This is our new house!'

After all, I couldn't take anybody back to the old house: ‘Here, come and sit on this box of beans, and I'll get you a nice drink.'

Wouldn't think of it.

But it was time for me to find my own place. At first I didn't have the money to do that, and when the money came in I was out on tour all the time. The first big cheques went towards a flash car anyway. No sooner did I get my hands on some serious cash than I bought myself a Lamborghini. So here was this Lamborghini outside the house in Endhill Road, Kingstanding. The house cost £5,000 when they bought it; this thing was like
five times more than that. That car outside, we were mad in those days.