Former Ozzy Osbourne producer Max Norman has revealed that members of Osbourne’s band were treated “badly”.
During an appearance on The Metal Voice (via Ultimate Guitar), Norman got on to the topic of the band members who performed on Osbourne’s 1980 debut solo album Blizzard of Ozz.
Speaking about Jake E. Lee, Osbourne‘s guitarist at the time, Norman said: “He’s a very modest guy, he does what he wants to do, and he very much doesn’t like the music business because of that, because of the way they treated him.”
“He wrote lots of that stuff, and that’s why it’s good. In a way, he is as much of a force as Randy [Rhoads] was. Unfortunately, by this time, the die had been cast with the whole management situation.”
“And that was all became kind of non-musical, and just all about the money, and how best to fuck people over, basically. I get into trouble with this all the time.”
He continued: “The last time I was on Eddie Trunk’s, we were talking about the same thing and I was saying how badly I thought they treated the guys in ‘Blizzard,’ and I got a cease and desist the next day from Ozzy‘s lawyers saying, ‘You better shut the fuck up or we’re going to sue the shit out of you.'”
“This is what happens every time I talk about this stuff. But I don’t give a fuck because I don’t have any money anyway. You can’t get blood out of a stone.”
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Norman continued on to say that he attributes the band’s problems to their differing personalities.
“It was such a great band, for the first two records, the band was so good you just couldn’t do any wrong. They could play any fucking song and it would sound really good,” he said.
“But they never seem to last that long, very few bands go more than a few years with having that kind of lineup, like Cream or Hendrix. Maybe The Stones is probably the only one that keeps going.”
“You see this happen all the time, bands don’t last that long because of the personalities, and what kind of makes them good is also what destroys them in the end. You see this happening over and over and over again.”
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Check out Max Norman discussing Ozzy Osbourne and his band:
