I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne The classic autobiography from Ozzy Osbourne, the heavy metal music icon and frontman of Black Sabbath
What's it about?
I Am Ozzy (2009) is the story of how a working-class kid from Aston ended up redefining rock music – and lived to talk about it. It charts a life of chaos, excess, and dark humour, from factory floors and prison cells to fame, infamy, and near-death experiences. It’s raw, unfiltered, and delivered with all the madness and mischief that became Ozzy’s trademark.
Born John Michael Osbourne in working-class Birmingham, Ozzy rose from factory floors and petty crime to cofound Black Sabbath – the band that defined the sound and rebellious spirit of heavy metal.
His life was even wilder than his music. The self-proclaimed “Prince of Darkness” bit the head off a bat onstage, was banned from cities, and took more drugs than most people would think physically possible.
When Ozzy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, actor and rock devotee Jack Black called him “a madman, a genius, a revolutionary.” He wasn’t exaggerating.
In this lesson, you’ll get the unfiltered story of a working-class kid from Birmingham who rewrote rock history, terrified parents, and baffled the press. Against all odds, he became one of music’s most beloved legends. A defining voice of what came to be called heavy metal, Ozzy insisted they were “just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.”
But first, let’s go back to where it all began.
John Michael Osbourne came into the world in 1948, in the soot-stained backstreets of Aston, Birmingham. His parents, Jack and Lillian, were decent, hardworking people. Jack, a toolmaker, worked nights at the GEC. Lil, a factory worker, manned the household with grit and discipline. But they were poor, and the house was packed to the rafters with six kids, no hot water, and one outdoor toilet. The air stank of gasworks and coal smoke.
School was a nightmare for Ozzy. Undiagnosed dyslexia left him struggling in class, and the teachers’ solution was violence. Classmates weren’t kinder, mocking him relentlessly. By 15, after years of dodging gang beatings and failing grades, he walked away for good. A turning point came when he brought home the album With the Beatles – he said later, it was like “a light went on in my head.” He realised he didn’t just want to make music – he had to.
But before music, there was crime. Ozzy turned to burglary. On his first break-in he blundered into grabbing baby bibs and toddler underwear rather than anything he could sell; later he tried hauling a 24-inch TV and ended up pinned under it. The police eventually caught up with him when he used a thumbless glove while stealing shirts. He was sentenced to three months in Winson Green prison. It was filthy, terrifying, and humiliating. He was released after six weeks. But his time in prison had taught him something important: whatever happened next, he wasn’t cut out for normal life.
Once out, he tried odd jobs – cleaner, plumber’s mate, car-horn tuner – but nothing stuck. The worst was at the Digbeth slaughterhouse, where his work – from cutting open sheep’s stomachs to killing cows – left him reeking of blood and filth. At the time it was just a job; only later did it add to his dark stage image.
During this stretch of dead-end jobs and dashed dreams, Ozzy married a local woman named Thelma Riley. They had two children – Jessica and Louis – and he also became father to Thelma’s son, Elliot. But Ozzy, by his own admission, was a terrible husband and an absent father, already losing himself to drink. The marriage wouldn’t last.
Eventually, Ozzy scraped together cash to buy a microphone and amplifier by pawning his dad’s sound system – a move that didn’t go unnoticed. He scrawled an ad for the music shop window: “Ozzy Zig needs gig.” He claimed he was an “experienced front man” with his own PA system and gave his contact details. It was ridiculous – but it worked.
That was how he landed a spot in Rare Breed, a short-lived project with bassist Geezer Butler, who shared Ozzy’s love of weird lyrics and heavy riffs. The band fizzled out, but soon enough he crossed paths with guitarist Tony Iommi, a fellow Brummie with an intimidating presence and a finger injury that gave his playing a unique sound. Together with Bill Ward on drums, they started to bash out songs in a freezing rehearsal room. Something dark and dirty was beginning to take shape.
Ozzy may not have been a trained singer – and actually, he wasn’t even that confident – but when he opened his mouth, it worked. In a place where nobody had dreams, he’d found one – and he was hanging onto it with both hands.
The band formed like a gang of misfits with nowhere else to go. Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and Ozzy Osbourne rehearsed in damp, freezing rooms, travelled in rusted out vans, and played every dive they could book. They called themselves Earth and shared a single goal: escape.
