Speaker 1: Hello everybody, and welcome back to these Surely you can't
be serious podcast. I am here with my best friend
Dee Graves, and we are talking about the effing Prince
of Darkness himself.
Speaker 2: Dunham, Dunham, Dunham.
Speaker 1: Hey, Hey, we are talking about Ozzy Osbourne and we
are comparing his No More Tears album to the Aerosmith
album that we heard last week. Get a grip the
seventies rockers who have finally gotten sober and produced some
great albums of the nineties. Oh no, bats were harmed
during the recording of this podcast.
Speaker 2: Okay, so this is gonna be great. We are comparing
a rock god of the seventies to another rock god
of the seventies, but albums that they both produced in
the nineties.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: So our story begins in August of nineteen eighty nine,
when Ozzy is sent to prison for the second time,
this time for attempted murder.
Speaker 1: This blew me away. Yeah when I heard this.
Speaker 2: Before we get there, though, we need to go back
about forty years and get the history leading up to
that moment.
Speaker 1: Let's do it, all right.
Speaker 2: So John Michael Osborne was born December third, nineteen forty eight,
which means he's alluding my dad. Yeah, it's crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: His first job was in the music industry, was it. Yes,
he was a tuner for car horns.
Speaker 1: I didn't know car horns had to be in tune,
but apparently it's a.
Speaker 2: Very important Yeah. You don't want to have it a
flat sounding no? Okay, no little sharp, dark platt Okay,
got it perfect right there?
Speaker 1: Me me.
Speaker 2: His second job was at a slaughterhouse, which becomes relevant
later on in his life. And then he went to
prison for the first time, and it was for stealing
a black and white TV from a little shop that
didn't work. I mean he chunked it out the window
of the shop, which is probably why it didn't work.
But all he had to do was pay a forty
dollars fine, but his dad said, I'm not paying that fine,
and so what he did instead was get picked up
on the warrant and spend four weeks in prison.
Speaker 1: Forts No, I'll take the jail time.
Speaker 2: Total lesson from dad. There, thanks a lot, Dad. So
just not too long after that, he had himself a
blue transistor radio, hopefully that he purchased as opposed to stole,
and he heard the song She Loves You by the Beatles,
and he said, I need to be in the music industry.
So in nineteen sixty eight, he had been in the
music industry for a brief period of time and Tony
Eyomi sees an advertisement at the local music shop. It
says Ozzie Zig needs a gig, has own PA. And
it was that has own PA that caught his attention.
This story familiar to you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is just like van Halen, right, yep. They
got the brothers hired David Lee Roth because he had
a PA. Ozzy Osbourne and David Lee Roth hired because
they had their own PA.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so they went to the address to talk
to the guy and Eomi when Ozzy came out from
another room, he saw who it was, he turned around,
he walked out because he had known him from their
school days together and he was just a pest and
he was like, I don't want to work with this guy.
But fortunately the PA system won him over. Yah yess,
and they decided to he had a killer PA.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So Tony Eomi was guitarist. But before this meeting takes place,
before Tony Eomi meets Ozzy Osbournen for the first time
he's working in the factories. They all come from Birmingham,
which is a factory.
Speaker 1: Town Alabama, not Alabama, And I thought that was a funny.
Speaker 2: Actually yeah, right, And so he's he's playing guitar. He
enjoys the guitar, but he's got to work a real job,
and his real job is to be a welder at
a metal factory. And so he would weld after another
guy would cut the metal and send it down to him. Well,
one day he shows up. He's thinking, this is my
last day here because I just got a paying gig
as a member of a band. I'm super excited. Right,
So when he gets there, the other guy whose job
it is to pass him the cut metal isn't there,
and so they're like, okay, we're going to have you do.
It's like I don't really know how to. They're all right,
we'll teach you. And so he's like, I can't believe
this is happening on my last day here. They show
him how to cut the metal. He goes home for lunch.
He tells his mom He's like, I'm not going back.
