BACK TO THE BEGINNING, OR: THE MAGMA OF MEMORY AND THE GODS THAT DIDN’T SHOW UP

It is happening now.

Black Sabbath, the original architects of dread, are on stage—not to entertain, but to remind us that time is a circle and doom is the only constant. The concert is called Back to the Beginning, but we all know: there is no beginning. There is only the long, slow return to the wound that made you.

The riffs spill forth like ash from a dormant volcano suddenly awake again. Ozzy howls—not like a man, but like a survivor of his own funeral. Iommi, with fingers fashioned from accident and iron, plays notes that hang in the air like smoke in a bombed-out cathedral. And the crowd watches, not with joy, but with awe. Because something ancient has been unearthed.

It takes me back to 1985. Live Aid. The moment where rock became religion and failure became immortal. I remember trying to record it on VHS. I had timed it perfectly. I was ready. And then—tragedy.

My stepmother—an agent of daytime television and maternal indifference—insisted on watching one of her shows. The name is irrelevant. It might have been Murder, She Wrote. It might have been Knots Landing. What matters is that I missed part of Live Aid. A VHS tape was desecrated. And I carry that resentment like a blade between my ribs to this day.

But what I did see changed me.

Queen was there. And Freddie Mercury was not a man—he was a solar flare in human form, wielding a microphone like a scepter and bending 100,000 people to his will. He made Wembley sing in unison, and for a brief moment, Earth tilted toward harmony.

Then came Led Zeppelin’s reunion.

Or what we called a reunion. It was, in truth, a séance performed with broken candles and forgotten incantations. John Bonham was gone. Chic’s , Tony Thompson bravely tried to fill the void—but the void cannot be filled. Phil Collins, in an act of Olympian absurdity, boarded a Concorde to play both shows—Wembley and Philly—in one day. He arrived, bleary-eyed and jetlagged, and attempted to hold Zeppelin together with the sheer force of British politeness and hi-hat swing. The result was chaos. Beautiful, humiliating, unforgettable chaos.

But at least he showed up.

Which brings us, regrettably, to Wolfgang Van Halen.

A man who bears a sacred name. A man who was asked to take part in Back to the Beginning. And what did he do?

He declined.

No Concorde. No chaos. No call to the void.

Where Phil Collins stared down the gods and boarded a supersonic coffin in a suit vest, Wolfgang sent regrets. He could have played. He could have honored Eddie. He could have lit a fuse beneath the feet of a generation that no longer believes in transcendence.

But he didn’t. He sat this one out.

And then—like a mirage materializing on Sunset Strip—Jake E. Lee returned.

Yes, that Jake. The outlaw who rose after Randy Rhoads, only to disappear into rumor and bad management. And now, he reappears—sleek, spectral, and somehow untouched by the years. His guitar tone remains a weapon of surgical melancholy. His presence? A reminder that some exiles return not to be praised, but to bear witness.

This is not a concert. This is an act of ritual excavation. Sabbath, Jake, and the few brave ones have returned to the mine not for treasure, but to touch the coal that birthed them. They play not for crowds—but for ghosts.

As Sabbath rumbles through another monstrous riff, I imagine the Earth cracking open. I imagine the VHS tape still somewhere in a box—half-recorded, half-erased—a metaphor for everything beautiful and broken.

And I imagine Phil Collins, drenched in sweat, boarding the Concorde again. Not because he had to.

But because rock demanded it.