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Written by Byron Kerman Wednesday, 11 August 2004 17:00

UMB Bank Pavilion, St. Louis, August 12, 2004

Well, Simon and Garfunkel failed to show up at Ozzfest 2004, but the crowd didn’t seem to notice. Between Phil Anselmo’s ramblings about our collective duty to “eat pussy” and some guy in a cheerleader costume doing beer bongs of milk onstage for MTV’s cameras, the folks were preoccupied.

There was a lot to absorb. Coffee (or beer) achievers arrived in time to catch the first band (some angry young dudes called Unearth) at 9:30 a.m. You have to salute the next band, Every Time I Die; their lead singer tried in vain to rile up the crowd by proclaiming, “It’s 10 a.m. and that stands for Absolute Mosh.” Sorry, dudes. Ten o’clock in the morning is like, 5 a.m. in metal-time. Most of the folks were asleep on their feet. It was hard to feel sorry for a band that stole Rage Against the Machine’s sound and their graphic-design team, though.

Notable second-stage acts included Atreyu, which features an emo-style singer trading vulnerable sentiments with a Listerine-gargling hardcore growler. Ah–the power of demographic research.

On their CD, Darkest Hour features a lead singer, John Henry, who transcends that standard hardcore growl-vocal with some spooky hissing, a la Sweden’s Witchery or local boys Harkonin. In concert, though, Henry’s growl was indistinguishable from that of most of the other singers in the second-stage bands.

In fact, most of these “hardcore metal” bands sound similar. One after the other, Throwdown, Bleeding Through, DevilDriver, God Forbid, and even such popular acts as Lamb of God and Hatebreed all rolled out their croaking, unintelligible vocalists and the relentlessly un-melodic bang-bang-bang-bang of their noisy music.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I may be old, but the music wasn’t too loud. It just wasn’t all that creative. Even the Ramones and Black Flag understood the value of melody. The music that’s heating up MTV2’s “Headbanger’s Ball” these days, though, owes nothing to songwriting—it’s just a bludgeon to the head, pure and simple, again and again. Twenty years ago, who could have imagined that hardcore, punk’s ugly little cousin, would someday rule the hard-rock scene?

Amidst that thick-as-a-brick all-American style, a band like Lacuna Coil really stood out. Their female lead singer, darkwave/metal dirge-sound and Italian accents captured the crowd’s attention. So too, the critical darlings of Otep, with their female lead croaker, got the Ozzfest kids moving.

But when Slipknot took the stage everybody went apeshit. Is it the splatter-movie rubber masks that they wear? Those matching black coveralls? The fact that there are eight of them onstage together, including two DJs and two superfluous percussionists? Whatever the case, Iowa’s finest had them body-surfing and jumping around like pissed-off trout in the bottom of a johnboat. Rick Rubin, I blame you.

During a number of the second-stage acts, the pranksters at MTV arranged for bizarre onstage happenings for the sake of the Ozzfest reality show. A tuba player joined one band, a guy wearing nothing but an adult diaper capered around, and the aforementioned milk-bong incident took place. The gimmicks didn’t seem to move the crowd one way or another.

Not so the “Village of the Damned” marketplace of the obscene. Vendors selling T-shirts with crude slogans (“It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself,” e.g.), rock stickers and even marijuana-flavored lollipops crowded two well-traveled areas flanking the mainstage. Carnival-game operators, apparently working on commission, put up hand-lettered signs bearing such bon mots as “Play My Fucking Game.”

And yet I managed to find the clever metalhead. The owner of www.metalbabies.com sells baby clothes screenprinted with puns from the world of hard rock. “Two Minutes to Bedtime,” “Nappeth Baby Nappeth” and “For Those About to Walk” onesies are hilarious.

I also managed to stumble into the freakiest tableau of the day: an amputee in a wheechair getting his prosthetic leg airbrushed with racing flames in the body-painting booth. Whoa.

Zakk Wylde’s Black Label Society kicked off the mainstage shows in the evening. BLS’ brief set left me with the impression that Wylde sounds more than a little like Axl Rose, and that his guitar collection is way cooler than his songwriting. The mildly enthused crowd seemed to agree.
Boy, that Phil Anselmo’s a talker. But if you’ve read this far, you already knew that. The lippy former Pantera frontman filled the space between songs with a stream of blather about how his current band, Superjoint Ritual, is “anti-image,” and how the blokes in the band are ordinary folk “just like you,” and blah-blah-blah. Regardless—or perhaps because of--his pointless stoner invective, Anselmo sure got the UMB crowd into the music. He closed the set with a parting “everybody drop acid” and left the stage in a predictably agitated state.

