Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (11 page)

TONY IOMMI:
When we were doing [1972’s]
Volume 4
, the amount of drugs we were doing was absolutely ridiculous. We were having stuff flown in on private planes. But it was a great period for us. For the next album, [1973’s]
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
, we tried to re-create the same thing and it didn’t happen. We went back to Los Angeles, the same house, the same everything, but it didn’t work. So we went back to England all disappointed. It was the first time in my life I’d ever had writer’s block. We thought, “Well, that’s it. We’re finished. It’s over.” And then we rented a castle in Wales and rehearsed in the dungeons, and as soon as we were there I came up with the title track, “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.” Just like that, the riff came up, and I thought, “That’s it, we’re off again.”

While Sabbath and Priest confronted dark, sometimes violent subjects, AC/DC preferred songs about getting loaded and getting laid. “The Jack” is about a girl with gonorrhea; “Crabsody in Blue” is about getting crabs; “Go Down” addresses oral sex. But the band’s racy lyrics aren’t always so blatant, and their use of double entendres became a trademark. The best example is “Big Balls,” a song simultaneously about testicles and fancy parties.

ANGUS YOUNG:
I’ve always viewed our lyrics as a tongue-in-cheek thing—just schoolboy humor. But sex has always been a big part of rock and roll. When I would hear [Chuck] Berry singing, “Riding along in my automobile / my baby beside me at the wheel,” it was the same thing. For every rock-and-roll band there’s been the cars, the women. The Stones had “Honky Tonk Woman” and “Starfucker.” They probably got away with a lot more than we did. Even the Beatles—they had songs like “Why Don’t We do It in the Road” and “Lady Madonna.” Hell, that’s rock and roll.

BRIAN JOHNSON:
We had a Swedish reporter who said to us, “Sex, sex, sex! Everything is sex. How would you like it if you were thrown in the back of a car by a woman, and she tied you down and abused you?” I went, “Fucking great! That’s me fucking dream come true. Bring a friend.” She said, “Do you think that’s amusing for the woman?” I said, “I’d fucking love it. Tie me up in a car and get me fucking brains fucked out by some wild rampant tottie” [
laughs
]. Working lads, that’s where your head’s at.

MARTIN POPOFF:
I always thought of AC/DC as the ultimate party band that will kill
somebody
with alcohol poisoning one day, because those records were so intense as soundtracks to partying, to throwing up, to having big drinking parties out in the woods where something bad is inevitably going to happen. There’s going to be a car accident or something. And yes, I guess a lot of that is underscored by the lyrics. A lot of them are about drinking and womanizing, and evil women.

From a fan’s perspective, Sabbath was still the kingpin of metal. Its first four albums were revered as classics, and the band filled arenas. Behind the scenes, however, Ozzy’s chronic substance abuse and unreliability was driving a wedge between him and the rest of the band.

TONY IOMMI:
Ozzy used to get out of hand on days off. I used to try to keep myself fairly straight, even though it didn’t happen all the time, because
somebody
had to be in control. Many times somebody phoned me up from the bar in the hotel and said, “Can you get down here and get him out.” ’Cause he’d be passed out on the table. So I’d go down and get him and bring him up to his room and put him in bed. We were in the studio once and we went to a real plush club afterwards. We were drinking away and he got absolutely smashed and passed out on this couch. The club was closing and the guy from the club said, “Get him out. Get him out.” I went, “I’m not moving him. If you want him out, you get him out.” So they picked him up and put him over their shoulders—and of course, I knew what he was gonna do—he pissed himself all over them. And they went, “You dirty bastard,” and threw him off. They couldn’t wake him up. But I’d seen that so many times, I just knew what was gonna happen.

OZZY OSBOURNE:
I really was drunk all the time. I was just fucking crazy, but I was a fun crazy guy, I think. I wasn’t a bad crazy guy. I wouldn’t hurt anyone intentionally. I put
myself
in danger. But every time you get in a car you put yourself in danger. Every time you leave the house you put yourself in danger.