I've got this paying gig coming up, but I don't
need the job. I'm not going back. And his mom's like,
you're going to do the right thing, and you're going
to go back to that job and finish like you should.
And so he goes back and he's cutting the metal
and all of a sudden comes down on his fingers
left hand. He pulls back and pulls the tops of
his fingers off. Oh no, and so music career over
apparently at that point, right, Oh my gosh. Yeah, And
so he's rushed to the hospital. He's just got little
nubs of bone sticking out of the end which they
cut off. He's I mean, to this day, he's missing
those fingers, and so he's distraught and a friend comes
to him and says, you can't give up. He's like,
what do you mean, I've got no fingers And he's like,
just listen to this, and he plays in this music
by Django Reinhardt, and he's like, why you know, are
you trying to make me feel bad? This is great,
this guy's obviously great, and I can't do this. And
he's like, this guy doesn't have the ends of his
fingers either. It's nice, okay. So he melts down these
little like soap bottles and makes plastic ends that he
polishes down, uses a soldering iron to put the hole
so that his fingers can fit in, figures out that
to put some leather on the end so that he
will grab the strings. Yep. And for the last fifty
years he's been a guitarist with fake fingers. He keeps
all of his little fake fingers in his finger box.
Speaker 1: That is cool, the finger box.
Speaker 3: Yeah sweet.
Speaker 2: So he and bill Ward had been together in a
band called Mythology. Bill Ward's the drummer. When they go
to get Ozzy, Ozzy brings along Geezer Butler, who had
been in the band Rare Breed together and Geezer had
been a guitarist, a rhythm guitarist. But Tony Yomi was like, no,
I don't want another guitarist in the band, and he's like, okay,
I guess I'll play the bass then, And so his
first time to play the bass was actually on stage
at their first gig with a borrowed bass that had
only three strings on it. But again, fifty years, yeah,
he's still playing the bass, that's right. So the name
of that original band was called the Polka Tulk Blues Band. Yeah, yeah,
Poka band. I totally see how a blues polka band
became Black Sabbath.
Speaker 1: Is that insane, It's crazy wow.
Speaker 2: And so for that original band, they had a guy
playing the slade guitar, just like the Blues. They had
a guy play in the saxophone. It was Jimmy Phillips
was their slide guitarist. Alan Aker Clark was their saxophone player.
And after a little while they're like, hey, guys, we're
splitting up the band. See you later. And then those
guys didn't get the memo that actually we're putting the
band back together. We're reforming. Five minutes later, we're reforming
as a now, and we're going to call ourself Earth, which,
as he hated. At this time, you've got all the
flower power music going on, right, the San Francisco hippie thing,
and these guys from their industry town, they're still working town.
We're like, this is not our scene, right, And so
they had an entirely different idea how to go now
for about two months. You only quit December of sixty eight,
he quit and joined Jethro Toll really yes, and like
they made him get up in the morning and go
to practice, like he had to practice was at nine.
He had to be up at eight, and so from
that experience he learned the work ethic that probably led
to Black Sabbath being the success that it was. Interesting.
So nineteen sixty nine, they're practicing. They happened to be
across the street from a movie theater and they notice
people keep paying money to go in and see these
scary movies.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so their idea was, if people enjoy being
scared watching scary movies, then we ought to make scary music.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: They invented the genre that we know today is heavy metal.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So it's funny because they hated the term heavy metal.
It had nothing musical about it. Honestie said, I'd rather
be called hard rock than heavy metal, because what does
that mean. You know, now everybody that has a guitar
at a bass and drums is a heavy metal band.
But there's no question the music that they were doing
back in the seventies was different. It is different. So
they had decided to do scary lyrics. Geezer had started
studying the occult, which didn't go over real well for
his Catholic upbringing, and he had also developed an interesting
classical music and so one day while he's practicing, he's
trying to figure out this music from Gustaf Holtz Mars
from the Planets. Okay, listen to that real quick. When
he comes back the next day, Eomi has a guitar
riff that sounds very similar to what he had been
trying to figure out. Yeah, and they're like, oh, wait,
this is a whole new song. We can make this
a song. And then they're like, hey, what do we
call it? Hey, let's call it the thing that's in
the theater across the street, Black Sabbath.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that has Boris Karloff in it.
