At 16 He Was On Ozzy Osbourne's Tour Bus Traveling Music Historian Stephen Rae

An entertaining, heartwarming memoir detailing the adventures and valuable life lessons learned from the author's four decades of friendship with Ozzy Osbourne and the Osbourne family.Stephen Rea was born in Northern Ireland in 1969, the same year "The Troubles" began. Violence was everywhere. His grandmother was nearly killed when gunmen opened fire on the wrong house, leaving young Stephen to pick at the bullet holes in the walls. He found refuge from this turmoil in heavy metal-especially the music of Ozzy Osbourne. As a pre-internet teenager, he hunted down dozens of live concert bootlegs-corresponding by mail with collectors around the world-and devoured every music magazine he could find.In late 1984, when Stephen was fifteen, he read about a huge festival in Rio de Janeiro that January called "Rock In Rio" whose bill included AC/DC, Queen, and Osbourne. As a lark, he mentioned it to his dad, and was stunned when he said they should go. He was even more shocked when his mother, looking for information about how to get tickets, began a correspondence with Osbourne's secretary, who scored the family VIP passes and introduced them to Osbourne in Brazil. Thus began a friendship with Ozzy, his wife Sharon and the rest of the Osbourne family that has continued for decades.While traveling on tour in the mid-nineties, Ozzy gifted Stephen a pair of fancy leather notebooks and told him to keep a record of their adventures and conversations. The result is Ozzy & Me: a beautiful behind-the-scenes memoir that proves the life-affirming, soul-nourishing power of music-and disproves the notion that you should never meet your heroes.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's just one of those things that I do. I
host seventeen different podcasts, So the question is where are they?
How can I find them on these digital platforms. Well
it's very easy now ero dot net, a R r
oe dot net. Thank you so much for all your support.
Good morning, Steve, and you were talking about your daughter
being here in Charlotte. What was up? What's going on?

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Yeah, No, I spent a lot of time in Charlotte.
My ex wife moved there, so the moved back to
Gastonia actually, and then they moved to Valentine. So up
until this smer, my daughters just started college in London.
But up until this summer, I went to Charlotte once
every month. I would go up and see her every month.
So I spent a lot of time in Charlotte up
until up until she graduated high school and gym.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Wow, I'm presently in Valentine. I'm one of those foolish
people that built a forest here and won't let the
people in to build other things, and so I'm fighting
for this forest right here in Valentine. So that's very
special to hear that she lived here.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Oh, that's fantastic. She lived near the h what was
there was like a like a mall with like a.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
Cinema a I'm so grad stone Crest Crest.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah, my daughter lives like half a mile from Stonecrest.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Oh my god, Oh my god. What was it like
to put this book together? Because a book called Ozzie
and Me, that to me pulls me in because it's like,
here we go. We're going to go on a story
because a lot have been written, but they're not going
to be like this one. And you prove that to
be true.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Absolutely, you know. That was one of the things that
sort of wonder hit me to write the book. Was
I realized, actually at a young age, how lucky I was.
I mean, think about that story. Imagine today somebody writing
a letter to the fan club of Metallica or Taylor
Swifter or anyone and saying, hey, my son's a big fan.
He's going to this show, and those guys sort of

(01:42):
taking that fan under their wing and becoming a friend
with not just sort of treating them as a vip
at a gig, but actually having a relationship with them
for decades. I mean, I would spend Christmas Alsie would
invite me to his house for Christmas and I grew
you know, I spent my life with the Osbourne family.

(02:03):
So absolutely I do think there's a part of me
that realized is the lucky I was on this story
needed to be told.

Speaker 1 (02:11):
Wow. One of the things that blew me away, only
because I've been a daily writer since nineteen ninety four,
when people share notebooks with you, that gets my heart
in a really big, big moment, because a lot of
books are shared, but they don't do anything with them.
And I love your honesty on what you did with
it and how you reacted to it, because I mean
to receive not one, but two leather notebooks for Mozsie.

