Choosing an opening act can be the difference between having a great night and a terrible one, which is a lesson Black Sabbath learned hard and often while touring their 1978 album, Never Say Die! The band was on its last leg when it released its eighth album, and it would end up being the last record the original lineup ever recorded. Almost as if to add insult to injury, the hobbling heavy metal pioneers were being bested by their openers multiple times.
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Frontman Ozzy Osbourne recalled these gut-wrenching moments on tour in his posthumous memoir, Last Rites. The band’s first questionable opener choice came in 1976 while they were touring Sabotage. In that instance, Black Sabbath felt like their opening act didn’t appeal to the same audience as them, which is a frustrating problem to have, but not one that’s particularly upsetting to the ego.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t say the same for their second poor opener choice.
Ozzy Osbourne Said Black Sabbath and Kiss Were Just Too Different
More often than not, you want your opening band to be somewhat similar to the headlining act. The opener should appeal to the headliner’s audience while being different enough to keep the night interesting. But for Ozzy Osbourne, the differences between Black Sabbath and KISS were too stark to ignore. “We were the kind of band that went on stage in our jeans and leather jackets, plugged in our gear, played our set, and f***ed off. KISS, on the other hand, would squeeze themselves into these spandex jumpsuits with their nipples showing, paint their faces in crazy black-and-white Japanese clown patterns and set off about half a ton of explosives every night. It was nuts, what they did,” Osbourne wrote.
It wasn’t just the band’s aesthetic choices (or the fact that Gene Simmons almost gave Geezer Butler a heart attack while in full KISS regalia, waggling tongue and all). Osbourne wrote about how KISS would spend their post-show evenings partying with women, while “all we got were a bunch of blokes who wanted to drink beer and talk about ‘Spiral Architect’. We were a male band, Sabbath, for male audiences. We never had many women at our shows.”
After their experience with KISS, Black Sabbath vowed never to have such an ill-fitting opening act again. The band told their management they wanted a band with “the same vibe as us, no studded collars, no high-heeled boots, no flames shooting out of their arses.” One could argue that the band the company found fit the bill a little bit too well.
The Band’s Second Opening Act Was Arguably Worse
Appealing to a different fan base is one thing. Appealing to the same audience even more than the headliner is another. In his posthumous memoir, Last Rites, Ozzy Osbourne recounts how Van Halen proved to be an even more disastrous opening act than KISS. On the first night of the 1978 Never Say Die! tour, Black Sabbath watched Van Halen open the tour at Sheffield City Hall. From Eddie Van Halen’s lightning-fast guitar playing to Alex Van Halen’s powerful drumming, the band won the crowd over immediately.
“All I remember is us leaving the auditorium in silence, going back to our dressing room in silence and just sitting there, staring at the f***ing wall,” Osbourne wrote. “I mean, look… you had to hand it to the guys in Van Halen. It was like they’d found a way to time-travel to the mid-eighties, even though it was still 1978. Van Halen couldn’t have blown up at a worse time for Sabbath. Every night of that tour, they just slaughtered us. They’d go on stage, steal all our thunder, then you could feel the energy of the crowd dipping when we went on and plodded through our set. We did some good shows. But metal was evolving, and it felt like we weren’t keeping up.”
Although Black Sabbath would continue to exist in various incarnations, some of which had Ozzy Osbourne at the helm, this 1978 tour marked the end of the band as it was during its earliest days in Birmingham.
Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns
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