When I was checking the stats of the page, I saw that a lot of people where referred to my site by typing “Brad Wilk drum solo Allphones Arena” in Google.

So people are going to watch Black Sabbath, but they don’t even know who the drummer is performing live with them, even after Ozzy mentioned that “on drums we have Tommy Clueftos”.

I am a big Black Sabbath fan. That is the beauty of music, I like a lot of bands and styles. I like Machine Head, Dream Theater, Motley Crue, Killswitch Engage and so on. I even saw the set list on http://www.setlist.fm from the New Zealand and Brisbane shows, so that I could do a play list of the songs they would be playing live. More importantly, I knew who was playing on the stage for them. Why would I want to know that? That is what fans do, we want to know everything about our heroes. When information was scarce in the seventies and eighties about our heroes, we seemed to know more. Now with the rise of the internet and information at our fingertips, we seem to know less.

How a person can spend $160 on a ticket and not know who the drummer is beyond me?

Black Sabbath is an institution. The name of the band is now bigger than the individuals in it, I heard a person say. Sort of like Pink Floyd. Roger Waters thought he was Pink Floyd, and then when he left, he thought the band would end. Dave Gilmour had other ideas.

Will Black Sabbath fans care if Zakk Wylde fills in for Tony Iommi on certain dates of the North American tour? I’m not saying that Tony is ill or is pulling out, I am just getting that thought out there. All you need to do is glance back a year and see the Ozzy and friends shows played when Tony was undergoing cancer treatment.

Basically if Ozzy goes out on the road with his solo band and calls the tour Black Sabbath, I don’t believe people will care that it is not the original line up anymore. It has already happened. Remember, that Tony Iommi did the same with the Dio and Tony Martin versions of Black Sabbath. You can say the Dio version of Sabbath is the real deal as it featured three of the original members, however the Tony Martin era, was all new musicians and if anything should have been called Iommi.