(CNN) – Rock icon Ozzy Osbourne opened up about his health struggles in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, saying he would “die happy” if he could play one more concert to express his gratitude to his fans on stage.
“If I can’t do concerts regularly, I just want to be healthy enough to do a concert where I can say, ‘Hey guys, thank you so much for my life.’ I’m working on it, and if I end up dropping dead, “I’ll die happy,” he explained.
The 74-year-old singer announced the end of his tours in February because he was “no longer physically fit” after several health problems. In July he withdrew from a music festival planned for October.
Osbourne injured her spine in a serious accident four years ago, has since had to undergo several surgeries and announced her Parkinson’s diagnosis in January 2020.
The fall and subsequent surgeries “really hit me,” Osbourne said. “The second operation was fatal and left me virtually crippled. I thought I would recover after the second and third surgeries, but the last one they put a damn rod in my spine. They found a tumor in one of the vertebrae, so they had to remove it too. It’s pretty hard, man.
Although Osbourne appeared intermittently during this time, including at the closing ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games in her hometown of Birmingham, England, she largely stayed away from the stage.
During his career, which began as a member of the groundbreaking heavy metal band Black Sabbath, Osbourne won Grammy Awards for both his solo work and his membership in the band, which he left in 1979.
Ozzy Osbourne, photographed in 1991. Photo credit: Martyn Goodacre/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
He became famous for both his colorful performances and his music, particularly in the 1980s, when he threw raw meat at concertgoers and bit into a dead bat thrown at him by a fan on stage (Osbourne had thought it be rubber). , But that was not the case).
“I’m taking it one day at a time, and when I can get back into acting, I will,” he said. “But it was like saying goodbye to the best relationship of my life. When I stopped touring at the beginning of my illness, I was very upset with myself, with the doctors and with the world. I said to myself, ‘Well, maybe I have to accept it.'”
Acting like “a half-hearted Ozzy looking for sympathy” is out, the legendary singer said.
“I recently saw a presentation by Phil Collins and he has essentially the same problems as me,” he added. “Go on stage in a wheelchair! But I couldn’t do it.”