Danzig, Sepultura, and The Narcotic Gypsies rounded out the bill at the Corestates Center
On September 15, 1996, Philadelphia rock station 94 WYSP celebrated its birthday in suitably loud fashion, taking over the newly opened CoreStates Center for a massive night of heavy metal headlined by Ozzy Osbourne. Billed by the station as its “Big Ass Birthday Bash,” the concert came only about a month after the new South Philadelphia arena opened its doors and featured an imposing lineup of Osbourne, Danzig and Sepultura, with concert archives listing The Narcotic Gypsies as the opening act. The show was more than another stop on Ozzy’s extensive 1996 touring schedule: it was a full-scale WYSP promotion celebrating what the station called “24 years of radio that doesn’t suck.” The station broadcast live from the event, handed pieces of a specially made birthday cake to the first 500 listeners and gave away major prizes, including a 1997 Pontiac Firebird convertible, a trip to London and, appropriately, an opportunity for one winner to join Ozzy onstage. Contemporary radio-industry coverage actually listed Clutch as appearing alongside Ozzy, Danzig and Sepultura, while surviving concert listings and photographs identify The Narcotic Gypsies, creating a small historical discrepancy surrounding the opening slot. What is firmly documented is that Ozzy, Danzig and Sepultura formed the core of one of WYSP’s heaviest birthday celebrations.
Check out the setlists from each act below.
The concert also arrived at an interesting moment for all three major acts. Ozzy was in the middle of his massive “Retirement Sucks” era, the tongue-in-cheek name given to the touring cycle that followed his supposedly final No More Tours trek earlier in the decade. His 1995 album Ozzmosis had put him firmly back into the contemporary rock conversation, while his concerts remained celebrations of both his solo catalog and his Black Sabbath history. Sepultura, meanwhile, were touring behind Roots, released in February 1996, an album that dramatically expanded the Brazilian band’s already ferocious blend of thrash and groove metal by incorporating tribal percussion and Brazilian musical influences. It would ultimately become the final Sepultura studio album featuring frontman Max Cavalera. Danzig were in another period of transition. Glenn Danzig’s group was touring ahead of the October 1996 release of Danzig 5: Blackacidevil, an album that pushed his music toward industrial and electronic textures while retaining the dark blues, punk and metal foundation that had defined the group. The Philadelphia concert therefore captured three generations and interpretations of heavy music on the same stage: Ozzy representing metal royalty, Danzig occupying the dark space between classic metal and the alternative era, and Sepultura representing one of the most adventurous and aggressive forces in 1990s metal.
The early portion of the Birthday Bash belonged to the opening act listed in surviving concert archives as The Narcotic Gypsies. Documentation of the band’s actual Philadelphia performance is extremely limited; unlike the three major acts, no reliable surviving song-by-song setlist appears to be available. Photographs preserved by Concert Archives do, however, document the September 15 appearance and associate The Narcotic Gypsies directly with the CoreStates Center show. The group was also connected to the broader Ozzy/Ozzfest orbit during 1996, appearing on other bills that year. Their presence gave WYSP’s celebration the feel of the multi-band metal packages that were becoming increasingly important during the mid-1990s, particularly as the first incarnation of Ozzfest began taking shape. With the crowd still filling the brand-new arena, the opener essentially served as the ignition point for a night that would grow progressively heavier.
Sepultura’s arrival represented the first major explosion of the evening. The band was touring on its “Tribalism Across the World” cycle and was at perhaps the peak of its international popularity. Max Cavalera commanded the stage on vocals and rhythm guitar alongside guitarist Andreas Kisser, bassist Paulo Jr. and drummer Igor Cavalera, with the Roots material giving the group a particularly physical, percussive sound in an arena environment. A complete verified setlist for the September 15 Philadelphia performance is difficult to establish from surviving online records, but Sepultura’s documented set only five days later in York, Pennsylvania, illustrates the material dominating the band’s performances at the time: “Roots Bloody Roots,” “Spit,” “Territory,” “Breed Apart,” “Attitude,” “Slave New World,” an “Arise/Dead Embryonic Cells” combination, “Refuse/Resist” and a “Ratamahatta/Kaiowas” medley. That mixture placed the new Roots material alongside favorites from Chaos A.D. and Arise and showed exactly how dramatically Sepultura had evolved without abandoning its earlier aggression.
