BRISTOW, Va. — August 21, 2016 — When Black Sabbath called its farewell run The End, there wasn’t much ambiguity in the name.
The band that helped define heavy metal was taking nearly five decades of music on one final world tour, and on August 21, that road brought Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler to Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia. The stop came during the second North American leg of The End, with Rival Sons opening the show.
For a tour built around saying goodbye, Black Sabbath didn’t spend the night quietly looking backward. The set reached deep into the band’s early catalog, opening with the unmistakable title track “Black Sabbath” before moving through “Fairies Wear Boots,” “After Forever,” “Into the Void” and “Snowblind.”
The night continued with songs that have long since moved beyond a single generation of Sabbath fans, including “War Pigs” and “N.I.B.” The Bristow set was overwhelmingly drawn from the band’s classic early albums, particularly Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality and Vol. 4.
At the center of it all was Tony Iommi.
Iommi’s guitar sound is so fundamental to Black Sabbath that hearing those riffs live carries a weight that recordings can’t entirely reproduce. Against the enormous video screens and The End production surrounding the band, the familiar riffs remained the thing everything else was built around.
Geezer Butler supplied the other half of that unmistakable heaviness on bass, while Ozzy worked the crowd from the front of the stage. This wasn’t a newly assembled version of Sabbath trading on an old name: Osbourne, Iommi and Butler were three of the four musicians who had formed the band’s classic original lineup in Birmingham decades earlier.
The production made sure nobody forgot the significance of the tour. Giant screens, dramatic lighting and THE END stretched across the stage gave the night the scale of a farewell, but the set itself remained focused on what made Black Sabbath matter in the first place — the songs.
The latter part of the show delivered “Hand of Doom,” “Rat Salad,” “Iron Man,” “Dirty Women” and “Children of the Grave,” before Sabbath returned for the encore everyone knew was coming: “Paranoid.”
Watch: Original Barrelassin’ footage from Black Sabbath’s The End Tour stop in Bristow, featuring moments from the August 21, 2016 performance.
At the time, The End was being presented as exactly that: Black Sabbath’s final tour. The journey continued after Virginia through North America, Latin America and Europe before ultimately returning the band to Birmingham, England, for its final performances in February 2017.
For the crowd in Bristow, August 21 was their goodbye — a chance to hear the riffs that helped build heavy metal played one more time by the musicians who created them.
