Black Sabbath Thrill With Hits-Heavy ‘The End’ Set in Chicago
“Welcome to the end.” Ozzy Osbourne‘s introduction to the first of two concerts Black Sabbath will play in Chicago this year on their farewell tour, appropriately named “The End,” came off a lot gloomier than how the group actually sounded last night. From the pulverizing opening tritone of “Black Sabbath” — during which Osbourne lifted his arms like Frankenstein’s creature — to the galloping closing cut “Children of the Grave,” the show was more a celebration of the pioneering heavy-metal band’s legacy than an epitaph.
Throughout the two-hour set, the frontman wore a Cheshire smile as he and his bandmates — who all wore black — revisited songs they’ve been playing for nearly five decades. Osbourne mugged at guitarist Tony Iommi, who couldn’t keep a straight face during his fleet-fingered solos, and he even managed to coerce the group’s usually stoic bassist into a half-grin while introducing him to the audience as “Mr. Geezer fucking Butler, man!” Goofy faces, however, were where the silliness ended.
Since 1968, heaviness has been serious business for the band members. Its 1970 debut, Black Sabbath, midwifed both heavy metal proper and its dreary sibling doom metal with stark, footslogging riffs and melodramatic lyrics like, “Big black shape with eyes of fire/Telling people their desire,” that were scary enough for the Boris Karloff movie that inspired the group’s name. Other bands can claim a stake in metal — like Led Zeppelin, to whom the evening’s opening act, the dynamic and impassioned Rival Sons, owe a debt — but none captured its girth quite like Sabbath.
It was a unique sound and Black Sabbath stuck to it, through foothills of cocaine and oceans of alcohol, for a decade until they fired Osbourne in 1979, opening a revolving door of singers who never sounded quite as perfectly anguished as he did. In that first decade, Black Sabbath were the lords of their world, the masters of surreality, the spiral architects of a genre that’s evolved in unpredictable ways but none that sound so weird as to hide Sabbath’s influence. They reunited with the singer in 1997 and toured off and on, never letting differences impede their weighty sound. They’re aware of their influence — “It took us fucking 47 years to get our first American Number One,” Osbourne told the Chicago crowd of the group’s 2013 LP, 13, “Can you fucking believe that shit, man?” — so they’re saying goodbye in style.
Black Sabbath’s first Windy City date, staged at the 20,000-seat United Center, was only one gig removed from the tour’s kickoff in Omaha on Wednesday, but they already sounded as though they’d settled into a groove. The show began with video of a winged demon hatching from an egg and breathing fire to display the band’s name. The stage was relatively sparse, save a giant LED screen which showed the group and a pyro setup that shot fireballs, allowing the band to place more emphasis on their performance.
The set list drew mostly on the group’s first four albums, including nearly all of Paranoid, with 13 cut “God Is Dead?” and the guitar showstopper “Dirty Women,” off 1976’s Technical Ecstasy, rounding it out. Butler told Rolling Stone earlier this month that the band had added three classic songs to its rehearsals that they hadn’t played on recent tours — Paranoid‘s “Hand of Doom,” Master of Reality‘s “After Forever” and, judging from Omaha’s set, Vol. 4‘s “Tomorrow’s Dream” — to keep them on their toes, and it was worth it.