Their rehearsal room at the community centre in Six Ways was across from the Orient cinema. Horror films shown there often drew queues down the street and around the corner. Watching this, Tony had a thought: if people paid to be scared, why not make music that terrified them? That spark led to a new track. Tony crafted a chilling riff, Ozzy and Bill wrote eerie lyrics, and Geezer suggested the name 'Black Sabbath,' borrowed from a Boris Karloff film. Soon, it became their name, and their identity.
The sound followed. Tony, still adapting to the fingers he’d lost in a factory accident, tuned his guitar lower to make playing easier – but it gave their songs a new, menacing weight. Bill adjusted to match him. Ozzy pushed his voice harder, higher, sharper. The combination of sound, subject matter, and imagery gave them a strange, theatrical menace that set them apart.
Ozzy looked just as strange as they sounded; long hair, flamboyant clothes, and platform boots. When he walked out on stage, he arrived like a warning. The band’s look and sound fused into something bleak, unpredictable, and loud.
The whole thing started to feel like some kind of ritual. Audiences weren’t sure what to make of it. Some stood in stunned silence while others threw glasses. Ozzy got used to dodging missiles between verses. But word spread. Journalists called them dangerous. Some people accused them of corrupting youth. None of it slowed them down.
In 1970, they signed with Vertigo and recorded their debut album in just one day. Released on Friday, February 13, Black Sabbath sounded like a storm unleashed. The title track began with ominous thunder, tolling bells, and a three-note-riff so crushing it felt like the walls were caving in. Ozzy’s voice sliced through the murk, wide-eyed and apocalyptic.
They hadn’t set out to invent anything. But by the time that record hit shelves, Black Sabbath had done more than name a band. They’d cracked open a whole new genre. And Ozzy – equal parts menace and spectacle – was the face and voice of it all.
“Paranoid” was born in minutes. The band were in the studio between takes when Tony started playing the riff. Their producer suggested they turn it into a song – and they did. Ozzy later joked it sounded like “a chip-pan catching fire.” But that fire spread fast. In the US, Paranoid went gold, catapulting Black Sabbath into rock stardom.
The success brought a new kind of chaos. They flew constantly, waking up in one city and going to bed in another. Exhaustion blurred the days, and jet lag left them playing shows without knowing what country they were in. Ozzy, terrified of flying, drank heavily to cope. Speed kept him awake to get through interviews; then tranquilizers knocked him out. Cocaine crept in. Downers, too. Every new pill felt like a fix – until it wasn’t. The band was wrecked, physically and mentally. When they weren’t arguing, they were barely speaking.
Tony, always the most serious of the group, started taking control. He cared about the music, but also about the image – and didn’t like Ozzy's sloppy stage gear. He pushed for tighter shows, more professionalism, better press. Ozzy, half-mad on drink and pills, resisted. Bill, once the gentle glue, was unraveling too. Only Geezer managed to keep some kind of middle ground, but even he couldn’t hold it all together.
Their manager, Patrick Meehan, made things worse. They struggled to understand the contracts and where the money was going, and when they asked questions, they were stonewalled or brushed off. Ozzy didn’t know what he was earning – or if he was being robbed.
By the late ’70s, cracks had become chasms. Ozzy was missing rehearsals. His voice was giving out. He stopped caring. One day, he walked into their rented house in Los Angeles to find the others lined up like a tribunal. They didn’t mince words: he was out. After ten years, Black Sabbath had fired their frontman.
Ozzy felt numb more than angry. Somewhere deep down, he knew it had been coming. He’d become a liability, and they’d had enough. But even so, it hurt. Sabbath had been his life – and now, without warning, it was over.
After Black Sabbath fired him, Ozzy sank into isolation. He spent three months holed up in a hotel room, drinking around the clock and waiting for everything to end. But Sharon Arden had other plans.
Sharon – the daughter of Sabbath’s former manager Don Arden – took charge. Her father, Don, had once terrified Ozzy in business meetings – his reputation for brass-knuckle tactics was well known. But Sharon wasn’t afraid of Ozzy, or of anyone. She saw potential where others saw a lost cause. She pulled Ozzy out of his self-destruction, became his manager, and, years later, his wife. She found musicians, booked rehearsals, and pushed him back into shape.More than that, she refused to let him slip back into the void. Her sheer determination kept the band together, the shows on the road, and Ozzy himself alive. Without Sharon, there would have been no second act.