Speaker 2: Yep, that's the one nineteen sixty three movie. And so
that's what they named song, Black Sabbath.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: And then they say that's what we should name the band.
And then they say that's what we should name the album.
Wait a minute, what album?
Speaker 3: Ah?
Speaker 2: Yes, they got a record deal. Yes, so they are
big time now. They get paid one thousand dollars to
make a record.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: So they make the record Black Sabbath in two days,
twelve hours.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: And the second day they spent mixing. The first day
was was all the recording. They did almost everything live
almost everything in one take. They had Ozzie in a
separate room, but they all played and sang at the
same time.
Speaker 1: Twelve hours, twelve hours.
Speaker 2: Incredible, and they produced one of the most iconic albums
in history. The album is released February Friday, the thirteenth,
nineteen seventy. Oh. So they start touring. Okay, the album
is hated by the critics but loved by the fans,
right right. And so they get back from touring and
they see Black Sabbath in the UK album charts and
they go, is there another band named Black Sabbath? No idiot,
that's us. So just a few months later, June nineteen seventy,
they start recording their second album. They spend an astronomical
amount of time on this one, a whole six days.
This time. It's an album you might have heard of.
It's called Paranoid. So this one was originally supposed to
be called War Pigs. There's even kind of this picture
of a war pig looking thing on the front of
the album, and Warpigs has to do with their hatred
for Vietnam. But Warner the record company changed the name
to Paranoid, kept the picture, changed the name a little weird.
But of course it's again the same story. They've reached
the end of the album, they don't have enough songs,
and then Tony Yomi's playing some guitar lick and they go, hey,
that sounds good, let's do that, and that in twenty
to twenty five minutes later becomes the song Paranoid Wow.
Paranoid gets released as a single in September of nineteen
seventy shoots up to number four on the UK Singles.
The album comes out the next month, it hits number one.
And with these songs War Pigs, Paranoid, Iron Man, they're
seeing success like they've never seen, which means they're realizing
their biggest fear. They're becoming a pop band. So album
number three, they spend more time in the studio and
they get a briefcase full of money for drugs. Oh good, Yeah, yes,
because that's what you do in the seventies for your bands,
is you give them drugs and more time to record.
Speaker 1: It's part of the recording budget, you know.
Speaker 2: So Master of Reality comes out in nineteen seventy one,
It goes gold in two months. It has acoustic songs
for the first time, it's got a couple of crowd favorites,
Child of the Grave and Sweet Leaf, and they're continuing
to rock. On albums number one and two, they were
sober because they didn't have any money to buy.
Speaker 1: It, any money drugs.
Speaker 2: Right, So they were going to name album number four
snow blindness. Can you guess what that's about?
Speaker 3: Cookie?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Came from the song that's about doing cocaine. The record
label was like, no, you won't, and so that album
is just called Volume four without a Volume one through three.
That doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but whatever,
it still went gold in less than a month. This
is their fourth consecutive album to sell a million copies. Wow,
the drugs were so prevalent by this time that Ozzy
can't remember recording some of the albums. Yeah, And it's
amazing because he said almost the exact same thing that
Joe Perry said. He said, we went from being a
rock band messing with drugs to a drug band messing
with rock. It's incredible. I mean, the storylines parallel.
Speaker 1: The fact that these guys emerged the other side of
this drug problem to produce what they produced in the
nies is truly remarkable.
Speaker 2: Well, it wasn't without some scars. Have you heard Ozzie talk?
Speaker 1: I can't wait to get into the scars. My gosh, gosh,
the stories that this guy can tell. He truly is
somebody who has seen and experienced it all.
