Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s final show, Back to the Beginning, featured some of hard rock and metal’s best-known talents performing their own renditions of both seminal and deep-cut Sabbath and Ozzy tracks.
Halestorm were one of the bands that made up the historic lineup, which also included Mastodon, Anthrax, Tool, Alice In Chains, Guns N' Roses, and Metallica, to name a few. However, as they reveal in a recent interview, the show's set list wasn't cemented until just a few weeks before the event.
"When we got the call, ‘Sharon's asking you to be a part of this,’ we're like, is this real?” Lzzy Hale tells Guitar World's Paul Riario.
“There was this email. It was like, ‘Hey, Sabbath is gonna play one last gig with the original four members, and maybe Metallica might be there. Do you guys wanna be on the show?’” relates lead guitarist Joe Hottinger.
“We're like, ‘Well, yeah, of course.’ And that's all we knew about it. Then they announced it, and we were like, ‘Oh, this is a whole thing.’”
Halestorm ended up putting their own spin on Perry Mason, from Ozzy's 1995 record, Ozzmosis. However, it wasn't their original choice – or what they had prepared for.
“That wasn't what we were going to be playing until about two weeks out. We were going to be playing A National Acrobat off Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” explains Hale.
“We worked up A National Acrobat, and then Morello was like, ‘Hey, you can't do that. I think Metallica was gonna [do that]...’ ‘All right, fine,’” continues Hottinger.
“He's like, ‘Tony Iommi hasn't made up the set list... It's up in the air with that one,’” adds Hale.
When A National Acrobat was axed, Perry Mason felt like a natural choice, since, as Hottinger relays, “When we came up, listening to rock ’n’ roll in the ’90s, Ozzmosis was out, [and] that song was the one on the radio.”
In more Halestorm news, Hale recently revealed how a “fluke accident” resulted in her band opening for Heaven & Hell during what would be Ronnie James Dio’s last show before he died.
