8

DEAR OZZFEST

You were my sleepaway camp, my stomping ground, my summer school, my traveling circus, and about the most interesting childhood adventure a kid could ever hope to have.

Every summer from birth to when I was almost twenty, I went on tour with my dad. The idea of growing up on a bus might seem like the average person’s idea of hell. Yes . . . I had to sleep in a bunk bed that was the size of a coffin. I shared a bathroom about the size of Harry Potter’s cupboard under the stairs, with up to twelve people. It may seem impractical to you, as it can only be used to wash your hands or take a piss, because the number one rule on the tour bus is NO SHITTING!

In retrospect, I have probably taken a shit in more truck stop bathrooms than I have in my own bathroom at home! Like they say, what happens on the road stays on the road, and it was a very long road. Every morning, I woke up in an entirely different state, sometimes even a different country. The Ozzfest crew were the outcasts of society by nothing more than our appearance and love of heavy metal. Ozzfest was, and forever will be, my extended, crazy, loving, dysfunctional, kind, disgusting, generous, heavy metal family.

Ozzfest started in 1996, after Lollapalooza refused to book my dad. They said he wasn’t “Lollapalooza material.” To that, Mum said, “Fine, fuck you, then,” and started her own festival. The first lineup featured eleven bands, including Ozzy Osbourne, Slayer, Danzig, and Sepultura. The next year, it grew to fourteen, adding Black Sabbath, Marilyn Manson, Pantera, and Type O Negative, among others. From the very first show, Ozzfest was a massively huge success.

In my eyes, what made it a success wasn’t that it was completely sold out every night, with up to seventy-five thousand people. No, to me it was a success because it gave the metal heads, goths, freaks, and geeks of the world somewhere to belong. Remember the scene from the Men in Black 2 movie, when Tommy Lee Jones opens the locker and there’s a whole new, tiny world? That’s what Ozzfest felt like—like you’d stepped into a different universe that most people didn’t even know existed, one that had its own gods, customs, and laws.

Before Ozzfest, no one in the music industry really seemed to give a fuck about metal bands or metal fans. Heavy metal is music’s eternal outsider. It’s not pretty. If you go to a metal show, you’re not going to find the popular people. Instead, it’s a crowd of glorious misfits who’ve come together because they all have one thing in common: They fucking love metal. We’ve all heard someone walk into a room and say, “It smells like sex in here.” Walking onto the grounds of Ozzfest was like that, except it was the smell of people’s musical dreams coming true. With Ozzfest, metal fans knew that no matter how shit their life was before they came, or how shit it was going to be when they left, they could come to the show, forget about everything, and have the best times of their lives. That joy was contagious, even if you were a miserable teenager, angry at the world like I was.

When Ozzfest came to town, it was like Carnivale had just rolled in. In some cities, it was the biggest thing they’d see all year, with people lined up, cheering and waving along the side of the road as we drove by. The sight was impressive. Each band had a bus and a truck to haul all their equipment, so depending on the tour, there would be anywhere from twenty-five to seventy massive trucks in a giant caravan. It was just like that Coca-Cola commercial where the kids are all excited because “The holidays are coming! The holidays are coming!” We were just like that, except without any fancy lights, just all lit up with insanity.

Now that Dad flies everywhere, I haven’t traveled on a tour bus in about fifteen years, but I can still remember that smell. No matter if a bus is brand-new or was built in 1979, they all smell the same: like plastic seats, booze, gasoline, recycled air, and a hint of chemical toilet. No matter what was done to prevent it, it seemed as if extreme things were always happening on and to the buses. One of the buses had an ant infestation like something from another planet, and people couldn’t sleep because they’d feel ants crawling through their hair and into their ears.

Another horrible instance will forever be known as “The Tale of the Mystery Log Rider.” Trust me, it’s a true fable, and to this day it’s still a “Who did it?” argument in my household. In short, the cardinal rule was broken: Someone took a dump in the tour bus bathroom. After that, it didn’t take long for literal, actual human shit to somehow get sucked into the air vents of our bus. Laws of physics were possibly broken in the process. No one knows how it happened, but we all awoke to the smell of human feces being blown out of the air vents directly onto our faces, and with screams to match.

