By Soberinfo Staff WriterOriginal Source: soberinfo.comIn the early 1990s, if you’d told anyone with a straight face that Ozzy Osbourne and Nikki Sixx would both be sober at any point in the foreseeable future, it’s possible you would have needed to save their life with the Heimlich maneuver. Two alpha males whose voracious appetites were the stuff of legend, they were walking symbols of rock-and-roll and all its attendant excesses.Yet there they sat, on a cool day in the fall of 2017, calmly discussing the fact that Ozzy Osbourne hasn’t had a drink in half a decade. According to former guitarist Zakk Wylde, the onetime arena rocker doesn’t even have coffee anymore — nothing stronger than tea.It seems he can’t afford to; with his overwhelming personality, any indulgence on Osbourne’s part threatens to turn into something larger than life. “I can sit here and go, ‘A glass of wine would be good,’ the next thing you know…I’m going to wake up covered in…puke, on my own somewhere.”The facts of Osbourne’s life certainly indicate he understands himself all too well; in 1989, while blackout drunk, he tried to strangle his wife Sharon. He had no clue what he’d done until he came to in the police station and learned he’d been arrested for attempted murder. By the Osbourne’s own admission, their marriage was a whirlwind of thrown bottles and knocked-out teeth. Remarkably, the couple have weathered the storm and remain happily married.Nikki Sixx, the host of this interview with Osbourne, has battled his own addictions. In 1987, as Motley Crüe prepared to take the world by storm with their “Girls Girls Girls” tour, he was pronounced dead for two minutes — the result of alternating alcohol, heroin, and cocaine for the better part of an evening.Even after staring death down, Sixx wouldn’t get sober until 2001; since then, though, he’s been a tireless advocate for sobriety, even penning an op-ed for the LA Times earlier this year about America’s opioid crisis.Although they once served as symbols of excess, these two rock gods now stand for something larger: the idea that we’re never done growing into our truest selves. As Sixx wrote on his Facebook page: “Today, I get to be a better father, friend, artist, and future husband.” Ozzy’s advice to Goldmine was similar, but had his classic Osbourne wit: “These days, I just try not to make the same mistake twice.”