That second act was Blizzard of Ozz. Recorded in 1980 with classically trained guitarist Randy Rhoads, it marked a creative and commercial rebirth. With his classical training, Randy’s elegant, fluid solos lit a fire under Ozzy’s raw vocals and gave the album its distinct edge. For the first time in years, Ozzy felt like he was making music that mattered.
But the chaos hadn’t stayed behind. At a meeting with CBS executives to celebrate his first solo deal, Sharon had brought white doves as a peace gesture. Drunk and restless, Ozzy shocked everyone by biting the head off one dove and threatening to do the same to the other before letting it go. Security dragged him out.
Then came the night in Des Moines.
A fan threw a bat onto the stage. Thinking it was a rubber prop, Ozzy picked it up and bit into its head – only to realize, too late, that it was real. Blood filled his mouth. The bat was alive. Ozzy was rushed to the hospital for rabies shots, and the story exploded in the press.
The media reaction was instant and frenzied. Ozzy leaned into the image they created. His stage show turned into a gothic theatre of fog, crosses, and menace. Offstage, though, things were spiraling. He was arrested more than once. He lost passports and wrecked hotel rooms.
Despite the chaos, Blizzard of Ozz broke big – UK Number 7, US Number 21 – and ultimately sold about four million in the States. Randy became a guitar hero. Sharon kept the show on the road. And Ozzy, scared and stumbling, found himself more notorious than ever.
By the early ’80s, Ozzy’s life was a wrecking ball with no brakes. Booze, cocaine, pills – he consumed them constantly. One morning he woke up in a hotel room battered and bleeding with injuries he couldn’t explain. These kinds of blackouts weren’t occasional – they were normal.
One moment, Ozzy was onstage. The next, he’d lesson and find himself on a plane, with no idea what city he was in or what had happened the night before. Sometimes he couldn’t remember whole stretches of a tour. People told him he’d been hilarious, terrifying, or unconscious. He believed them. He had no evidence to the contrary.
Amid all this madness, tragedy struck. Randy Rhoads – the brilliant young guitarist who had helped resurrect Ozzy’s solo career – was killed in a horrific plane crash in Florida. The pilot, fooling around, made a low pass over their tour bus, clipped it, then hit a tree and a house before crashing. The plane exploded on impact. Randy was 25.
Ozzy was devastated. One minute they’d been laughing together; the next, he was identifying his friend’s remains. Randy had been quiet, disciplined, and kind – nothing like the rest of them. His death pushed Ozzy further off the rails. He drank more, used more, and barely held it together. On one infamous day in San Antonio, Sharon had hidden his clothes to stop him from disappearing on a bender. Ozzy found one of her dresses, put it on, and wandered out anyway. He ended up urinating on the Alamo Cenotaph, sparking public outrage and earning a lifetime ban from the city – eventually, it was lifted.
His relationship with Sharon grew darker too. Though they married in Hawaii in 1982, Ozzy had almost no memory of the ceremony. He was too drunk to remember much of Jack’s birth, “on another planet” for Aimee’s, and checked into the Betty Ford Center the day after Kelly was born. The house was a battleground of smashed furniture, screaming matches, and unpredictable rage. Ozzy lost his driving license. He lost days at a time. Then, one night, he lost himself completely.
In a blackout, Ozzy tried to choke Sharon. She locked herself in a room and called the police. He was arrested, taken to court, and banned from contacting her. Released on bail on the condition he enter treatment, Ozzy didn’t even remember what he’d done.
This was the line. Sharon gave him an ultimatum: treatment or goodbye. Ozzy checked into rehab, barely knowing what it meant. It wasn’t glamorous. It was humiliating. He had to mop floors, clean toilets, and face counsellors who wouldn’t let him joke his way out. He vomited, shook, and begged for alcohol. But slowly, something began to shift.
He started writing again. He remembered his children’s names. He stopped feeling like a ghost.
There was no grand epiphany, no sudden moment of transformation. But for the first time in years, Ozzy realised he didn’t want to die. And that, for him, was its own kind of miracle.
Ozzy stumbled out of rehab dazed – but alive. His hands still shook, and the cravings hadn’t vanished, but something had changed. He’d stood at the edge, stared into the abyss – and stepped back.
Bark at the Moon had already kept him on the road; after rehab, he kept working, touring and recording, though it wasn’t easy. His nerves were shot and he struggled to focus, but the music kept coming, and Ozzy was back on stage doing what he’d always done – only this time, he was more present for it.
