Rob Zombie recalled how his long friendship with Ozzy Osbourne got off to an “uncomfortable” start when the pair met for the first time.

The encounter took place at the Black Sabbath singer’s home, although Zombie told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that he couldn’t remember why he was there.

“Ozzy’s great. I’ve known Ozzy for a long time,” he said in a new interview. “We toured together for the first time maybe 20 years ago, but I met him before. The first time I met Ozzy was really weird. ... I thought, ‘There’s going to be a bunch of people, a manager will be there, Sharon will be there.’ It turns out to be just me and Ozzy by ourselves.”

He remembered Osbourne telling him: “Oh, Rob, I want to play you my new record. So, he puts on his new record; I think he’s going to play one song, maybe. He plays the whole album, looking directly at me, singing most of it. I’m simultaneously thinking, ‘This is awesome!’ and ‘This is so uncomfortable I don’t know what to do!’” You can listen to the story below.

The tale led to reflection on the most difficult experience of his career, which Zombie said was the long period leading up to finding success with White Zombie in the early ‘90s.

“We had at least seven solid years of nobody giving two shits that we existed on any level,” he noted. “Every day you wake up and you kinda think, like, ‘What is the fucking point? This is absurd.’ … It’s kind of like a sickness; you feel like a junkie.

“That’s why I would never tell anybody I was in a band, back in the day. If they didn’t know, and they were like, ‘Are you in a band?’ ‘No! I am not.’ Because it was embarrassing. ‘This is not being in band yet – this is being a homeless guy with instruments.’”

 

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