Just when you thought he had gibbered his way off the cultural map, Ozzy Osbourne, the one and only Prince of Darkness, resurfaces with an autobiography promising to tell his full story, with no expurgations. An intriguing conceit. And, for the most part, I Am Ozzy succeeds as a tell-all, stitching together familiar bits and pieces of his life and smoothly filling in the gaps.

But the question that kept popping up as I read I Am Ozzy is how? How did the bat-biting rock icon, most recently seen staggering his way through his own reality show, gather together enough of his scattered and fractured thoughts to produce a book? One wonders if the result isn’t a sort of fiction co-authored by writer Chris Ayres and perhaps Ozzy’s wife Sharon, who must have been on hand to “refresh” her husband’s memory.

After all, Ozzy has made a career out of Herculean substance abuse. “Over the past 40 years I’ve been loaded on booze, coke, acid, Quaaludes, glue, cough mixture, heroin, Rohypnol, Klonopin, Vicodin, and too many other heavy-duty substances to list in this footnote. On more than a few occasions I was on all of those at the same time.”

Nevertheless, the saga of John Michael Osbourne efficiently unfolds, with the hundred million records, the sex, the bat and dove biting, the tragedies (Ozzy’s writing partner Randy Rhoads perished in a plane crash), the family and of course the drugs. The drugs. So much of Ozzy’s life has been about drugs, he admits. And guess what? Contrary to what you might have thought, Ozzy’s performance on The Osbournes was not a result of lamentable brain illness, or a short-circuit of the central nervous system caused by previous drug abuse, or a muscular issue. Nor was he playing it up for the camera. We discover that during the entire run of the show Ozzy was pretty much wrecked out of his mind on a cocktail of drugs that would have killed a rhino. And yes, it made for great television. He could be as funny as a drug addict, and we all know how funny they are.

Yet, one can’t deny the book its delights: reading about Black Sabbath’s rise from folksy persona non grata (called “Earth” before being cleverly rechristened) to one of the groundbreaking rock acts of the early 1970s is fascinating. Seemingly overnight, through some clever marketing and angling – with producers even contriving the potent satanic shtick – their first album, self-titled Black Sabbath (the one with the “witch” on the cover) shot them into the stratosphere. Life would never be the same for Ozzy and the boys. And he gives us the goods on the roller-coaster ride of it all.

And reading about Ozzy’s various shenanigans and brushes with death and the law, whether represented faithfully or not never disappoints. The tone of the whole book is pleasingly “down-to-earth”; words from a regular Birmingham bloke and not a drug-addled rock deity. The narrative’s working-class British patter engages. This is Ozzy talking about his early, brief career as a thief: “I was a fucking crap burglar. I kept going back and doing the same job, over and over. I’d scoped out this clothes shop called Sarah Clarke’s, on the street behind my house in Aston. During the first break-in I grabbed a load of hangers and thought, Magic, I’ll be able to flog this stuff down at the pub. But I’d forgotten to take a torch with me, and it turned out that the clothes I’d nicked were a bunch of babies’ bibs and toddlers’ underpants.”

But let’s face it, as good and gritty as this is, one always wonders if a mega-rocker like Ozzy is really capable of being “down-to-earth.” Maybe it doesn’t matter. I Am Ozzy is a good read. How the Prince of Darkness survived his toxic lifestyle and wound up fairly snug and grandfatherly in Buckinghamshire and Beverly Hills is a good story.

I AM OZZY
Ozzy Osbourne with Chris Ayres
Grand Central Publishing
391 pages. $26.99.