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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Hell hath no house band like Slayer; Ozzy has no mojo.
Jun 15, 1999 | Bringing the original Black Sabbath with Ozzy Osbourne to New Jersey is like ... what, bringing the Olympics to Athens? There's an Ozzy Osbourne service area on our Garden State Parkway. Our state bird is the Headless Bat. The State Legislature failed to elect a chairman one year in the early '80s, issuing instead a proclamation that "Ozzy rules forever." Yup, this ain't one of your effete New York crowds over here. So the choice was a tough one: Go to Ozzfest and rock one's balls off, or enjoy, for once, the rest of the Garden State, suddenly quiet with all the mooks and mullet-heads penned up in one huge terrarium of Ugly.
Actually, things began fairly quietly at the Art Center, a 17,000-capacity shed off the parkway in central New Jersey. Besides the main stage where the headliners played, there was a fairly large second setup out on the lawn, with a canonical festival spread of booths and concessions going out in all directions. The crowd assembled slowly about a nucleus of serious hard-liners, the "take a day off work" people, who looked as though they didn't want to miss a single thing, say in case Sabbath's Tony Iommi erupted from backstage, shouting, "Ozzy is sick! We need a singer! But ... does anybody know the words!?" There were a lot of 30-ish men with blond moustaches -- the kind of ruddy-featured balding guy who looks like his divorce just made the drinking worse. You could see them all at 17, wild and doomed, but at 30, the doom had come and gone. The few women looked like they had reasonably intact working-class lives -- with kids, and family to watch the kids, and girlfriends to hang out with while the kids are being watched. The men looked like they only had a bar to go to, and a girlfriend with somebody else's kids. These are the Dudes of Jersey Past, whom punk never knew. You have to respect them.
The musical program began, as usual, with the small fry. The main stage yielded up Apartment 26, an unsigned industro-techno metal band with a cool British (read: postpunk) sensibility. One of the members is Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler's son, which explains how the "unsigned" part fits with the "main stage" one. But better them in the big top than the hiply all-lowercase "hed (pe)" a plastic hip-hop metalpunk act with lyrics like, "Niggaz hitch a ride white boyz too/In the car with the hed crew/What ya gonna do/Rollin in the 96 fuck you." Woo-hoo. Whatta buncha poo. They use the word "dick" a lot, too.
System of a Down took over the big stage with their grungy agitpunk, to a scanty crowd. They've got a bit of the bitter playfulness of the Dead Kennedys, a little of the Killing Joke groove, a singer with presence and a loose, catlike guitarist. These guys are good. But political rock bands, like the French army, tend always to be fighting the previous war. Singer Serj Tankian on Kosovo: "We're not fighting for freedom; we're fighting for oil profits!" Slipknot take the little stage. Imagine a noisy metal band with Cali-punk vocals, except instead of a metal band it's eight guys in orange jumpsuits and clown masks, beating on each other. Overheard: "You know, those bands on the second stage pay to get on there ... They sell the space." Hmm.
During the early part of the day, the most heartfelt performances were being heard at the karaoke stage, tucked away in a corner of the midway. While on the big stage Godsmack blared and clattered through a set of whatever you call it when it's just a two-chord riff and a guy going Yah! a lot, the karaoke stage offered a bunch of people doing Sabbath, Guns N' Roses, Doors and Ozzy songs really, really well. A large burnout chick belted out a hot version of "Roadhouse Blues." A skinny young guy did "War Pigs" as well as Ozzy could in the '70s. Cool!
