Ozbourne live at Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay, 13 March 2019

Eighteen Canadian dollars bought a ticket to Ozbourne, and the night was a Wednesday, 13 March 2019. The act billed itself as The Ultimate Ozzy Experience, a tribute to the singer Ozzy Osbourne. The room was Crocks at NV in Thunder Bay. A Wednesday show has to lean on songs people already know, and a tribute night is built on exactly that.

Osbourne was off the road. His farewell tour, No More Tours II, had opened in April 2018, and on 29 January 2019 its European leg was postponed because of illness. Six weeks later, in northwestern Ontario, the songs were being played by someone else.

A club five months into its new address

The night belongs to a particular stretch in the life of the club. Crocks had spent about nine years at 16 Cumberland Street South. On 5 October 2018 its concerts moved into the NV Nightclub building at 228 Red River Road, while NV kept its weekend dance parties. The last night on Cumberland Street, 29 September, was Dear Rouge.

Both addresses are in what was once Port Arthur, which merged with Fort William in 1970 to form Thunder Bay. The move changed the door and the street, but the club stayed in the same old downtown, a short distance from the Lake Superior shore.

By March the arrangement was five months old, and Ozbourne was a modestly priced night on the new calendar. At C$18 it sat in the cheaper half of 2019, a year in which listed prices run from C$10 to C$45. Ticket buyers were not asked to pay for a spectacle, only for a familiar set of songs.

What the name promises

Black Sabbath formed in Birmingham in 1968, and Osbourne fronted them on their first records, Black Sabbath and Paranoid, both released in 1970. His solo career started with Blizzard of Ozz in 1980, an album that carried “Crazy Train” and “Mr. Crowley” and gave him a life outside the band that had dismissed him in 1979, and Diary of a Madman followed a year later.

The solo band on Blizzard of Ozz was small and tight: Randy Rhoads on guitar, Bob Daisley on bass and Lee Kerslake on drums. Sabbath, meanwhile, stayed part of his story. He rejoined them in 1997, and their farewell tour, The End, finished in Birmingham on 4 February 2017, two years before this Wednesday.

A tribute act with that name on the poster has two catalogues to draw on, one from each career. The bill named Ozbourne alone. No support act appears with it, and set times were not given. The title is the promise: a full evening of one man’s music, played by a band that says up front that it is not him.

A name with a pun in it

Ozzy is a nickname; the singer was born John Michael Osbourne in Birmingham. Ozbourne trades on the swapped letters, and the tagline follows a habit of the season. Eight days after the second Ozbourne night, Dizzy Mystics came through under the banner of an “Ultimate Soundgarden & Tool Tribute Experience”.

The word “ultimate” was cheap to print, and the Thunder Bay calendar carried it more than once that spring. No bill could ever settle which tribute deserved the title. What the buyer got for C$18 was one band, one singer’s catalogue and a Wednesday night out.

The second night

Ozbourne came back to the city five weeks later. On 18 April 2019 the act shared a bill with Steel Beaver at an 80s hair metal party, priced at C$20. The two nights are different evenings: this one was a single-artist tribute, and April’s was a themed party with two acts.

Two visits in five weeks to one city can be read as a sign that the format worked, though that is only a reading of the calendar and not a reason anyone gave at the time.

Two guitarists, one date

The guitar parts on those first two solo albums belong to Randy Rhoads. He died in a small-plane crash in Florida on 19 March 1982, aged 25. That was six days after this date on the calendar, thirty-seven years earlier.