GEEZER BUTLER:
I did everything you can think of and I’m lucky to be alive. But I went off drugs in 1976 once they weren’t doing anything for me anymore. They made me depressed more than anything. They were great at first, but once they started taking over my life, I went right off the whole idea. And I saw the way Bill Ward and Ozzy were getting overtaken by it, and I didn’t want to get like that. So I was lucky to be content being boring.

TONY IOMMI:
Drugs and alcohol eventually take their toll, and Bill was probably the first big sign of it. And Ozzy, of course. We’d all have our times of getting drunk, but Bill actually started drinking onstage. He really got bad. He used to get nervous and take Valium. Then he decided he was too scared to fly and started traveling by road. He’d develop these fears and it was coming out more the more he’d drink and take drugs. It just built up over a while. We’d all go out to clubs and get pissed and come back out of our brain. But Bill was the only one who had to have a drink before he played. The rest of us didn’t do that. We
couldn’t
do that. I couldn’t play drunk. I wouldn’t be able to.

MICK WALL:
Ozzy told me once, “Me and Bill were like the drug commandos. We would never come through a door if there was a plate glass window we could smash instead.” Ozzy told me as far as he was concerned they were all just bumpkins and that “as long as we had a few quid in our pocket, some tarts to fuck, and a bootload of drugs, we were happy.” I think in Ozzy’s happy-go-lucky world, especially in those days, it was about the intoxication. It was about being permanently out of it every day.

OZZY OSBOURNE:
I said to Bill recently, “Can you believe we used to believe having a belly full of alcohol, a bag of pills, and hash and dope was our idea of having a good time?” I can’t even think that way nowadays. I figure, “Why did it take me so long to get it?” And he goes, “Yeah, but it worked for a while.” That’s about right. But when it stopped working, at the end of the day with drinking and me, I’d be miserable. Then I’d have another drink and be even more miserable. Then I’d think to myself, “What am I doing this for?”

GEEZER BUTLER:
We played Nashville one time and Ozzy went into the hotel and didn’t tell anybody what room he was in. He went to a completely different room than he was registered at, and we thought he’d been kidnapped. We had the FBI come in and look for him. We were playing with Van Halen that night, and they finished their show and then we had to go onstage and say, “Sorry, we don’t know where Ozzy is.” The next day we all got on the bus and we were really worried. We were saying, “I wonder who’s got him and if they’ve killed him.” Ozzy was already on the bus. He went, “Hello fellas, where’s the show?” We felt like killing him. As it turned out, he’d had a cough, so he went out and bought two bottles of cough medicine, drank them both, and knocked himself out. That was the last tour we did. It was sort of the last straw.

TONY IOMMI:
In 1978, when we went to Los Angeles to write [
Never Say Die
], we had a house and we all lived there. We turned the garage into a studio so we could rehearse and write. We had equipment in the house as well so we could put rough ideas together and then go in the studio and play it. When we were trying to come up with riffs, Ozzy came apart from us. He was going to clubs and getting really out of it and not coming home some nights. It got to a stage where nothing was happening with him.

GEEZER BUTLER:
Ozzy didn’t show up for six weeks. We couldn’t go on with him after that.

TONY IOMMI:
It was me that dealt with Warner Bros. in them days. That was my task: to talk to them about the progress of the album, which, of course, we didn’t fuckin’ have. I’d go over there and they’d say, “How’s the album coming?” And I’d go, “Oh, great, great.” “When can we hear some tracks?” “Oh, soon, soon.” We hadn’t got anything, and I was really worried. I had to go and face these people knowing full well that we hadn’t got anything to play them. It just got to a real desperate stage. At that point Ozzy didn’t want to do anything apart from go out and get drunk. So it came to the point where the other guys said, “Well, look, if we don’t do anything we’re gonna break up. We’re not gonna stand it. We’re gonna leave.” So that was the decision between the three of us. We said we’re gonna have to replace Ozzy, and that’s what happened.

