The rare hell of being Ozzy Osbourne’s support band in the 1990s
When Black Sabbath started making music, they carved out a new path for rock, one which celebrated much heavier and aggressive music.
The reason why everyone was so heartbroken when Ozzy Osbourne passed away wasn’t just because he was a great musician, but he was also instrumental in making alternative-sounding music more mainstream, and a lot of the bands that you love today wouldn’t have found the platform that they did without bands like Black Sabbath coming before them.
Black Sabbath were also always keen on showcasing new music when they toured, as they had some of the more exciting bands in whatever moment they were on the road supporting them, which sounds great in theory, but it was also a problem from time to time, as some support bands were so exciting that it was impossible for Sabbath to support them.
One of the bands that supported Black Sabbath and made life quite difficult for them as a result was Van Halen, and when they went on tour with Sabbath, people were still getting used to the new, increased speed at which Eddie Van Halen played guitar, and this meant that audiences everywhere were captured by this innovative approach. Despite Tony Iommi being one of the greatest riff masters in metal, even he struggled to live up to the hype.
“They were very good. They were very energetic. You’ve got David Lee Roth there, jumping up in the air and doing somersaults, and God knows what else,” he said. “The way they’d run around the stage, of course, it was the complete opposite to us […] You knew then that they were gonna make it. There’s no two ways about it. They just got something that nobody else was doing at that time.”
Sabbath also had a hard time when they took Kiss on tour with them. This time, it was less about musical ability and instead more to do with the fact that Kiss were using pyrotechnics, which was pretty new for the time. Once again, it’s hard to follow a band who are giving the audience something they’ve never witnessed before.
“Kiss was the first one to use pyro,” said Geezer Butler, reminiscing about their tour with the band. “You’ve never seen that. I mean, the shock of that. And they were supporting us, so they weren’t even headlining. I went out and watched them. There were all these flames coming out the stage and everything. It was like ‘Oh my God, what’s going on here?’”
When you see the kinds of bands who have previously supported Black Sabbath, any metal band who were asked to step up and come out on the road with them would have been somewhat optimistic about their future, which is exactly what happened with Fear Factory, as they were asked if they wanted to go on tour with Ozzy Osbourne in 1996. Naturally, they snapped up the opportunity, but wound up regretting doing so, given how indifferent the crowds wound up being to seeing them. It wasn’t just that audiences didn’t love the music, but they hated it so much that they threw coins and other pieces of shrapnel onto the stage. The time they spent on the road with Osbourne could only be described as hell.
“We did three months throughout the United States and Europe. And Europe was fucking tough, because we were the only opening band and all those people in Europe, they didn’t wanna see us. They just wanted to see Ozzy. So they were literally just standing there watching us,” band member Burton C Bell concluded. “After every one of our shows, they just threw shrapnel up – coins. And I collected enough coins to buy a beer. It was worth it. I got spat on a lot.”