Speaker 2: Right, And as long as you can catch every third
or fourth word you get an idea. Oh yeah, So
we're onto album number five. They go back to la
where they had done Volume four, except they get there
and the room they had recorded in is taken up
with this giant synthesizer and they can't come up with anything.
They're tired, they're drug addult, no good is coming from anything.
They spend a month there and have no results. So
they end up going back to England to a place
called the clear Water Castle. It's a recording studio that
has been used by Matt Hoopel Deep Purple, White, Snake
Queen and where Led Zeppelin recorded their last album in
Through the Outdoor Wow. They rehearsed in dungeons at this
castle nice, which is where he came up where Eomi
came up with the riff for Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath, which
of course that's what became the name of the.
Speaker 1: Album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
Speaker 2: What was interesting to me. I love the band, Yes,
I think they're fantastic band. They brought the Yes keyboard
just In Rick Wakeman to be a part of the album.
Awesome Sabbath Bloody Sabbath comes out and it's their fifth
platinum More Money for Drugs, which means album number six
and not so much. It doesn't tank, but it doesn't
do as well as the other ones had. And then
in December, to kind of make up for that, the
record label decided we're going to release the greatest hits
album called We Sold Our Soul for Rock and Roll,
which they did without getting any input from the bandital Wrong,
Yeah wrong. Next album is Technical Ecstasy. At this point,
Ozzie is losing interest. The album is done and Ozzy
gets committed to the Stafford County Asylum.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the drugs have gotten pretty bad. Yes, the drinking
has gotten really, really bad. In nineteen seventy seven, Ozzy
quits really yeah okay, and so they're scrambling. They have
things coming up in the next two days, and so
Tony Yomi gets Dave Walker from Fleetwood Mac who is
a friend of his, to come in and be their singer,
and Dave Walker says later on I ran into Ozzie
at a pub and I could tell he wasn't fully
committed to leaving the band. And sure enough, nineteen seventy eight,
Ozzy rejoins the band, but he says it's just to
get money from the record label and to get fat
on beer and put out.
Speaker 1: An album YEP that sounds like Ozzie.
Speaker 2: So after he rejoins the band, days later they're in
Toronto recording Never Say Die. This is nineteen seventy eight.
They go on tour. Do you know who they're opening?
Banded Van Halen? There you go wow. So that is
when we tie back to one of our earliest episodes
on the Van Halen Boys, where Van Halen is showing
up Ozzy Osbourne and.
Speaker 1: Black Sabbage loaded yep, drug addl Ozzy Osbourne.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And final show of that tour is Ozzie's final show
with Black's abam right until they reunite in the late nineties.
So his drug use had gotten so bad that in
nineteen seventy nine, at the behest of their manager Don
Arden Don Arden, they fired Ozzie. Now Don Arden had
come along Midway through this Ozzie's stint with Black Sabbath,
and it didn't go well because he was taken over
for their old managers, who then served Ozzy papers while
he was on stage during a live performance. What Yeah,
And then you know, two years of litigation follows that.
Speaker 1: Hey, you know what, you absolutely know where he's going
to be at that moment. Other than that, you may
not know where he's going to be.
Speaker 2: Right. So they had been with Don Arden for a
while and Don was tired of Ozzie's stuff, and so
they said you're done, and they bought him out of
the band for ninety six thousand pounds. And his idea was,
I'm going to go to a hotel room and snort
and drink every last shilling of it. Yeah. But then
Don's daughter, Sharon Arden steps in. Yes. Now, she and
Ozzy had met nine ten years earlier when she was
just a receptionist at Don's office, little eighteen year old
kid basically, But by this time she's grown up and
she thinks she can save him, and she.
Speaker 1: Does, yeah thankfully multiple times.
