music

The concert opened with the "Halloween" movie theme, a video of a flying bat and a guy wearing face paint who treated us with songs like "American Witch" and "Living Dead Girl." It ended with the guy, who once bit the head off a bat, singing his own demonic hits, including "Mr. Crowley" and "Bark at the Moon."

Two of heavy metal's ghouliest, ghastliest veterans -- Ozzy Osbourne and Rob Zombie --bit into a rabid crowd of about 11,000 fans at the Target Center in Minneapolis on Wednesday night for perhaps the most perfect Halloween concert ever to hit the Twin Cities.

Every night is like Halloween for the Ozzman and Zombie, though, so it was hard to know if and how the holiday made the show any more monstrous. But it was monstrous nonetheless.

Fresh from directing the remake of "Halloween" that hit theaters over Labor Day weekend, Zombie brought plenty of slasher-flick images with him. Every song in the former White Zombie frontman's hourlong set had its own video montage -- either gory horror clips or mammary-filled B-movie fare.

Zombie is essentially a one-trick pony musically, riding the same pulsating crunch-metal sound that defined his old band a decade ago. But he has become one of metal's best purveyors of visual gimmickry since Kiss. Among his arsenal Wednesday were scantily clad female dancers, flame throwers, an enormous devil-faced drum riser and a 10-foot tall evil-looking robot that danced around the stage.

Zombie also climbed out into the crowd -- not on a runway or in a security detail, mind you -- to deliver "More Human Than Human."We can go to a rock concert any night," Zombie said back onstage, "but it's Halloween tonight. We came to party."

After 59 mostly hard-lived years, Ozzy came off a bit zombie-like. His voice was a shadow of its former self, noticeably cracking during older, high-reaching tunes such as "Suicide Solution" and "Crazy Train."

The Prince of @$#! Darkness still brightened the stage with his energy and presence, delivering such tellingly titled new songs as "I Don't Wanna Stop" and "Not Going Away" with gusto. On his first arena tour in six years, he also benefited from the more intimate setting. "Paranoid," played for the encore, doesn't echo through the crowd as well outside as it did Wednesday.

Ozzy's bag full of tricks included a firehose he repeatedly used to spray the crowd with foam. His opening video montage was the most clever bit of all. Devilishly dropped into famous movie and TV clips, Ozzy popped up on the bed wrestling with Borat's beefy friend and getting kinky with Helen Mirren's Queen Elizabeth.

Now that's scary stuff.

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658

Chris Riemenschneider • chrisr@startribune.com