The chaos didn’t disappear. Ozzy still relapsed more than once and got into scrapes. But the worst was behind him. He began to rebuild. He stayed married to Sharon. He saw more of his kids. He showed up for interviews. The fog began to clear.
Slowly, Ozzy’s image began to evolve. Once, he’d been a tabloid demon, the man who bit the heads off animals and urinated on sacred ground. Now, he was something else: a survivor, a rock institution. Younger bands hailed him as an icon. Journalists called him “the godfather of metal.” His name became less associated with scandal and more with recognition for his musical legacy.
There were hints of a different kind of fame, too. TV appearances, jokes at his own expense, a growing awareness that the public liked seeing him as much as hearing him. He was still rough around the edges – but less terrifying now. More human.
Ozzy closes I Am Ozzy with a shrug, offering no easy answers. He wasn’t sure why he’d survived so much chaos, why he outlived so many of his friends. But he did. He stayed onstage, true to himself, and kept going long after anyone thought he could.
In this lesson to I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne, we’ve followed the wild, tragic, and often darkly hilarious story of a man who revolutionized music – without ever learning to read it.
Raised in postwar Birmingham, Ozzy stumbled through school, crime, and dead-end jobs before finding purpose in music. That unlikely spark turned into Black Sabbath, the band widely credited with inventing heavy metal and that terrified a generation of parents. With a sound steeped in horror and a reputation to match, Sabbath shot to fame – but fame brought pressure, and eventually Ozzy was out.
Then came Blizzard of Ozz, Sharon Arden, and Randy Rhoads – a creative rebirth wrapped in chaos. Ozzy bit heads off animals, drank himself senseless, and somehow topped the charts. When Randy died in a plane crash, Ozzy’s life truly began to unravel. Entire years vanished into drugs, violence, and blackouts. After attacking Sharon during one such episode, he was arrested – and finally got help.
He came back, shakily but triumphantly, recording new albums and slowly shifting from menace to metal icon. He never became stable, but he did become legendary.
Ozzy Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, aged 76. That he lived that long is something no one – least of all Ozzy – would have predicted. His legacy endures as the voice that gave heavy metal its shape and its soul.
I Am Ozzy (2009) is the story of how a working-class kid from Aston ended up redefining rock music – and lived to talk about it. It charts a life of chaos, excess, and dark humour, from factory floors and prison cells to fame, infamy, and near-death experiences. It’s raw, unfiltered, and delivered with all the madness and mischief that became Ozzy’s trademark.
Born John Michael Osbourne in working-class Birmingham, Ozzy rose from factory floors and petty crime to cofound Black Sabbath – the band that defined the sound and rebellious spirit of heavy metal.
His life was even wilder than his music. The self-proclaimed “Prince of Darkness” bit the head off a bat onstage, was banned from cities, and took more drugs than most people would think physically possible.
When Ozzy was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, actor and rock devotee Jack Black called him “a madman, a genius, a revolutionary.” He wasn’t exaggerating.
In this lesson, you’ll get the unfiltered story of a working-class kid from Birmingham who rewrote rock history, terrified parents, and baffled the press. Against all odds, he became one of music’s most beloved legends. A defining voice of what came to be called heavy metal, Ozzy insisted they were “just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.”
But first, let’s go back to where it all began.
John Michael Osbourne came into the world in 1948, in the soot-stained backstreets of Aston, Birmingham. His parents, Jack and Lillian, were decent, hardworking people. Jack, a toolmaker, worked nights at the GEC. Lil, a factory worker, manned the household with grit and discipline. But they were poor, and the house was packed to the rafters with six kids, no hot water, and one outdoor toilet. The air stank of gasworks and coal smoke.
School was a nightmare for Ozzy. Undiagnosed dyslexia left him struggling in class, and the teachers’ solution was violence. Classmates weren’t kinder, mocking him relentlessly. By 15, after years of dodging gang beatings and failing grades, he walked away for good. A turning point came when he brought home the album With the Beatles – he said later, it was like “a light went on in my head.” He realised he didn’t just want to make music – he had to.
