Ozzy Osbourne Allegedly Had Bandmate Sign NDA

Jake E. Lee recently recalled accidentally confirming his songwriting contributions on “Bark at the Moon” despite an alleged contract which won’t allow him from doing so. He told Chris Jericho that he felt like it was obvious Ozzy Osbourne didn’t write the album alone and that he wasn’t going to face serious consequences.

From Randy Rhoads and Bob Daisley to Jake E. Lee and Zakk Wylde, Ozzy Osbourne’s solo career was marked by the presence of top-tier musicians, thanks in part to his wife’s and manager’s business skills. Meanwhile, the Osbournes’ legal disputes with Daisley and Lee are well-documented, illustrating a “complicated” professional dynamic, as Daisley described last August.

For Lee, this involved an alleged contract preventing him from discussing his songwriting contributions to 1983’s “Bark at the Moon” in public. In an interview on November 5th with Chris Jericho, Lee mentioned he initially forgot about this restriction and ended up revealing it.

“I figured that, okay, it’s gonna say, ‘All songs written by [Ozzy Osbourne].’ Nobody’s gonna believe that [laughs]. Anybody familiar with Ozzy knows he didn’t do that. And I said, ‘So, I’ll still get some cred out of this.’ So it didn’t bother me that much. I know one part of the contract was that I could never publicly discuss how I’d written anything on there.”

“But once the album was out, the first interview I did, ‘Yeah, I wrote it!’ Not like I wrote the whole album, but yeah, I wrote [some parts], but it didn’t say. So, who you gonna believe? Because I figured, by then, I was on the album, tour was being set up. They’re not gonna fire me because I opened my mouth to say something that was obvious. And, yeah, they didn’t.”

Back in 2014, Lee said that the contract was forced on him after the album had been written, even though, he claimed he was initially told he would be credited proportionally to his contributions. When he asked Sharon why he should sign it, the alleged answer he got was:

“Because if you don’t, we’ll give you a plane ticket, you go back home and you stand in line and you sue us. In the meantime, we have all your tracks, we’ll get another guitar player, he’ll redo your tracks, and you’ll have nothing.”

In the same interview, Lee also stated that he refused to work on 1986’s “The Ultimate Sin” until he was presented with a contract that would safeguard his songwriting credits.