Ozzy Osbourne Was 25 When Black Sabbath Played California Jam. Then the Cameras Caught Him Backstage.
One word in Black Sabbath’s backstage clip drew nearly as much attention as the interview itself. Talking about the people he had just played to, Ozzy Osbourne called them “kids.” At California Jam in 1974, he was 25.
The show took place on April 6 at Ontario Motor Speedway in California, during the band’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tour. Tony Iommi was on guitar, Geezer Butler on bass and Bill Ward on drums. Ozzy had spent the set out front, addressing a festival crowd that looked enormous even through the original television cameras.
The backstage camera works on a different scale. A reporter with a handheld microphone finds Ozzy just after the performance. The frame is tight enough to follow his expression as he tries to answer a question about the crowd, and the pauses become part of the exchange.
Stevie Hirsch, commenting under the clip, picked out that one word and recalled being right up front at the show. The line makes sense coming from the stage: no matter how old the singer is, the people looking up at him can feel like a different generation.
The original ABC broadcast adds a useful contrast. It places the interview after “Children of the Grave,” then takes viewers back to the music with “War Pigs,” “Paranoid” and “Killing Yourself to Live.” The broadcast sequence moves from the scale of the stage to the intimacy of the interview and back again.
The short clip is worth seeing first. In less than a minute, the conversation brings the festival back down to two people and a microphone. The longer backstage footage and the ABC broadcast put that brief encounter back in the middle of the day it came from.
