By: Robert Cavuoto
Tuesday night, June 11th, the legendary Iridium Jazz Club in New York played host to guitarist, Zakk Wylde, for his Book Tour of Doom. It was the second of three sold out nights!
Zakk is famously known for being Ozzy Osburne’s guitar player for over 20 years, as well as heading up his own band, Black Label Society (BLS).
His book “Bringing Metal to the Children: The Complete Berzerker’s Guide to World Tour Domination” was a New York Times Best Seller in 2012 and depicts tales of excess and debauchery while on the road with Ozzy and BLS.
The book has countless laugh-out-loud stories about Ozzy, his BLS bandmates, his experiences in dealing with record labels, and even depicts how to set up a shooting range on a tour bus.
New York and New Jersey Chapters of the Black Label Society were out in force packing the tiny basement club in Times Square. Though small in size, the Iridium has an infamous musical history with some of the biggest and best guitar legends playing there, including a standing Tuesday night gig by Les Paul.
Tonight, Berzerkers in attendance were in store for more than just a concert, it’s was going to be an overall rock experience with Zakk performing BLS songs on acoustic guitar and piano, followed by a spoken word “gone wrong” segment, as Zakk likes to put it.
Zakk opened the show with an acoustic version of “The Blessed Hellride” and continued to perform a song from almost every BLS CD. Highlights of the night were “Spoke in the Wheel”, “Speedball”, “Rust” [piano], and “Queen of Sorrow”.
The song that brought down the house was his piano version of “In this River”, which is a tribute to his friend Dimebag Darrell. Backing Zakk on rhythm guitar was Nick Cantonese from BLS who laid down a solid performance, allowing Zakk to showcase his shredding abilities.
Zakk’s guitar wizardry on the acoustic versions maintained each song’s sense of ferocity, attitude, and passion. After the show he told me he found his acoustic sound by accident when he distorted his acoustic guitar and thought it sounded like a “Strat gone out of control”.
He went to say that, “his stage guitars were relatively inexpensive Epiphone Masterbilts, around $400, but they play like Les Pauls”. His bad ass sound was assisted by his MXR Berzerker Overdrive and an EVH Phaser 90 run through a pair of his Roland Jazz Chorus JC120s!
During the storytelling portion of the show, Zakk shared the time he showed Ozzy a photo of Aleister Crowley and he had no idea who it was. Turns out, Ozzy never saw a photo of Crowley or even read any of Crowley’s books prior to writing the mega hit, “Mr. Crowley”.
Another great story was when Zakk’s fiancé [now his wife] called his hotel room while in the middle of a tryst and told him to toss the girl out of the fucking room…and he did. The stories in the book are hysterical, but to hear Zakk tell them with his wise-cracking-delivery was riveting.
If you missed the New York show don’t fear, it was taped for a PBS special and this summer Zakk will be releasing a similar Black Label Society DVD called Unblackened with reworked songs played in an intimate setting. Also, BLS will be joining the Gigantour with Megadeth and Jason Newsted.
T.M. (10 years ago)
Wow, sounds like a great night of music. I never thought I would have came to Guitar International to see photos of Zackk Wylde playing a classical guitar and the piano. Some cool factoids in there as well. Thanks for this!