July 28-August 3, 2005

music

blistered in the sun

Hot as Hell.

by Jesse Delaney

For 10 years, Ozzy Osbourne has dominated the summer concert landscape the way Lance Armstrong has the Tour de France: drawing crowds of spectators and laying waste to all competition. Having survived a near-fatal ATV accident, the late '90s rap-metal fad and 20 years of answering the same damned questions about biting bats, Ozzy, like Armstrong, has faced adversity and triumphed again and again, and his Ozzfest remains the single best reason for missing a day of work. Just try not to imagine Ozzy in a yellow jersey.

With too much metal for one amphitheater, the 2005 festival swelled beyond the puny borders of the Tweeter Center into the parking lot, allowing fans to tailgate (and not have to crotch a flask or 40) while listening to the second stage bands through a chain link fence. It wouldn't be Ozzfest without an excessive heat warning. And with temperatures in the dangerous amber level (another incomprehensible color code system), fans taking in Mastodon's literate set — a heady and headbanging interpretation of Moby Dick — found the day as scorching and breezeless as the middle chapters of the Melville classic. Fortunately, Mastodon took a CliffsNotes approach — all action, little whaling terminology — and Camden firefighters were on hand to hose down the audience.

As three-time Ozzfester and Hollywood mogul Rob Zombie astutely noted, the makeshift fountains also created a sea of wet T-shirts. Promoting his new movie and sporting blond highlights, Zombie gave a lesson on the etiquette of passing a beach ball stamped with the Devil's Rejects logo, before admitting, in an unintentional review of his own movie, "Yes, it's stupid, I know, but it's fun."

After enduring all the stupid fun and gridlock of the high-density feed lot by the second stage, fans were eager to stretch their legs and kick up dust on the lawn. By Shadows Fall, the pits were evenly divided into two groups: those with an ear for the music and combatants staging their own private Fight Clubs. Tough guys and gals who wanted to hit something that wouldn't hit back laid down cash to cold-cock a dumbbell at the knockout booth.

The games in the Village of the Damned closed for the night as Iron Maiden, led by a hyperactive Bruce Dickinson, took the stage. Performing limbering stretches during guitar solos, he ran to the hills, balanced on monitors and bounded all over the stage. Of everyone present, only the kid wearing hybrid roller skate sneakers looked like he was having more fun than Dickinson.

Not to be upstaged at its own festival, Black Sabbath was in fine form (Tony Iommi, in particular), and as the air-raid sirens of "War Pigs" sounded, Ozzy gave everyone a warm fuzzy feeling when he announced, "We love you all!" (By comparison, Judas Priest's Rob Halford was an emotionally distant stepfather when he filled in last year.) The show closed with Ozzy's usual admonishment to not smoke weed and drive ("Don't be stupid the cops are waiting for you") but without a promise to return next year; which left many to wonder if Ozzy, like Lance, had ridden off into the sunset.

Ozzfest, July 19, Tweeter Center

• Number of bands: 20
• Acts that have played Ozzfest before: 6
• Tickets: $30.25-$80
• Service Charge: $8.45-$12.25
• Best giveaway: mint-flavored oxygen
• Zippo Salutes: 5 (Sabbath 3, Maiden 2)
• Parking: $15
• PATCO: $2.30 round-trip
• Number of plugs for The Devil's Rejects: 6
• Number of ads for Mindfreak: 5
• Biggest waste of paper: FYE's meet-the-band leaflet