Ozzfest: The festival that was made purely out of spite
Not many people got past Ozzy Osbourne back in the day and lived to tell the tale.
As much as ‘The Prince of Darkness’ held up the peace signs every single time he played, he didn’t take any prisoners, either, and many of the greatest openers in the world should have been prepared for a bloody battle if they wanted to leave an impression. But while everything was usually cordial between Osbourne and his touring mates, there were bound to be a few times where things didn’t exactly go as planned.
Then again, Osbourne wouldn’t have been half the frontman that he was without the help of his wife, Sharon. His former manager, Don Arden, did almost everything he could to advise against using his daughter as his management, but looking at how far he had fallen since his days in Black Sabbath, they were going to need a massive overhaul for him to come anywhere close to his prime.
And while Randy Rhoads helped do a lot of heavy lifting in the music department, Sharon managed to actually get his public image off the ground a lot more. It might not have been the best PR for him to bite the head off of a dove in front of a bunch of industry executives back in the day, but that was also half of the charm. No one knew what to expect with Osbourne, but that could also be a big turn-off for the non-metal crowd.
Even though Osbourne was more than capable of weathering the storm of grunge when releasing No More Tears, it’s not like the grunge bands hated him by any means. Kurt Cobain was enough of a fan to have a favourite Osbourne record, but by the time that grunge began to fade in the mid-1990s, it appeared that the alternative kids were a bit too cool for the Osbournes when Lollapalooza came along, and Sharon wasn’t going to let them forget it for a second.
How Sharon Osbourne got her ultimate revenge on Lollapalooza
It’s not like Osbourne wasn’t cut out for a festival that was a little left-of-centre. He had played everywhere and anywhere with Sabbath, and if the alternative promoters had a no-metal ban on any of their clients, they certainly were talking out of both sides of their mouth if they somehow managed to let Metallica get on the bill during their Load era and playing tunes like ‘Master of Puppets’ next to their thrash classics.
Osbourne would have been fine doing his own tour, but Sharon felt the best way to get revenge on Lollapalooza was to build Ozzfest from the ground up, with Ozzy recalling, “That was a Sharon department, not me. Sharon tried to get me on Lollapalooza, and they told her they didn’t think I was relevant any more, that I was a dinosaur. So she said fuck them, we’ll do our own thing. Ozzfest gave new bands a stage. There’s no platform now for new bands to play.”
And judging by the kind of people that Osbourne was putting on the bill, they certainly had a good ear for what metal fans wanted to hear. There might be the odd punk outfit that would have fit right in with Osbourne’s music like bringing in Henry Rollins, but even if alternative festivals considered bands like Slipknot to be too weird, their performance at Ozzfest 1999 still feels like witnessing a piece of metal history happening before your eyes.
Although it takes a certain degree of pettiness for Sharon Osbourne to build an entire festival to prove a point, it’s not like she didn’t have a point when it came to bringing in new talent. There are many festival bills that wouldn’t give a second glance to any new metal acts, but even after decades, Ozzfest has still found a way to give a platform for people that don’t exactly fit into the non-heavy parts of the music business.
