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Zakk Wylde
100% Wylde
by Kara Uhrlen |
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While the first week of the US Ozzfest Tour may have gotten off
to a bumpy start with the unfortunate news of Sharon Osbourne’s
fight with Cancer. The first two dates were quickly rescheduled,
and the festival is now moving full-speed ahead. Ozzy tells fans
that he is indeed depressed to be touring without his wife, but
says that Sharon is fine and she promises to kick this Cancer’s
@ss!
Guitarist Zakk Wylde has more joyous family news to tell with
the recent birth of his new son, but that hasn’t stopped him
from tearing things up at Ozzfest as he’d promised he
would…“We’ll beat the living p!ss out of it…Then, I’ll come out
with Ozzy, Mike, and Robert and just destroy whatever’s left,”
said Wylde in a pre-tour interview.
Wylde brings the evening to a close as he shreds his way through
classics like “Crazy Train” and “Ironman,” as well as newer
material that he has trademarked himself. But, behind the media
frenzy surrounding all things Ozzy, is Wylde’s true legacy, the
Black Label Society, who perform a half hour set opening the
main stage, in support of their latest release 1919 * Eternal
(Spitfire Records).
1919 * Eternal
Actually, Wylde says the latest offering from Black Label
Society originally bore the name “Death of a War Machine
Eternal,” but after "the 11th,” he was pressured to change the
name. He then suggested “Bin Laden I’m Going to Blow Your F*cking
Brains Out,” but that apparently didn’t sit well either.
So, after further contemplation, Wylde chose to dedicate the
album to his father, who he describes as the “Architect of Black
Label.” Thus, the title was chosen to represent the year of his
father’s birth.
Wylde explained that his father is everything that Black Label
represents “Strength, Determination, Merciless, Forever". He
says his father was raised in an orphanage, went straight to
World War II, and eventually he laid his mother to rest. And,
even though he is now eighty-two years old, he still works five
nights a week.
While the new album opens up with perhaps Wylde’s heaviest riff
ever, there has been quite a lot of talk about the ballads on
the album. But, Wylde doesn’t think of them as ballads. When he
thinks of ballads, he remembers “cheesy” power ballads from the
eighties. He doesn’t really consider any of his songs ballads,
but melodic soft toned songs that seem to make it onto each of
his albums.
“I think I put them on every record. ‘Smoke in the Wheels’ is on
the first one, then we put ‘Just Killing Time’ on the other one
and then we’ve got ‘Bridge to Cross’ and ‘Lost Heaven’. I don’t
think they’re ballads, that would be just like saying that
“Melissa” or ‘Midnight Rider’ by the Allman Brothers are
ballads. To me a ballad, a power ballad is like a hokey f*ckin’
Bon Jovi crap song,” he explains.
This album also includes a special acoustic version of “America
the Beautiful,” which Wylde originally arranged for a
compilation album benefiting the World Trade Center aftermath.
He tells us that there are also songs from Steve Vai, Eric
Johnson, and Carlos Santana on the compilation, and that they
all chose to contribute because they wanted to help out. Wylde
says he was “really happy with the way it came out” and he
thought “it was a good way to close the record.”
Reality and Fantasy
This past year, MTV gave birth to a hot new reality television
show called the Osbourne’s. With Sharon Ozbourne named as one of
People Magazine’s most beautiful People, and the entire family
featured in mainstream entertainment publications, fans old and
new are flocking to see what all the buzz is about.
Touring in Ozzy’s band once again this past year, Wylde had a
bird’s eye view of that series and eventually got used to having
cameras everywhere. He comments, “It’s pretty damn funny, that
show is hysterical.” He also explained that “The scary part is
that none of that sh!t’s even scripted, you know what I mean?
That’s just reality (he laughs).”
In addition to making it onto the television screen with the
Osbourne’s, Wylde also starred in the movie Rock Star, which hit
theaters and DVD in the past year. It also brought a lot of
laughs, but didn’t fare as well as expected. Perhaps fans didn’t
find it to be too realistic, after all, Marky Mark played the
part of the lead singer in Zakk Wylde’s band. Regardless, Wylde
says that he really enjoyed it because he had several friends in
the movie.
While Wylde had written a lot of material for the soundtrack,
they only used one of the songs he wrote in that movie, but he
had performed on all of the music that the band performed, even
though most of the performances were lip-synched. He says, “It
was just like making music videos but on a bigger scale,”
Tragedy and Comedy
Sure a bit of tragedy falls into everyone’s life, and when Wylde
first found that his original Les Paul guitar had gone missing,
theft was the band’s first assumption. They later then learned
that the gear had not been locked up and it was likely that the
guitar felt out somewhere along the highway. With plenty of his
signature Gibson Les Paul’s to choose from, Wylde can at least
joke about the loss of the original now and hope that one day
the guitar will again be his.
“Well it’s either somewhere between Dallas and Houston, or else
it’s sitting in someone else’s house who doesn’t know who the
hell I am. Either that or they do (he chuckles) and they’re
sitting there looking at it going ‘Dude it’s Zakk Wylde’s
guitar.’ Who knows, maybe it’ll turn up someday.”
Photo Credit: Michael Kazmierczak. Photos used
by 1heavymetal.com with permission from Spitfire Records. |
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