One thing I loved was the truck stops. They sold velvet paintings, trucker hats (I’m talking real trucker hats, not Von Dutch, or “Von Douche,” as I call them), and dream catchers that were made in China. I can’t tell you how many jackalopes we bought. (For the uninitiated, a jackalope is a taxidermied jackrabbit with antelope horns and is a mythical creature in the American Southwest.)

As you can imagine, it took a long time for busloads of people to do their business and buy their snacks, so we spent a lot of time at truck stops and got to know several truckers along the way. Ozzfest was a window into one world, and spending more than five minutes at a truck stop was a window into another. I learned what a lot lizard was (for those who don’t know, it is a truck stop prostitute) and learned the different numerical codes and slang that truckers would use to signal to one another that there was construction, a car accident, slowed traffic, or cops ahead.

The tour buses had a La-Z-Boy seat, called a jump seat, next to the driver. Usually, this was the place where people would go and sit when they needed to get some work done, but sometimes I’d go and sit there when I was bored on long night drives. When I’d hear the driver’s CB radio crackle with things like “10-200” (they need to take a shit on the side of the road) or “10-10 in the wind” (listening and driving), I felt like I was clued in to a secret society. I have a lot of respect for truckers, because they do a really hard job. They deserve more credit for how many accidents they prevent, because if you spend enough time on the highway, you’ll see that most people can’t drive at all.

Jack, Aimee, and I had a bus to ourselves, which was called the kids’ bus no matter how old we were. It was the fun bus, and over the summer, people who we became friends with would slowly migrate to our bus, since it was one of the least disgusting. Aimee, who was in her Post-Adolescent Idealistic Phase, had the back bedroom to herself, and we had to constantly listen to “Nobody Loves Me but You” and “One (Is the Loneliest Number)” on repeat. We were lucky if we got a taste of PJ Harvey. Regardless of her teenage angst, her no-go zone (or as we called it, the Boring Zone) was respected by all. If there is one thing to know about Aimee, it is that nobody fucks with her. (She’s my sister, so I know that better than anyone.)

Other than that, everyone kept reminding us that we were free. “You can do whatever you want!” one of our friends encouraged us. “Your parents own the tour!” We were always shocked by this. “No way!” we’d say. “You’ve seen what Mum and Dad are like when they yell at someone!” We were terrified of that someone being us, so when Mum and Dad gave us a rule—such as being in Dad’s dressing room by the time he had finished singing “Paranoid”—we learned the true meaning of humiliation when we didn’t comply. Regardless of all this, the truth is that we were naughty little shits, and we took full advantage anyway.

TRANSLATION

Port-a-loo

Porta potty

There was one guy on tour who everyone hated (I won’t give any details about him, to save him at least some dignity), and he was always especially obnoxious to Jack and me. When we decided to get revenge, someone threw fireworks into a port-a-loo** right before he went in, so that they were cracking off when he was trying to take a dump. He started yelling and cursing everyone out, but little did he know that the worst was yet to come: me, driving a golf cart.

Everyone was egging me on, of course, so I got the golf cart up to its top speed (which, let’s be honest, was probably about seven miles per hour) and rammed it into the side. When he came out, he was covered in shit and that horrible blue disinfecting liquid, and it caused such a mess that my parents had to pay a five-thousand-dollar sanitation cleanup fee. Whoops. Mum ripped me a new one for that.

A lot of the amphitheaters we stopped at had only one road in and one road out, which meant we needed to do a “runner” as soon as the show ended. Everyone would grab a slice of pizza, or whatever else might be considered dinner that night, and book it to the bus, which had a police motorcade waiting to escort us out and around the traffic. Needless to say, if you were the person—like the one and only time I once was—who missed bus call and made the entire tour sit in eight hours of traffic, all because you were off sneaking a Smirnoff Ice behind the bathrooms, you were really and truly fucked!

The inside varied from bus to bus, but typically it had bunks lining the sides. Sometimes, if we were lucky, we’d get a bus with condo bunks, which meant they were tall enough for you to sit up in without knocking your head on the bunk above, but usually they were in stacks of three. This space was your “room,” the place you slept for an entire summer, and was basically the size of a body locker in a morgue. Even though they were tiny, some people (definitely not me) still found ways to have sex in these crawl spaces, though I don’t even know how they managed to get their ass up and down.

