POP MUSIC REVIEW : Ozzy, Sabbath Not Together Again

COSTA MESA —  Ozzy Osbourne is probably off somewhere counting his money from his two highly publicized, sold-out shows at the Pacific Amphitheatre. But he should be counting his blessings that he has fans that will, apparently, forgive him anything.

These weekend concerts were supposed to give those fans two things: the final nights of the last-ever concert tour by the Oz and an expected reunion of the colorful rocker with the other original members of Black Sabbath, the current version of which was the second-billed act on these nights only.

On Saturday, the first of the two nights, the fans got neither.

What they did get was a relatively routine performance by an artist who, if he could be vested with such sophistication, could be accused of self-parody.

But all the zombie mugging, the mooning of the crowd, the curious frog-hop move he makes and the constant exhorting of the fans to “get (expletive) crazy”--all done in the span of the first song--is just what Ozzy is: Take him or leave him.

And these fans will take him, any time, anywhere, any hype.

Early in the evening, Oz-maniacs lined up to fork over $23 a pop for T-shirts commemorating the supposed finality of the event--one billed them as “The Last Bloody Shows.” But out in the parking lot, a crew was already readying a fireworks display featuring a sign that read “Ozzy Osbourne: I’ll Be Back.”

To be fair, Ozzy’s camp never explicitly said that this would be the singer’s final tour--just that it was his last under his solo billing. In other words, he’ll be back in the context of a new band. And they never said that there’d definitely be a Sabbath reunion, but they certainly encouraged fans to expect that.

On the first matter, Ozzy himself seemed a bit confused on stage Saturday, appearing to be unsure about how sentimental he was supposed to get.

“If this is the end of the road, which I very much doubt, I want to say one thing,” he told the crowd. “Thank you for a great ride.”

The waffling is forgivable. After all, many boxers and other entertainers have “retired” countless times. The failure to do the Sabbath reunion is less so.

Sabbath’s own set seemed to set up the reunion. Ex-Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, filling in for current Sabbath vocalist Ronnie James Dio (who didn’t want to serve as a support act for his predecessor/rival Osbourne), gamely led the band through material drawn from both the Ozzy and Dio eras. But the group steered clear of its best-known songs--”Paranoid,” “Iron Man”--making it a reasonable conclusion that they’d be done later.

Ozzy did do “Paranoid,” as his first song, no less. But he did not do “Iron Man” during his set, and the fans clearly expected an encore with Sabbath on the cartoonish sludge-rock classic. No such luck.

As the house lights came on to signal that the show was over Saturday, Jerry Wolff and Jon Chavez appeared clearly disappointed as they stood in front of the seats close to the stage that they’d purchased through a ticket broker. “I spent 125 bucks for this chair, man,” said Wolff, 26, of Woodland Hills. “He was supposed to play with Sabbath.”

But, Ozzy fans that they are, the two shook off their anger.

“It was worth it,” Wolff said. “Nothing else to do on a Saturday.”

Ozzy had better be back. He owes these guys big time.