Speaker 2: So interestingly, Sharon is the one who suggested Ronnie James
Dio from Rainbow to be the replacement singer for Ozzy
for Black Sappen. That is interesting, that is crazy, right,
And then after a little bit of time passes, Don
Arden starts waffling. He's like, now, maybe we should get
Ozzie back in the band. But at this point, Sharon
and Ozzy have begun dating, and she's like, nope, I'm
going to manage him and I'm going to make him
a success. And it was through her that the Blizzard
of Oz band was formed. We got Lee Hurslake on drums.
We've got Bob Daisley on bass who had been with Rainbow. Yes,
We've got Don Airy on keyboards, who had also been
with Rainbow. Okay, like they you know, they intermingled, swapped wives, yep, yep.
And then drum roll please, from the band Quiet Riot.
Speaker 1: Comes Randy Rhodes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that Blizzard of Oz band name they decided
to change into the album name and give Ozzy Osborne
full credit despite the fact that this is a phenomenal band.
Speaker 1: Yes, but hey, I heard that was the record company
that decided to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, ok right, got it. So at this point, they
release Blizzard of Oz and they have to go meet
the folks at CBS Records.
Speaker 1: Let's go do a meet and greet with the suits.
This is where the stories to me start to really
take off. Oh my gosh, hey, you've got coked out, drunk,
bloated Ozzy, who's a star. I mean, he is a star.
Speaker 2: Right, but CBS Records has been managing the Jackson five
up at this point.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So Sharon has this idea. I've got a great idea.
They don't know who you are, so we need.
Speaker 2: To make an impression.
Speaker 1: Here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna put two doves in
your pocket, and when when I bring you in, we're
gonna say, and here is Ozzy Osbourne. You're gonna pull
the doves out of your pocket and release them. They're
gonna fly away, and it's gonna make this wonderful impression.
Speaker 2: Peace offering.
Speaker 1: It's a peace offering. So before this all happens, Ozzie
comes and he sits down on the knee of like
one of the girls in.
Speaker 2: The she's the room. She's the head of publicity.
Speaker 1: Yes, she's the head of publicity. Yeah, So he sits
on her knee, he pulls out the doves. The doves
are kind of.
Speaker 2: She's she's irritated. I mean he's he's drunk out of
his mind. I mean, at eleven am, what do you
expect he's He's like, I'm well drunk and Cavassia I
just wint right. And so he's drunk. He's sitting on
her lap. He's not a light guy at this point.
Speaker 1: He's a big guy.
Speaker 2: The doves are like pecking and flapping in his pockets.
He hasn't even taken him out right, So he's drunk high.
She's screaming. He's irritated, and so his solution.
Speaker 1: Is, I'm gonna pull this dove out of my pocket
and bite its head right off.
Speaker 2: So she loses it.
Speaker 1: She's like screaming her head off.
Speaker 4: And and really these suits are like, who is this
devil we brought in here?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've seen have you seen the picture? There's a
blood like trickling down his chin. Yeah, And he's like, ah,
you know, I mean, just craziness.
Speaker 2: It didn't go quite the way that he planned.
Speaker 1: So they are repulsed and angry.
Speaker 2: They have security come up and escort them out of
the bill.
Speaker 1: Get this psycho out of here, right, So.
Speaker 2: They get a call from the lawyers and they say,
we're not going to terminate the contract. We're not going
to do that. We're going to end you.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: By the way, all of this happened on the same
day that Blizzard of Oz was really which includes did
a track he might have heard of called Crazy Train.
Speaker 1: This was the release day of Crazy Train. And so
this event happens the same day that Crazy Train drops.
Six days later, it's like number one on the Hot
Rocks charts. And they call them up and they say,
we knew you guys were something special when you came
into the office.
Speaker 2: Wait it go. So that's the Dove thing. And so
at that point, all of Ozzie's fans thought he was
into killing animals. I guess yeah, And so they would
throw stuff at him on stage.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like frogs and rats and mice and rabbits and
all kinds of stuff.
Speaker 2: And occasionally they would throw a plastic bat.
Speaker 1: This is the stuff of legends here. So Buddy throws
a bat on the stage.
