November 07, 2009

By Ray Waddell

Unlike most rock music tall tales, stories about Ozzy Osbourne contain more truth than myth. But beyond the diary of this madman is the story of one of rock's most unique and enduring frontmen, with fan appeal that transcends generations and popular trends.

And for nearly 40 years and countless shows, Ozzy has won his fans over from the stage, often with a fire hose in hand, wielded with love.

"I love my fans more than they'll ever love me," Ozzy says. "I'm not one of those guys that would ever say that they're privileged to see me. To be honest, and I'm not trying to be slurpy, it's a privilege for me to see them. My job is to give them the best fucking night out they could possibly have—that's what we're there for. There's no sex, drugs or rock'n'roll that could compete with a great gig. It's fucking awesome."

Billboard will fete Ozzy with the Legend of Live Award at the 2009 Billboard Touring Awards Nov. 5 at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York. The honor recognizes an individual who has made significant and lasting contributions to live music and the touring business and acknowledges a commitment to the art of performing live and reaching fans through the concert experience. Ozzy has reached—and mooned, and doused—hundreds of thousands of fans, and rocked them all.

"Ozzy's whole thing has always been touring and performing live," says Sharon Osbourne, his wife and manager.

Simply put, Ozzy has altered the course of rock music and live performance, first through his work with Black Sabbath and then as a hugely popular solo artist. His impact on live music, including pioneering with Sharon the multi-act hard rock festival tour Ozzfest, will be felt for many years to come.

Ozzy's career has spanned four decades and he has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide—50 million with Black Sabbath and millions more as a solo artist, according to his representatives. But few would have forecast such a future for him during his humble, gritty beginnings in Birmingham, England.

"Where I was raised as a young guy there was not much hope for the future," Ozzy says. As a youth, he says he loved the Four Seasons, Chuck Berry and "Little Richard was fucking great."

And then, as with so many artists, the Beatles came along and opened Ozzy's eyes. "They came from Liverpool, which was approximately 60 miles north of where I come from," he recalls. "So all of a sudden it was in my grasp, but I never thought it would be as successful as it became."

Sharon first saw her future husband perform with Black Sabbath as a young teenager, as Sabbath was managed by her father, Don Arden.

"It was in 1970 at the Marquis in London," she recalls. "I remember that it was absolutely packed in the club in London, perspiration was dripping from the walls. I don't know whether it was the music I liked, or rather the atmosphere that the music got going when it was performed live. I was just trying to make it out: 'What is this?' "

Sabbath fired Ozzy in 1979, reportedly for his legendary excesses. Once again, his prospects didn't look good. In the wake of leaving Sabbath, Ozzy did what Ozzy did in those days. "I remember staying in an apartment in Los Angeles ordering alcohol from the local liquor store and having a single-minded party on my own, a last blast," he says. "And one day Sharon came 'round and I remember her saying to me, 'If you get yourself together, I want to manage you.' I was knocked out. Why would anybody want to manage me? I was an alcoholic fucking drugged-out wreck at that point."

But Sharon saw Ozzy's potential as a solo artist. "Before the Sabbath shows would start, they were just screaming his name over and over. So we knew Ozzy had this huge fan base."

Sharon might have seen the potential, but the music businesses didn't, even if Sabbath had been a hit for Warner Bros.

"We still have a letter from [then-Warner Bros. president] Mo Ostin saying, 'Nice try, Ozzy, but we're going to have to pass on the record'," she recalls. "That would have been [the 1980 album] 'Blizzard of Ozz' that went on to sell probably 6 million worldwide."

Meanwhile, for Ozzy, his legendary onstage behavior came naturally, including spraying the audience with a hose. "I threw a bucket of water into the audience one night. I don't know when, and it went from there," Ozzy says. "I love all that stuff. It's a bit fucking hokey, it's a bit fucking slapstick, but getting the people off is what it's all about. I've had some memorable shows when I worked the audience and it's been sort of a giant party for me. I love that."