No one ever wanted the bottom bunk, because it was right above the wheels, and you had to be a Zen master to sleep through the rumbling, roaring sound of the tires kathunk-kathunking as the bus sped down the highway. Some of the guys preferred the top bunk, but I hated having to perform gymnastics and pray for a perfect dismount just so I could hop down to wee, so I usually aimed for the middle.

Every bus had a “junk bunk,” which was the empty bed that everyone used for storing their stuff. Because space was so limited on the bus, you had to keep most of your stuff in luggage compartments underneath, which was a giant pain in the ass. If you left anything you needed in your bag, you couldn’t get it until the next stop, which would sometimes be hours away. At the beginning of tour, everyone was really good at keeping only what they needed in the bus, scared that they’d just end up having to move anything they stashed in the junk bunk. But as the summer wore on, people grew more confident—thinking, No one’s going to use this—and the junk bunk would fill to the brim with the random shit everyone stashed and forgot about. Inevitably, there would come a night when an extra person needed to sleep on your bus, and then you’d have to clean six months’ worth of who knows what out of there, usually at some ungodly hour in the morning, so that they could go to bed.

As we traveled from show to show, I’d look through the tour book, which had a map of our route. The longest leg we’d ever do was twenty-seven hours, driving from Seattle to somewhere in Texas. On rides like those, or just any time things were getting pretty rank, we’d have to clear out our junk bunk to make room for a second driver, who would get flown in so the drivers could each take shifts and we would not have to stop.

While Jack and I were just as terrified of going against the bosses (Mum and Dad) as everybody else on tour, there were obvious perks of being Ozzy’s kids, the main one being that we got second choice of where our bus parked. Therefore, we never parked anywhere near the second stage.

Second-stage show sound checks started at eight A.M. If you had the misfortune of being parked nearby, you would be awoken, after having gone to bed just a few hours before, to the not-so-sweet sounds of sound check—the double-kick drum going berrderdadadadadadderderderderder, accompanied by the soothing vocals of the microphone checks . . . “Testing, testing, one, two, three . . .” Over and over again.

Even if you were parked so far away from the second stage that the kick drum was just a whisper in the distance, wafts of parking lot barbecue drifted past the blackout curtain and into your bunk to tell your nose it was time to get up. This was the smell of people tailgating, pounding cheap beer early in the morning and grilling meat on the engines of their cars—the smell of people getting ready to have a really good time.

The second stage was usually smaller bands, and in the beginning, there was always a hierarchy on tour between the main stage bands, the second stage bands, and the carnies. The roadies were always cautioning my brother and me to stay away from the Freak Show, who was part of the Village of the Damned that toured with us, but those quickly became our favorite people. In our opinion, the Freak Show was the best place to be. We wanted to hang out with the two-legged dog who walked upright like a human and who we tried to adopt (but her owner was too in love and wouldn’t let us) and with Reverend B. Dangerous, who would let us use an electric screwdriver or hammer nails into his nose. After a while, it became normal for Jack and me to spend our afternoons being called onstage to staple an ace of spades to someone’s ball sack.

Through our drifting about, from the main stage to the Freak Show to the second stage and everywhere in between, we eventually broke down the barriers and brought all the different bands and camps together. Everyone got along so well that we became a family, and if there was one band of assholes that came on the tour, it became a toxic environment for the whole lot. You’d see the biggest, gnarliest, ugliest grown death metal men upset because they’d just seen some dick be rude to an assistant. This taught me so much about treating everyone as equals.

Over the years, we did have a few epic pricks on tour, especially the lead singer from Lostprophets, who creeped me out from day one. He had the most plaque-covered teeth I have ever seen. He looked at people as if they were food, and he had an evil appetite that could not be filled. He was uncomfortably nice, in a way that told me instantly the he had something big to hide.

I was spot on, unfortunately. He was finally revealed to be a massive, hard-core pedophile. I don’t know what I would do if I ever saw him again, because his crimes are some of the worst things I have ever heard. So I guess it is fortunate for him, and for the rest of us, that he is probably going to be in jail for the rest of his miserable life.