But before music, there was crime. Ozzy turned to burglary. On his first break-in he blundered into grabbing baby bibs and toddler underwear rather than anything he could sell; later he tried hauling a 24-inch TV and ended up pinned under it. The police eventually caught up with him when he used a thumbless glove while stealing shirts. He was sentenced to three months in Winson Green prison. It was filthy, terrifying, and humiliating. He was released after six weeks. But his time in prison had taught him something important: whatever happened next, he wasn’t cut out for normal life.
Once out, he tried odd jobs – cleaner, plumber’s mate, car-horn tuner – but nothing stuck. The worst was at the Digbeth slaughterhouse, where his work – from cutting open sheep’s stomachs to killing cows – left him reeking of blood and filth. At the time it was just a job; only later did it add to his dark stage image.
During this stretch of dead-end jobs and dashed dreams, Ozzy married a local woman named Thelma Riley. They had two children – Jessica and Louis – and he also became father to Thelma’s son, Elliot. But Ozzy, by his own admission, was a terrible husband and an absent father, already losing himself to drink. The marriage wouldn’t last.
Eventually, Ozzy scraped together cash to buy a microphone and amplifier by pawning his dad’s sound system – a move that didn’t go unnoticed. He scrawled an ad for the music shop window: “Ozzy Zig needs gig.” He claimed he was an “experienced front man” with his own PA system and gave his contact details. It was ridiculous – but it worked.
That was how he landed a spot in Rare Breed, a short-lived project with bassist Geezer Butler, who shared Ozzy’s love of weird lyrics and heavy riffs. The band fizzled out, but soon enough he crossed paths with guitarist Tony Iommi, a fellow Brummie with an intimidating presence and a finger injury that gave his playing a unique sound. Together with Bill Ward on drums, they started to bash out songs in a freezing rehearsal room. Something dark and dirty was beginning to take shape.
Ozzy may not have been a trained singer – and actually, he wasn’t even that confident – but when he opened his mouth, it worked. In a place where nobody had dreams, he’d found one – and he was hanging onto it with both hands.
The band formed like a gang of misfits with nowhere else to go. Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and Ozzy Osbourne rehearsed in damp, freezing rooms, travelled in rusted out vans, and played every dive they could book. They called themselves Earth and shared a single goal: escape.
Their rehearsal room at the community centre in Six Ways was across from the Orient cinema. Horror films shown there often drew queues down the street and around the corner. Watching this, Tony had a thought: if people paid to be scared, why not make music that terrified them? That spark led to a new track. Tony crafted a chilling riff, Ozzy and Bill wrote eerie lyrics, and Geezer suggested the name 'Black Sabbath,' borrowed from a Boris Karloff film. Soon, it became their name, and their identity.
The sound followed. Tony, still adapting to the fingers he’d lost in a factory accident, tuned his guitar lower to make playing easier – but it gave their songs a new, menacing weight. Bill adjusted to match him. Ozzy pushed his voice harder, higher, sharper. The combination of sound, subject matter, and imagery gave them a strange, theatrical menace that set them apart.
Ozzy looked just as strange as they sounded; long hair, flamboyant clothes, and platform boots. When he walked out on stage, he arrived like a warning. The band’s look and sound fused into something bleak, unpredictable, and loud.
The whole thing started to feel like some kind of ritual. Audiences weren’t sure what to make of it. Some stood in stunned silence while others threw glasses. Ozzy got used to dodging missiles between verses. But word spread. Journalists called them dangerous. Some people accused them of corrupting youth. None of it slowed them down.
In 1970, they signed with Vertigo and recorded their debut album in just one day. Released on Friday, February 13, Black Sabbath sounded like a storm unleashed. The title track began with ominous thunder, tolling bells, and a three-note-riff so crushing it felt like the walls were caving in. Ozzy’s voice sliced through the murk, wide-eyed and apocalyptic.
They hadn’t set out to invent anything. But by the time that record hit shelves, Black Sabbath had done more than name a band. They’d cracked open a whole new genre. And Ozzy – equal parts menace and spectacle – was the face and voice of it all.
“Paranoid” was born in minutes. The band were in the studio between takes when Tony started playing the riff. Their producer suggested they turn it into a song – and they did. Ozzy later joked it sounded like “a chip-pan catching fire.” But that fire spread fast. In the US, Paranoid went gold, catapulting Black Sabbath into rock stardom.
