Just finished reading this very interesting book. He has played with so many different people over the years that the book was full of great stories. He is obviously still bitter over the Blizzard Of Ozz situation which he and Lee Kerslake eventually lost in the courts. If you believe Daisly’s side of things he was pretty royally screwed by the Osborne clan. Anyway, if you are a fan of hard rock / heavy metal in the past 40 years or so, you would probably dig this.
I do. Based on what I've heard at any rate...Originally Posted by SteveSly
I believe him as well.
It's so bizarre, then, that he left Uriah Heep to rejoin Osbourne and co-write the songs for "Bark at the Moon." I suppose he explains it in the book, but in my estimation, it's a bit like "Oh, maybe THIS time it'll work out…"
"Arf." -- Frank Zappa, "Beauty Knows No Pain" (live version)
Daisley and Kerslake weren't the only people who sued the Osbournes. I think the actual problem isn't Ozzy, but rather Sharon. I get the impression she's an old school manager, ie ripping off everyone she can.
When Carmine Appice was on That Metal Show, he said the reason he got fired from Ozzy's band was because "my name was too long", and then explained that apparently anytime the tour was talked about in the media, they'd always say something like "Ozzy Osbourne, on tour, featuring Carmine Appice on drums", and that apparently pissed off Sharon.
Yea, it is odd that Daisley has continued to work on and off with Ozzy all through his career after the first 2 albums even while the legal battle was ongoing. He still seems to consider Ozzy a friend, and blames most of it on Sharon (and to a lesser extent her father).
Basically Sharon’s mission is to keep up a myth that Ozzy is a major creative force in his music, when the reality is that he has actually written / created very little in his career with most of the actual songwriting being done by others. According to Daisley, Ozzy can’t play anything other than a little harmonica, and he also cannot write lyrics to save his life. Daisley admits that Ozzy is a charismatic front man, but his albums have all been mainly created by other people.
He got paid up front whenever he worked with Ozzy after the debacle of being fired after Diary of a Madman. That's probably why he never had to sue the Osbournes again for his later work with them.
Jake E. Lee also got screwed by the Osbornes. Jake did much of the writing on Bark At The Moon, but didn't get credit. Three makes a pattern as far as I'm concerned.
While I believe Carmine's version of events, I also tend to believe a contributing factor was brother Vinny drumming for Black Sabbath. Ozzy held a grudge over being fired for the longest time, particularly against Tony Iommi.
"Well my son, life is like a beanstalk, isn't it?"--Dalai Lama
Ozzy uses a rhyming dictionary to cobble together his lyrics (the ones he doesn't come up with himself). Jake E. Lee said on That Metal Show that he doesn't care about money anymore, he'd rather actually have his writing credits for Bark At The Moon and The Ultimate Sin printed on the album, not "Words and Music by Ozzy Osbourne" under everything. The Rhoads and Lee albums are so stylistically different, everyone knows Ozz didn't write the music. Sharon is a total c*nt.
And Zakk keeps coming back because Sharon doesn't regard him as a threat. The guy only gives a shit about being onstage with a guitar and getting paid.
Is there any mention of Dana Strum in the book?
According to Daisly there are very very few lyrics that Ozzy has actually contributed, and then mostly a phrase here or there.
That name rings a bell, but I don't recall a specific reference. Daisly talks about so many different people it is hard to keep track of them all.
That seems unlikely. Dana Strum introduced Ozzy to Randy Rhoads, but that was in Los Angeles prior to Daisley getting involved with Ozzy, as I recall. After finding Rhoads, Ozzy decamped to England and set up rehearsals with Daisley and Kerslake, though there may have been a bit of a delay between the two events.
Dana Strum was a bassist in the L.A. hair metal scene. He was working with Ozzy in 1979 to put a band together in Los Angeles and brought Randy Rhoads into the picture. Dana was involved in the early days of a couple bands that later got big. He hit it big himself in the band Slaughter.
He was also in The Vinnie Vincent Invasion (which is where he hooked up with Mark Slaughter).
Does he mention his time in Rainbow? I think by their standards he counts as a 'long-time' member...
Then why would Ozzy hire Carmine in the first place? By the time of the Bark At The Moon tour (the only thing Carmine did with Ozzy), the Mob Rules lineup of Sabbath was already history. It seems unlikely that Ozzy would hire the brother of the guy who was by then no longer working with two of the guys who fired Ozzy if whatever bad vibes he was still feeling about being sacked would come into it. Then again, people do strange things sometimes (and I'm not talking about biting the heads of doves and bats).
Interestingly, another thing Carmine said when he was on That Metal Show, was that apparently even when he was suing the Osbourne camp, Ozzy himself went out of his way to call Carmine and say he hoped they could still be friends, "even though you're having trouble with my Missus".
And I agree, Sharon's trying to create an illusion that Ozzy's the main creative genius in his solo bands, and I'm not sure that's true. I know I've seen it said in a number of places that Geezer wrote most of the lyrics on the Sabbath records, and most of his albums (other than apparently Bark At The Moon) has lots of other people's names listed in the bylines.