(02:35):
What an amazing gift not only for you but for
those that will one day read what you put in it.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah, well hopefully that's true. And again that just that
tells you so much. And one of the things as
a writer is that you show little sections or snippets
and that then portrays the greater, the greatest sense. And
Assie on a whim was in the gift shop with
this hotel and this is the nineties. He spent hundreds
of dollars on leather notebooks for me, just blank notebooks,

(03:05):
and sort of said, hey, you are a go right,
And again that just shows you his generosity, the way
he thought about other people. And I did and I wrote,
and I used them and hopefullyly that years time people
will look back and again it's it's it's big, it's ausy.
This was always coming out in November twenty twenty five
of this book, and of course considering what happened, it

(03:27):
makes it all the.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
More mentally and physically. When it comes to Ozzy Osbourne, well.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
I hope. So I have a chapter in the book
about that show, that world detur that came to my
house in New Orleans and visited me and we talked
about the old days. So that's actually in the book.
Funny enough, but.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
To go through that and then to put it on paper,
I mean, I know how many times I cry real tears.
I can't imagine what you went through.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
It was absolutely it was crazy. We'd all been together
at the last show in Birmingham in July. Everybody from
his past excuse me, everybody who had sort of had
anything to do with the Osbournes, anybody who had worked
with Aussie we all came together in July and it
was so fantastic. It was such a fitting send off,
and we were all just so happy for him and

(04:13):
the high fantastic, the whole thing had gone. And then
two weeks later we get a call and suddenly all
of us are back again in England. Two weeks later,
you know, for a reunion none of us wanted or expected,
and yes it was, it was awful.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Please do not move. There's more with Stephen Ray coming
up next. The name of the book Ozzie and Me
Life Lessons, Wild Stories and Unexpected Infanies. We are back
with Stephen Ray. Both of us are both writers, and
we both listened to music and even while we're writing,
you know, Alexa may not be playing music, but we
hear it inside our souls. What would your soundtracks sound

(04:50):
like if you were to go in there, because I mean,
you wrote this story. What were the songs that you
were hearing inside your hearts while you were putting those
paragraphs together?

Speaker 2 (05:00):
You know, probably those Aussie deep cuts. Of course everybody
knows Crazy Train, our iron Man and Paranoid and those
kinds of things, but it's really the deeper cuts. Because
I became a fan, I grew up with Assie. It's
sort of hitting my teenage years. So those first two albums,

(05:20):
that Blizzard album, that Daria from Adman to this day,
Diary of a Madman is my favorite album of all time.
And of course it's different these days because back then
we listened to albums, you know, we didn't dinload a single.
An album had to be a contained entity, and funnily
enough it was. It took me months. What are we

(05:40):
Assie's passed in July, when are in November. It's taken
me four months really to sort of come to terms
with putting on an Assie song. And yesterday, maybe for
the first time, I played Daria from Adman and I'm
just like, what a fantastic album this was. And again,
like you said, it takes us back, right, you listened

(06:02):
in an album and suddenly you're thirteen years old again.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
The front cover is what really gets me. And what
I mean by that is is that we've seen Ozzie
in concert, we've seen Ozzie on TV. Everything has been colorized.
But when you grab this book and it's done so
on the front cover in black and white, you're saying,
this is the origin. Let's start here and then we
can all grow forward.

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, that cover photograph was taken in nineteen eighty eight.
That was about three am. That was in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Of course, Northern Ireland we were rocked with the troubles
and many stars didn't come to Belfast. There was no
reason to go a it was an extremely poor place.
We didn't have much discretionary cash to buy concert tickets.

(06:43):
And then b of course, and much more importantly, we
were blowing each other up and shooting each other, and
nobody wanted to come and play Northern Ireland, and Ozzie did.
Ozzie played it in nineteen eighty six, he did two
shows in Belfast and then that photograph was taken the
next time he came back in teen eighty eight, and
that was at every four to five secure hotel and

(07:06):
that was taken about three am.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
Just between the two of us. Though, what was your
dad's look when you told him that you want to
go to the festival in Rio? Because I know as
a father I would have looked at my son or
daughter and said you what what I mean? Do you
want the same reaction?

Speaker 2 (07:22):
No, I was actually my dad. My dad kim to Brazil.
He was the one that took me a much more
sort of yeah. Yeah, so my dad went with my parents.
But in eighty six, so I was only sixteen years old.
I cut out of school and I went on tour
with Ozsie on his tour bus and spent a month
hanging out sort of traveling around the UK. Can you
imagine that if you're sixteen year old today said Hey,

(07:45):
I'm leaving school for a month and I'm off the
tour with her offine.

Speaker 1 (07:49):
Where can people go to find out more about what
you're up to, Stephen, Because I mean, we're just barely
scratching the surface here and I want listeners and fans
of Ozzie to really dive into your project.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Oh up, So if they can find the website is
Stephen Hyphenay dot com s T E p h E
N hyphen r a dot com. They can find me
on Facebook Stephen Ray and yeah Google Allzie and me.

Speaker 1 (08:11):
Please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you, sir.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
Will you be brilliant today? Okay, thank you