For Philadelphia metal fans, the biggest Sepultura highlight would have been hearing the Roots-era sound at full arena volume. “Roots Bloody Roots” had become an instant anthem, built around one of the simplest yet most crushing riffs of the band’s career, while songs such as “Attitude,” “Spit” and “Breed Apart” emphasized the dense grooves and tribal rhythms of the new album. Material such as “Territory,” “Slave New World” and “Refuse/Resist” connected that new direction to 1993’s Chaos A.D., while the older “Arise” and “Dead Embryonic Cells” represented the band’s thrash-metal past. The timing makes the appearance particularly significant in retrospect. Within only a few months, Max Cavalera would leave Sepultura following the conclusion of the Roots touring cycle, meaning the WYSP Birthday Bash caught the classic Cavalera/Kisser/Paulo/Igor lineup during the final months of its existence. The combination of a band at its commercial peak, a landmark new album and an unusually aggressive opening slot made Sepultura far more than a conventional support act.
Danzig followed with a set that mixed Glenn Danzig’s established classics with material pointing toward his next chapter. Surviving records for the CoreStates Center performance list a nine-song set beginning, remarkably, with the band’s biggest crossover hit, “Mother.” Rather than saving the song for the climax, Danzig immediately put one of the most recognizable riffs in his catalog in front of the Philadelphia audience. From there came “Sacrifice” and “Until You Call on the Dark,” followed by “It’s Coming Down,” “Deep,” “Dirty Black Summer,” “7th House,” “Twist of Cain” and “Long Way Back From Hell.” The set consequently touched several eras of Danzig’s career while also introducing the darker industrial direction of Danzig 5: Blackacidevil.
“Mother” was naturally an enormous moment, having found a second life several years after its original 1988 release when a live version became a major MTV and rock-radio hit in 1993. “Twist of Cain” reached all the way back to the first Danzig album, while “Long Way Back From Hell” and “Dirty Black Summer” represented the muscular heavy-metal sound of Danzig II: Lucifuge and Danzig III: How the Gods Kill. “Until You Call on the Dark” brought in the brooding atmosphere of Danzig 4, while “Sacrifice” and “7th House” previewed the forthcoming Blackacidevil era. Danzig’s position between Sepultura and Ozzy also made stylistic sense. Where Sepultura delivered relentless rhythmic violence and Ozzy would ultimately provide a career-spanning arena spectacle, Danzig offered something darker and more stripped down — heavy riffs, blues-inflected vocals and Glenn Danzig’s unmistakable stage presence. The relatively compact Philadelphia set appears to have been tailored for the multi-act bill; a documented Danzig performance in York just five days later stretched to 17 songs.
Then came Ozzy. By 1996, any suggestion that Osbourne had actually retired had become part of the joke. Only a few years after announcing his farewell, the Prince of Darkness was back on the road with the aptly named Retirement Sucks Tour, and the WYSP Birthday Bash allowed him to close the evening with a set constructed almost like a history of heavy metal itself. Rather than gradually building toward his biggest material, Ozzy opened with Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid,” immediately turning the CoreStates Center into an enormous singalong. He followed it with the solo classic “I Don’t Know” before returning to Sabbath for “War Pigs.” “Goodbye to Romance” came next, followed by “No More Tears,” the then-recent Ozzmosis single “I Just Want You,” “I Don’t Want to Change the World” and “Suicide Solution.” The first half alone covered Sabbath, Blizzard of Ozz, No More Tears and Ozzmosis, emphasizing how deep Ozzy’s catalog had become by the mid-1990s.
The instrumental portion of Ozzy’s show gave guitarist Joe Holmes an opportunity to take center stage. Holmes, who had replaced Zakk Wylde in Ozzy’s touring band during this period, performed a guitar showcase incorporating pieces of “Over the Mountain,” Black Sabbath’s “Symptom of the Universe,” “Diary of a Madman” and “Believer.” It functioned as both a traditional arena-rock guitar solo and a rapid trip through material that was not otherwise being performed in full. Ozzy then launched into an extraordinary run of Sabbath songs: “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” “Iron Man,” “Sweet Leaf” and “Children of the Grave.” For a crowd raised on WYSP’s combination of classic hard rock and contemporary metal, that sequence connected the evening’s newer sounds directly to their source. Sepultura and Danzig had both been profoundly shaped by Sabbath’s legacy, and now the man who had sung those songs originally was performing them in the same building.