Speaker 2: So he picks it up. He thinks it's one of.
Speaker 1: Those rubber flap around stupid toy bats. It's not. It's
not even dead. It's still alive. He says. It bit him.
So then he bit the head off the bat. Okay, yeah,
so you know it's this big thing. Sharon says she
saw the fur still in his mouth. She's like heaving,
grossed out. They leave the show. They're on the road
and they realize that bat was alive and bitch, you've
got to get Raby shots. So I heard him talking
about you like Raby shot is not fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he hasn't quit drinking or doing drugs at this point.
Speaker 1: He hasn't quit biting the head off animals either.
Speaker 2: You know, well, it just maybe in the haze, it's
hard to tell a rubber from fur.
Speaker 1: So just just to recap, the dovehead incident happened March
twenty seventh, nineteen eighty one. The bathhead incident happened January twentieth,
nineteen eighty two. Okay, yep, on February the nineteenth, nineteen
eighty two. I've got a story for you. So they're
in San Antonio for a show at the like the
like the County Fair. I mean it's not like it's
not like the big place, right. So Ozzie is drunk
and high. Sharon does not want him to get out,
but she's got to go do publicity responsibilities whatever. So
she hides his clothes so he can't leave. But Ozzie's
too smart for us, So what does he do.
Speaker 2: He puts on a dress, He puts on.
Speaker 1: Her dress, and he rolls out of the hotel drunk
as can be. So he's gonna get down a jug
out Lamu. So he goes down to the Alamo and
he realizes, well, crap I got a pee, so he
this is broad daylight on zips, takes it out and
peas on what they call the Cenotaph, which is inside
the Alamo Plaza. It's not the Alamo per se. People
always say he PE's on the Alamo. But he takes
a leak on the Cenotaph, which is a grave basically
a big grave monument to all those who fought and
died at.
Speaker 2: The alamossing on your grave.
Speaker 4: You know how Texans take this type of thing. You
know how people of San Antonio would take this personally. Yeah,
so he's arrested, yep, right, he pays a forty dollars fine, they.
Speaker 1: Get him out. He plays the Fair or whatever that night,
but he is banned from playing San Antonio until nineteen
ninety two the No More Tours tour.
Speaker 2: Wow, So second album that Ozzy Osbourne releases as a
quote unquote solo act, still with the same band, still
mostly written by Kerslake, still fantastic leads by Randy Rhodes
that qualify him as one of the greatest guitarists of
all time. Right, that one's Diary of a Madman.
Speaker 1: Okay, so yeah. So in nineteen eighty one he releases
Diary of a Madman for Me Flying High again. That's
the song that everybody knows.
Speaker 2: So we are recording on March nineteenth. It is exactly
thirty nine years ago that there was a tragedy. Yeah,
and we lost one of the greatest guitarists of all time. Yes,
March nineteenth, nineteen eighty two, the band was in Florida
for the Diary of a Madman tour. They were a
week away from playing Madison Square Garden in New York City.
And Andrew Acock, who was the band's tour bus driver,
owned some land near the area, also was a pilot
and he was basically having some fun, yeah, driving people
around in the plane. And he got Randy Rhodes and
the band's costume and makeup designer whose name was Rachel
Youngblood to come up with the plane with them. He
thought it would be funny if they buzzed the tour.
Speaker 1: Bus, yes, where Ossie was asleep.
Speaker 2: Sleep Yeah. And so as he attempts to buzz the
tour bus, his wing actually cuts into the bus, causing
the plane to graze a tree and crash in the
garage of a big mansion nearby, killing Rhodes, Acock and
young Blood.
