Mac Sabbath toasts 10 tasty years of Drive-thru metal in San Diego

What’s better than Black Sabbath? Black Sabbath in the form of McDonald’s characters, greasing classic Sabbath songs with new lyrics aimed at the demise of the fast food industry. That’s what.

In fact, it’s been 10 years since Mac Sabbath introduced the world to the Drive-thru metal genre…

Oh how fast a decade of finger-lickin’ good music flies! To celebrate this McMilestone, Mac Sabbath has enlisted the help of other oddball bands to promote high-caloric rock around the country, including an in-and-out stop at San Diego’s House of Blues.

And what a weird and wonderful night it was… Being my first Mac Sabbath meal, I was simply unprepared for this amount of herbs and spices. Opening the night was Japanese-American outfit Peelander-Z, an entity you have to witness to believe. They bill themselves as a “Japanese Action Comic Punk band hailing from the Z area of Planet Peelander”. Enough said.

Next up was hometown horrors The Creepy Creeps — complete with two go-go dancing She-Creeps.

Filling the stage with fog and fun lighting, you couldn’t look away from the swiveling coffin-shaped keyboard, the orange graveyard glow of the skeleton masks, the ghoulish antics of the men onstage, and… well… the scantily-clad go-go dancing She-Creeps. At one point, The Creepy Creeps had the entire audience freak-dancing and moshing like zombies! What a way to kick off Halloween season.

If the two opening bands weren’t entertaining enough, up popped The Dickies, ejaculating caricature punk rock of the 70s and 80s as direct support. From “Waterslide” (complete with snorkel and blowup doll) to “You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)” (sung in gorilla mask), The Dickies came, they conquered, they pulled out, and came again. With me being a cult cinema buff (and certified Trom-ette of Tromaville), I wish they played their “Killer Klowns” and “Toxic Avenger”; next time, maybe.

Last, but certainly not least, was the tasty, the terrifying, and the terribly high in saturated fat, Mac Sabbath. Led by “Ronald Osbourne”, originally donning a tuxedo before stripping to his brand colors, Mac Sabbath went through their entire McDiscography right out of the “Frying Pan”, from “Sweet Beef” to “Pair-A-Buns””, as well as to a supersized “Chicken for the Slaves”. Squirting ketchup and mustard, scraping spatulas, smoking chickens, and spouting terrible fast food puns in Ozzy’s unmistakably slurred accent, Ronald Osbourne led the hungry crowd under the yellow arches and into a world of Filet-O-Fright, flanked by bandmates Slayer MacCheeze on guitar, Grimalice on bass, and Catburglar banging away on the drums.

I can never unsee the perfection that is Mac Sabbath. Or The Dickies. Or The Creepy Creeps and Peerlander-Z. All four blew my ever-McLovin’ it mind.

Photography by Kristy Rose

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