Megadeth bassist James Lomenzo, reportedly stated, that the band was not invited to participate in Ozzy Osbourne‘s and Black Sabbath‘s final Back To The Beginning charity concert, which took place on July 5th, in Birmingham, United Kingdom
In a post in the Back To The Beginning – Black Sabbath’s Final Concert Facebook group, Charrie Foglio, who spent a decade with Doc McGhee (Bon Jovi, KISS, Mötley Crüe) as part of the McGhee Entertainment artist management company, shared a portion of the interview she conducted with LoMenzo on July 9th for Japan’s BURRN! magazine. After Foglio inquired, LoMenzo said, “Charrie, I’m going to let the cat out of the bag. The truth of the matter is, I don’t believe that anybody asked us, which was fine. Not everybody gets invited to every party. But at the same time, when we were in Europe last week, David [Mustaine] said that he was reaching out to everybody and telling them that we were in the neighborhood and that we were close enough to come. And if they wanted us to, we could stay over for a few days and work it out… If they wanted us to. I don’t know what our manager had accomplished with that, but it didn’t get accomplished, so we just came home.”
He continued, “So I know what you’re saying [about one Big Four band[s] missing from the event]. Even before all of this started, everyone was saying, ‘Well, what about Megadeth?’ It was really funny to read because there was no invite and there was no talking to people, there was actually nothing to do with any of it. It was this exciting situation where we’re celebrating Ozzy [Osbourne] in his retirement… Anyway, the show was amazing. I would have loved to have been there. I knew about the show months and months ago.
I’ve been recording with [original Black Sabbath drummer] Bill Ward. He’s been doing his [new solo] record, and every now and then I’ll get this wonderful phone call from his assistant Walter saying that ‘Bill would love to have you come down and do a song with him.’ And you don’t know what that sounds like to my brain. It frazzles me, but I’ve been working with him for a while. And he intimated about the show. I would ask him if he had spoken to any of the guys in Black Sabbath, and he said that he spoke to Ozzy every day because Ozzy wasn’t feeling very well at that time, so I was curious. He said, ‘By the way, it looks [like] we may do this final show.’ So he knew about it, obviously, before they announced it. So I was excited when it came to fruition because I knew that it meant a lot to all the guys in Black Sabbath to have Bill up there.”
Adding to Megadeth‘s absence from the event, LoMenzo added, “I don’t see it as controversy or anything. I do know that conspicuously we were missing, but nobody was invited.”
On a semi related note former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson, who was fired from the band in May 2021, was at the event, taking part in the first of two hastily assembled supergroups which performed at the event. He played The Ultimate Sin (with Lzzy Hale, Nuno Bettencourt, Jake E. Lee, Mike Bordin and Adam Wakeman), Shot In The Dark (with David Draiman, Jake E. Lee, Mike Bordin and Adam Wakeman) and Sweet Leaf (with David Draiman, Nuno Bettencourt, Scott Ian, Mike Bordin and Adam Wakeman)