The success brought a new kind of chaos. They flew constantly, waking up in one city and going to bed in another. Exhaustion blurred the days, and jet lag left them playing shows without knowing what country they were in. Ozzy, terrified of flying, drank heavily to cope. Speed kept him awake to get through interviews; then tranquilizers knocked him out. Cocaine crept in. Downers, too. Every new pill felt like a fix – until it wasn’t. The band was wrecked, physically and mentally. When they weren’t arguing, they were barely speaking.
Tony, always the most serious of the group, started taking control. He cared about the music, but also about the image – and didn’t like Ozzy's sloppy stage gear. He pushed for tighter shows, more professionalism, better press. Ozzy, half-mad on drink and pills, resisted. Bill, once the gentle glue, was unraveling too. Only Geezer managed to keep some kind of middle ground, but even he couldn’t hold it all together.
Their manager, Patrick Meehan, made things worse. They struggled to understand the contracts and where the money was going, and when they asked questions, they were stonewalled or brushed off. Ozzy didn’t know what he was earning – or if he was being robbed.
By the late ’70s, cracks had become chasms. Ozzy was missing rehearsals. His voice was giving out. He stopped caring. One day, he walked into their rented house in Los Angeles to find the others lined up like a tribunal. They didn’t mince words: he was out. After ten years, Black Sabbath had fired their frontman.
Ozzy felt numb more than angry. Somewhere deep down, he knew it had been coming. He’d become a liability, and they’d had enough. But even so, it hurt. Sabbath had been his life – and now, without warning, it was over.
After Black Sabbath fired him, Ozzy sank into isolation. He spent three months holed up in a hotel room, drinking around the clock and waiting for everything to end. But Sharon Arden had other plans.
Sharon – the daughter of Sabbath’s former manager Don Arden – took charge. Her father, Don, had once terrified Ozzy in business meetings – his reputation for brass-knuckle tactics was well known. But Sharon wasn’t afraid of Ozzy, or of anyone. She saw potential where others saw a lost cause. She pulled Ozzy out of his self-destruction, became his manager, and, years later, his wife. She found musicians, booked rehearsals, and pushed him back into shape.More than that, she refused to let him slip back into the void. Her sheer determination kept the band together, the shows on the road, and Ozzy himself alive. Without Sharon, there would have been no second act.
That second act was Blizzard of Ozz. Recorded in 1980 with classically trained guitarist Randy Rhoads, it marked a creative and commercial rebirth. With his classical training, Randy’s elegant, fluid solos lit a fire under Ozzy’s raw vocals and gave the album its distinct edge. For the first time in years, Ozzy felt like he was making music that mattered.
But the chaos hadn’t stayed behind. At a meeting with CBS executives to celebrate his first solo deal, Sharon had brought white doves as a peace gesture. Drunk and restless, Ozzy shocked everyone by biting the head off one dove and threatening to do the same to the other before letting it go. Security dragged him out.
Then came the night in Des Moines.
A fan threw a bat onto the stage. Thinking it was a rubber prop, Ozzy picked it up and bit into its head – only to realize, too late, that it was real. Blood filled his mouth. The bat was alive. Ozzy was rushed to the hospital for rabies shots, and the story exploded in the press.
The media reaction was instant and frenzied. Ozzy leaned into the image they created. His stage show turned into a gothic theatre of fog, crosses, and menace. Offstage, though, things were spiraling. He was arrested more than once. He lost passports and wrecked hotel rooms.
Despite the chaos, Blizzard of Ozz broke big – UK Number 7, US Number 21 – and ultimately sold about four million in the States. Randy became a guitar hero. Sharon kept the show on the road. And Ozzy, scared and stumbling, found himself more notorious than ever.
By the early ’80s, Ozzy’s life was a wrecking ball with no brakes. Booze, cocaine, pills – he consumed them constantly. One morning he woke up in a hotel room battered and bleeding with injuries he couldn’t explain. These kinds of blackouts weren’t occasional – they were normal.
One moment, Ozzy was onstage. The next, he’d lesson and find himself on a plane, with no idea what city he was in or what had happened the night before. Sometimes he couldn’t remember whole stretches of a tour. People told him he’d been hilarious, terrifying, or unconscious. He believed them. He had no evidence to the contrary.
Amid all this madness, tragedy struck. Randy Rhoads – the brilliant young guitarist who had helped resurrect Ozzy’s solo career – was killed in a horrific plane crash in Florida. The pilot, fooling around, made a low pass over their tour bus, clipped it, then hit a tree and a house before crashing. The plane exploded on impact. Randy was 25.
Ozzy was devastated. One minute they’d been laughing together; the next, he was identifying his friend’s remains. Randy had been quiet, disciplined, and kind – nothing like the rest of them. His death pushed Ozzy further off the rails. He drank more, used more, and barely held it together. On one infamous day in San Antonio, Sharon had hidden his clothes to stop him from disappearing on a bender. Ozzy found one of her dresses, put it on, and wandered out anyway. He ended up urinating on the Alamo Cenotaph, sparking public outrage and earning a lifetime ban from the city – eventually, it was lifted.
His relationship with Sharon grew darker too. Though they married in Hawaii in 1982, Ozzy had almost no memory of the ceremony. He was too drunk to remember much of Jack’s birth, “on another planet” for Aimee’s, and checked into the Betty Ford Center the day after Kelly was born. The house was a battleground of smashed furniture, screaming matches, and unpredictable rage. Ozzy lost his driving license. He lost days at a time. Then, one night, he lost himself completely.
In a blackout, Ozzy tried to choke Sharon. She locked herself in a room and called the police. He was arrested, taken to court, and banned from contacting her. Released on bail on the condition he enter treatment, Ozzy didn’t even remember what he’d done.
This was the line. Sharon gave him an ultimatum: treatment or goodbye. Ozzy checked into rehab, barely knowing what it meant. It wasn’t glamorous. It was humiliating. He had to mop floors, clean toilets, and face counsellors who wouldn’t let him joke his way out. He vomited, shook, and begged for alcohol. But slowly, something began to shift.
He started writing again. He remembered his children’s names. He stopped feeling like a ghost.
There was no grand epiphany, no sudden moment of transformation. But for the first time in years, Ozzy realised he didn’t want to die. And that, for him, was its own kind of miracle.
Ozzy stumbled out of rehab dazed – but alive. His hands still shook, and the cravings hadn’t vanished, but something had changed. He’d stood at the edge, stared into the abyss – and stepped back.
Bark at the Moon had already kept him on the road; after rehab, he kept working, touring and recording, though it wasn’t easy. His nerves were shot and he struggled to focus, but the music kept coming, and Ozzy was back on stage doing what he’d always done – only this time, he was more present for it.
The chaos didn’t disappear. Ozzy still relapsed more than once and got into scrapes. But the worst was behind him. He began to rebuild. He stayed married to Sharon. He saw more of his kids. He showed up for interviews. The fog began to clear.
Slowly, Ozzy’s image began to evolve. Once, he’d been a tabloid demon, the man who bit the heads off animals and urinated on sacred ground. Now, he was something else: a survivor, a rock institution. Younger bands hailed him as an icon. Journalists called him “the godfather of metal.” His name became less associated with scandal and more with recognition for his musical legacy.
There were hints of a different kind of fame, too. TV appearances, jokes at his own expense, a growing awareness that the public liked seeing him as much as hearing him. He was still rough around the edges – but less terrifying now. More human.
Ozzy closes I Am Ozzy with a shrug, offering no easy answers. He wasn’t sure why he’d survived so much chaos, why he outlived so many of his friends. But he did. He stayed onstage, true to himself, and kept going long after anyone thought he could.
In this lesson to I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne, we’ve followed the wild, tragic, and often darkly hilarious story of a man who revolutionized music – without ever learning to read it.
Raised in postwar Birmingham, Ozzy stumbled through school, crime, and dead-end jobs before finding purpose in music. That unlikely spark turned into Black Sabbath, the band widely credited with inventing heavy metal and that terrified a generation of parents. With a sound steeped in horror and a reputation to match, Sabbath shot to fame – but fame brought pressure, and eventually Ozzy was out.
Then came Blizzard of Ozz, Sharon Arden, and Randy Rhoads – a creative rebirth wrapped in chaos. Ozzy bit heads off animals, drank himself senseless, and somehow topped the charts. When Randy died in a plane crash, Ozzy’s life truly began to unravel. Entire years vanished into drugs, violence, and blackouts. After attacking Sharon during one such episode, he was arrested – and finally got help.
He came back, shakily but triumphantly, recording new albums and slowly shifting from menace to metal icon. He never became stable, but he did become legendary.
Ozzy Osbourne died on July 22, 2025, aged 76. That he lived that long is something no one – least of all Ozzy – would have predicted. His legacy endures as the voice that gave heavy metal its shape and its soul.
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