Ozzy Osbourne Initially Refused to Give Up His Howard Stern Slot — Until He Heard It Was for Paul McCartney

Ozzy Osbourne was rarely short of a good story, but one of his warmest involved the day he was asked to change his scheduled appearance on The Howard Stern Show.

His initial response was characteristically blunt.

Then his assistant told him who needed the slot: Paul McCartney.

Suddenly, there was no argument.

“It’s done!” Ozzy replied.

For a man whose memories included chaotic encounters with animals, outrageous stage productions, Black Sabbath’s turbulent final years and an alcohol-soaked wedding to Sharon, the McCartney story revealed another side of him. Behind the Prince of Darkness persona was a lifelong Beatles fan who never forgot the music that convinced a working-class kid from Aston, Birmingham, that another life might be possible.

A Wedding Cake Loaded With Hennessy

The stories came from an interview Ozzy gave to Q magazine in the early 2000s, later revisited by MusicRadar.

He began with his July 4, 1982 wedding to Sharon Arden in Maui, Hawaii.

Ozzy admitted he was already extremely drunk that day, and the wedding cake did little to improve matters. According to him, it contained seven bottles of Hennessy cognac.

Nobody wanted to eat it.

Ozzy did.

He joked that after having a slice, he remained drunk for a week.

It was an appropriately chaotic beginning to a collection of stories that only became stranger from there.

The Cop Who Completely Misunderstood Ozzy’s Stage Show

During the early 1980s, Ozzy’s concerts incorporated elaborate theatrical elements, including a mock hanging involving performer John Edward Allen.

Allen wore a harness for the stunt, which took place after “Goodbye to Romance.” Ozzy recalled discovering that Allen carried a Swiss Army knife in case the harness slipped.

Ozzy immediately spotted a problem with the emergency plan: cutting the rope while suspended could simply cause him to fall.

But the strangest misunderstanding came after a show in America.

A heavily equipped police officer entered Ozzy’s dressing room and asked whether the band really “hanged” one of the performers every night.

Ozzy confirmed that they did.

Then came the officer’s astonishing follow-up: where did they get all of them?

Ozzy realized the man apparently believed the band was using a different person each night.

The mental image of a truck filled with terrified replacements left Ozzy laughing uncontrollably.

Becoming a Werewolf for Bark at the Moon

Ozzy’s visual presentation became even more elaborate for his 1983 album Bark at the Moon.

The album artwork and title-track video transformed him into a werewolf, with the video filmed inside a disused Victorian mental hospital.

The makeup was remarkably detailed and made from human hair, but getting Ozzy into character required approximately eight hours.

He hated the process.

Patience was never one of his strengths, and while applying the transformation took most of a working day, he joked that removing it happened considerably faster.

The finished look was convincing enough to cause problems away from the cameras.

Ozzy remembered entering a restaurant while still wearing the makeup and frightening two children. When a photographer suggested he stand at a bus stop dressed as the creature, Ozzy refused, reasoning that the sight could give an elderly passerby a heart attack.

“Sharon, the Thing’s Falling Over!”

Another photo shoot from the era paired Ozzy with an elephant and a chimpanzee while the band was touring California.

Predictably, things did not go smoothly.

Ozzy climbed onto the elephant, which then walked across a bridge made from railway sleepers. One of the beams was rotten, and the animal’s foot went through it.

From Ozzy’s position on top, the sudden movement felt enormous.

While Sharon encouraged him to smile for the photographs, Ozzy was considerably more concerned that the elephant appeared to be falling over.

Once he was safely off the elephant, the chimpanzee was brought in.

That created an entirely different problem.

The camera flashes frightened the chimp, which grabbed Ozzy’s thumb and bit down. As Ozzy struggled with the animal, Sharon continued telling him to smile.

Eventually, the trainer intervened and freed him.

Ozzy remembered the entire shoot as one of those days when virtually everything that could go wrong did.

Ozzy Looks Back at His Big-Hair Years

By the later 1980s, rock fashion had changed dramatically.

Bands including Mötley Crüe helped popularize huge hairstyles and colorful clothing, and Ozzy embraced the look himself.

Years later, he could barely believe what he had been wearing.

He joked that his enormous hairstyle made him look as though he had been cleaning chimneys and described the broader aesthetic of the decade as a bizarre collision between Liberace and heavy metal.