GOING CRAZY

Touring was always a key in the strategy of Ozzy's solo career, beginning with the Blizzard tour in 1980. "We stayed on the road the first three years of his solo career, touring and touring," Sharon says. "With Ozzy's music and what Ozzy represents, that's the way to do it. That's what kept Ozzy different from all these other groups; we didn't rely on whether the radio was playing the lead track from his album, because Ozzy just sold tickets on Ozzy. People wanted to see him perform, people wanted to wear his merchandise."

Both in the studio and on the road, Ozzy was backed by top-flight musicians, initially including the late guitar hero Randy Rhoads, who died in a 1982 plane crash. Ozzy's bandmates since Sabbath have been among hard music's best, including Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo and Black Label Society guitarist Zakk Wylde. Ozzy's criteria for bandmates begins, obviously, with the songs. "A lot of musicians want to rewrite the fucking songs, and that ain't right for me—you've got to do the songs as they were written," he says. "They'll say, 'If you change the key to C,' I'm [saying], 'No, no, what key is the fucking song in? Play it in fucking D.' "

The songs from Ozzy's solo career remain staples of his live shows. "Those first two Ozzy albums were magic," he says, referring to "Blizzard" and the 1981 set "Diary of a Madman." "Then Randy got killed and the band broke up and so on and so on."

Despite this setback and many other well-chronicled struggles, Ozzy's popularity "never missed a beat," according to Sharon. "He's gone through flower power, disco, pop, grunge; he survived," she says. "Ozzy wasn't one of these people that had one huge record and spent the rest of his career trying to get that hit again."

Along the way, "I've done my fair share of bad concerts as well as good concerts, and you kind of remember the good ones more than the bad ones," Ozzy says. "When I first played Madison Square Garden with Black Sabbath, when I first played the [L.A.] Forum with Black Sabbath, those memories are good. Then in my solo career I did Castle Donnington, the festival; I did that one time and had a great time."

THE OZZFEST

Ozzfest was launched first as a couple of one-off events in 1996 after Ozzy was rejected from the lineup of what was then the top touring music festival, Lollapalooza.

"Lollapalooza at that time was very experimental, taking different genres of music and mixing it all together, which I thought was brilliant," Sharon says. "So when they refused Ozzy because he wasn't perceived as being cool enough, I was like, 'OK we'll do something on our own, with our own genre of music, stick to what we know. We'll do our own harder-edged festival.' And we outlasted others, we opened the doors for similar tours, and it's been great."

Ozzy says a lot of luck was involved. "When we tried to get on Lollapalooza, they said, 'Ozzy's a dinosaur, there's no room for him,' so Sharon said, 'We'll do our own Ozzfest,' " he says. "A very lucky person, I am."

Ozzfest became the most financially successful of all touring festivals, taking in nearly $205 million and drawing attendance in excess of 5 million to 313 shows since debuting in 1996, according to Billboard Boxscore.

Virtually every hard rock band that has broken through in the past decade spent time on the Ozzfest stages, which is a source of pride for Ozzy. "I'm proud of the fact that we've given a platform for other bands to have a go, because it's getting harder and harder," he says. "I always tried to be fair with the people we were working with. I'm not one of those guys [who says], 'You're on my show. You've got to fucking bow when you see me.' That's bullshit."

In 2007, Ozzfest became Freefest, a free version of Ozzfest, moving more than 428,000 tickets, which producer Live Nation said at the time was the largest number of free tickets distributed in the United States in the history of the concert business. In 2008, Ozzfest was staged as a one-off show, with Metallica and Ozzy as headliners, grossing nearly $3.5 million with attendance of 30,000 at Dallas' Pizza Hut Park, according to Boxscore. The festival took a break in 2009, but Sharon says they're looking at reviving Ozzfest as a tour, and Ozzy says he's in.

