OZZFEST - August 13, 2005

On August 13, Mike and I went to Ozzfest 2005 at Shoreline Amphitheatre. This is an all day heavy metal music festival and consists of two stages: the second stage (which was set up in the parking lot) had bands playing from 9:30am - 4:30pm and the main stage (which was in the amphitheatre) ran from 4:30pm - 10:45pm. The lineups were:

Second Stage

• Arch Enemy
• Trivium
• The Black Dahlia Murder
• It Dies Today
• The Haunted
• Wicked Wisdom
• Bury Your Dead
• Gizmachi
• Soil Work
• A Dozen Furies
• Mastodon
• As I Lay Dying
• Killswitch Engage
• Rob Zombie

Main Stage

• In Flames
• Black Label Society
• Shadows Fall
• Mudvayne
• Iron Maiden
• Black Sabbath

We arrived at the venue before the music started and went straight to the front of the second stage. For the next 5 hours, we watched the bands while a huge mosh pit circled behind us and people crowd-surfed above us. Some of the highlights of these early bands were Trivium and It Dies Today which I thought had good music, great stage presence and really got the crowd into it. It was also pretty cool when the bassist and lead singer of A Dozen Furies jumped in the crowd and crowd surfed on top of us (I thumbed the bass).

A couple of strange moments were when the lead singer of The Haunted tore off his clothes and sang the last song wearing only a thong (not pretty) and when a guy who looked like a computer geek doing the sound check turned out to be the lead singer of The Black Dahlia Murder who proceeded to go crazy and rock on stage.

The lowlight was definitely Wicked Wisdom which is a newly formed band whose lead singer is Jada Pinkett Smith; you know, the actress whose husband is Will Smith. It was obvious that they were only there because of Will's connections because they really sucked. The only cool part was that Will Smith was there and walked up and greeted the people who were in the front. We were standing right in front of him and Mike shook his hand (he probably still hasn't washed it =)

Before the last two bands on the second stage played, we moved back from the stage because we were getting tired of people launching themselves out of the mosh pit and onto our heads. I stood behind the mosh pit for Killswitch Engage and Rob Zombie which were both very good and drew a huge response from the crowd as expected, especially when Rob played his hits from White Zombie (More Human than Human, Thunder Kiss '65 and Dragula). After that, it was time to head to the amphitheatre and watch the bands on the main stage.

I don't know if I was just tired from standing for 7 hours straight or disappointed from being so far from the stage (we had seats right in front of the lawn) after having been in front for all of the earlier bands, but I couldn't get into the first few bands on the main stage; although the dreadlocks that went down to the ankles of the lead singer for Shadows Fall were impressive. Mudvayne ramped the crowd up for the bands I really was looking forward to seeing.

In my opinion, Iron Maiden put on the best show of the night. They had the best stage set-up with two elevated platforms on either side of the stage where Bruce Dickinson (lead singer) was able to run back and forth and pump up the crowd. They also had a huge (probably 12 feet tall) Eddie (their scary mascot) walk across the stage and mess with the guitarists. The only disappointment was that they didn't play longer. They only had 60 minutes and played mostly music from their first few albums including 4 songs from their very first record. I guess when you have 13 studio releases, you can't play everything, but not even "Fear of the Dark".... bummer.

Finally, it was Black Sabbath's turn. They played all of their greatest hits that have influenced all of the bands that played during the day. The strange thing was that, after having listened to all of the speed metal bands earlier, Black Sabbath sounded really slow and it was weird to imagine how they were cutting edge and "heavy" in their day. Ozzy has seen better days as he hobbled around the stage and screamed into the microphone while recovering from laryngitis. While this might be one of the last (if not the last) tours for Black Sabbath, I'm glad I saw them before they call it quits.