I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne
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Depending on your age and demographic, your familiarity with Ozzy Osbourne will stem either from his music career, as frontman of Black Sabbath, or from his later foray into reality TV, as the doddery, drugged-up patriarch in The Osbournes, which he filmed for several years with his wife Sharon and two of their three children, Kelly and Jack.
In I Am Ozzy he recounts all of the above, and while the memoir features sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll from start to nearly finish, and the bones of the story are familiar, it is far from cliché. Born in 1948 to a working-class Birmingham family, young Ozzy (he is known by his given name, John, only to his family and his first wife) did poorly at school and was unable to hold down a job. He was, he says fortunately, dissuaded from a life of petty crime by a short stint in jail. (He notes that his poor literacy and inability to concentrate at school were explained in mid-life, when he was diagnosed with dyslexia and attention-deficit disorder.)
What Ozzy developed an early talent and affinity for was going down the pub. He says he has an addictive personality; even in the final part of the book, when he describes the past five years of full sobriety, he swaps his copious consumption of alcohol and drugs for tea, drinking eight or 10 enormous mugs a day. In a bid to cut down on smoking he gave up cigarettes for cigars, and was quickly inhaling up to 30 Cohibas each day.
He would undoubtedly have been a full-fledged alcoholic even without stardom; what fame and fortune gave him access to was a variety of drugs, most particularly cocaine, marijuana, heroin (which he says he was lucky not to have been swallowed up by; he lost several friends to the drug), and later, prescription painkillers and tranquillizers such as Klonopin and Vicodin. Quite often over 40 years of drug abuse he was on everything all at once, which makes it astounding that he can remember anything at all. It’s evident that there have been some memory lapses, with a period of several years after he was fired from Black Sabbath being skipped over with nary a mention, but Chris Ayres, his ghostwriter (I’m sure Ozzy would hate the term, but there’s some writing been done here and it wasn’t by him) does a fine job of stitching it all together.
One of the best decisions made in the crafting of this book was to write it in Ozzy’s voice – that is, not only from his perspective but with all the poor grammar and bad language that characterizes his speech. Pitch is everything with a first-person memoir (Andre Agassi’s Open worked so brilliantly in part because it maintained the present tense throughout), and the style of I Am Ozzy makes you feel like a rock raconteur is personally spinning you a great yarn.
There are some juicy rock n’ roll anecdotes, including one involving Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee that is far too filthy to repeat, and Ozzy is painfully honest about his flaws and failings. He admits being a ghastly stepfather to his first wife’s son, to the point of abuse, and to cheating on both his wives, even his beloved Sharon. He tells of one of his lowest points – waking up in jail with no memory of how he got there, and being told that he was facing an attempted murder charge for having tried to strangle Sharon.
By rights, he should have no friends or fans – he shouldn’t be alive at all – but not only is his liver confirmed by doctors to be in great shape, he is as adored as ever. There’s just something about Ozzy. This book goes a long way towards figuring out what it is.
3/5 Stars: A mad, messy memoir from one of rock’s true survivors.
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