Bassist says Megadeth was not invited to play at Sabbath’s final show

The Megadeth bassist James LoMenzo, who replaced David Ellefson, said in an interview with Japan’s BURRN! that he believes the band was not invited to be part of the final Black Sabbath show/festival Back To The Beginning which happened last July 5 at the Villa Park in Birmingham, the band’s hometown. Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax, the other three Thrash Metal Big 4 bands were part of the celebration.

Bassist says Megadeth was not invited to play at Sabbath’s final show

“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 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.”

“So I know what you’re saying (About the only Big 4 band that wasn’t there). 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 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.”

Megadeth was Black Sabbath’s opening act during their reunion tour in the 2010s and already covered their hit “Paranoid” in the 90s. Although the band was not part of the celebration, the bassist David Ellefson, ex-longtime member of the band played the bass in some of the supergroups that performed that day.

James LoMenzo recorded with Bill Ward recently

The original Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward recently revealed that he is working on a new solo studio album with many special guests like Dave Lombardo, for example. During this same conversation with Burnn!, LoMenzo revealed that he recorded with the drummer too.

“I’ve been recording with Bill Ward. He’s been doing his 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.”

“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 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,” James LoMenzo said.

Besides having been previously a member of Megadeth, LoMenzo worked with many other artists during his career. Some of them are John Fogerty, Ace Frehley, Slash and Black Label Society.