One of these bands is not like the others. Dimmu Borgir brought the chilly metal of Norway—complete with corpsepaint, spiked costumes and poor command of English--to an unseasonably cold St. Louis. Lead singer Shagrath has a great haunted-house voice: not a growl (thank Satan) but a deep rasp. Dimmu Borgir’s synthesizer goth metal excited some, and left others mystified, but that’s part of the deal with Ozzfest–with so many subgenres of fast, angry, doom music represented, not every camper remains happy throughout the trip.

It’s hard not to love Slayer, though. As soon as the Slayer backdrop fell into place behind the stage, the entire mood of Ozzfest changed. An air of genuine menace filled the place, as the security forces prepared to contain the most violent mosh pit of the day, and the reigning kings of Satanic metal readied themselves backstage.

When Slayer roared into the title cut from God Hates Us All, the crowd came alive. This may sound ridiculous, but nobody can make death metal swing like they can. Their hooks, their musical interplay, their sense of melodic drama–no other speed-metal band comes close. Every band on that second stage should take a break from their post-show carousing and watch Slayer every night. This is how angry, evil music is done, kids. You can’t just bang out real intensity–you have to craft it. Of course it helps to have the best drummer on planet earth (Dave Lombardo), the scariest-looking guitarist on said planet (Kerry King), and guitar solos that come from a sick, sick place. The two drunk dudes playing air guitar in front of me were simply saluting the masters.

The reunited Judas Priest was a sweet, sweet promise to me, but I feared their music would prove too slow and candy-assed for the hardcore kids in the crowd. In truth, I was too busy re-living the mid-80s to notice what anybody else was doing. When Rob Halford emerged from the pupil of the “Electric Eye” backdrop, heavy metal’s Jesus Christ had risen from the dead.

The black-bearded Halford was wearing a leather outfit so outrageously laden with metal, it looked as if he’d been dipped in chrome and dragged through a saddlery. The band, in fine fettle for men in their 50s, launched into “Electric Eye” (naturally) followed by their anthem “Metal Gods.” Questions about Halford’s voice were answered when he hit those castrato highs in such songs as “Victim of Changes” and “Beyond the Realms of Death,” and his joy in joining his old mates onstage was evident with every hammy gesture; Halford was born to be a frontman.

Black Sabbath opened with the sirens of “War Pigs”—a statement on the invasion of Iraq from that savvy political observer, Ozzy Osbourne? A calculated move by that crafty Sharon, more likely. The most energetic (and the oldest) singer in metal informed us that he’d recently told his worrywart doctor to fuck off–he had an Ozzfest to pull off, fer godsake! Sabbath played their classic dirges, with brain-damaged Ozzy warbling away, Geezer Butler playing that bass like a rhythm guitar, ancient drummer Bill Ward holding down the fort and the real Prince of Darkness, Tony Iommi, standing stock-still, coaxing that gorgeous evil from his Gibson SG yet again.

This is where it all started. Sabbath influenced Priest. Priest influenced Slayer. Slayer influenced every other band at Ozzfest. That’s why it was so shocking to hear everyone from the front row to the outermost reaches of the lawn singing along with Black Sabbath. How is it that the 17-year-olds at Ozzfest know the words to an old chestnut like “Fairies Wear Boots”?

It can only be the success of Ozzfest, and by proxy, the success of Ozzy’s reality show on MTV, The Osbournes. Whatever the cause, hearing mere teenagers sing along to Sabbath’s thunderous Children of the Grave filled this drunk metalhead’s heart with joy.

Indeed, hearing Slayer, Priest, and Sabbath one after the other was a rare example of the “summerfest” arena-concert package that actually delivers. For metalheads of a certain age, witnessing metal gods Rob Halford, Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne on a single bill was like seeing the pages of Circus magazine, circa 1985, all come to life at once.

Standing in the trash-strewn lawn section of UMB; lost amid thousands of other buzzed, happy metalheads in the dark; overwhelmed by 14 hours of continuous music; and singing along to Slayer’s “South of Heaven,” Judas Priest’s “Green Manalishi with the Two-Pronged Crown,” and Black Sabbath’s “Snowblind”—I was in ecstasy.