All I have to give you is a love that never dies

Freshman year sucked. I wasn't any better at algebra, I didn't join any clubs or groups, and I flunked chemistry. And it hit bottom when I soured on Ozzy Osbourne. In public I swore fealty to Zakk Wylde and his obtrusive squealing; in silence I feared that the Prince of Darkness had abdicated to an asinine prince regent. My fingers fumbled and I looked at the ground when inquiring about Ozzy concerts. I wanted to hear that he put on a good show, and I needed to believe it. The man renounced his "retirement" with a series of shows the year before, and scheduled a three date set of Ozzfest performances in Arizona, California, and Alaska (!).

And in 1997 Ozzy Inc. turned the festival into a tour. I recognized some of the bands on the roster, and I nodded with the arrogant approval of a young man who knows things. I was also broke, jobless, and didn't own a car. The seeds of my ambition germinated through round after round of begging my parents, wearing them down until I heard "we'll see if there are any tickets at work." It's the way your humble narrator used to see concerts. My parents worked for large corporations, and the execs owned plum seats at the big venues. Mom and dad could claim those tickets, provided the disinterest of the big fish. They landed ZZ Top in 1994, the J Geils Band in 1999, and on one sweaty June day they gave me four pieces of paper for Ozzfest.

credit: The Birmingham Mail

My jubilation soon turned complicated. Neither I nor any of my friends could drive, and all of our parents were at work. So three adolescent boys anxiously waited in a sweltering house, trying to will my mother's car up that blacktop driveway. We squirmed with agony in every pore and neuron, recognizing that sets from Type O Negative, Neurosis, and Fear Factory were drifting out to the ether. It was four o'clock before my mom came home. Three over-eager teenagers raced to the front door, arguing about who should ride in the front seat of a hot and cramped two door car. The victor won a scalding leather perch and an unobstructed view of of bumper-to-bumper, traversing the long suburban wastes between Bloomfield and Clarkston. I-75 at rush hour is not a pleasant experience, but we were losing vital bragging rights. Minute by minute we relinquished our chances to gloat about the bands we didn't really know, playing songs we'd never heard before. How else could we trumpet our superiority?

Those pretensions melted before the dreary leviathan of Pine Knob. I'd never been to an amphitheater before, and had no experience with the frustration of finding a parking spot, shuffling through security lines, or waiting for the ushers to admit you. Hell, I didn't even know that the first several rows were reserved for corporate sponsors. It birthed a great resentment in me. My ire remains.

I think we caught the last song or two by Pantera. They were on the Trendkill tour, and I was seriously impressed. Ozzy Osbourne performed a decent solo set, albeit with a band that I didn't recognize. They hewed to his first three solo albums, and I was pleased. Ten silly metal anthems were accompanied by gratuitous destruction of the lawn. The man next to me leaned over, shouting "those drunk idiots keep on digging and they'll hit garbage. This shithole used to be a landfill." This was a popular urban legend, but it proved satisfying enough that I clutched the lie to my bosom for another decade.

A short intermission later, and I had what I was there for: Black Sabbath. I screamed like Bobby Hill, one squee amid a deafening roar. I didn't know that Bill Ward was absent, and at this point in my life I didn't care. I was listening to songs that I'd spun dozens of times, and something that was new to me... "Into the Void?" I needed to hear it again. Instant love. All of those open and closed palm mutes, the trills and the slow blues coda at the conclusion. The hooks were in my flesh.

Which is why I didn't consider my mother's reaction to all of the literal flesh on display. The jumbotron documented a great many women who were lifting their shirts. Cathode rays flickered with exposed mammaries for the cheering amusement of seven thousand drunk idiots. I, being a 16 year old boy, believed myself to be the culmination of human achievement and on the verge of transcendent greatness. My brain simplified this to "boobs are awesome."

Later, my mother told me that she liked Ozzy Osbourne. She also said that if it weren't so, she would have yanked us all from our seats and ended the evening. Really mom, which songs? "I like those slow ones from his newer albums." Oh thank you sappy radio ballads. Even if I knew that "Mama I'm Coming Home" was written by one of the dirtiest dogs in rock history, I wouldn't have the heart to tell her.