But for the most part, we remained one great big happy rock ’n’ roll juggernaut. Bands like Pantera, Slipknot, Linkin Park, and System of a Down looked out for Jack and me like we were their own siblings. At the same time, they didn’t hide anything from us or treat us like stupid little kids. Phil from Pantera showed me how to mix Sprite and Crown Royal, and he even let me keep the fancy purple bag the bottle came in. I still count Mikey from Incubus as one of my best friends in the whole world, and when it came time for me to record my own album, he and José were the ones who gave me the confidence to sing in a studio for the first time. They actually produced and played all the instrumentals for my first single, “Papa Don’t Preach.”

Marilyn Manson never seemed to forget that we were still kids. He kept us entertained by giving us weird presents or telling strange stories. One of his gifts was a packet of this tasteless herbal powder you could slip in someone’s drink and make them shit their pants.

Ironically, it was usually the groupies, who weren’t even part of the tour, who were the rudest to Jack and me, probably because treating us like shit was some fucked-up way for them to convince themselves that they weren’t only there to hang around with rock stars and give blow jobs. (Allow me to paint you a picture: In order to get access to the rock stars, one first has to get through parking lot security, backstage security, a roadie who would then make an introduction to the tour manager, and then the band. So how many dicks is that? I’m counting at least four before walking through the backstage door.) Well, after we had that powder, anyone who was a bitch to us had to watch—and most likely wash—her ass.

My friends now might wonder why I’m single and don’t trust men, but they need only look back to my time on tour to understand why: The dynamic between the groupies and the bands was disgusting. I must have seen at least one hundred dicks being sucked before I ever saw a penis that was meant for my eyes only. It wasn’t unusual to walk in on someone in the middle of the act. Everyone just did their best to ignore it and walk off.

I once saw a girl stick a pen up her ass and use it to write people’s names. There was the girl who was convinced to take off all her clothes and do naked jumping jacks while chanting, “I love Ozzy! I love Ozzy!” just so that she could get a free glow stick. A fucking glow stick!

Then there was the one who had “Brown-Eyed Girl” tattooed around her asshole—though, to her credit, she had a very cute anus. One of the nicest assholes I have ever seen, that’s for sure, and it was a really well-done tattoo.

TRANSLATION

Gearbox

Vagina

At the end of every tour, Mum would throw a party that was out of control. Jack and I were always up front, no matter what the “entertainment” was—strippers, porn stars, freaky clowns, fire eaters, everything. I saw a stripper fuck a lollipop and then give it to my manny (male nanny) to suck on. Another one lay on her back and dumped an entire two-liter bottle of water up her gearbox,** stood up, then bent over and sprayed the crowd. The spray hit me, and I started screaming bloody murder. Dad ran over, hooked me under one arm, and then hauled me to the bathroom and shoved me in the shower with all my clothes on.

The cherry on the cake, and the most disgusting thing I ever saw, was a pregnant woman shooting her breast milk into people’s mouths for backstage entertainment. I was standing next to a friend of mine, and we were watching in horror, when my friend started to retch uncontrollably. It was that gagging sound that a cat makes when it’s about to spit up a hairball: gaaaawwwwwwthhuuuccckkkk, gaaaawwwwwwthhuuuccckkkk . . . As soon as I heard him, I also started to gag, and we ran out of the room, dying with laughter but also scared that we were going to start puking any minute.

Far be it from me to slut-shame, but try being the daughter of a rock star and watching groupies disrespect your mum by throwing themselves at your father and any male within his radius. When you are looking at it from that perspective, it is hard to see using your vagina to gain access to a rock star as an act of empowerment.

As you can imagine, when I wasn’t able to bring a friend on tour, I was pretty starved for female friendship. When Marilyn started dating Dita Von Teese, it was like the heavens had opened up and sent us an angel. She was the first true lady, aside from my mum, that I’d ever met on tour. Dita was the furthest thing from a groupie. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. In fact, I still do.

I grew up such a tomboy that I’m still learning how to do girly shit, but everything that I do know, I learned from Dita and drag queens. I would try to make myself invisible and just stare at her, taking mental notes on how she walked, how she held her champagne glass, and how she never, ever walked around looking like shit. Meanwhile, I might have been wearing my brother’s shirt and my mum’s skirt, because that was all I could find in the junk bunk that morning.

Dita and I are still friends, and while I will never be as girly or as graceful as she is, she did teach me that I have it in me to search for those qualities. I’ll always be grateful to her for that.

