Ozzy Osbourne As I Remember Him

That event, featuring Sabbath-influenced major acts including Metallica, Slayer and Pantera, raised over $190 million for charities including Birmingham Children’s Hospital, Cure Parkinson’s and Acorn Children’s Hospice. The organizers call it the highest-grossing charity concert of all time, and Ozzy’s last show was filmed for a 100-minute concert film and documentary, Back to the Beginning: Ozzy's Final Bow, due early next year. His memoir Last Rites, focusing on his Parkinson’s years, will be published Oct. 7.

Ozzy did have a black sense of humor, but he was not at all the Prince of Darkness he played onstage. In every conversation I had with him over the years, he came off as a genial, witty, self-deprecating motormouth, a working-class chap who found fame and fortune playing the rock game. He gave a good-natured groan when I asked about the famous 1982 occasion when he bit into a dead bat someone threw on stage in Iowa. He’d thought it was a rubber toy, but had to have rabies shots. “Will that ever leave me?” he said. “I’d like to be remembered on this planet for not just biting bats but for making music.”

His music is remembered more than his mischief. "He was the Godfather of metal," Blue Oyster Cult singer-guitarist Eric Bloom, 80, told me the day Ozzy died. "When I met him in the 1970s, he was amiable, just hanging out, no airs about him at all, a regular guy. All that crazy Ozzy stuff, a madman — he was nothing like that when you met him in person.”

Ozzy cursed like a pirate and laughed at most every joke, and his sometimes slurred Brummie accent made it problematic to parse what he was saying. What he found problematic was overcoming drug habits. “I hope to say I’m over it and have found peace with myself,” he told me in 1997, “but you know it still haunts me from time to time.” In 1998, he told me he was working hard to beat what he called his “last addiction,” tobacco. “Toughest thing I've ever had to kick in my life,'' he growled. “Worse than smack, cocaine, crack, anything. I'm not all clear yet. It's too easy for me to go out and buy a pack of cigarettes.'’

Ozzy Osbourne performs in 2022.

Brian Rothmuller/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

Ozzy told me he was serious about getting in better shape. “I’m still kind of decadent,” he joked. “I like a good cup of tea now. The reason I don’t drink anymore is I can’t: I’m dead if I do. A lot of the guys I grew up with in northern England, hundreds – not just ten or 20 – are dead. It’s awful. They say the world’s getting bigger, but in my head it’s getting smaller. I’ll say, ‘What happened to Bill or Ed?” and they’ll say, ‘His liver exploded’ or “He got in a car crash’ or “He OD’d.’ There but for the Grace of God go I.”

Ozzy looked at his history squarely in the eye. “What’s the point in doing one line of coke? Or one hit off a joint? There are addictive people and non-addictive people. My wife can have a sip and stop. I drank for a totally different reason. For me, it’s all or nothing. Moderation is not in my vocabulary.”

“If you like getting drunk or stoned, I don’t have a problem with that, but look at your list of people who’ve lived to a ripe old age who’ve used heroin or crack.”

He told me he would never relinquish his final, happiest addiction. “I’m addicted to my work, to love, to life. The reason I’m still alive is that my love for life was greater than shoveling all the shit down me.”

Ozzy looked back fondly on the good part of his early days, making classics like “Paranoid,” “War Pigs” and “Iron Man.”  “Going back to the beginning, you don’t realize what you’re doing until it’s gone. When you’re writing something, you don’t think in 30 years people are going to look back at you and go, ‘How did you do this?’ We were just four kids in an awkward band that sounded awkward, but we made it sound right.”

I asked Ozzy about his idea of an afterlife. What might he say if he met his maker in heaven? “I’d say, ‘Thanks for one hell of a life, man!’ I hope He says, ‘Come on in!’ If He says, ‘No' — well, at least I’d be with people I know.”