Nuno Bettencourt Recalls Sending an Audition Tape to Ozzy as a Kid and Then Refusing to Play With Him 10 Years Later: ‘I Should Have Done It’

“It finally worked, and I turned it down.”

Nuno Bettencourt looked back on sending an audition tape to Ozzy Osbourne as a young teen, and refusing the invitation to play with the legendary vocalist ten years later.

There have been a lot of truly impressive guitarists who have played with The Prince of Darkness in the past, and even more of those who auditioned for the prized role but never made it (for long). However, it’s a little-known fact that Extreme’s Nuno Bettencourt also threw his name in the hat when he was but a teen.

Although his original application never went far, Nuno would be offered the same job years later — only to turn it down. He looked back on the experience during a recent chat with Rick Beato, noting how the first time he played through a proper cab when he recorded his audition tape (transcribed by Ultimate Guitar):

“The first time I ever played through a proper cab was [when the] Circus Magazine [put out an ad]; I think it had come out [when] Randy [passed away] unfortunately, and we were all devastated. And I think, at the moment, they were looking for a guitar player… There was like a little cutout thing, like, almost like an ad; ‘Send your tape here, Ozzy looking for a guitar player.'”

Nuno noted that he had only started high school at that point and that he had only been playing for a few years, adding:

“And I’m like, ‘This is my gig! I can do this!’ [Beato breaks out in laughter] I’m in this four-family home in Hudson, Massachusetts, and [the ad says], I don’t know, ‘Send ‘Crazy Train’ on cassette to this address.’ And I’m all in, man. I call my buddy saying, ‘Can I borrow your Marshall?’, and I put it in my bedroom. I can’t do without a cabinet, and I borrowed a 4×12; I had never played through one before… I [also] borrowed some harmonizer and I didn’t even know how to run it, and I’m like, ‘That’s it!’

“I’m playing [‘Crazy Train’] probably horribly; I’m doing the solo… I didn’t tell anybody. I took the solo, [wrote down] the address, licked the stamp, brought it to the post office, and I was just like, ‘Okay, now I wait. But I’m getting this gig.'”

After weeks of eagerly waiting for Ozzy’s positive reply to come in the mail, during which time he self-admittedly drew his family nuts by constantly asking them whether there was anything in the mail for him, Nuno eventually found out that Brad Gills was chosen for the role:

“Weeks have gone by, and I’m getting really upset. Then, I read that Brad Gillis is filling in, and I’m like, ‘Oh man, they better not keep him, because this is my gig.’ I believed I was going to do it… I’m waiting, and months have gone by. And then, I heard they got Jake E. Lee. I might have shed a tear, because [I thought] that was my gig.”

When dreams become a reality

Fast forward ten years later, Extreme’s booking agent Rod MacSween, who was also working with Ozzy, visits Nuno’s locker room during a tour on which Extreme opened for Aerosmith:

“He pulls me out and we’re in a hallway. I’ll never forget this. He’s facing me, and Rod says, ‘Nuno, Sharon Osbourne called me. Ozzy wants you to be his guitarist.’ And then, he says, ‘What do you think?’ And all I could say was, ‘They heard the cassette?’, and he’s like, ‘What are you talking about?’… I was literally thinking about the cassette I sent when I was 12. That’s how much trauma I had.”

Cassette or no, Nuno says he ended up declining the gig:

“It finally worked, and I turned it down, because I was in a band, and I was doing my job. And that was the stupidest thing I ever did. Why? Because I left Extreme about two weeks later. I was like, ‘I’m an idiot.’ I could have toured with Ozzy, and been on the next album… Because, playing with Ozzy was almost a rite of passage, like you were the chosen one… If Ozzy chose you, you were somebody… But, I was trying to carve my own path, and be my own person. I don’t know what I was thinking; I should have done it.”