The summer that Limp Bizkit was on the main stage for the first time, Fred Durst came onstage by jumping out of a thirty-foot-tall Styrofoam toilet. Getting that toilet in and out of certain amphitheaters was the nightmare of the tour, but when Fred couldn’t have his toilet, he would lose his fucking shit. (I think I would, too.)

One band, which shall not be named, brought an entire gym with them. It required an additional roadie whose sole responsibility was to set it up for them, over and over, with each relocation. It even had carpeting, which was made more disgusting by the copious amounts of body oil they would be rubbing all over one another when off-shift from pumping iron and running on the treadmill. Initially, this scene was jaw-droppingly shocking, but it quickly became the biggest joke of the tour and a source of entertainment. That shit was way better than television.

I remember walking by it with Mum, who’d had to help them figure out the logistics, and she just said, “Fucking pussies,” under her breath. This was a metal tour. No matter how much money they made, most of the bands probably could have survived on Budweiser and slept in a trash can if they had to, but this particular band was out there in MAC Studio Fix powder, even when we were in Arizona and it was 125 degrees.

One year, Dad decided he wanted his own Jumbotron. After much debate about paying to rent one for the entire length of each tour or buying one to have forever, Mum and Dad decided to buy one. It was so huge, it required its own truck. Only a few weeks later, the driver decided to pick up a lot lizard and apparently she shifted his stick just a little too hard. When he pulled his O face, the truck got wrecked and Dad’s shiny new purchase got wrecked right along with it. The police found the truck driver walking down the side of the highway, stark-ass naked.

After being on tour for so many years, I started to develop a sixth sense about the new bands who joined. I could tell who was going to be big, who was going to fizzle out, who was going to get fired, and who was going to end up addicted to drugs. I learned a lot of it from watching Mum, who always seemed to be one step ahead of everyone else in the music industry. She saw the genius in Queens of the Stone Age and put them on the main stage before anyone else even really knew who they were. They were a real band’s band, and when word spread that they were coming on tour, everyone was so excited.

When my mum was booking new bands, she would always ask Jack and me a lot of questions about what we liked and who we were into. I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was her way of doing research. Rock ’n’ roll is passed down from father to son, from mother to daughter; it is generationless. However, she was always looking for the next big thing, and it was really important to her that Ozzfest appealed to audiences of all ages.

My mum was badass before it was trendy for a woman to be a badass. She just wasn’t someone you would fuck with, ever. She had everything on lock. She didn’t just oversee the entire tour—she paid attention to every single detail of it and knew everyone’s name. For example, at every new venue, she ordered more port-a-loos and placed them between the beer tents and the merch stands, knowing that most smaller bands made a lot of their money from selling T-shirts. Another time, there was a tornado warning at one of the shows. I remember huddling underneath the stage with Mum at the open-air amphitheater while she was on the phone with the fire marshal, screaming at him to allow more people to join us so they could be out of harm’s way. “What about everyone out there?” she kept asking. Luckily, the tornado didn’t hit and everyone was safe.

It often seemed like there were no rules on Ozzfest, but there was one big one—unofficial and unwritten—and it was law: No one ever disrespected Mum or Dad. They weren’t just the bosses—they were the tour parents. Anyone, no matter how big or small their job was, could go to Mum with a problem and know that she would do her best to fix it.

This rule was broken in a major way in 2005, when Iron Maiden was on tour. Iron Maiden is a talented group and everyone I met in the band was lovely . . . but there’s always one bad egg. For some reason, the lead singer, Bruce Dickinson, who was a little, Napoleon-complex of a man, had it out for my dad.

Every night, he’d peacock onstage, talking about how he didn’t need a reality show to stay relevant, how he didn’t need a jet because he flew his own plane here, and how he wasn’t coming out here just to sing karaoke. All of those were jabs at my dad, and it was mental, especially since Iron Maiden were opening for Ozzy Osbourne, so let me just put this very bluntly: My dad was basically paying his bills.

Dad has written or cowritten all his songs, and has been singing them for decades, but he’s like me. We are both extremely dyslexic. Sometimes all it takes is a sudden sound or flash to distract him and make him lose his train of thought. For that reason, he had a monitor at the bottom of the stage that scrolled the lyrics, so that if something did ever happen in the middle of a song, he could pick up where he left off without a hiccup. The prompter is there just in case—if you watch my dad perform, you’ll see he never even looks at it, and most people never even know it’s there.