Ozzy saved another run of solo classics for the closing stretch. “Mr. Crowley,” with its ominous keyboard introduction and dramatic guitar work, gave way to “Crazy Train,” one of the defining songs of his post-Sabbath career. After leaving the stage, he returned for an encore beginning with the power ballad “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” The final song was “Bark at the Moon,” sending the Birthday Bash out on one last blast of 1980s Ozzy. Altogether, the documented set contained 17 full songs plus the guitar feature, with six Black Sabbath numbers woven among Ozzy’s solo classics. Blizzard of Ozz was particularly well represented through “I Don’t Know,” “Goodbye to Romance,” “Suicide Solution,” “Mr. Crowley” and “Crazy Train,” while No More Tears contributed its title track, “I Don’t Want to Change the World” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” The new Ozzmosis album was represented by “I Just Want You.”
What made the gig memorable beyond the individual performances was the collision of eras it represented. Ozzy had helped establish the vocabulary of heavy metal with Black Sabbath more than two decades earlier. Danzig had emerged from punk through the Misfits and Samhain before creating a blues-heavy form of metal under his own name. Sepultura had begun as an extreme-metal band in Brazil before evolving into one of the defining heavy bands of the 1990s. Hearing those artists in succession demonstrated how far heavy music had traveled while still retaining a common thread. Even the setlists reflected that lineage: Danzig performed “Mother” and “Twist of Cain,” Sepultura was immersed in the groundbreaking Roots period, and Ozzy finished the night moving freely between “War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” “Crazy Train” and “Bark at the Moon.”
There was another historical element that could not have been fully appreciated at the time. The CoreStates Center itself was virtually brand new. Philadelphia audiences were only beginning to establish memories in the building that would later be renamed the First Union Center, Wachovia Center, Wells Fargo Center and eventually Xfinity Mobile Arena. The September 15 show came during the arena’s first weeks of operation, making WYSP’s celebration part of the earliest chapter in what would become one of Philadelphia’s principal concert venues. Concert Archives preserves photographs from the event, providing rare visual documentation of the Birthday Bash and the young arena.
WYSP made certain that the event felt like a station celebration rather than simply another Ozzy tour stop. Radio & Records reported shortly afterward that the station had broadcast live from the Birthday Bash and distributed custom birthday cake to the first 500 listeners. Three grand-prize promotions offered dramatically different rewards: a 1997 Pontiac Firebird convertible, a London trip and the chance to get onstage with Ozzy. That combination of live radio, giveaways, station personalities, listeners and major rock acts embodied the power that terrestrial rock radio still possessed in 1996. WYSP was not merely playing the artists on the bill; it could assemble thousands of its listeners in one arena and turn its station anniversary into a major Philadelphia concert event.
Thirty years later, the 94 WYSP Birthday Bash stands as a snapshot of an especially important moment in heavy music. Sepultura were touring behind Roots with Max Cavalera still at the helm. Danzig was preparing to release the controversial Blackacidevil and experimenting with a new industrial direction. Ozzy Osbourne had emphatically reversed his retirement and was once again demonstrating why he remained one of metal’s greatest live attractions. And all of it happened inside a Philadelphia arena that had barely begun building its own concert history. From Sepultura’s crushing mid-’90s attack and Danzig opening with “Mother” to Ozzy leading thousands through “War Pigs,” “Iron Man,” “Mr. Crowley” and “Crazy Train,” the September 15, 1996 Birthday Bash captured WYSP at the height of its influence and brought together metal’s past, present and future for one thunderous night in South Philadelphia.
Ozzy Osbourne Setlist:
- Paranoid
- I Don’t Know
- War Pigs
- Goodbye to Romance
- No More Tears
- I Just Want You
- I Don’t Want to Change the World
- Suicide Solution
- Over the Mountain
- Symptom of the Universe
- Diary of a Madman
- Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
- Iron Man
- Sweet Leaf
- Children of the Grave
- Mr. Crowley
- Crazy Train
- Mama, I’m Coming Home
- Bark at the Moon
Danzig Setlist:
- Mother
- Sacrifice
- Until You Call on the Dark
- It’s Coming Down
- Deep
- Dirty Black Summer
- 7th House
- Twist of Cain
- Long Way Back From Hell
Sepultura Setlist:
- Roots Bloody Roots
- Spit
- Territory
- Breed Apart
- Attitude
- Slave New World
- Arise / Dead Embryonic Cells
- Chaos B.C.
- Refuse/Resist
- Ratamahatta / Kaiowas