I saw Ozzy pee on the Alamo – and other hair-raising rock war stories
Allan Jones is the man responsible for publicising the most eye-catching rock’n’roll story I’ve ever heard. On February 19 1982, the then 31-year old music writer, on assignment for the British music paper Melody Maker with photographer Tom Sheehan, witnessed one John “Ozzy” Osbourne urinating at a monument on the site of the Alamo dedicated to the lives of soldiers killed in the 1836 Texas Revolution.
As if this weren’t quite enough, he did so in the middle of afternoon, wholly drunk, in full sight of a battalion of tourists, while wearing women’s clothes.
“It was extraordinary,” Jones recalls. “Tom and I had flown into San Antonio the night before. We were staying in a different hotel, so the next morning we thought we’d go over to the hotel where Ozzy and his tour party were staying, just to make contact, and as we arrived we saw him just kind of stumbling out of the bar. It was only about 11 o’ clock, 11.30am, and he was damp all over. It turned out that he’d been out all night drinking… and on the way back to the hotel he’d fallen into a canal and nearly drowned.”
Our boy was just getting started. That afternoon, Ozzy, disbelieving that his act of public ablution merited the interest of law enforcement agencies, was told by a state trooper, “Son, when you p--- on the Alamo, you p--- on the state of Texas”. With what sounds like impeccable comic timing, his manager and wife, Sharon Osbourne, screeched onto the scene just as the singer was being bundled into the back of a squad car bound for the Big House.
The prison complex “was a really heavy place,” Jones tells me. “It was a really torrid atmosphere there. Lots of people being processed, taken into jail cells; lots of women and wives and families.” With things at first looking grim for the English inmate, it was left to Sharon O to remind the authorities that “Ozzy had a gig [at the nearby HemisFair Arena] that night, for 15-to-20,000 people, and that his non-appearance would very likely spark a riot. The police thought about that and released him so he was able to play the gig.”
The above story appears in Jones’s first book, Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down, a compendium of the now 72-year-old’s short-form journalism that continues to sell well long after its original publication. Perhaps with this in mind, this week sees the emergence of Too Late To Stop Now, a second collection of pieces culled from the pages of the Melody Maker and Uncut – Jones edited both – featuring interviewees as diverse as Elvis Costello, Chrissie Hynde, Wilko Johnson, Ian Anderson, Robert Plant, Dr Feelgood, Peter Gabriel, and many more. That the book’s subtitle is More Rock’N’Roll War Stories speaks volumes.
Because if you want blood, Allan Jones has got it. There he is doling out hard drugs to a troupe of Hells Angels in the bathroom of a hotel in San Francisco. He’s riding with Rockpile as manager Jake Riviera has a gentle word – “open this f---ing gate or we’ll drive the f---ing van straight f---ing through it!” - with backstage personnel at an Oxford University May Ball. He’s in a diner with The Clash in the thick of winter at 4am in Washington DC. He’s taking cocaine with Bryan Ferry in a west London Flat. (“’More Charlie?’ he asks, even though we’ve been hitting it pretty hard for the past couple of hours…”)
“Forty years ago, when I was in the thick of it, you would just set off on these adventures that would always provide the most entertaining stories,” is how Jones explains the frankly remarkable degree of candour on display in both of his books. “You were on the road with a band [where] anything could happen; in those days, you weren’t chaperoned by press officers… you just got on a plane, landed somewhere – sometimes in the middle of absolutely nowhere – and hooked up with a band who you were with for the next week.”
I can only marvel at the latitude. By the time I arrived on the scene, a generation later, record companies had begun the process, now almost complete, of convincing weak-minded editors and pliable music journalists that they were somehow part of an artist’s publicity department rather than storytellers in their own right. And while big-name news organisations and quarrelsome websites have been able to buck this trend, the formal music press itself is today a diminished beast. Certainly, the idea that a writer for Mojo, say, or Classic Rock would be allowed to accompany a major artist on the road for a week is for the birds.
One aspect of all this change can even be seen in my interview with Jones himself. Our encounter on Microsoft Teams, via a pair of laptop computers, allows me to deduce only that my subject is a smoker who looks like a wizard. By comparison, I’m drawn to a piece in Too Late To Stop Now in which Peter Cook – a rare non-musical entrant – is luxuriously described as being “lanky enough to pass for an exclamation mark with elbows and knees… [whose] trousers sag on him, exhausted, like he’s been wearing them since he had legs”. I can't rival that. I don’t even know if Allan Jones has legs.