Speaker 1: Tragedy. Yeah, you can see anybody who's young twenties with money. Hey,
let's get in the plane. We're gonna buzz the tour bus, right,
this is gonna be hilarious and then clip and then
crash and then fireball.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Tragic.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So after Diary of Madmen in eighty one, we have
Bark at the Moon in nineteen eighty three. The Moon
is kind of the main song that you may know
from that. After that you have The Ultimate Sin in
eighty six that song, so you've got shot in the dark,
Ultimate Sin, and then in eighty eight we get No
Rest for the Wicked.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And just so that we're clear on where Ozzy
Osbourne is at that point, he was also in the
Decline of Western Civilization, Part two, The Meddle Years. Yeah,
and he told the director, sobriety fing sucks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you forgot to mention one thing. Go ahead on
January fourth, nineteen eighty two, Ozzy Mary's Sharon Arden.
Speaker 2: Through those albums you had several guitarists. Eventually Ozzie finds
Zach wild through auditions, who ultimately becomes the most enduring
replacement for Randy Rhoades. Rhodes remains Wild's foremost guitar playing
and stagecraft influence. They have a very similar style, the
style of their guitars similar but to other Zach Wilde,
Ozzy Osbourne and the rest of the band record No
Rest for the Wicked. It's to You on drums, Sinclair
on keyboards, Daisley co writing the lyrics and playing bass,
and then Geezer Butler comes back and plays bass with
him for a while during the tour.
Speaker 1: Nice Yeah.
Speaker 2: He does a live EP called just Say Ozzy, which
has Geezer on it, which was released a couple of
years later. So nineteen eighty nine, that's when I really
get introduced to him for the first time. There's a
weird thing that happened during the eighties where like everybody
thought that people were in a satanic cult. Do you
remember that? Like it was every youth.
Speaker 1: I was like, yeah, no Ozzy Osbourne.
Speaker 2: For me as a little kid at that point, I
don't even remember my parents ever saying one word about
Ozzy Osbourne. It was just the perception that I have
was this guy is embracing the satanic thing that everybody
is so scared of right now, staying away from him.
So eighty nine, I'm a little more mature at that point,
I'm hitting thirteen fourteen, I'm starting to open my eyes
a little bit. And then I catch this.
Speaker 1: Your eyes are not closed forever, Your eyes are open.
Keep going.
Speaker 2: And so I catch this video with this really kind
of hot, slightly trashy looking girl playing guitar, and I'm
like hey, And then I'm like hey, Ozzy Osbourne singing.
He he doesn't look like the devil. This is okay.
This song is beautiful. Yeah, gets a sad, don't really stands.
Speaker 3: On mine.
Speaker 1: It's a great guitar song with Ozzy and Leda.
Speaker 3: He's in my head way.
Speaker 1: So this it was my introduction to you, and I
kind of talked off air. I was very aware of
who Ozzy Osbourne was, but I don't think I really
knew any of his music. But this is where I
jump on board with closed my eyes forever. This song
peaks at number eight on the US Hot one hundred.
I mean, it's a big hit.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so now Ozzie is hanging with all of
Doc McGee's bands when they decide to go over to
Moscow and do a little thing that we've talked about
a couple times now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we have called the Moscow Music Piece Festival, just
to recap. On this tour, you have bon Jovi, skid Row, Cinderella,
Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne and the Scorpions, and Gorky Park, Yeah,
and maybe the CIA and maybe the CIA.
Speaker 2: Different story, different story, all right. So then he comes
home from the Moscow Music Piece Festival and we're back
to where we begin.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, the Moscow Music Peace Festival is all
about no drugs, right, right, get kids off drugs right.
And we talked before Motley Crue was the only band
that was sober, which is.
Speaker 2: Easy laughable irony on top of irony. Yes, So he
comes home and is obviously heavily on drugs and drinking
quite a bit. He goes to bed early that night. Yes,
Sharon stays up. They have had a let's say, tumultuous relationship.
They are very in love with each other, but it
is very passionate whether they're matt or not. So they've
had their scuffles.
Speaker 1: If you've ever seen the view with Sharon Osborne, yeah,
you can tell this woman can be very stubborn and
difficult paining the butt and she's got she's very intelligent.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: As it happens, that got her in some trouble right
now at this moment. But we're not talking about that.
