Upstairs in his bedroom, trying to sleep, Ozzy Osbourne has just about had it with all the goddamn noise floating in from outside his window. He tosses and turns, frets and stews, moans and groans, and finally shakes himself loose of his sheets. This is in Beverly Hills, inside an arid marble palace just off Sunset Boulevard, where Ozzy lives with his wife, Sharon, and their three teenage kids, Aimee, Kelly and Jack. And it's those kids, splashing and laughing in the family swimming pool, who are denying Oz his sleep. Fingers trembling in the darkness, he tries to decide what to do. He'd like to lay some words on the kids. These would be words of instruction, admonition and correction, the feared words of a dad. Maybe he has those words somewhere, but he can't find them right now. He starts to reach for the bedroom intercom.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the kitchen, Sharon Osbourne has finished clearing the dinner table. Besides being Ozzy's wife, she is also his manager, and so she knows a few things about the former Black Sabbath frontman, highly successful hard-rock solo artist and current namesake of the big summertime hard-rock extravaganza known as Ozzfest. "He's vulnerable," she says. "He's really, really vulnerable. And he's more vulnerable now, because he's cold turkey on everything - drugs, drinking, caffeine, cigarettes. He's raw. He's fucking raw as they come. Sometimes he trembles so bad, he's like a frightened Chihuahua. It's like every nerve in his body is wanting something, something, something - 'Ozzy, please, give me something, something, please!'"

Just then the intercom crackles to life, and through it comes an agitated voice: "Kelly, Kelly, please! You sound like a lunatic. Quiet, please! OK?"

Sharon jumps up from the table. "Hold on, Ozzy. I've got it." She goes to the door leading to the pool. "Kelly?"

"Yeah?" says fifteen-year-old Kelly.

"Please. You've woken Daddy."

Jack, who is fourteen, and Aimee, who is sixteen, start laughing.

"Shut up, you two," snaps Sharon. "All of you, stop it. Be respectful!"

Sharon sits back down, smiling. She is a lovely, intelligent and rather fierce woman in her late forties. She's been married to Ozzy for eighteen years, through many ups and many, many downs. "Yes, it's been a challenge," she says. "Yes, indeed."

Then there's noise again. The laughter of the kids, the shouting, the high-pitched squealing. It rises through the night sky and once more finds its way into the upstairs bedroom, this time forcing Ozzy to roll out of bed, off the lacy pink sheets. He wobbles to the window in his black underpants, long hair dangling. He is concerned now not only for his own sleep but also for that of his closest neighbor, the seriously religious crooner Pat Boone.

Glaring down at his brood, he opens his mouth and says, "If you all don't shut up, I'll - I'll -"

He goes silent.

His kids look up at him, chins resting on the lip of the pool.

"I'll - I'll -"

"Well, yes, what will you do?"

"Now listen to me, children," he says. And then they start snickering and giggling. For, indeed, what dadlike words can he say to them? What is he, Ozzy Osbourne, legendary drug-addled Prince of Darkness, the very founder of parent-freaking-out heavy-metal music, going to do to them if they don't settle down? A bunch of thoughts crumple his brain. How can I give out the rules when I'm worse than them most of the time? When they've seen me coming home in police cars, in fucking ambulances, in straitjackets and chains? When I have gone to parent-teacher conferences stoned on Vicodans or Percosets and nodded off in the middle, and Sharon has had to kick me under the table, and I wake up shouting, "Hey, what do you keep fucking hitting me for, man?" I try to be a figure of authority, but do they listen to me? Fuck, no!

Jack, Kelly and Aimee are still waiting for an answer.

Ozzy blinks a few times. Then in a very small voice, he says, "Well, try to be quiet, will you?" And then this rawest of men - raw like no one else probably in the history of raw - aims himself back toward his bed to find sleep amid the ruckus, if only he can.

This is not generally well-known about Ozzy Osbourne, but he is, in fact, a deeply modest and reserved fellow. Because of his past - because he has shot up a henhouse full of chickens, and killed a whole gang of cats, and snorted a line of ants like they were a line of cocaine, and bitten the head off a bat, and catapulted meat (stomachs and intestines, mostly) into his audience, and downed four bottles of Russian vodka at one sitting, and taken a crap in an elevator, and set a total stranger's newspaper on fire in an airport - and because that's only the half of it, lots of people assume that he must be some kind of terrible, towering asshole egomaniac. But all that nuttiness took place a long time ago, under the influence, and, according to the world's foremost Ozzy authority, such is not really the case.