“Most interviews these days are by Zoom [which has] almost turned writing about rock music into a sedentary profession,” he says. “I would write about whatever happened in front of me. And you had to be there. You couldn’t replicate that experience with chatting with someone via Zoom. You can get a decent interview out of [that], but the piece itself with lack the colour, the drama, the excitement of whatever might happen if you were actually with them… Just being in the proximity of someone, you get a much more vivid sense of their personality.
“I’m sure the record companies love the new development, which was obviously a consequence of Covid and the lockdowns,” he says. “And they must be absolutely delighted that they’ve made that interaction between a journalist and their subject that much more remote.”
Allan Jones had no intention of becoming a writer. But while sitting in Green Park one afternoon, in 1973, his girlfriend read aloud an advert placed in Time Out by Melody Maker offering space on their pages for a young reporter whose strength of opinion mattered more than any previous experience. Even though the 20-year old Welshman had been taking ‘the Maker’ since the 1960s, in recent times his eye had been caught by hip new writers such as Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray over at the NME. He replied to the ad with a letter that included the line, “Melody Maker needs a gun up the a---: I’m the bullet – pull the trigger”.
His arrival on the scene coincided with a golden age of music writing in which he played no small part. Troublesome, irreverent, egotistical and (usually) readable, his habit of placing himself in the centre of each piece was made tolerable largely by his talents as a writer. From a technical point of view, a feature-length article about the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium, in 1982, in which the performance itself is mentioned only in passing, in the final paragraph, requires both chutzpah and skill. That the piece, like so many in the book, was created on a manual typewriter makes the achievement only more remarkable.
“One of the things I did find continually frustrating about [Melody Maker] was that [when I arrived] it was stripped of personality,” Jones tells me. “So when I started writing, I wanted to take the reader with me on a trip, on a journey, especially when I started going on the road with bands. This was a great opportunity to bring that world alive for readers who probably wouldn’t experience [this world] for themselves.”
With this access came power. The music press’s ability to break bands meant that each week its verdicts were noted by hundreds of thousands of readers for whom the writers themselves were often as notable as the artists. These were the days when print was king. With the exception of The Old Grey Whistle Test, on BBC Two, television rarely granted airtime to the kinds of acts favoured by papers such as the Melody Maker. Today, perhaps the only positive aspect of the diminishment of the magazine class is that fewer and fewer are the people who can remember being reliant on the endorsements of reporters whose judgements were not always as sharp as their prose.
The book’s startling blood-alcohol level is another clue that Jones practiced his trade in different times. Over the span of 360 pages, our narrator gets drunk with Elton John (champagne: three bottles), Lou Reed (whisky: two bottles), Loudon Wainwright (wine: five bottles), Dave Edmunds and Nick Lowe (two crates of beer, a bottle of vodka, four bottles of wine) and many, many more. Such is the ubiquity of grape and grain, in fact, that its absence merits alarm. “We meet in a pub in Brentford, but Nick’s not drinking, which is a bit of a shock,” is the opening sentence of a subsequent interview with Nick Lowe.
To give him his due, Jones allows my question about whether or not he was (or is) a practicing alcoholic a measure of thought. “I don’t think so,” is his reply. But after a bit more thinking, he adds the qualification: “By a lot of metrics, I probably would have qualified as an alcoholic, but I never depended on drink… It was the same with any drugs that might have been lying around. I never depended on them, either. I took loads of coke when I was out on the road with bands… but I was never under any illusion that taking piles of speed, or piles of coke, was going to make my writing any better.”
In fact, even when the action in Too Late To Stop Now lurches between the breathless and the terrifying, the author himself retains a reliably deft touch. In one exquisitely judged profile from 1979, Joe Cocker, ravaged by alcoholism and recovering from an addiction to heroin, is allowed space in which to lament his mistreatment by a plague of spivs, cheats and parasites who “sucked the f---ing life out of him”.
But only so much space. Because in rock’n’roll “you can’t afford to dwell on s--- like that,” the singer says. “There’s no bloody point. You do what you do, and you pay the price. F--- it. Let’s have another [drink].”
And because Allan Jones is no different from the people about whom he writes, he does. “And a couple more after that” too, he adds.
Too Late To Stop Now by Allan Jones (Bloomsbury) is available from Telegraph Books for £16.99.