But Bruce had to talk about it, even though Iron Maiden were getting paid plenty of money to be on Ozzfest, and since we are being honest, at that time, he hardly had anywhere else to be. To me, it felt like Bruce had had a problem with my dad since they were kids, probably because Black Sabbath was more successful. Regardless of the reasoning, it was petty. The one thing that stood out to me was that, after years and years of spineless jabs from Bruce, my father never once responded and always took the high road. He had no problem with Bruce, and since he was always backstage getting ready when Iron Maiden was performing, he didn’t even really know what was going on.

By the end of the tour, I had had enough of this fucking cunt going onstage and talking about my family every night. Pretty much everyone else on tour were sick of it, too. It all came to a head at our show in San Bernardino. The highest access you could have on tour was a skull pass. A skull pass meant you could go absolutely anywhere. If there was a fence in your way, someone had better move it. I made a bargain with a friend of mine who worked for one of the tour sponsors: I’d get him a skull pass if he took the blame for what we were about to do. He agreed.

I asked my mum to order eggs and not to ask any questions. God only knows why, but she did it. What must have been three thousand eggs got delivered to me in under an hour. I rounded up everyone I could—all our friends, production, and even band members from the first and second stages. We all had black hoodies and bandannas around our faces, and we looked like we were about to rob somebody. Instead, we loaded up our pockets with eggs and baby powder. I had on a giant fanny pack with thirty-five eggs in it. I remember the specific number because I had counted to see how many would fit.

As soon as we were ready, we funneled down to the photography pit, a line of open space between the stage and the crowd. Security was shitting themselves. We were clearly up to no good, but every person in the group had a skull pass around their neck, which meant we were unstoppable.

For the first song of Iron Maiden’s set, we all stood with our backs to the stage, which meant Bruce was singing to a first few rows filled with the backs of a bunch of heads, all wearing black. Our cue was their second song, which was usually right when Bruce would start taking digs at my dad. The minute they started, we all spun around and emptied our pockets, throwing eggs and powder. I hit Bruce right in the face with an egg. Now, I’ve never been athletic, but something came over me that day and I’m still impressed with my aim.

As soon as security and the crowd started to catch on to what was happening, we spread like wildfire and ran backstage where no one could catch us. It was our Sandlot moment, the triumphant, egg-throwing end to a summer of carnies, groupies, two-legged dogs, and a whole lot more innocent, heavy metal fun.

I’m not being sarcastic—it really was innocent, and there were innocent times, too. For example, if a band like Incubus was on tour and knew we were headed to a particularly beautiful venue, such as the Gorge in Seattle or Red Rocks in Colorado, they’d push everyone so we could get there early and watch the sun slip up over the horizon.

It was magic watching the crew build and then dismantle a whole new world each and every day. There were superheroes, like Rigger Dan, who would free climb up the jib to check out the lights. You had to be a special kind of brave to be a rigger in those days, because who knew when the last time the stage was really, truly safety-checked? Dan had previously been a porn star and had also lost a finger after being bitten by a rattlesnake. He was so much fun, and one of the greatest guys ever.

When the shows were over and the crowds were clearing out, Jack and I would head out into the field to see what we could find. It wasn’t like a Justin Bieber concert, where you’d find a few lip glosses and some chewed gum. We’d find tomahawks, dead animals, and enough bandannas to outfit several Boy Scout troops. Sometimes there would be scorched patches of grass where someone had set the earth on fire, or we’d find wallets and keys to Porsches or Mercedeses. We turned that stuff in. The tomahawks, we kept.

A lot of the band members were only a few years older than Jack and me, and we were all just looking to have fun. If you were close to our age, you were accepted as part of the crew. You were supported. People believed in you and no one shat on you about who you were or who you wanted to be. To an outsider, Ozzfest might seem shocking, but for me, I was more shocked when I went into the rest of the world. There, I couldn’t believe how unaccepting people were, and how vitriolic they could be to someone who was different. To this day, I will gravitate toward the freaks wherever I am, because that’s what I am. That’s who I am. And I have Ozzfest to thank for that!

Love,

Kelly O