Bootleg City: Ozzy Osbourne in Tokyo, June ‘84

Friday, March 27th, 2009

Bootleg City: Ozzy Osbourne in Tokyo, June ‘84

The first six months after 9/11 were a confusing time, and America wasn’t sure when it would be okay to laugh again. Then on March 5, 2002, some well-funded foreigners snuck into our country — and into our hearts! That’s when MTV’s megapopular reality show The Osbournes debuted, and after a couple months of round-the-clock media saturation even I was demanding stricter anti-immigration laws. But it turned out British rocker Ozzy Osbourne and his wacky family had already been living in the United States for several years by that point. How could we have let this happen?!

I never watched a full episode of The Osbournes, one of the first reality programs to focus on famous people and their everyday lives, but it was hard to escape its net: Ozzy’s daughter Kelly recorded an album for Epic despite limited musical skills; his son, Jack, appeared in a few episodes of Dawson’s Creek despite nonexistent acting skills; his wife, Sharon, got her own daytime talk show despite having trouble completing a sentence without the F word; and Ozzy himself, a heavy-metal icon who once fronted the legendary Black Sabbath, found a new career as a mumbling, shuffling punchline who was (mostly) in on the joke. The entire family even had a cameo in the third Austin Powers movie. It was too much too soon, so when The Osbournes finally stopped production in 2005, it felt like it’d been on the air much longer.

But the war on terror didn’t end when G.W. left office two months ago, and the Osbourne family’s reign of terror isn’t over either — on Tuesday, March 31, they return to TV, this time on Fox, as the stars of the new variety special Osbournes: Reloaded. It airs after American Idol, the second point on the axis of pop-culture evil that we came to know after 9/11. We’ve temporarily won the war against the third point on the axis, Paris Hilton, but we must remain vigilant.

This week’s bootleg is “Beast in the Darkness,” recorded on June 29, 1984, at Tokyo’s Budokan during Ozzy’s Bark at the Moon tour. “So Tired,” a track that appears on Bark at the Moon, shows up at the end of the bootleg, but I’m not sure why — it’s not part of the Budokan set, and it runs 45 seconds shorter than the version on the album. All I know is that I can’t wait for Kelly and Paris to cover it on American Idol before the end of this season.

I Don’t Know
Mr. Crowley
Rock ‘n’ Roll Rebel
Bark at the Moon
Revelation (Mother Earth)
Steal Away (The Night)
Suicide Solution
[keyboard solo]
Centre of Eternity
Flying High Again
Iron Man
Crazy Train
Paranoid

unexplained bonus track:
So Tired

Tags: Austin Powers, Black Sabbath, Budokan, Dawson's Creek, Jack Osbourne, Kelly Osbourne, MTV, Ozzy Osbourne, Paris Hilton, Sharon Osbourne

This entry was posted on Friday, March 27th, 2009 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Bootleg City, Music, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

WHarrisBullzEye

I'd love to tell you it's a variety special, but, no, it's scheduled to be a regular series...though based on what I've seen, I'm anticipating that it'll be yanked within an episode or two. It's horrendous.

rwcass

I read that it's only airing once or twice this season, followed by five installments next season if the initial ones do well. Not true?

WHarrisBullzEye

To be fair, I have not followed it in great detail since January, when Fox trotted out the Osbournes for the TCA tour, but at the time, it was very much being treated as a proper series. Maybe the resounding thud that met the footage they showed us resulted in a change of plans...?

rwcass

Fox's page for the show says, "Following the premiere, OSBOURNES: RELOADED will return to the FOX schedule as a series of one-hour specials to air later in the season," and an article on Canada.com says, "'Osbournes: Reloaded' bows Tuesday, following 'American Idol' on the Fox network. It will then disappear until the fall, when it will return with 'at least' five new shows, and possibly a full-blown series."

It sounds like you're on to something -- maybe Fox saw the footage and decided to scale back.

WHarrisBullzEye

I checked in with my buddy Brent Furdyk, the editor of TV Week, and he confirmed my sanity:

"You're absolutely right. Didn't they say they shot six of them? And I love how they're only going to air the first one as a one-off 40-minute episode (because Idol runs 20 minutes long), with the remaining episodes to air at some nebulous point in the future. My guess is that it was supposed to be a series until they actually saw it. And that batch of candy they sent didn't have a full episode, right, just that same clip they showed at TCA? Anyhow, what we've seen so far looks awful."

BTW, the "batch of candy" he refers to is the gift box of snacks that Fox sent the critics, along with a DVD...but when we turned it on and expected to see the first episode, instead we just got the clip that we'd already seen during the TCA tour in January.

Now THAT is a classic "this bodes ill" situation.

rwcass

I heard that HBO only sent out the pilot for "Eastbound & Down" earlier this year even though only six episodes were shot. It seems to have a healthy "cult" buzz about it, so I wonder why HBO didn't want critics to see more than one episode before they reviewed it. I doubt "Osbournes: Reloaded" will have any healthy buzz, cult or otherwise, but you never know. I don't want Jack Osbourne acting ever again, though. To be fair, he looked more bored than any potential audience member.