My mother would never accompany me to a metal show again, though I would see Black Sabbath three more times. I finally caught them with Bill Ward during the aughts, though Ozzy's grip on the English language was severely diminished. He slid further into the grip of genetic disease, and my appreciation for Ozzfest slipped with him. I try not to gloat so much in my middle age, particularly as concerts recede into the mists of memory, but I make a few special exceptions. Man, I saw Black Sabbath in the twilight of something great. The old magic sparked and the dark flame was lit. You shoulda been there.

I was born without you, baby...

I was a Boy Scout, but I was never dutiful, responsible, or enthusiastic. A couple of moribund years passed before I could say this to my parents, who told me "joining is the only intelligent decision you've ever made in your life." Camping trips and handbooks thus became doleful obligations. This set the tone for the summer of 1993, with another unhappy trek to a campground in the boonies. The experience was ritual by now: you sit in a group at the wooden picnic benches, and exchange macho insults. Two older boys were waiting at one particular bench. They were supposed to teach us how to tie knots, though I received knowledge of infinitely greater value.

Someone had a boombox on the table, and a neighboring stack of cassettes.

"What's that?"
"Not for you."
"Anything good?"
"You wouldn't like it; it doesn't suck."

He pulled a tape from the pile. It was red and black with lightning bolt figures in place of the letter "S." The cover art was stark, simple, and it bore vaguely fascist iconography. The mood became just a little off-putting. He slapped the plastic door shut and flipped the switch on top of the box, and I heard those loud droning bends on the guitar chords. Some Englishman was shrieking about a time traveling robot coming back to save us from ourselves, only to decide that we didn't deserve to live. Contacts buzzed within my twelve-year-old brain, and cyborg circuits hummed with life. Iron Man lived again, and I was reborn.

And in short order I, a nerdy and socially awkward suburbanite became obsessed with heavy metal. I did this in ignorance, at the outset of the Great Metal Purge, a time when the English speaking world decided that metal was passe and that its fans were drooling mongoloids. For roughly a decade, listening to metal was about as cool as painting flames on a hopped-up Gremlin. There was nothing clever or ironic about it. You walked into a music store, announced to the surly clerk that you were spending your allowance on a Savatage CD, and they looked at you like someone who collected wombat turds.

But Black Sabbath were still hip. Vaguely. Mostly. They retained the vestiges of psychedelia and hard rock that informed grunge. If Soundgarden and The Melvins were allowed to listen to Master of Reality on infinite repeat, then so was I. Getting my very conservative and very White Catholic parents to overlook an album called We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll was a more delicate matter. I expended two years of begging, mowing lawns, and pruning shrubs. I finally broke their resolve at age 15, and Tony Iommi's buzzing roar overwhelmed our house. My dad was unthrilled.

"It's satanic garbage that rips off Cream, set to tuneless screaming."

His love of Bob Seger, Cream and the Allman Brothers led me to this place. The rough beast slouched toward Bethlehem, waiting to be born.

Dio was more of a departure. By the time he joined Black Sabbath in 1979, their downtuned heavy psych was subsumed by prog and arena rock. This, combined with the diminutive tenor's operatic delivery made him an easy target in the era of Seinfeld. Dio Sabbath represented everything grunge fans and punks mocked about metal: theatricality, homoeroticism, escapism, and romanticism. This was music for the terminally uncool, and listening to it felt like begging for a swirly. I promptly bought Mob Rules and Heaven and Hell. I might as well have drawn a middle finger on the receipt.

Over and over I heard "the Ozzy albums are the only good ones," and I took pride in dismissing that conventional wisdom. I was in my late teens, and a pompous contrarian. Still, I had to confess that Sabbath's day had come and gone. I'd only seen one rock concert, ZZ Top, and my prospects for a Sabbath show seemed a pipe dream. That was before I found out about Ozzfest...