Название: Bringing Metal To The Children: The Complete Berserker’s Guide to World Tour Domination
Автор: Rob Zombie
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Музыка, балет
isbn: 9780007413331
isbn:
You’re Fucking Out!
REMEMBER HOW I WAS TELLING YOU ABOUT THE RECORD LABELS THAT I dealt with and how I told them, “I’ll do my end of the deal, you fucking do yours”? Well, here’s a perfect example of when you know they’re lying to you, and you just wish somehow you could prove it. None other than “Mom”—Sharon Osbourne—conceived this little plot of record label investigation during the release of the No More Tears album. Mom wanted to have the Boss get closer to the Ozzy Army so she rounded up a batch of in-stores and smaller gigs for us to play, instead of the enormodomes we were doing up to that point. It was her idea to give all the Ozzy-heads a chance to see the boss in a more intimate setting. As far as the gigs went, they were fucking awesome! Between the fucking energy coming off the stage and the insane asylum in the crowds, it was fucking killer. Thank the good Lord the gigs were a blast because the in-stores were a whole other fucking story.
On paper, it all looked fucking grand—Ozzy and the band would roll into the record store with the new album blasting throughout the fucking place. The Ozzy Army could come in, get the new record and whatever other Ozzy album they wanted, and have them signed by the boss and the band. With about fifteen hundred crazy Ozzy-heads at every in-store, you would figure they would sell fifteen hundred copies of the new record, and plenty of other Ozzy and Sabbath records. Then Ozzy and the band would sign everything and a good time would be had by all. How fucking complicated is that? Keep reading.
If I’m a manager at fucking McDonald’s and I realize that we are starting to run low on fucking hamburger patties, I am immediately blowing a phone call in for a massive shipment of patties so that we don’t lose out on a ton of burger sales. The music business is no different. If you’re a record company, your bands’ CDs and product are your burgers for sale. You don’t sell fucking burgers, you don’t pay the bills and you don’t eat. Common sense, right?
The boss and the rest of the band showed up at one particular record store and there was a massive line around the fucking building. As soon as we stepped foot in the store there was a Black Sabbath video cranked up on all of the TVs—STRIKE ONE!
Ozzy looked around and said, “Do these fucking assholes realize that I’ve been out of Sabbath longer than I was in it? Tell someone to put the new fucking record on!”
Once they got that sorted, we sat down at the signing tables. The doors opened and in came the Ozzy Army—all super-cool people, all super-pumped to meet the Boss. After Ozzy signed about five CDs the store completely ran out of the new record. The shelves were pillaged to find every last CD with Ozzy’s name on it—one copy of Blizzard of Oz, two copies of Diary of a Madman, one copy of Bark at the Moon, one copy of Master of Reality, and two copies of Paranoid—and that’s all, folks! They had booked a living legend to appear in their store, the Prince of fucking Darkness, and had a total of twelve fucking copies of any music with Ozzy on it—twelve fucking copies to span his entire career of music! The only problem is, we had fifteen hundred fucking people wanting to buy a record and have Ozzy sign it. If the store manager had pulled this horseshit at any other job he would have been fucking fired, killed by a death squad in some countries—STRIKE TWO!
It gets better.
Instead of signing flyers or posters or whatever promotional items might have been brought into the store to promote the fucking album (which, by the way, are supposed to be supplied by the fucking record company), the Boss and the band were signing fucking paper towels from the fucking bathrooms. Oz, being the super-cool guy that he is, just signed anything handed to him. He greeted everybody, right up to the last person waiting in line to meet him and the store employees as well. After we left, on the way back to the hotel, that’s when he laid it down.
“Fucking napkins? How many years have I been doing this shit and I’m signing fucking napkins from the bathroom at a record in-store? Are you fucking kidding me?”
After Mom got word of this fucking fiasco of doom, each day we rolled into any town to do a show, she had the assistant to the band (which really meant best friend and drinking partner)—Will “the Chill”—go out to every fucking store and take an inventory of every last Ozzy record in the place, the name of the store, the manager, contact numbers, addresses. That way when Mom called the record company as we were headed out to bring the doom, she could say, “We were in Miami yesterday and there were no fucking Ozzy records in the stores, assholes!”
The record company would fire back, “Yes there are! There are tons of Ozzy records out there!”
Mom would reply, “Listen, cocksuckers, don’t you fucking lie to me! I’ve got my assistant going out to every big chain and mom-and-pop record store out there! I’ve got a list of names, dates and times, contacts, which records and how many at each and every store. You’re busted fucking cold!”
To this day it never ceases to amaze me that this shit still goes on. If we own a Burger King, and somebody pulls up and orders a burger, we don’t tell him, “Sorry, we are out of burgers, but would you like a grilled chicken sandwich?” For fuck’s sake, the name of the restaurant is called Burger fucking King, not Grilled Chicken Sandwich King! No fucking burgers? STRIKE THREE, MOTHERFUCKER—YOU’RE FUCKIN’ OUT!
It would just be easier to have them give us twenty thousand records, bring them to the in-store, and whatever we don’t sell, we have for the next in-store. What the fuck is so fucking hard about that? It’s the record company’s job to make sure they sell fucking records. Do we not want to sell records? Maybe we should go into the bathroom-paper-towel business, because there were plenty of those fucking things to go around for Ozzy and the band to sign. Better yet, if they could find a way to make a living by coming up with bullshit excuses, they would. Since that’s what the majority of their job consists of—weak-willed, excuse-riddled shit. The whole thing is you’re supposed to work as a fucking team, not us against you.
Somewhere in the middle of the No More Tears tour, the record company held this dinner in some fancy banquet room and presented Oz and the rest of us with double-platinum discs. They also presented Ozzy with this gigantic frame with all of the platinum albums that he had sold—from Saint Rhoads to Father Lee to when my dumb ass joined the band. It was massive. I felt so happy for Oz—he’s one of the coolest guys on the planet and we were all there to celebrate with him.
One of the big guys at the label got up and gave a speech about how awesome Oz was and about all his years of hard work and success, how proud they were to be his record company. Then he said, “We’d like to congratulate Ozzy and his band for No More Tears going double platinum!”
Everyone began to clap and cheer, when all of a sudden Mom’s voice overpowered everything with, “It could have done fucking better!”
There was dead silence, then uncomfortable laughing, and then clapping again. And then again at the top of her lungs, Mom shouted, “It could have done fucking better!”
Needless to say it was fucking awesome.
Thank you, Mom.
Hair of the Gods: The Metal Beard
One of my favorite nicknames for Zakk is “Hangtime,” because he’s always got food or something stuck in that filthy thing that he calls his beard.
—RITA HANEY, DIMEBAG’S HAG
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I DID CHILDISH THINGS, СКАЧАТЬ