"From Kiss to Bon Jovi to the Backstreet Boys, who hasn't done a milk ad?" says Sharon Osbourne. "But you will never see Ozzy doing one. He doesn't play that game. You will never see Ozzy walking around with ten fucking bodyguards, and he would rather poke a stick in his eye than get out of a limo. He would find it embarrassing. When we were at the Grammys recently, he's looking at me going, 'We don't belong here. I want to go home.' You see, he doesn't fit in with what I call the Versace rockers in this business. He is not one of the beautiful people. He's just Ozzy."

Nonetheless, as just Ozzy, he has been tremendously successful. Since leaving Black Sabbath in 1978 - or, rather, since being booted from the band for reasons of overindulgence - he has sold more than 67 million albums as a solo artist, which is no mean number, and has never had an album do worse than platinum. Moreover, the Ozzfest tour is now in its fifth year, having so far played to 1.7 million hard-rock-loving kids and taken in more than $60 million, making it one of the top-grossing summer tours in the business.

It has also helped deliver huge audiences to hard-rock bands like Limp Bizkit, Slipknot, Soulfly, Static-X and System of a Down. "For a young band like Static-X to stand next to an icon like Ozzy, it doesn't get any better," says Static-X manager Andy Gould, who also manages Rob Zombie, Powerman 5000 and other acts that have played Ozzfest.

As it happens, however, Ozzfest wasn't Ozzy's idea but Sharon's - she simply thought it would be a fun thing for Ozzy to do - and it's not Ozzy who decides which hot bands will play on the Ozzfest bill but Sharon and young Jack Osbourne, who, despite his age, is well known inside almost all the clubs on Sunset Strip. Actually, Ozzy doesn't listen to much music these days (unless it's by the Beatles or a former Beatle); nor does he even hobnob with the other bands on the tour, preferring to stay away from any temptations that might cause him to fall off the wagon. Even so, he does occasionally show up at Ozz Records on Santa Monica Boulevard in Beverly Hills, where much of the Ozzfest planning takes place.

Today, he wanders in looking pretty relaxed, pretty chipper, in a black T-shirt and black drawstring trousers, with blue-tinted shades covering his eyes. He is fifty-one years old and looks far better than he did a decade or even two decades ago. He also smells fantastic, having doused himself with Czeck & Speake's No. 88 cologne. He does not so much walk anywhere as shuffle forth, hunched, stooped, arms dangling almost simianlike, fingers in perpetual trembling motion. Nonetheless, he almost always looks like he is on the verge of grinning. His face is warm like that. It's appealing. It's inviting.

Taking a seat on a couch, he is silent. This is characteristic of Ozzy too. He is often silent. He seems to prefer it this way, or perhaps he has no choice. But then some topic or other will find a slightly willing part of his brain, and he will open his mouth to speak. Yet what typically come out first are not words but noises - crabbed, unintelligible creakings, half-utterances and mashed syllables, saliva-specked mutterings. These eventually subside, however, and he is then free to soliloquize on, say, the antidepressant Zoloft, of which he takes 200 milligrams every day.

"I'm one of those guys, I wake up in the morning and I got a problem," he says, pleasantly. "My problem is, I'm looking for something to kill or blow up. My nerves are shaking. My head is a running riot. I'm insane by midday. It's just the way I am. I don't think I was born - I was shot out: Blam! 'He's here!' So about a while ago, they started trying me on various pills. I'm quite happy with the Zoloft. I mean, I have attention-deficit disorder, as do my kids and everybody in my family. I'm like a natural-born speed freak. But the Zoloft mellows me out a bit. I still wake up with that feeling, but I'm able to sort of cope with it."

"Hey, Ozzy!"

Sharon and the staff want Ozzy's feelings about the design of the Ozzfest stage, which this year is a fanciful depiction of hell. He offers a few opinions, then decides that what really needs discussion is his onstage costume.

"I'm going to have you made a diamond-studded codpiece," says Sharon.

"Oh, fuck off!" sputters Ozzy. "I'm not going to wear a fucking codpiece and a sword and all that shit. I'm serious."

"No, no, Ozzy," says Sharon. "I'm winding you up. It's a joke!"

"I'm not wearing codpieces anymore, man," Ozzy continues, on a roll. "The last time was 1981, I think, and it nearly fucking killed me. It was red, and when I'd sweat, it'd tighten up on me."

They are both silent for a moment, drifting back to those early days of Ozzy's career.

"And when he would take the red codpiece off," says Sharon, "his ball bag was red from the dye."

"And she would lick the dye off my balls - it was lovely, that part."

There is more silence. Then Ozzy snaps back to the present and says, "OK, answer my question. What am I wearing? And I'm not going to be fucking Kiss. Please don't go over the top. Because I am fifty-one, and I don't want to look like an old queen up there."

[Excerpt From Issue 844/845 — July 6, 2000]