"Ozzy loves doing [Ozzfest]," Sharon says. "He moans about it all the time, but that's Ozzy, he loves to moan. But he really misses Ozzfest, and that's why we're going to do it again, hopefully next year, because I think the economy will be a little better next year and we won't have to worry so much whether people will show up."

WORKING WITH THE OZZMAN

New York promoter Ron Delsener says solo Ozzy was an arena-level attraction from the beginning. Sometimes, much patience was required when working with the Prince of Darkness. "In those days if the crowd wasn't going nuts, he'd throw his hands up in the air and scream, 'Go crazy, go crazy.' It was mostly guys in the audience at that time, all young guys, and they would go crazy by taking the cushions and carving them out of the seats and flipping them through the air like Frisbees toward the stage."

Louis Messina, president of TMG/AEG Live, has worked with the Osbournes for decades and was one of the original promoters of Ozzfest. "The wizard of Oz," he says. "I love Ozzy both on and off the stage. There is never a dull minute, it's a 24-hour show. Working with him and Sharon is definitely one of my career highlights."

Other promoters express their affection for the Osbournes. "Ozzy's devotion to his audience, as well as his family, is unmatched and a standard which all others should strive to achieve," says Danny Zelisko, president of Live Nation Southwest. "I always look so forward to seeing him and Sharon. They were both there for me as I battled colon cancer, right after Sharon was getting over the same disease. [It is] just one of the wonderful examples of how our lives have interwoven."

Promoters love working with Ozzy, and seemingly not just because he makes them money.

"We don't break their balls," Ozzy says. "Some bands go, 'The guarantee is the guarantee, I don't care if you had four people there, that was our guarantee.' We cut them slack. It's always a crapshoot, really. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose."

Mostly they win, and Ozzy has also won respect as a performer. "No one turns it on like he does when he hits that stage," says Randy Phillips, CEO of AEG Live, producer of last year's Ozzfest. "And remember, with Ozzy, it's the 'Ozzie and Harriet' show—you get Ozzy and Sharon, and they're an incredible team together. She's a great manager for him and he is iconic. He invented metal in a lot of ways."

Along the way, Sharon has earned a reputation as a savvy, tough-as-nails manager, a reputation she shrugs off. "It's expected to be a hard businessperson when you're a man, especially in this genre of music that we deal in," she says. "We're not like the Philharmonic Orchestra, where people are gentle. But when a woman's hard, it's like, 'Whoa, she's a bitch.' Women are not supposed to tough, but you have to be."

Being married in both career and life has its own dynamic. "Sometimes I wonder, 'Is she telling me this as my wife or is she telling me this as my fucking manager?' " Ozzy says. "Sometimes it's great, sometimes it ain't. But you know what? She ain't done such a bad job with me over the years."

Ozzy recently moved his booking responsibilities to William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, where his responsible agent is contemporary music head Marc Geiger, ironically one of the founders of Lollapalooza.

"WME is thrilled that we get to work with Ozzy," Geiger says. "I don't even know what to say, as he has accomplished so much in so many areas, let alone his influence on thousands of rock musicians and fans. We are just lucky to be able to work with him. He will show us all how it's done live again next summer. Ozzy rules."

Ozzy rules, sure, but he would be the first to admit he's not perfect, and the road can become a grind these days. "I want to give the audience my heart and soul every night, but sometimes I pull it off, sometimes I don't," he says. "We're human. I don't use any tricks. I don't lip-synch my voice. What you see is what you get. I've done my fair share of fucking bad gigs. I'm not embarrassed to say that."

Such honesty is typical of Ozzy, who's clearly in a good place these days. "People ask if I have any advice to give them, [but] the only thing I could say really is, 'If you've got any dreams of a better life or you want to do something, hold onto the dream because sometimes they come true,' " he says. "That's the case for me. My prospects for the rest of my life weren't that good when I was a kid. The whole journey for me has been magical."

Subscribe to Billboard magazine today!