Jason Newsted recalls playing with Ozzy Osbourne
Former bass player of Metallica Jason Newsted recalls playing the longest concert he ever played, no he didn’t play bass for Bruce Springsteen this was when he was a member of Ozzy Osbourne’s band.
The show lasted for total of three hours and Jason Newsted is still unsure on why the band remained onstage for all the three hours.
Newsted told Florida Weekly in a recent interview. “I don’t know if the right combination of pills had hit, or he got off of them, or was only halfway into them, but he was in a mood that night” He continues “We played 28 songs. In any kind of set, 20 is pushing it. To listen to the same guy sing 20 songs, you’re asking a lot. … There’s so many songs to choose from with Ozzy. He could tap into the whole Black Sabbath catalog. I was playing with him in 2003, so he had already done all of the Blizzard of Ozz stuff, all the cool shit. He had a couple hundred songs.”
“the same 30 songs we’d push around.” But he says that that night was quite different Ozzy would call out songs at random “And expect everyone to know it” Ozzy called out “The Wizard” “I fuckin’ never played ‘The Wizard,’ let alone with him! I played it in my bedroom when I was 14, but never even got all the way through it. We barely made it through. He called out three to five songs that night that I had never played with anybody before.” recalled Newsted.
Jason responded to the speculation that Ozzy may not have noticed if Jason got the song right or wrong Jason said “That’s the thing – he didn’t. The people didn’t either!”
Jason recalls playing gigs with Metallica and how grueling the live shows were “You can weigh yourself before the show, and it was at least a three-pound difference, sometimes more,” he noted. “We’d rate the power and energy of the show by how many T-shirts we went through. You could wring ’em out and fill up a bottle. Four was a pretty good show. Everybody had their way of keeping fit. I took my bicycle on tour with me for years.”
In other news Newstead comes back at the criticism for him using a plectrum for his bass playing
“Lemmy played bass with a pick, and I played bass with a pick. And I got made fun of for playing bass with a pick.
“Back in the day, I wish I had the answers now when somebody talked shit like that. The most successful bassist of all time plays left-handed, and his name is Paul McCartney. He’s the only billionaire bassist that ever lived. He played with a pick.
“Gene Simmons is pushing a beat; 840 million. He plays with a pick. Metallica, 100 million records sold. The ‘Black Album’ is one out of four all-time that’s been on the Billboard charts 500 weeks or more. So this guy played with a pick, too.”
There’s nothing wrong with playing with a pick!
Check out Jason Newsted playing with Ozzy Osbourne
