‘I Am Ozzy’ smart, funny, touching

  Editor's Note: Ozzy Osbourne will be in town for a book signing at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18, at Borders, 6521 Las Vegas Blvd. South.

  Whether you know him as the “F’ing Prince of Darkness,” or as that muttering, stumbling dad from “The Osbournes,” there’s one thing for certain — nearly everyone knows who Ozzy Osbourne is.
  When it comes down to it … he’s just a guy. A guy who has had some incredible luck, more than his fair share of extreme experiences, and an over-the-top lifestyle in front of millions of people. OK, maybe he’s not that ordinary.
  But John Osbourne didn’t start out life as the wild, maniacal rock star Ozzy Osbourne, and in his new autobiography, “I Am Ozzy,” he tells the story of his life (as best he can remember it) in fascinating detail — from his bleak childhood in Ashton, Birmingham, England, right up to his present day life as a semiretired rock star.
  Osbourne was the first son in a family of six children. They were dirt-poor, working class folks. Never much good in school, due to what would be now diagnosed as ADD, Ozzy (as he’s always been called) had a fascination with music. After a short stint in prison for being an awful shoplifter, and after his job as a slaughterhouse worker ended, his father took out a loan and bought him a small PA system, and Ozzy’s career as a singer/front man was off and running.
  With schoolmate Tony Iommi, Ozzy started a band that would become Black Sabbath, and from there, his rise to fame would be a 40-year roller coaster of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. And from what he calls “the jelly that is my brain,” Ozzy tells the stories in a surprisingly intelligent, extremely funny, and sometimes downright heartbreaking style that sits the reader in a corner pub with the “Prince of Darkness” himself.
  Yes, he tells the story about biting the bat’s head off and about pissing on the Alamo. Yes, he admits to hitting his first wife, Thelma, and nearly choking his second (and current) wife, Sharon, to death. Yes, he did so many drugs that he should have been dead a thousand times over.
  But there are the surprising tender bits in Ozzy’s story that make him the lovable old fool of a rock ’n’  roll star today — his love for his family (he talks to his oldest sister Jean every Sunday), his love of his children, all five of them (two with Thelma — Louis and Jessica; and three with Sharon — Aimee, Jack and Kelly), and his never-ending love of music.
  “I suppose the one ambition I have left is to get a number one album here in America,” Osbourne writes at the end of the book. “But if it doesn’t happen, I can’t really complain. I’ve managed to do just about everything else. I mean, I’m so grateful that I’m me, that I’m here, That I can still enjoy the life I have.”
  And we’ll all be watching, Ozzy.