It is a little-known fact that when Zakk Wylde does a phone interview he rises to his feet and puts the caller on hands-free, the better to demonstrate the choke holds, knockout punches, devoured pints and plummeting televisions that form the cornerstones of his war stories. Wylde is aptly named. Describing himself as a “little kid who loved ” when he joined Ozzy’s solo band in 1987, the Black Label Society guitarist has grown into a bearded berserker with the mouth of a Glaswegian docker and the personality of a runaway train.
When he sat down with Classic Rock in 2008 to speak about some of stars who have lit up his life, it wasn’t an interview, it was a verbal battering. The old man is fuckin’ hysterical. I worship the ground he walks on.
I was meant to be with him – lions hang out with lions, you know? The comedy never ends. The funniest story from my time with the old man is probably when we threw a fuckin’ TV out the fuckin’ window. It was me, Ozzy and , sitting up in a Prague hotel room at three in the morning.
We’d just played to about 60,000 people and we’re getting fuckin’ loaded. This was when Ozzy was still drinking, so pops is fuckin’ shit-faced and we’re all fucked up. We must have spent two grand on beer that night.
So we were shooting the shit about Keith Moon, and how bad-ass he was, throwing TVs out of the window and getting wasted on elephant tranquillisers. And pops says: “Man, I’ve done some crazy shit in but I’ve never thr.
