There are good reasons why Mac Sabbath sends its manager—aptly named Mike Odd—to do the group’s press interviews. For one thing, the world’s only fast-food-obsessed, “drive-through metal” band has at least a quarter-pound of mystique to keep warm.
“Also, if you interviewed [lead singer] Ronald Osbourne, you wouldn’t get anything that makes any sense,” Odd says. “He claims he is a time-traveling whatever. You can’t even talk to him about any technology past 1979 or he’s going to get confused and you’re going to end up with seltzer water in your camera or pie in your face.”
Ronald Osborne—an amalgam of the most famous hamburger clown and the reality-star metal singer infamously inclined toward bat meat—fronts Mac Sabbath, a band that reinvents Black Sabbath’s primal screams of the soul as still-darker commentary on the crappy food that ails it.
“Fast food and heavy metal are both kind of scary,” Odd explains. “Black Sabbath was this heavy, scary thing about the evils of humanity—and this is a band doing the same thing about the evils of fast food.”
Monsanto, GMOs and low-paying McJobs are all part of this house of horrors. Sabbath’s “Iron Man” is now “Frying Pan.” “Paranoid” is, what else, “Pair-a-buns.”
Mac Sabbath’s campy floor show will make more sense to those who grew up in the 1970s—the heyday of Ozzy Osbourne’s Sabbath and the cheesy—and beefy—McDonaldland commercials that once brazenly dominated children’s television, with Mayor McCheese ruling over the likes of Officer Big Mac and his criminal nemesis, the Hamburglar.
Mac Sabbath’s big-costume drama—in addition to Ronald Osbourne’s scary-clown menace—also boasts guitarist Slayer McCheese, bassist Grimalace and Cat Burglar, the drummer.
“I’m sitting in this booth waiting for something to happen and this abomination of a clown bursts through the door, like a tornado of red and yellow dirty tassels scraping the ground, and started spewing these concepts all over everybody’s lunch. I thought I was being punked. I was looking around for a hidden camera. The next thing I knew we were kicked out of this place.”
It all might be considered a sort of fast-food answer to Gwar [interviewed in this column in October 2012], which was itself a darker rejoinder to ‘70s-era H.R. Pufnstuf.
In Denver, Mac Sabbath serves it with a smile Feb. 20 at the Marquis Theatre, 2009 Larimer St. Opening the multimedia, prop-heavy theatrics will be Galactic Empire, yep, a “forceful” heavily-costumed Star Wars metal band. [Some will, no doubt, plan to stay far, far away.]
It is difficult to tell where McFact and McFiction start and end with the Mac Sabbath legend. To hear Odd tell it, it all began when he was summoned to an unnamed burger joint in 2014 where his destiny was ordered, unwrapped and super-sized.
“I’m sitting in this booth waiting for something to happen and this abomination of a clown bursts through the door, like a tornado of red and yellow dirty tassels scraping the ground, and started spewing these concepts all over everybody’s lunch,” Odd says. “I thought I was being punked. I was looking around for a hidden camera. The next thing I knew we were kicked out of this place.”
That scary clown turned out to be none other than Ronald Osbourne, who told Odd he had traveled through time from the 1970s and that it was Odd’s destiny to manage Mac Sabbath.
Accepting his destiny, Odd took a while to find the band’s niche for engagements. Taken in by Mac Sabbath’s funny costumes, G-rated lyrics and eat-healthy messages, he says he found the band an early booking at an elementary school’s Halloween party.
“Here they are playing in front of these children. Some of them are laughing and screaming. Some of them are crying,” Odd recalls.
Then the principal made a beeline to the flustered manager: “I was like, ‘I’m sorry. What did he do? Let me help.’ And she said, ‘No, I just want to say this is great. You should be doing more schools.’”
Once the band graduated to more profitable venues, Mac Sabbath continued to operate outside the standard conventions of the music industry.
“Instead of releasing an album, the band has released a coloring book,” Odd says. “Inside the coloring book is a flexi-disc you would get in a Cheerios box in 1975.”
Although amused members of Black Sabbath have given their Mac counterpart an online plug or two, the same cannot be said of the fast-food industry, whose lawyers presumably have bigger fish sandwiches to fry anyway.
When it comes down to it, Odd says today’s heavy metal is not so dissimilar from today’s fast food in its marketed kitsch. As one time Black Sabbath vocalist Ian Gillan told this column in October 2006, the term “heavy metal” has become something of a pejorative anyway.
Odd agrees.
“The corporations take the term and run with it,” he says, “with a bunch of bands that have hairspray and play ballads. Then the bands that started the genre don’t want anything to do with a genre that’s no longer a genre. It’s a product that doesn’t have any value—like fast food.”
Mac Sabbath performs Feb. 20 at the Marquis Theatre. For more information, visit themarquistheatre.com or officialmacsabbath.com or call 303-487-0711.
Contact Peter Jones at pjoneslifemusic@aol.com.
