Sharon Osbourne spent much of 1984 trying to keep Ozzy Osbourne out of trouble. Then he went on tour with Mötley Crüe.
According to Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, Sharon repeatedly flew out to the tour after hearing reports of the chaos unfolding backstage each night. Eventually, she confiscated Mötley Crüe’s after-show passes and banned them from bringing guests backstage in an effort to protect Ozzy from the nonstop partying surrounding the young band.
“Put it this way, Sharon was not happy with us,” Lee recalled during a recent appearance on The Zach Sang Show.
The tour, which paired Ozzy’s Bark at the Moon lineup with Mötley Crüe in support of Shout at the Devil, has since become one of hard rock’s most infamous road outings. Stories from the trek — including Ozzy’s notorious ant-snorting incident — have become part of rock folklore.
But Lee says those tales barely capture the atmosphere that surrounded the tour, one that ultimately left Ozzy physically and emotionally spent by its conclusion.
“Some people lost brain cells, marriages,” Lee said. “She’d get called out. Like, ‘The Mötley guys are bringing shitloads of girls backstage after the show; it’s a fucking party everywhere.’”
According to Lee, Sharon would often fly in after hearing reports of the band’s latest exploits.
“She took all of our after-show passes from us,” he recalled. “We’re no longer allowed to have any guests backstage. She cut us off.”
The restriction didn’t go over particularly well with Mötley Crüe.
“We made special shirts that had a smiley face with a bullet hole in it, and it said ‘The No Fun Tour,’ because she came out and just literally shut it down,” Lee said. “She was like, ‘There is no way this is going to continue.’”
Looking back, Lee admits Sharon had good reason to be concerned.
“When I say ‘continue,’ I’m talking about ’til-the-wheels-fall-off shit,” he added. “It was bad for Ozzy to be around.”
By the end of the tour, Lee says the toll on Ozzy had become impossible to ignore.
“I remember Ozzy coming out towards the end of the tour,” he recalled. “He came out in, like, tighty-whitey Hanes underwear, some boots, and that’s it. He had been up for days partying. I mean, days.
“He finally stumbles out to the microphone, and he just starts crying. Then he just turned away and walked right off the stage. First song. Came out, started crying, and left. That was it. The tour was done. It was time for him to go home and get some rest.”
The atmosphere wasn’t just hard on Ozzy. The tour also became notorious for clashes between members of the two camps, most notably guitarists Jake E. Lee and Mick Mars.
In a 2019 interview with Tone-Talk, Lee recalled that he and Mars frequently clashed during the run and claimed that some members of Mötley Crüe had even floated the idea of replacing Mars with him.
“Nikki [Sixx] and Tommy wanted me in the band,” Lee told Tone-Talk in 2019 (via Ultimate Classic Rock). “They wanted me to replace Mick. You can understand that — better looking and a better player. But Mick’s in-law or whatever was funding the band, so that didn’t happen.”
According to Lee, tensions eventually boiled over when Mars called him a “slant-eyed Japanese bastard.”
“I did not like that,” Lee said. “I hadn’t heard it since I was in grade school, and it pissed me off. I was gonna beat the fuck out of him, but [Ratt guitarist] Robbin Crosby, who was six-five, came up to me, picked me up and said, ‘C’mon, Jake. None of that shit matters.’ And he carried me out of the room.”
Between Sharon Osbourne’s efforts to rein in the partying, Ozzy’s deteriorating condition and tensions between members of the two bands, the Bark at the Moon/Shout at the Devil tour earned its reputation as one of hard rock’s most chaotic road adventures.
