One year ago today, I stood inside Villa Park in Birmingham, England and watched Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath say goodbye.

The all-day event was called Back to the Beginning. The band that most people credit with inventing heavy metal returned to the city where it started, played one last time, then left the stage triumphant, cheered by more than 40,000 fans in the stadium and millions more on the internet around the world.

17 days later, Ozzy Osbourne passed away.

I wrote about Back to the Beginning for the first time last August, but at that time I focused more on the idea about music, about performance, about creativity, and about something that was just becoming a thing at that time — the fact that we were starting to see AI-generated music climbing the charts and becoming popular on Spotify and elsewhere. Some things have changed since then. I’m not really going to revisit that today. Maybe later. I want today to be about the moment, because it’s a moment I think about constantly.

I have a lot of memories from that day. I left London at 5 am (after a long, twice cancelled and rebooked flight from the U.S.), I boarded a coach with a bunch of other fans from the UK and beyond (I remember some from Canada, and a few from the United States like me).

Pictured: crowds of fans waiting to get into Villa Park, Birmingham for Back to the Beginning, July 5, 2025. Photo by Mark Dauner

In the stadium, there were fans from all over the world. To my left, a young woman that flew in from the Middle East who had an immeasurable love for Alice in Chains but despite traveling all over Europe and the Middle East to see shows, she’d never seen them. She told me that if they played “Man in the Box” she was going to cry. When they did, I looked over. She was indeed crying.

That’s music.

To her left, there were some women from France. Behind us were medical students from Croatia. They could not sing well at all, but they sure did. Loudly. Ozzy sang “Crazy Train” that night but it may as well have been those two guys.

That’s music.

Venturing out past them you had people from Birmingham, you had Londoners, you had Scots, you had some people from Japan. It was an incredible setting that brought people together from around the world because of their love of hard rock and heavy metal music, and their deep love of Ozzy and Black Sabbath.

People were having a great time. People were there to see their favorite bands. People were there to say thank you. Many more people were in tears by the time the show ended, and Ozzy said goodnight alongside his Sabbath bandmates, with fireworks erupting over the stadium.

Pictured: Hey, that's me at the show!

It took time to get out of there after the show. Our coach made it back to London at slightly before 4 am the next morning. People on the Tube were just going home from the dance clubs. They didn’t know I’d seen music history: a nearly 24-hour trip to witness one of the greatest musical events of my lifetime. I was too tired to tell them. They were too drunk to care.

Back to the Beginning could be considered the ultimate nostalgia event. A farewell show, a legacy act, a stadium full of people singing songs that were older than most of them. Not only did we get to cheer on Sabbath and Ozzy, but for most of the day we watched legacy acts like Metallica, Guns n’ Roses, Slayer, Steven Tyler, Sammy Hagar, Ronnie Wood, Alice in Chains.

There were some acts from the current century like Halestorm, Gojira, and Mastodon (the band not the network). We also saw Yungblud, a new artist for me at the time, who has taken the world by storm in the past year. He covered Black Sabbath’s “Changes” live on stage with Nuno Bettencourt and others, blowing everybody away. It would go on to win a Grammy for Best Rock Performance.

Even though it was a day to look back, I wouldn’t call it a nostalgia event. Looking back only feels right when it’s done authentically. I think that happened at Back to the Beginning. Nobody on that stage was preserving anything. They were continuing it. It felt like they were picking up the torch and moving it forward.

Halestorm played “Perry Mason” as Halestorm, and Lzzy sounded like Lzzy when singing “The Ultimate Sin" with Jake E. Lee on guitar. Gojira played “Under the Sun” as Gojira. It was awesome. Metallica, Guns N' Roses, Alice in Chains, Slayer, and so many others — each artist took songs from the Ozzy and Sabbath catalog and ran them through their own sound, their own style, their own unique filter.

Pictured: various artists at Back to the Beginning. Lzzy Hale and Jake E. Lee, Yungblud, Alice IN Chains, Tom Morello, Steven Tyler, and Metallica.

All of it felt right. Perhaps that’s because of the way Sabbath got their start. First they were Earth — a blues rock band patterned after all the other British bands playing blues rock in the mid to late ‘60s. Except it wasn’t working for them, and it wasn’t right for them. They pivoted. They got darker. Heavier. They created a sound that seemingly came straight out of the heavy industrial factories of Birmingham, where they had worked. They made art that didn't exist yet, and they created a genre of music that is so important to people around the world.

Yesterday I published a piece called “Five Years” that was mainly about why I’m “reclaiming” my place on the internet. That’s not to push anyone else out. In fact, the opposite. We are better when all kinds of people from all kinds of places and all kinds of backgrounds are making the things that matter to them. The nature of the open internet lets us do that.

That’s what I felt in Villa Park one year ago today.

I may go back to the topics of “Five Years” from time to time, but I don’t want it to be my focus. My focus is on rock & roll. It’s on creativity. It’s probably on whiskey. It’s going to be fun, for me anyway.

One of the slogans I’ve put on my media over the past couple of years is, “Make shit that matters — even if it only matters to you.”

That’s the focus. That’s the thesis. That’s why creativity is important and why it matters to have spaces on the internet for creative independence that aren’t closed off, siloed, or corporate-controlled.

That’s what I’m choosing to take inspiration from the legend that was Ozzy Osbourne — a man who battled his own personal demons, overcame most of them as best he could, or at least managed them. He tried his best. He had a good heart. People loved him for it. Sometimes they didn’t — and he didn’t give one fuck.

Pictured: Ozzy Osbourne on stage with Black Sabbath