Pop Music : Ozzy Out of Tune at KNAC Blast

Now that dance music rules both the sales charts and the airwaves, KNAC’s testosterone-charged rock ‘n’ roll seems almost avant-garde. It’s the ‘90s equivalent of the bombastic album-rock stations that dominated ‘70s radio, except it plays Metallica and Guns N’ Roses instead of Foreigner and the Zep, and its jocks are incoherent in a manic rather than a laid-back sort of way.

You see KNAC bumper stickers on half the beat-up cars in the Southland, and you could have seen an incredible concentration of them Friday at the Long Beach Arena, where the station celebrated its fifth anniversary with a gala concert by half of its rotation. It was like a 1991 hard-rock refresher course: Arena Rock 101.

Progressive Seattle metalers Alice In Chains opened up with a snappy set of Soundgarden-ish metal sludge; Los Angeles’ Lynch Mob followed with its undistinguished commercial pop-rock. When hometown heroes L.A. Guns took the stage, scads of guys whipped out their lighters, others pumped their fists, and some girls near the stage held up a poster that spelled out an, er, invitation to the singer. L.A. Guns has good songs enough to make a short set sound like a greatest-hits sort of thing, and the slashing rhythm section made the full-on glam grunge stuff sound just fine.

A blast of Orff, a sea of churning green laser light, and it was time for headliner Ozzy Osbourne, who wore a spangled housedress and shuffled across the stage. His guitarist Zakk Wylde was spectacular, filling out the skeletal, pop-structured songs with powerful, crystalline cascades of 32nd notes. But his boss was painfully out of tune, both on recent songs and those--such as “Iron Man”--he’s been singing for almost two decades. Ozzy may have created the modern pop/heavy-metal synthesis with “Crazy Train,” but if he keeps performing like this, he might well kill it off again.