So, I’m driving with my wife to MSG to see the show, and she says, “I want to hear “Crazy Train,”  that’s the one song I want to hear.”  So I say “Honey, that’s Ozzy solo, we’re going to see Black Sabbath, they are not going to play any Ozzy stuff.”  She was like “Oh, you should not have brought me then, we are going to leave the show early.”  Then Sabbath comes on and rips through a 110 minute assault of face melting pure rock.  Needless to say, we did not leave early.  I am pretty sure that my non-music fan brother and my big music fan wife (albeit not a huge Sabbath fan) genuinely enjoyed the show.

They literally did not play a song that was less than 35 years old.  And that’s OK, it was exactly what I expected, a tribute to their past greatness.  They did not improvise, they played the exact same set list they did in all their prior shows.  But you know what, it was still incredible how much sound only three guys make (at times they had the keyboardist off to the side that Ozzy even introduced).  Ozzy was fit and sang great.  The band was tight and spot on.  The drummer they recruited killed it.  

Driving home with a smile on my face I’m recapping the show and thinking to myself, ALL those hard rock/metal bands that have come and gone since 1971 are basically standing on Toni Iommi’s and Sabbath’s shoulders.  They all just reconfigured what Sabbath did.  Paranoid was the first record that my brother and I ever bought.  In HS, we literally listened to Sabbath five or six times a week while we worked out.  One of five or six Sabbath tunes was playing in the locker room before EVERY football game we ever played in.  

It was good to go back in time and see greatness before me.

Here is another story on the show by Brian Ives at Radio.com.

Andrew Sacher’s story at Brooklyn Vegan is comprehensive too.