BTW, I remember reading an article back in 1984 where Kevin DuBrow basically went down a list of songs that were recorded by Ozzy which he claimed were actually leftovers from Randy's days in Quiet Riot, but were basically credited as being written by Ozzy (or maybe Ozzy and Randy together). I wonder if that once again wasn't Sharon's doing.
I don't think Vinny Appice had anything to do with Carmine's split with the Ozzy band. There is a wonderfully detailed book about Ozzy and Sabbath in the '80s called Sabbath Bloody Sabbath: The Battle for Black Sabbath that goes into all this stuff. Haven't read it in awhile, but I believe that Carmine thought he was worth more financially and promotionally than the Osbournes thought he was. Also, I seem to recall that Carmine was sort of a last-minute addition to the band because Tommy Aldridge dropped out rather suddenly. I could be wrong about that last bit, though.
Randy used Quiet Riot riffs, but not entire songs. He wrote the first two albums with Bob Daisley. Almost any song credits to Ozzy are more about distributing the money than about who wrote what. Same as how BB King's early manager got all the co-writes of BB's classic material from the '50s and early '60s.
I was just curious if Daisley mentioned Strum in any way. Dana Strum did play bass on some of Ozzy's recordings even though he is not credited on the LPs.
Dana knew Mark before VVI. The stories of Mark Slaughter being 'discovered' by VVI were all lies started by Vinnie and Chrysalis as a means of promotion.
When you have a number of individual sources filing legal actions against one entity, it's pretty obvious who the culprit is. She was also ("allegedly," you know) behind the infamous "mysterious power outages" during Iron Maiden's set at Ozzfest.
Yea, he talks quite a bit about his Rainbow days and his lifelong friendship with Ronnie James Dio. There is also a pretty funny story in the book about Richie Blackmore getting a hair weave all the way back in his Rainbow days because he was going bald.
Yes, Butler wrote almost all of the lyrics for the Ozzy era Sabbath albums. According to Daisly he wrote almost all of the lyrics for the first two Ozzy solo albums, as well as some later albums. Ozzy’s most successful album “No More Tears” had a good chunk of the lyrics (and some of the music) written by Lemmy Kilmeister from Motorhead.
The story about Ozzy calling Appice pretty much parallels some of Daisly’s stories as he and Ozzy stayed in contact through much of the legal battling.
Well, Tommy played on Bark At The Moon, while Carmine did the tour, so yeah, I would imagine the "last minute addition" thing probably has a certain amount of truth to it.
But I'm inclined to believe Carmine's statement that Sharon fired him because everyone kept saying "featuring Carmine Appice" whenever the tour was mentioned in the media at the time. I've heard too many stories about her (including that business where she attempted to sabotage a Iron Maiden Ozzfest performance...real professional Sharon, real professional).
That happened with a lot of people. When Maybellene first came out, there were two men (one of them being Alan Freed, the NYC DJ, and the other apparently being Leonard Chess' lawyer or accountant) listed in the byline who Chuck Berry had never even met, never mind written songs with.
There's a handful of songs that Elvis Presley is credited with co-writing, which I believe has been said was more about Corporal Parker getting his share of the songwriting royalties (remember, the manager gets 10% of everything the artist makes). And I think it was Fred Frith who made a comment that the O. Rasputin credit on one of the Yardbirds B-sides (O. Rasputin being a Giorgio Gomelsky pseudonym) had more to do with money than any actual contribution Gomelsky may have made as a songwriter.
On the other hand, I've heard it suggested that Jacques Morali really did co-write most of the Village People songs (there's absolutely no reason I should know, or even know what the name of The Village People's manager was).
I've also heard it suggested that most of the time, bylines that list all band members as the songwriters are more about making sure nobody gets jealous because the guitarist or the singer or whomever it is making more money because he wrote the majority of the songs, or because his song was chosen as the single (I think this latter point is probably why I'm In Love With My Car, as one example, was the B-side of the Bohemian Rhapsody single, because it was usually Freddie and Brian's songs that were on the singles, and therefore Roger and John were cut out of the songwriting revenue from single sales and/or airplay...probably also the reason why You're My Best Friend was the other single off A Night At The Opera).
Of course, what then happens is the one or two guys who actually do write the majority of the songs get pissed about having to do all the "heavy lifting" in terms of coming up with material and then having to share credit and monies with "freeloading" rhythm section or whatever.
Didn't she and her bratty kids actually egg Bruce Dickinson during the performance? Apparently, Bruce had been mouthing off about their TV show (he does that a lot, there's concert footage from around 2000 where he's mouthing off about "that Britney Spears shit" or something like that), and that once again upset Sharon, so in front of a paying audience, at a show she was bankrolling, in fact, Sharon decides to seek retribution via sabotage. I think this woman has seriously lost touch with reality (ironically given the fact that nobody would even know who she is if it weren't for a "reality" TV show).
Last edited by GuitarGeek; 03-25-2014 at 09:28 PM.
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