Ozzy Osbourne was ‘on the verge’ of dying from a drug overdose before Sharon saved him, according to Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler in a new Eddie Trunk Podcast interview. He also discussed Ozzy’s Sabbath departure.
“Ozzy had already left the band before the [1978] ‘Never Say Die!’ album [Ozzy briefly quit in ’77], and he was always going on about doing his own thing back then.
In fact, in one of the Sabbath photos, he’s got a ‘Blizzard of Ozz’ t-shirt on, so he just fell out of love with what we were doing in Sabbath. I wasn’t really paying much attention to what he was doing, to be honest, and then, he came out probably bigger than Sabbath ever was.”
The interviewer asked, “You ended up going to play in his band for a little bit, not too long after that [Geezer played in Ozzy’s band in 1988, 1989, 1995, and 1996]. So there wasn’t a rivalry, there wasn’t looking at chart positions, there was none of that?”
Geezer answered, “No, we all loved Ozzy. We were so glad that he got himself – because he was killing himself. The state that he was in when he left Sabbath, he really was on the verge…If it wasn’t for Sharon, I think he’d topped himself eventually, he’d OD or something, and she pulled him out of it, got him straight again.”
