The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [183]
Were you guys interested in black magic—even a little?
We couldn’t conjure up a fart. We’d get invitations to play witches’ conventions and Black Masses in Highgate Cemetery. I honestly thought it was a joke. We were the last hippie band—we were into peace.
In a lot of live Sabbath photos, you’re flashing the peace sign.
I never did this black-magic stuff. The reason I did “Mr. Crowley” on my first solo album [Blizzard of Ozz, 1980] was that everybody was talking about Aleister Crowley. Jimmy Page bought his house, and one of my roadies worked with one of his roadies. I thought, “Mr. Crowley, who are you? Where are you from?” But people would hear the song and go, “He’s definitely into witchcraft.”
You were fired from Black Sabbath in 1978. Did you deserve it?
We deserved to fire each other. There was no one worse than anybody else. If the others had been churchgoing Bible punchers and I was fucking their wives, I could have expected it. But they were doing booze and quaaludes too.
In those days, we were well into cocaine. That turns you into a powder-seeking freak. The thing was, get the gig over with so we could get our bump of coke. We had a guy on tour with suitcases full of different strengths of coke.
We went head over heels. It made me incredibly afraid. I remember lying in bed at night, feeling my heartbeat, thinking “Please, God, let me sleep for an hour, so I’ll be okay.” Then I’d wake up and [makes sniffing noise] be straight into it again. We did it for years. Eventually it turned everything sour. One minute, we were a rock band doing coke. The next, we were a coke band doing rock.
You’ve been married to Sharon for twenty years. What was it that first attracted you to her?
Her laugh. She has the best laugh. She was so infectious, the way she laughed and cursed. I fancied her from a distance for quite a while. We’d pass in hotels, airports. Her father, Don Arden, managed Black Sabbath, and she worked in the office.
Then I got fired from Black Sabbath. I went to a hotel in L.A., locked myself in this room, ordered cases of beer and had a dealer bring me coke every day. I thought, “I’m on my last fling. I’m going to get well fucked up for a few months, then go home and call it a day.” My idea was to open a bar—which is a brilliant idea for an alcoholic.
One day, there is a knock at the door. Someone in the band’s organization had given me an envelope of cash I was supposed to give to Sharon. I blew it on coke. So she came round to tear me off a stripe. She comes in—I think she felt sorry for me. She goes, “If you straighten your act up, I want to manage you.”
Everybody up to that point was going, “You dummy, you idiot, you can’t do fuck-all.” All my life, I used to be called a dummy. She was the one who didn’t. She encouraged me. She got my ass in gear. We’re the greatest team on earth.
You were arrested in 1989 for trying to kill her in a drunken rage.
It has not always been bliss. But when I was doing the Queen’s Jubilee, there wasn’t one rock star there, not one, with a wife who was the same age. They were all twelve or thirty-two or whatever. I know to get a young piece of skirt is one thing. But what the fuck do you talk about? “Oh, that was bad news about India and Pakistan.” And it’s so common. I wouldn’t trade my Sharon for anything.
Are you amazed that, after everything you’ve been through and done to yourself with drugs and alcohol, that you’re still here?
Absolutely. I’ve danced with death so many times, knowingly and unknowingly. You know what I do? Every year, since I was forty-five, I have a full physical: colonoscopy, prostate test; they shove things up my dick. And at the end, they go, “You’re fine.”
Nothing—touch wood [he knocks on a table three times]—has gone wrong with me. But if it does, it does. I’ve had a great run. The thing about life that gets me crazy is that by the time you learn