That same year, the bottom fell out for Peter Criss, and KISS headed into a decline that ended two years later with the departure of Ace Frehley. After the four members released simultaneous self-titled solo records in 1978, Criss suddenly seemed less interested in the band and began to withdraw. He was credited as the drummer on KISS’s 1979’s
Dynasty
, but in fact only played on his own song, “Dirty Living.” The drummer in David Letterman’s band, Anton Fig, played on the rest of
Dynasty
and all of 1980’s
Unmasked
. Criss’s last show with KISS (until their reunion in 1996) was December 16, 1979.

PETER CRISS:
I thought, “God, this is turnin’ out to be such a damn business.” I was losin’ the fun of the early days when we were struggling, and now we were kind of having a lot of money and things we never could afford, we could [suddenly] afford without looking at the price tag. That got scary for me, I didn’t like it, and I started thinkin’ then about splittin’.

GENE SIMMONS:
[When we were making 1978’s
KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park
,] Peter [was] in [one of his] car accidents. He skidded 400 feet before he crashed, and he wound up in the hospital. When he did speak in the movie he was impossible to understand because of his thick Brooklyn accent. So his voice was dubbed. Even getting Peter and Ace in front of the camera didn’t always work out. Sometimes they went missing. The only solution was to use doubles. For Peter, we had a fifty-five-year-old guy and we put makeup on him. For Ace, an African American stunt double.

PETER CRISS:
I decided I wanted to do my own thing, my own music. Ten years in KISS was enough for me. I got tired of playing heavy metal. I like writing love songs. I like playing with strings, horns, and pianos.

ACE FREHLEY:
When Peter left, I really felt a great chemical imbalance in the band. Even though I loved Eric [Carr, Criss’s replacement], God rest his soul, losing Peter upset the balance of the band a little too much. Plus, I didn’t have my drinking buddy anymore, so I had to go drink with my bodyguards and roadies. It took me a long time to realize that I had a serious problem. I guess I finally realized it when I crashed my DeLorean in ’83. I also got busted for drunk driving six months later, and lost my license for a couple of years. That was kind of a wake-up call to me to get help. If I had stayed in the group, I probably would have self-destructed and killed myself. You know, there were plenty of times when, driving home to Connecticut from the city, I contemplated just driving my Porsche into a fucking tree and ending it all. So I had to choose the lesser of two evils.

GENE SIMMONS:
We consciously missed Ace and Peter all the time, but in no way, shape, or form did we feel responsible or blame ourselves for what happened to them. Everything is a choice in life and you make the bed you sleep in, and unfortunately, they decided to be self-destructive. That doesn’t mean you don’t miss them. We’ve had some great times. Some not-so-great ones, too—and that’s why they had to go.

AC/DC seemed unstoppable. Then, on February 19, 1980, Bon Scott tragically lost his life. The band was in London doing preproduction for the follow-up to
Highway to Hell
; Bon was living it up as he always did. The night before he died, Scott went to the Music Machine, a club in Camden Town, London, to check out the band Lonesome No More with his friend Alistair Kinnear, who was driving. After a night of heavy drinking, the two drove back to Kinnear’s apartment, and Kinnear noticed the singer had passed out.

ALISTAIR KINNEAR (Bon Scott’s friend):
I tried to lift him out of the car, but he was too heavy for me to carry in my intoxicated state, so I put the front passenger seat back so that he could lie flat, covered him with a blanket, left a note with my address and phone number on it, and staggered upstairs to bed. It must have been 4 or 5 a.m. by that time, and I slept until about 11, when I was awakened by a friend. I was so hungover that I asked him to do me a favor [and check] on Bon. He did so, and returned to tell me my car was empty, so I went back to sleep, assuming that Bon had awoken and taken a taxi home. At about 7:30 that evening I went down to my car intending to pay a visit to my girlfriend who was in hospital, and was shocked to find Bon still lying flat in the front seat, obviously in a very bad way, and not breathing. I immediately drove him to King’s College Hospital, where Bon was pronounced dead on arrival. The Lambeth coroner’s report cited acute alcohol poisoning, and death by misadventure.