Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s final concert event, the Back to the Beginning festival, was a massive convocation of heavy metal and rock icons from Metallica to Ghost and Lamb of God to YungBlud, but where was Megadeth? Turns out, they weren’t invited.
After their absence was noticed by fans of the iconic Big 4 thrash band, Megadeth bassist James LoMenzo tells journalist Charrie Foglio that it wasn’t by choice. In a post in the Back To The Beginning – Black Sabbath’s Final Concert Facebook group, Foglio shared some of an as-yet-unpublished interview she did with LoMenzo for Japan’s Burrn! magazine.
“Hi brother, I sure missed seeing you here in Birmingham this week. It was noticeable that the Big Four was short one,” she said, noting how the remaining Big 4 bands — Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax — were present for Back to the Beginning. LoMenzo replied, “Charrie, I’m going to let the cat out of the bag. The truth of the matter is, I don’t believe that anybody asked us, which was fine.”
“Not everybody gets invited to every party,” he said diplomatically. “But at the same time, when we were in Europe last week, David [Mustaine] said that he was reaching out to everybody and telling them that we were in the neighborhood and that we were close enough to come. And if they wanted us to, we could stay over for a few days and work it out. . . . If they wanted us to. I don’t know what our manager had accomplished with that, but it didn’t get accomplished, so we just came home.”
“So I know what you’re saying,” LoMenzo continued. “Even before all of this started, everyone was saying, ‘Well, what about Megadeth?’ It was really funny to read because there was no invite and there was no talking to people, there was actually nothing to do with any of it. It was this exciting situation where we’re celebrating Ozzy in his Retirement… Is that the right word? Retirement? Isn’t that hard to believe? Anyway, the show was amazing! I would have loved to have been there.”
Interestingly, LoMenzo confessed that he “knew about the show months and months ago” because he was even “recording with [Black Sabbath drummer] Bill Ward.”
“[Bill’s] been doing his record,” LoMenzo shared, “and every now and then I’ll get this wonderful phone call from his assistant Walter saying that, ‘Bill would love to have you come down and do a song with him.’ And you don’t know what that sounds like to my brain! It frazzles me, but I’ve been working with him for a while.
LoMenzo also explained that Ward “intimated about the show. I would ask him if he had spoken to any of the guys in Black Sabbath, and he said that he spoke to Ozzy every day because Ozzy wasn’t feeling very well at that time, so I was curious.”
“He said, ‘By the way, it looks we may do this final show.’ So he knew about it, obviously, before they announced it,” LoMenzo continued. “So I was excited when it came to fruition because I knew that it meant a lot to all the guys in Black Sabbath to have Bill up there.”
Finally, LoMenzo added, “I don’t see it as controversy or anything. I do know that conspicuously we were missing, but nobody was invited.”
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