The late Ozzy Osbourne surely sat at the top of the heap of rock stars with iconically distinctive voices. Amiable but vulgar. Forthright but kind of clueless. A guy you might want to regale you with stories of his hedonistic days, but certainly not one you'd want to drive you home afterward.
So the first thing I was on the look-out for when reading Osbourne's sadly and coincidentally titled autobiography Last Rites was that Ozzy Osbourne voice. Could I picture the text being spoken aloud in that slightly hard-to-decipher Birmingham gulp of his? Or did it sound like some polisher had intervened to spruce up the prose and water down the wizard? That the book was indeed co-authored with one Chris Ayers might be enough to raise certain concerns.
Probably for the best, it's a lot from column A and a little from column B. There's enough recognizable Ozzy in Last Rites to say, "That sounds like him" (so sayeth Oz: "I ain't the best person to ask about dates or whatever") and enough polishing to help the reader make it through 350 pages without needing some sort of decoder ring. The storytelling initially seems like it will be chronological, but when Black Sabbath is introduced on page 19, and we're already at The Osbournes reality sitcom on page 31, any sensible organization has clearly gone out the window, which is another point in the "Yup, that's Ozzy, alright" column. So is the sweetness, as when he expresses gushing fanboy fondness for Ray Davies and The Beatles (and Phil Collins, of all people) or continually expresses his love for his family.
The next point of concern in a book such as this is, does it holds one's interest? For anyone remotely familiar with Ozzy Osbourne's career (and I pretty much wander off after Sabbath Bloody Sabbath), this should be less of a concern, but he does spend an awful lot of time discussing his health problems, substance abuse problems, and all of his famous friends. You're about 130 pages in before he really starts discussing being in a band, but by then you might be a bit numbed after all the descriptions of swelling, snorting, aches, pains, and doctor's appointments.
So a lot of readers might do well to scan the first seven chapters before settling in on eight. That's when you start getting some information on Black Sabbath's songwriting process, what it was like to deal with tough-to-follow opening acts like Van Halen and Kiss (sulk), a drunken fist-fight with Bill Ward that involved Ward calling the blow-by-blows like an ESPN color commentator, and the time Ward passed out under a septic tank hose.
From that point on, it's a mixture of it all, a boggled mental scrapbook of drugs, health problems, recording, performing, drugs, health problems, creativity, reality TV, celebrity encounters, family, drugs, health problems, and drugs and health problems. It is sad that those recurring chemical and medical issues so overtook the man's life that they take over his autobiography so completely, but at least he recounts these episodes with the disarmingly self-effacing and blunt way he always expressed himself. All in all, pluses and minuses, you can't say Last Rites doesn't read like a book by Ozzy Osbourne.
