“He told Sharon, ‘I know a lot of guitar players. We don’t have to use him’”: Jake E. Lee recalls how his conflict with producer Ron Nevison impacted Ozzy Osbourne’s The Ultimate Sin

Ozzy Osbourne’s fourth studio album, 1986’s The Ultimate Sin, was fraught with disagreements between guitarist Jake E. Lee and renowned producer Ron Nevison.

Lee – who had already managed to navigate a contractual dispute regarding publishing and writing rights with Ozzy – was now faced with a producer who was ready to replace him at the drop of a hat.

“I’m a nighttime guy, right?” Lee remembers in the latest issue of Guitar World. “To me, rock is nighttime music you play in clubs until closing time. It didn’t feel like a daytime thing to me. I recorded at night, and that’s how we did Bark at the Moon. Max Norman, who produced that, was cool with that. Ron Nevison wasn’t.

“He told Sharon [Osbourne] that he wanted to start no later than noon. Sharon told me that, and I said, ‘Noon? I’m not even thinking about waking up then. I won’t start any earlier than 6 p.m.’ So right off the bat, we had problems, and Nevison told Sharon, ‘I know a lot of guitar players… we don’t have to use him. We can use other people to come in and play the parts. I have all the demos.’”

So how did Sharon respond? “It was ridiculous,” Lee replies. “He obviously had no idea what Ozzy was. He’s not somebody who brings in fucking guitar players. But Sharon told me that, and I said, ‘Really? And what did you say?’

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“Sharon said, ‘I told him he was out of his fucking mind. You’re playing the guitar. How about we start at 3?’” That proved to be a good compromise for Lee – although not one that won him any favors with Nevison.

“I said I’d come in at 3, but I never did,” he quips. “I’d get up, look at the clock, and if I saw it was 3, I’d say, ‘Oh, shit, I better get ready…’ But I never showed up earlier than maybe 4. I just hated the idea of forcing myself to wake up and play during the day. It felt wrong to me to make an album that would last forever that way. It irked me.”

The conflicts didn’t end there, however. The pair also disagreed on their personal preferences for, er, room temperature.

“When I came into the studio for the first time to record, I always played inside, where my amp was, because I like getting feedback,” Lee explains. “The headphones have to be really loud, but that’s my problem; I like playing in the room. But I went into the room, and it was fucking freezing.

“I was like, ‘What the hell? Can you warm up the room?” Nevison said, ‘No. I like my musicians to be awake. The cold keeps them awake and alert.’ I said, ‘Fuck you. You know what it also does? It makes my fingers fucking slow because they’re frozen. I can’t play like that.’ So we argued about the temperature in the room, which I won.”

For more from Jake E. Lee, plus new interviews with Steve Stevens and Steve Vai, pick up issue 601 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.