But if we do not talk about those things, let's
slide past that. We're going to move on past that.
So back in August of eighty nine, he goes to
bed early. She's staying up reading a book. And then
a couple hours later he comes down in his underwear. Yeah,
and he sits down across from her and he says,
I'm really so sorry about this, but we've made a decision,
and you have to die.
Speaker 1: We've made a decision.
Speaker 2: We've made a decision, speaking of the Prince of Darkness,
We've made a decision, and you have to die. And
she just thinking, you know, he's in his drug addle whatever,
is about to say piss off. But before she can
get past the pith, he's on top of her, choking
her out. Yeah. They're throwing each other back and forth.
All she can think about is, please, don't let the
kids see me die like this, you know, don't let
this be the way that it goes. They roll a bit,
a coffee table gets taken out, and as it happens,
they've got panic buttons in their home, in every room.
She hits the panic button just before she loses consciousness.
When she wakes back up, she can't find him. He's gone.
Speaker 1: She doesn't want to look for him. Who knows where
he is, probably taking a leak on some monuments somewhere.
And the police show up and they give me into custody.
Speaker 2: For attempted murder.
Speaker 1: I had not really heard this story.
Speaker 2: Now, have you seen The Wolf of Wall Street? Yes,
so you know the scene with the car when the
queludes kick in. Yes, and he goes to sleep and
thinks he made it home. Okay, Yes, from what I've
heard from Ozzie, it's kind of that same thing, Like
I went to sleep when I got home and I
woke up in jail. Yeah, he has no memory of
what went on, and she was done with him for
a time.
Speaker 1: I feeling happy, I feel so sad.
Speaker 2: I've lost the best friend could I ever have. At
the behest of everybody, appropriately should have been done with him.
But after six months and him being in rehab and
cleaning himself up, and her saying this wasn't him, this
was the drugs that did this, she decided.
Speaker 3: Not to leave them.
Speaker 2: A pretty incredible woman really. Yeah. As it turned out,
he produced an album a little bit later on which
we're here to talk about the day.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 2: So during the eighties, Yeah, there was this kid whose
dad belonged to a record club, you know where you
just get the mail, Yes, of course, and his dad
would leave these records unopened, you know, they just come
in the mail and the unopened. So finally one day
he's like, heck, I'm just going to take these and
he opens them all up, and this is where he
discovers Black Sabbath and gets into the hard rock of rock.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Ironically, the same week that No More Tears is released, Yeah,
he releases what some might call a breakthrough album with
his band Nirvana called never Mind.
Speaker 1: Wow, that is interesting. The BMI CD clubs and this
and that I still owe them, like, you know, one
hundred and seventeen dollars or whatever.
Speaker 2: They still think. My name is Mark Laar, Mark.
Speaker 1: Chilandeler Bong. No More Tears and never Mind are released
the same week.
Speaker 2: Yeah. On the same day, Guns and Roses released as
USEU Your Illusion one and two.
Speaker 1: What a day? Yeah, what a day for hard rock fans. Yeah,
you get two from Guns n' Roses, Yeah, and No
More Tears from Ausie.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the same day that Nevermind came out, Red Hot
Chili Peppers also released Blood Sugar Sex Magic, which is
my opinion best album that they had. So yeah, September
of nineteen ninety one was an incredible month for music.
Speaker 1: That was the same month that I started college. I
do remember leaving the dorms and going to the local
record shop and seeing lines of people lined up to
buy usual Illusion.
Speaker 2: One and two. Yeah for sure. All Okay, are we
ready to jump into the album.
Speaker 1: Let's jump into the album next time. Next time we're
gonna go track by track through No More Tears. We're
gonna talk about the stories behind the songs kind of
the story of the tour. And then we're gonna do
our final judgment, which is better Aerosmiths Get a Grip
or no more tears Come back.
Speaker 2: We'll see you next week.