BLACK SABBATH at the Air Canada Centre, Wednesday, August 14. Rating: NNN
The best description of a concert I’ve ever heard about came courtesy a university roommate’s dad. Sometime in the early 1970s, ’71 or ’72 or somewhere in there, this guy saw Black Sabbath live in Texas. And he was on acid. And it was the night before he shipped out to Vietnam, where he served as, I think, a medic.
It’s one of those charmed confluences of circumstances that are important to preserve somewhere inside of you, as a sort-of sacred ideal of What A Concert Is, trapped behind the unbustable tempered glass of impossibility. The idea of hearing Black Sabbath drill into heavy-as-fuck sorrow-pits of music, wailing about Lucifer and the imminent nuclear apocalypse, saddled with your death sentence in the form of enlistment in a pointless foreign war, while on LSD, all those dizzying ideas warping in and out of one another, the music not portending but actively registering real-deal DOOM: it’s perfect. And that perfection is ensured by it being something I’ll never be able to actually experience, barring some sort of highly unlikely sci-fi scenario.
So like anything these days, you settle for the next best thing. Here, that’d be three-fourths of the original lineup of Black Sabbath playing a hockey arena in 2013, diligently working through a catalogue of hits just as diligently cut with tracks from their new reunion record, 13.
I posted this on Facebook last night, when I returned from the show: a little bit drunk, a little bit exhilarated, a little bit disappointed [lax punctuation sic]:
the conflicted feelings i have re: the sabbath show are the conflicted feelings i have towards pretty much all of modern existence, i.e. tension between what you want something to be and what it is and how all of living is a haptic network of lies you constantly enact to reconcile that gap.
Apart from the totally incorrect usage of the word “haptic” – for some reason I always think it refers to the shifting manner in which discrete bits of information can be united, when really it just means “relating to or based on the sense of touch” – I stand by this. At a show like Black Sabbath ca. 2013 you’re basically deceiving yourself into believing a) that what you’re seeing is the genuine artifact and b) that there’s even such a thing as the genuine artifact.
It’s impossible to qualify the experience of seeing Black Sabbath in the ‘70s, when music didn’t really sound like Black Sabbath sounds. And then came Black Sabbath, sounding like Black Sabbath, and basically inventing heavy metal and basically being the font of inspiration for a whole movement, pretty much The Beatles of real music.
So instead we talk about other things. We enact a whole a program of nuanced, subconscious self-deception. We talk about showmanship and stage presence and grind the experience through some loose cost/value analysis to determine if we received our “money’s worth,” i.e. if the experience of seeing 75% of Black Sabbath’s original lineup in 2013 is worth $120. We talk, essentially, about a band’s ability to approximate the experience of what it sounded like when their music actually meant something: when you were paying all that money to hear something created instead of just performed.
Black Sabbath – Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, joined by hired-hand drummer Tommy Clufetos – are good at performing Black Sabbath songs. All the same, it is undeniably weird and sad to hear ten thousand-plus people wearing $40 tour t-shirts, clenching $10 Coors Light tallboys yelling the lyrics to War Pigs in an enormous hockey rink owned by the world’s tenth-largest passenger airline.
There is a big time disjoint here. As there is when Ozzy, covered in sweat and water from a bucket he kept dunking his head in, kept saying “God love you all!” after singing a song (Nativity In Black) that is a love letter to Satan. It’s very tempting (and easy) to mend this divide by chalking the whole experience up as “surreal” – the result of a weird cultural-capital juxtaposition. But it’s not surreal in a good, fun, productive way. I want something to be surreal because it stands in weird opposition to the grinding thunk of modern life, not because it so plainly expresses it.
It is unreasonable, probably even ludicrous, to expect this at any stadium/arena concert. Of course you’re only a consumer. The whole place is draped in crap inviting you to fork over more and more money: beer, king size Snickers bars, $80 tour hoodies, those people with clipboards trying to register you for a new credit card you don’t need and will for sure abuse just so you can get a free baseball cap or whatever.
When you’re in the Air Canada Centre, for whatever reason, you’re a punter. No matter what. You can’t not be. The particularities may be different (a hockey game, some shitty boy band, a pioneering doom metal act), but the experience is essentially the same at a nuts and bolts level. At such a scale, culture’s a substitutable widget swapped in and out to court different audiences accordingly. It’s a terrible experience.
It produces an irreconcilable disconnect between the thing you’re after (however impossible) and the thing that’s created for you. It’s like hanging out with your best friend in the house of some guy you don’t like. And if you’re sensitive to stuff like this – maybe too sensitive – the house will always win.
Maybe it’s enough to get so legitimately swept up in the moment a few times, during Behind The Wall Of Sleep and Black Sabbath and (especially) Children Of The Grave, that none of this matters and you’re not thinking about how pathetic this is and how it’s all bottom-line oriented and how none of it means anything and how it’s basically an animated wax museum version of “the real thing” and how your relationship with a band you’ve admired and enjoyed for your entire adult life is just a financial transaction, killing yourself to live, etc. Maybe that can allay that nagging hollow feeling that (per Gertrude Stein) there’s no there there. Maybe that’s enough. But I don’t know.
And would it kill them to play Sabbra Cadabra? Come on.
—
Correction 08/15/2013, 1:26 PM: This article originally named Black Sabbath’s touring drummer as Brad Wilk. While Wilk played on the band’s reunion record, the three original members are joined on tour by Tommy Clufetos. We regret the error.
