As for Satan, that's something that was missing from the whole carnivalesque aspect of Ozzfest. You go to the trouble of plopping a huge, whopping carbuncle of heavy metal into the middle of a dozen American cities, and you figure it should at least smell a bit of brimstone, to spook out the Christian in each of us. Real, full-time Christians might be perennially spooked-out by concerts like this, but they take it too much at face value. Ozzfest is mostly about fun and games. There's (naturally) a lot of stuff to buy, like jewelry and kewl, oval-logo bumper stickers, and outerwear of various sorts; and there are drum and guitar booths with merch and star apppearances. It's also set up with a lot of to-do stuff, like the karaoke stage, and a rock-climbing wall, and carnival games, and booths for airbrush body-painting and henna tattoos. But the closest thing to metal-monster depravity was a couple of girls steering their bare, airbrushed boobs through the crowd, guarded by a phalanx of sheepish male friends. Free paint-on bikini tops at the body-paint tent!

Slayer, you can imagine playing in hell. Not just fancifully, the way you'd imagine something silly or unlikely (like Judas Priest playing there), but with solid conviction, the way you can imagine Dire Straits playing in Purgatory. After hours of metal bands had done their meanest on two stages, Slayer came on with a thunderous whoom and laid the crowd down like matchsticks, killing everyone instantly. Speed metal is about discipline, since that's what metalheads most lack and what impresses them the most -- like ghetto hip-hop kids and the whole rap iconography of money. But most good speed metal bands only achieve a sort of clattery, robotic precision through lesson-book chops, or through technological gimmickry -- and few ever really learn to play as an ensemble. Slayer have micronuanced timing, a near-classical sense of horizontal composition, and ensemble playing to make a conductor expire at his stand. Cataclysmic, terrifying. Nothing this big should be able to move so fast.

Back in the "gimmicks" department, the highly-touted Fear Factory was pretty turgid and machinelike. Heavy sampling -- drums like a big, loud typewriter. New benchmark: Could this band play hell? There are no samplers in hell.

Nor turntables, but the Deftones are actually pretty good when vocalist Chino Moreno quits wit da get-down and opens up into his fine Gothic croon ("Be Quiet and Drive"). Rob Zombie would rule one of those early-'60s casino-decadent visions of the Abyss. His music is strictly by-the-numbers -- tasty maybe, and tight, but nothing that a bunch of kids from the karaoke stage and the drum and guitar booths couldn't make up on the spot. But whatta stage show. The arena was packed solid by this point, and the sun went down on a stageful of giant dice, belching firepots, dancers and stuff blowing up. There were video clips; banners; huge, flaming Xs for "Channel X" ... It makes sense that Zombie quit the Family Values tour because of its quick turnover times. ("You can't build a den of Satan and tear it down in five minutes.") Without his pyro he's got a good CBGBs-grade rock band, but with it, he's got "Kiss Alive."

Even Kiss, though, once opened for Black Sabbath. This go-round is supposed to be Sabbath's last ever with the Ozzy lineup, and it was a tremendous sendoff -- huge and rich sounding, with all the hits. "War Pigs" led off, and from the first, it was clear that Sabbath, well, rules for one thing. But also that they're more of a hippy-trippy band with all the edges sharpened (like, say, Hawkwind on really bad drugs) than a mean-ass hard-rock act. Ozzy has no mojo: He's a gawky, childlike sort of character whose face shows the creases not of debauchery but of lifelong confusion. Geezer Butler and Bill Ward still carry traces of the shuffly syncopation of mid-period Pink Floyd. It's through Tony Iommi's scathing guitar that the band's essential lopey-mopiness becomes creeping evil. Iommi's playing was letter-perfect, and you could hear in it all the elements of grunge-to-be, but also an awful lot that nobody has ever replicated: the tossed-off trills; the liquid soloing; the instinct toward the grandiosely perverse that made, say, "Iron Man" into something entirely different from the whiny Troggs song it might've been. If there's a lesson in this year's Ozzfest, it's that essence still has something over aspect -- whether you're marking Sabbath or Slayer (or even Rob Zombie) against bands like hed (pe), or watching the Dudes of Jersey Past slouch past the young guy smoothies who've taken their bio-niche. Or hooking up with a Carnival of Perversity that promises you serious Mojo but just ends up painting your boobs purple. Arrive late; keep your shirt on; bring lots of really bad drugs.
salon.com | June 15, 1999

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