At the time, however, it hardly seemed unusual. Excess was everywhere, and Ozzy was hardly going to be the one rock star who dressed conservatively.

One Memorable House Viewing

Around the same period, Ozzy and Sharon were searching for a home in rural Buckinghamshire.

One property they viewed belonged to folk singer Roger Whittaker.

Unfortunately, Ozzy had taken a colon cleanser the previous day.

During the viewing, he urgently needed the bathroom — only to discover afterward that there was no toilet paper.

His solution was exactly as inappropriate as anyone familiar with Ozzy’s stories might expect.

He later claimed he resorted to using the curtains.

It was another example of his ability to turn even the most embarrassing episodes of his life into stories he could tell with complete lack of inhibition.

The Van Halen Tour That Came as Black Sabbath Was Falling Apart

Not every memory was played purely for laughs.

Near the end of the interview, Ozzy reflected on Black Sabbath’s troubled 1978 Never Say Die! period.

The band was exhausted and relationships were deteriorating. Ozzy quit and then returned, but the original lineup was approaching the end of its first era together.

“We were tired,” he recalled, adding that management problems and legal costs had added to the pressure.

Van Halen opened for Sabbath during that period, and Ozzy remembered David Lee Roth closely watching his stage movements.

According to Ozzy, Roth would observe what he did and then reproduce some of those moves the following night.

The problem, from Ozzy’s perspective, was that audiences could then assume he was copying Roth.

Behind the humorous complaint was the reality that Van Halen represented an explosive new generation of hard rock arriving just as Black Sabbath was struggling internally.

Then Came Paul McCartney

After all the stories of drunken weddings, werewolf makeup, dangerous animals and difficult tours, Ozzy finished with something much more heartfelt.

He remembered being booked to appear on The Howard Stern Show in October 2001.

His personal assistant Tony approached him with a request: would Ozzy switch places with another guest?

Ozzy immediately refused in typically colorful language.

Tony told him he might want to hear the name first.

It was Paul McCartney.

Ozzy’s attitude changed instantly.

“It’s done!” he replied.

The encounter was significant because, despite Ozzy’s decades in the music business, it was the first time he had actually met McCartney. Records from Stern’s October 18, 2001 broadcast also describe Ozzy arriving that morning wanting to meet the former Beatle.

Cameras captured their brief backstage meeting, preserving the moment when one of heavy metal’s most famous singers finally came face to face with one of his greatest heroes.

“I Owe My Life to You”

For Ozzy, meeting McCartney was not simply another celebrity encounter.

He told Paul exactly what the Beatles had meant to him.

“I owe my life to you,” Ozzy recalled saying.

He explained that without McCartney and the Beatles, he did not believe he would have ended up where he did.

That feeling stretched back to his childhood in Aston, a working-class district of Birmingham.

Ozzy repeatedly identified hearing the Beatles’ “She Loves You” as a life-changing moment. In another interview, he recalled believing his future might involve crime or some other bleak path before music gave him something entirely different to pursue.

Elsewhere, he remembered walking down Witton Road with a transistor radio when “She Loves You” came on, describing the experience as something that propelled him into a new world.

The Beatles, he said, were ultimately the reason Ozzy Osbourne started singing.

The $42,000 Frame

Ozzy’s admiration for McCartney did not diminish after finally meeting him.

He kept a photograph of the two of them at home, signed by Paul.

But naturally, Ozzy Osbourne did not put a treasured photograph of his hero in an ordinary frame.

He said the frame was made of solid gold.

The cost?

$42,000.

For all the outrageous details in Ozzy’s stories, that extravagance made a strange kind of sense.

The Beatles had represented possibility to a young boy in Aston who wondered how he would ever escape the life he saw around him. Decades later, that same boy had become the frontman of Black Sabbath, built an enormously successful solo career and finally stood beside Paul McCartney as a fellow rock legend.

Ozzy could joke about almost anything.

But when it came to the Beatles, the gratitude was genuine.

Years later, he would describe meeting McCartney in even more reverential terms, saying it had felt “like meeting Jesus Christ.”

The funniest part of the original story, though, may still be the simplest.

Ozzy Osbourne had absolutely no intention of changing his schedule for somebody else.

Then he heard two words:

Paul McCartney.

And suddenly, the answer was easy.