Rowdy Ozzfest Does Justice to Metal’s Icon

The Ozzfest is a county fair with a county jail attitude. It’s a loud, gritty, exhausting, decadent affair that inspires fans of both genders to strip their shirts, bob their heads at vertebrae-threatening velocity and bark at the moon. Or, since it starts at 9 a.m., the sun.

The show, of course, takes its name from Ozzy Osbourne, the British metal hero who was born during the Truman administration and has become the most unlikely pop culture sensation of the 21st century. Like the Cher of the occult rock scene, Osbourne has gone from afterthought to beloved iconic elder because of the unscripted and gloriously odd MTV reality series “The Osbournes.”

The question at the Glen Helen Blockbuster Pavilion in Devore on Saturday was whether the 43,000 fans would find Osbourne’s rock show equally as entertaining, especially after thunderous sets by System of a Down, P.O.D. and even the cartoonish Rob Zombie.

The answer, as is so often the case in these settings, was in the lighters. The dense crowd that jammed the front seats and the vast lawns of this desert venue produced enough candle-power with their Bics during Osbourne’s set to skew any local global warming surveys that might have been underway.

Even Ozzy (think how many lighters he has seen held aloft) looked impressed, although he never stopped exhorting the crowd to cheer louder. “I can’t heeeaaaar you,” he screeched again and again, often adding his favorite f-word to the phrase for emphasis. If you closed your eyes, he sounded like a salty-mouthed grandmother making a long distance call.

It is both easy and risky to mock Osbourne these days. He has always been a blue-collar metal hero, known for his unpretentious personal manner and devotion to the genre’s requisite standards of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. His legendary excesses, however, have left the 53-year-old in a fragile state, with shaking hands and stage maneuvers that resemble nothing so much as light-impact aerobics in a physical therapy ward.

Osbourne came armed Saturday with two hand-held water cannons that he used frequently to douse the fans in the pit. With the elaborate water guns, his black costume and feeble menace, he looked like nothing so much as one of the harmless villains from the 1960s “Batman” television show. Adding to that illusion were his brawny bandmates, the lead henchman being guitar master Zakk Wylde, whose stage prowl and intense solos helped Osbourne fill out the stage for the rear of the sold-out crowd.

No matter that Osbourne is not as robust as in his Black Sabbath days, his Halloween songbook of “Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” “Mr. Crowley” and the rest clicked strongly with the crowd, which skewed young and made clear--through interviews, their cheering decibels and T-shirt logos--that they were in the house to see System of a Down, P.O.D, Adema and the younger bands.

The graybeard Ozzy fans in the mix brought a sense of amused bewilderment about their idol’s transformation via TV into a new type of rock star. Todd Winters shuttled his two wide-eyed sons, ages 12 and 9, in from Dana Point for the show. “We drove by Ozzy’s house last week in Beverly Hills just to see it too,” Winters said. “I’ve always loved Ozzy. I saw him 25 years ago in concert. It is kind of weird to see what’s happened with the show.”

The audience of the MTV show is by no means colossal (the show, with its 7.8 million viewers, is dwarfed by even middling hits on the network), but its valued demographic, critical acclaim and just plain weirdness have made it a pop culture touchstone of the moment. It’s also made celebrities out of the rocker’s brood: son Jack, daughter Kelly and wife Sharon.

Sharon Osbourne is the metal matron not only of the TV show but also of her husband’s career and Ozzfest, which was launched seven years ago. The formula for the festival was ingenious: Young metal bands still adored Osbourne and the Black Sabbath legacy, so Ozzfest would unite them under his banner. It also meant Ozzy would be performing for larger crowds, giving him an infusion of relevance and, with those young fans, perhaps a new market for his catalog.

“You have to respect Ozzy and Sharon as business people,” said Marky Chavez, lead singer of Adema, the young Bakersfield band that made it as a main stage performer this tour. “There’s always going to be baby bands that want exposure and that people want to come see. And there’s people who want to see Ozzy because of what he’s done in all entertainment fields. I hope I can look back on my career and say I’ve done what he’s done.”

A major theme of the day was the health of Sharon Osbourne, who would typically have been a major presence at this key Southern California date. She is recuperating from surgery related to her recently diagnosed colon cancer, and her health was the topic of wildly divergent rumors and heartfelt expression of support both in the audience and backstage.

“She has good days and she has bad days,” guitarist Wylde said backstage as he waited for a daylight performance by his own band, Black Label Society. “That’s what cancer is. Ozzy missed a few shows but then Sharon sent him back out. If he didn’t do this, if he didn’t perform, he would just sit at home and worry about her. And probably get wasted just to get his mind off of it all.”

Wylde said the success of the TV show has only shown the world the Ozzy he has called friend since the 1980s--a funny fellow who has a hard time dealing with his kids and pets but also happens to be a rock star. “The thing is, Ozzy always gets nervous when things go well. He thinks something is always going to screw him up. The show has been great, but now, with this ...”

Kelly Osbourne said Saturday that her mother was improving. “She’s doing fine, things are going well,” she said, before hustling off to prepare for her own moment on the Ozzfest stage. She had been performing the song “She Is Beautiful” on the main stage during the daylight set with young metal singer Andrew W.K., and her arrival on stage about 4:30 brought many of the milling fans to their feet. Ozzfest, post-”The Osbournes,” is as much about gawk as rawk when it comes to the first family of metal.

After Kelly’s vamping performance, it would be five hours before that other cast member of “The Osbournes” arrived on stage. The time was filled with music that veered wildly across the metal landscape.

There were also acknowledgments throughout the day to Dave Williams, lead singer of Drowning Pool, whose body was found last month on the band’s tour bus in Manassas, Va. The 30-year-old Texan’s official cause of death is pending, but many in and around the Ozzfest village chalked it up as another casualty of rock excess. A poster of the charismatic singer was affixed to a speaker stack on the main stage, offering a somewhat sobering juxtaposition to the many songs celebrating booze, drugs and nihilism.

The most powerful and memorable musical moments clearly belonged to System of a Down and P.O.D. The latter, the San Diego quartet that mixes punk and thudding metal with nuances of reggae and hip-hop, was a fresh change with its uplift and willingness to eschew the heavy metal tough talk without sacrificing an ounce of musical power.

For its hit, “Youth of the Nation,” the band surrendered part of the stage to youngsters from the crowd to chime in on the chorus, and lead singer Sonny Sandoval, beaming, carried one young boy on his shoulders as he performed the sensitive song that was inspired, in part, by the spate of school shootings in recent years.

System of a Down followed with its singular brand of mad sonic collage. Chants, rants, sound effects, howls and shards of music go into the mix, and manic lead singer Serj Tankian seemed at times like an Armenian-heritage version of Frank Zappa with his surreal humor, musicianship and, well, impressive beard. They sang of chop suey, sex and tapeworms, they performed chunks of songs by Dire Straits and Madonna (honest), and proudly displayed their anti-war politics and disdain for the CIA.

The show’s finale, Osbourne himself, was preceded by a truly funny five-minute video spoof showing the game veteran offering pornographic advice in a Miss Cleo-like costume and interacting, via clever edits, with Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, the cast of “Sex and the City” and others.

The bombast of his biggest songs filled the night, and he predictably mooned the crowd and collected bras tossed to his feet. But the real Ozzy of 2002 came through when the singer apologized for any lapses in his performance. “My old lady’s not in the house,” he said of his ailing wife, and he seemed suddenly not the madman in black, but the family man dealing with heartache. When he sang “Mamma I’m Coming Home” a few minutes later, you got the feeling he wanted to do exactly that.