Ozzy energizes metalheads at Mandalay Bay

Ozzy Osbourne can't !@#$in' hear us.

He just said so himself.

Loudly, like an exclamation point incarnate.

It was as if he'd swallowed a bullhorn or something.

This is a problem.

The crowd's yelling as hard as it can, courting laryngitis.

Dudes are pumping their fists triumphantly, like they had just scored a game-winning touchdown and then bedded an entire cheerleading squad.

The packed arena feels like a big perspiring volcano about to erupt, but with Budweiser, testosterone and expletives in place of magma.

OK, Ozzy's going to try this again.

"Let me see your hands in the air!" he commands like a shopkeeper catching a thief in the act of stuffing contraband in his pockets.

The audience obeys, even though obedience, along with temperance, is not in its nature tonight.

"That's getting better," Ozzy notes approvingly.

And so it goes, between just about every song, for the next hour and a half.

It's redundant, but it never seems to grow old -- kind of like Ozzy himself, who even at 62, bounds about the stage in what could pass for a heavy metal fitness routine, doing jumping jacks on the mic, running in place, whipping his hair around violently, as if he was trying to rid it of a spider infestation.

He's an animated presence, twisting his features into painful looking contortions when he sings, looking like a toddler with bad gas.

And he pretty much acted like one too, spraying the crowd with a water hose and dumping buckets of the stuff on the audience throughout the show.

"I'm the Prince of !@#$ing Darkness," he thundered at one point. "I can do whatever I want when I'm up here."

Basically, Ozzy is heavy metal's leering id, a caricature of the heedlessness and rebelliousness that is the genre's primal instinct.

He's a whoopee cushion of a man, a wild-eyed grandpa forever in pursuit of the good times that he's soundtracked for several generations of metalheads.

And he still delivers live, his voice strong and unwavering, save for a little warbling on ballads like "Mama, I'm Coming Home" near show's end.

Throughout his career, Ozzy has always recruited a top notch backing band, and his current unit lives up to the lofty standards.

Former Rob Zombie/Alice Cooper drummer Tommy Clufetos and bassist Blasko , who also used to play with Rob Zombie, anchored the rhythm section, which bared its teeth most forcefully when digging into the concussive bottom end and clenched-fisted groove of a selection of tunes from Ozzy's previous group, Black Sabbath, motoring hard through the of funeral march of "War Pigs" and the elephantine stomp of "Iron Man."

Completing the lineup was a new guitarist, cocksure hair farmer Gus G. (Kostas Karamitroudis) from Greek power metal favorites Firewind. He's a shredder supreme who plays with such effortless speed and dexterity, it was as if he had six fingers on each hand as he brought plenty of fretboard acrobatics to such classic rock radio mainstays as "Bark At The Moon," "Mr. Crowley" and "Crazy Train."

And that's the axis upon which an Ozzy concert pivots: serious playing contrasted with the decidedly less-than-serious demeanor of the man at the center of it all.

To wit: the show opened with what has become a staple of Ozzy gigs throughout the years, a video montage of the singer riffing on various popular TVs shows and movies, this time goofing on "Avatar," "Jersey Shore," and "Twilight," among others.

Ozzy can so knowingly skewer these pop culture phenomenons because he's become one himself.

But unlike some of the targets of his mockery, he's in on the joke.

"You gotta believe in foolish miracles," Ozzy sang knowingly during an invigorated "I Don't Know," his life, his career, the very embodiment of that of which he spoke.

Contact Jason Bracelin at 702-383-0476 or e-mail him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com.