Sabbath

Yesterday was New Music Monday. Here is something that is unimaginably old. It is 38 year old concert footage of Black Sabbath opening a 1970 concert in Paris with Iron Man. I brought this here from YouTube, but you can follow these links to see “War Pigs” and “Fairies Wear Boots” from that same concert.

Then try to reconcile the photo of modern day Ozzy with the young man in the video, and fear the ravages of age.

Regular readers of this blog know that I am self-absorbed, and often try to make everything about me. So here is my Ozzy story. Back in the 80's I worked at a job sort of tangentially related to the concert business. One of my bosses had previously worked as a tour manager. He worked with Andy Gibb and then Eric Clapton.

After his last Clapton tour, he went into semi-retirement. Then Randy Rhodes (Ozzy's guitar player) crashed a private plane into the tour caravan, threatening to end Ozzy's mega comeback tour. So the record label called my boss out of retirement to manage what was left of Ozzy's tour.

The main story that he told me and that I can share here was about their dwarf. Ozzy wanted a dwarf on the tour (think Spinal Tap), but the dwarf was a nasty drunk. One evening, after a show in L.A., my boss found himself helping to carry this drunken dwarf through the lobby of the Wilshire Hotel, while he was screaming vile, and very sexually detailed curses at everyone in the lobby. That was when he began to have second thoughts about coming out of retirement.

So enjoy the music, and don't try to think about what the dwarf might have said to you, if you had been in that hotel lobby that night.