Every musician plays a duff gig – and in the case of Ozzy Osbourne, it happened to be his very first show. But it wasn’t so much what happened onstage that was memorable, it was what came after - namely, Ozzy defacing the car of the person who booked the band in a less than hygienic way.
In an in-depth interview in the brand new issue of Classic Rock, former Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler recalls meeting Ozzy for the first time when Geezer was a member of pre-Sabbath band Rare Breed.
“When he first came round to our house, one of my brothers answered the knock at the door,” Geezer tells Classic Rock’s Paul Rees. “My brother came into the front room and told me, ‘There’s something for you at the door.’ When I asked him what he meant by ‘something’, he said, ‘You’ll see.’
“I opened the door and there was Ozzy. He had a haircut that was only a bit longer than a skinhead. He was wearing his dad’s toolmaker’s work gown. He’d a chimney sweeps brush over his shoulder, no shoes on his feet, but he was holding one shoe on a dog lead. It was pissing down with rain, too. I just burst out laughing at him.”
Geezer soon discovered that Ozzy had a unique party trick: he could defecate at will. He witnessed this when Ozzy played his very first gig as a member of Rare Breed at Aston University in Birmingham.
“We were so bad, the bloke who’d booked the night refused to pay us,” Geezer recalls. “He may have eventually given us a couple of quid, but as we were leaving, we saw his Jag was parked outside the front door. Ozzy climbed up onto it and did a great big turd on the bonnet, at will, and then we scarpered.”
In the same interview, Geezer addressed his current relationship with Ozzy and his other ex-Black Sabbath bandmates.
“I haven’t spoken to Ozzy since the last [Sabbath] gig [on February 4, 2017],” says the bassist. “Sharon Osbourne and Gloria [Butler, Geezer’s wife] fell out and that was it, we’re not allowed to speak to each other by command of our wives. I’ve seen Tony [Iommi, guitarist[ a couple of times. We got given a lifetime Grammy in 2019, and that was the last time I saw Bill [Ward, drummer].”
You can read the full interview with Geezer in the brand new issue of Classic Rock. Order it online now and have it delivered straight to your door.
